Miah Persson is exploring her darker side with two roles at Glyndebourne this season, and she's relishing the challenge
Swedish soprano Miah Persson has a beef with the opera world. "I have a problem with all this typecasting today. It's so much about what you look like. The few times I go to the opera, I don't want to have a pretty girl or boy up there who can't sing. I want to hear a beautiful voice. I don't care what they look like: if they give you the power of what opera is supposed to give you, that's the most important thing."
Persson, too, has found herself typecast, performing "light, soubrettey type characters" such as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Sophie in Strauss's Rosenkavalier, roles that she loves and has made her own all over the world. I guess, if you're going to be typecast, you might as well be stereotyped like Persson, as a beautiful, blonde, light-lyric soprano whose presence adds class to any production.
Persson's problem is that she sounds even better than she looks in these girlish roles, like her Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cos� fan Tutte, which marked her debut at Glyndebourne in 2006, or her Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden the same year. It's no surprise that opera houses and festivals, from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to Aix-en-Provence, book her years in advance for exactly these roles. But the preternaturally young-looking Persson is now ready to put away childish things: she's singing Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne. "It's so nice with Elvira ? I go on stage and feel like a woman, a proper woman for the first time," she says. She also sings the Governess in Britten's The Turn of the Screw, the final production of Glyndebourne's summer season.
Persson was a soloist with the Royal Swedish Opera for nearly a decade until 2007; she sang in houses from Salzburg to Berlin, and regularly performed at the BBC Proms and London's Wigmore Hall before making her Covent Garden and Glyndebourne debuts. And it's Glyndebourne particularly that nurtured Persson's UK career, casting her in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress last season.
In fact, Persson likes the Glyndebourne experience so much that she and her husband, tenor Jeremy Ovenden, now live in nearby Lewes, where they bring up their two children, Ella and Ed. And with a young family comes a new way of seeing the world, her career, and the possibilities on stage. "I'm becoming more rounded in my way of being, and not too bouncy any more," Persson says in her almost perfect English. "That comes from being a mum, with being married, and everything that goes with it."
Persson is about to throw all of her experience of motherhood and her career into a combustible crucible, one of opera's most disturbing reflections on the corruption of not-so-innocent childhood by a nefarious older generation: Britten's The Turn of the Screw. The part Persson sings is one of Britten's finest creations, a governness whose job looking after the orphaned Flora and Miles turns into a nightmare of ghostly apparitions and psychosexual manipulation. The boundaries between good and evil, between this world and the next, and between innocence and experience, are blurred throughout the opera. It's not just the ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who exert a malevolent influence in the story ? the children themselves are implicated in the amoral atmosphere of the drama. They are transformed from butter-wouldn't-melt archetypes into manipulative creatures ? a duality Persson recognises in her own children. "Ella and Ed know exactly how to play off each other, and how to play us, their parents, their nanny, or their grandparents to get what they want. It's amazing."
Persson has played the part once before, in Frankfurt eight years ago, but believes this time it will be different. "I have children of my own, which will bring a completely different dimension to everything that happens in that house," she says. "It's going to be so interesting to see how Jonathan [Kent, the director] sees the role." And Kent can bet that his Governess will have brought her own ideas to the rehearsal room. She was once part of a production of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne in Stockholm in which the whole cast revolted against their director. "He was this German guy, I can't remember his name," she says. "I was playing the glovemaker, and in my scene with the bootmaker, he said: [Persson goes into full-on comedic-evil-German mode] 'You haff ziss cupboard viz zese vhips and dildos, and you use zem on him like zis ?' And after about a week of this, in what was supposed to be a really funny operetta, I'd had enough." The cast had their way, and Offenbach was rescued from postmodern Teutonicism.
A walkout is unlikely this time, however. Persson saw Kent's staging of The Turn of the Screw when it was new, and was thrilled and disturbed by what she saw. "It was such a beautiful production, but in the big scene when Miles is in the bath and Quint wraps him in a towel and walks off with him, I just wanted to run on stage and shout, 'Leave him alone!'" For Persson, the main question is whether the Governess is an outsider in the house, a straightforward, normal woman who is slowly enmeshed in a terrifying dream, or whether she is mentally disturbed before she arrives. "I mean, it's insane that she takes this job," Persson says, "because she's not allowed to contact anyone, and she has to do everything on her own. In the second half she is fighting as much with herself as with the ghosts. And depending on which you choose, it's a completely different character." Persson seems more intrigued by the idea of a Governess who is already disturbed, rather than the straightforward interpretation; the character that she and Kent will create will no doubt change in the coming weeks.
The Governess is only part of Persson's operatic growing up. In the future, she says, she would like to move into the lyric, bel canto repertoire of Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. "My dream part, by far, is Violetta in La Traviata. To be able to create that role would be wonderful. But I would have to go through quite a few bel canto parts to prove myself worthy of Traviata. I'm sure I could be quite a credible Violetta right now as a person, as an actress, but I'm not sure I would do the music justice yet." For anyone who's seen her perform, what Persson says next may come as a surprise: "I'm looking forward to the day when I can really be who I want to be on stage. I still have a little bit of myself I'm holding on to. I'm not letting everything out yet. I'm longing for that day when, as a person and as the character, I can really open up and just go with the moment." If Fiordiligi marked Persson's fledging as an international opera-star back in 2006 at Glyndebourne, the Governess could see her fly.
? Miah Persson sings Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne until 15 July; the Governess in The Turn of the Screw from 11-28 August. Tickets: glyndebourne.com. Turn of the Screw will be streamed live on guardian.co.uk/glyndebourne on 21 August.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/23/miah-persson-interview
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