“THE problem with dramatic voices is that you have to sing with dramatic voices,” says dramatic soprano Sonia Anfiloff. 

For those not in the know, she’s talking about the rich, heavier voices, like hers, suitable for the great roles in opera, but while a blessing in some ways, it’s not easy to find the right role with matching voices.

After nine “bittersweet years” in Vienna, Anfiloff, ANU master’s graduate and recipient of the Kornfeld Scholarship, is returning to the stage in Canberra, where she was born and bred, in a concert called “The Unexpected Journey Back”, and thereby hangs a story.

Many will remember her as the radiant young soprano who charmed audiences in the role of Dido at The Street Theatre back in 2010, after which she left town full of optimism, only to return sadder and wiser.

She’ll be singing songs by Vaughan Williams in the concert for Art Song Canberra, accompanied by Kylie Loveland on piano and Rowan Harvey-Martin on violin and viola.

Far from concealing her heartache as some artists would, she’ll be using the chosen songs by Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Copland, Brahms, Duparc, Rachmaninoff and others to express the challenges she says “have both broken her and made her”.

“No relationships last in the arts,” she says of her seemingly golden marriage to fellow ANU voice student, the baritone Ben Connor. 

“Put simply, I stepped back so he could have a career.”

Now back in Canberra on her own with their three-year-old daughter Odette, she’s living in Belconnen with her parents, who are lightening the load with love and childcare while she teaches a .5 load (.6 next year, she says) at Canberra Girls Grammar School and establishes her own private voice practice in O’Connor, where she finds prospective students are “queuing up like mad”.

Girls Grammar, where she’s working with Harvey-Martin, her former mentor from fledgling days in Canberra Children’s Choir, is, she chuckles, “cushy” compared to her alma maters, Melba High and Hawker College.

Not that she has anything to say against Hawker, where she studied under legendary drama teacher Steve Brown and got the chance to play Mrs Lovett in the school production of “Sweeney Todd”, finding herself very nearly cast as the demon barber himself.

She hasn’t lost touch with Canberra during her nine years in Vienna, returning home most years to win first prizes in the Australian National Eisteddfod and the Orange Eisteddfods in 2012, sing in Verdi’s Requiem with the Llewellyn Choir and “In an Elemental Mood” for Art Song in 2017, and become artist-in-residence at The Street Theatre in 2018.

That bittersweet time in Vienna was sheer hard slog. It took ages to find exactly the right teacher, so she sang with young student pianists at graduation recitals and hosted transitory expatriates directed by the Australian Embassy to “the Connors” when they were in town. It was hard to integrate.

She’s much more comfortable back in her hometown with Odette, who turns four in November and while she believes she never really got a crack at a career in Vienna, she senses that she’s only just coming into her own now, since operatic voices often don’t mature until they’re into their 30s – luckily, they can go on for a long time after that.

“I don’t think I’ve ever sung as well as I do now,” Anfiloff says.

Bits of Vienna remain. With Russian parents, you’d think Odette might be learning Russian, but in fact she’s at the German Australian Playschool in Turner, and German is the mother-and-child tongue at home.

Her private students are a mixture of choral singers, aspiring young opera singers and her own former students and she likes flexing her teaching muscles while recalling her own studies at the ANU, where she started out as a mezzo soprano, studying under Angela Giblin and Patricia Davey.

She’s absolutely not over the idea of performing the great dramatic roles. Given the chance, she’d love to sing the title role in “Ariadne auf Naxos” by Richard Strauss, with the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” coming a close second.

Meantime, she says, “When you work by yourself, you feel like you’ve done yourself justice… As an artist, what I do is giving”.

“The Unexpected Journey Back”, Wesley Music Centre, Forrest, Saturday, October 17 at 3pm and 4.15pm. Bookings at trybooking.com/BLJNH

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