Conductor Lina González-Granados The 11th Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition took place at the National Concert Hall at the end of last month following auditions held in several European centres as well as in New York.
The triennial competition, set up by the redoubtable Ronnie, who died in 2021 and to whom there was a repeated and fitting tribute in the 2025 programme booklet by one of her distinguished pupils, Tara Erraught, had seventy participants. This number was whittled down to six – five women and one man – heard in three operatic arias in the final round with the NSO under sympathetic conductor Wyn Davies.
I felt was a little disappointing until the performances of the fifth and sixth singers – US mezzo Anna Kelly and soprano Julia Muzychenko-Greenhalgh, who has Ukrainian-Russian parents and is married to US baritone Tobias Greenhalgh.
In the heel of the hunt the jury decided, fittingly I thought (I often find myself at odds with jury decisions), to award the €10,000 first prize to Julia Muzychenko-Greenhalgh, a graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatoire and the Hans Eisler Music School in Berlin.
With arias by Puccini, Massenet and Verdi, she was also the recipient of the BVOP prize, which offers a professional engagement with the Blackwater Valley Opera Festival through either a recital or principal role. Anna Kelly, who chose music by Mozart, Massenet and Richard Strauss, received the €5,000 second prize.
The competition offered a number of other awards among them the William and Alison Young prize for the best oratorio aria in the semi-final round. This went to bass-baritone Hanseong Yun for his Es ist genug from Mendelssohn’s Elijah.
Soprano Nikolett Mráz took the Joan Sutherland/Richard Bonynge prize for the best Mozart aria from any round with the Dermot Troy prize for the highest-placed Irish competitor given to Dublin tenor Cathal McCabe who also won the Jane Carty prize for the most promising competitor aged 25 or under.
The jury, with renowned baritone Sir Thomas Allen in the chair, included Jonathan Friend of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Irish National Opera, Tobias Hasan, artistic director of the State Opera in Berlin, David Lomeli, chief artistic officer of the Santa Fe Opera and consultant to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Christina Scheppelmann, general director of the Seattle Opera, our own soprano Suzanne Murphy, former pupil and abiding friend to Ronnie, and the Italian conductor Carlo Rizzi.
Columbian-born conductor Lina González-Granados was also on the NSO’s rostrum recently in music by Debussy, Rakhmaninov and Irish-born Welsh-reared Stephen McNeff whose song-cycle The Celestial Stranger brought tenor (formerly baritone) Gavan Ring back to the NCH as soloist.
The cycle, that includes settings of Thomas Traherne and Dylan Thomas among others, uses the orchestra in a richly romantic vein and in the programme booklet Gavan Ring, who gave the work’s first performance in Cardiff last year, praised the composer’s ‘instinct for text selection and setting, coupled with his quite brilliant, mercurial musical imagination’. All very well, but in the NCH, I grasped few of the words although McNeff’s orchestration never sounded exaggerated.