The soprano with the world in her hands: An interview with Lucy Crowe

So when the Royal Opera asked her to take on the role of Adina in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, she was up for it.  There was only the question of how to fit in learning the part with the fact that she had just given birth to her  second child.

Nine weeks after the birth of her son Ernie she was in rehearsals, which included running up and down a vertiginous hill of hay bales in Laurent Pelly’s production while tackling Donizetti’s vocal acrobatics. When I met her during a break in rehearsals, she was fresh and enthusiastic to talk about the role between mouthfuls of Royal Opera canteen soup.

“Adina is strong and sassy, not a slave to any man, and in charge of her own destiny.  She uses men rather than let them use her.  She sees Nemorino as a brother, and they squabble all the time.  She is not good at expressing her emotions.  She may have been burnt in the past, or it may be that she doesn’t want to commit to anybody.”

The most touching moment of Donizetti’s light-hearted comedy is when Adina realises that after rejecting Nemorino for years, she has actually loved him all along.   In this revival Nemorino is played by glamorous Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo, of whom Crowe says, “He is very expressive and passionate, so you have to up your game.  He keeps me on my toes.”

Staffordshire-born Lucy Crowe first hit the headlines in 2007 after she took on, just three days before rehearsals, the role of Poppea in David McVicar’s decadent staging of Handel’s Agrippina at the Coliseum.  Her Poppea was a drunken sex-mad WAG who stripped down to bra and pants, which earned her Bravos for sheer nerve.   She made her debut at Covent Garden as Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in 2009 and at the Met last year as Servilia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito.

Crowe has an affinity for Handel but has widened her repertoire to include Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi.  Her Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto was another last minute occasion when, barely four months after giving birth to her first baby, Elsie, the Royal Opera called to ask if she would take on three performances of Gilda in the 2012 revival of Rigoletto.  She had suffered “a bit of post-natal depression” and learning the part in three or four days was “a gauntlet laid down in front of me that gave me something to focus on.”

At this point, the question arises, How does she do it?  She says she could not, if it were not for her husband, horn player Joe Walters, whom she met when they were both working with the conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner.   There has also been great support from her mother and her in-laws. Joe composes music, and is founder of Songbound, an outreach initiative in Mumbai, that sets up choirs for deprived children, to sing western classical music and adaptations of Indian folk songs.

Lucy Crowe is recording a disc of Mozart arias for Harmonia Mundi next month. Engagements in England next year include Purcell’s The Indian Queen for English National Opera, directed by Peter Sellars.  There are two roles at Glyndebourne, as Michaela in Bizet’s Carmen and a return to Handel in the oratorio Saul.  She has her eye on the great tragic roles - Mimi or Violetta or Lucia di Lammermoor - but for now “it’s time to be Mummy.” 

L’elisir d’amore opens at Royal Opera House on Tuesday (roh.org.uk).  Tickets: 020 7304 4000; £7-£163)