"I was grounded in a place of fun and enjoyment."
She still respects operatic endeavour but worries whether "the strict parameters of opera" sometimes hinder singers both psychically and vocally. "You find you can't spread your wings and sing anything without bringing along all of your operatic processes."
She is grateful for an upbringing that included much singing around the family piano. "I thought everybody sat around the piano of an evening and sang through Verdi's Requiem with just four people," she says. "Most importantly, we sang and listened to such a variety of music that there was never a sense of containment."
Song recitals are about communication on the most intimate level and Medlyn feels that "if you put yourself in all your vulnerability before an audience they will usually feel that and open up to you too". The five Shakespeare settings by Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) simply fitted. "Like a beautiful coat," she says, singing a well-tailored phrase from the Englishman's jaunty setting of It was a lover and his lass.
Leonard Bernstein wrote the five "kids songs" of I Hate Music in 1949, and Medlyn had already sampled one with Penny Dodd in cabaret.
"I didn't realise just how very difficult the others would be," she says, mentioning Jupiter has Seven Moons and A Big Indian & A Little Indian. "I hope no one notices me counting with my toes inside my shoes."
With Ravel's 5 Melodies Populaires Grecques, she turns wistful. "You can sense a pastoral, rural quality in them. You can almost see people scything the hay and feel the heat of the sun." Once again, she offers a phrase from one of the songs, more languorous and exotic than the Finzi.
Poulenc's five Apollinaire settings of his 1940 cycle Banalites were a revelation
"I was familiar with Poulenc but not with the enormity of Poulenc," she says, describing her favourite as being about someone isolated on a desolate moor, sad that all the beauty had been left behind in the forest. She singles out images of howling winds and life biting bitter death with greedy teeth. "All of that stuff just makes my mouth water."
Those who know this woman as one of our finest Mahlerian singers will be eager to hear the five songs of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder.
She feels a "real brotherhood between the two composers" and these songs show Wagner at his most "soul-searing and heart-grabbing ... This is the perfect coming together between his music and Mathilde von Wesendonck's words. The perfect marriage of the arts."
What: A Bunch of Fives
Where and when: Opera Factory, 7 Eden St, tomorrow at 5pm
