Murrihy’s work ranges from the Baroque repertoire that has become one of her artistic home grounds to the central Mozart and Strauss roles and the music of living composers, and she moves between the opera house, the concert platform and the recital room with equal commitment.
On stage she has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Ballet & Opera Covent Garden, the Opéra national de Paris, La Monnaie, the Teatro Real Madrid, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Dutch National Opera, Semperoper Dresden, the Bolshoi Theatre, the Salzburg Festival, Santa Fe Opera, Oper Frankfurt and Irish National Opera. Among the roles most closely associated with her are Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, the title role in Ariodante, and the Fox in The Cunning Little Vixen. She has also been drawn to new and recent work, creating Euryale in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Medusa at La Monnaie and singing the Waitress in Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence.
Murrihy tours widely as a concert singer and works regularly with Harry Bicket and The English Concert, with whom she has sung Goffredo in Handel’s Rinaldo in London and on tour to China and South Korea, and Sesto in Giulio Cesare at the Barbican and across the United States. Other long-standing partnerships have taken her to Berlioz’s Les Troyens as Didon with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, closing at the BBC Proms; to Bach’s St John Passion with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; to Mysliveček’s Abramo ed Isacco with Collegium 1704 in Prague, Dresden, Amsterdam and Salzburg; and to a wide-ranging collaboration with Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna taking in Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, Purcell’s The Indian Queen, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and Hindemith’s Die junge Magd.
The oratorio and symphonic repertoire has brought her to Handel’s Messiah, Serse, Solomon and Alexander’s Feast, Mozart’s Requiem under Jane Glover, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ and Les nuits d’été, Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Christmas Oratorio, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with orchestras including the Boston Symphony Orchestra — where she gave the premiere of John Harbison’s Symphony No. 6 — the Philadelphia Orchestra, the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.
An accomplished recitalist, she has sung at Wigmore Hall with Malcolm Martineau, Sholto Kynoch and Tanya Blaich, and at Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Concertgebouw, Oper Frankfurt, the Aldeburgh and Oxford Lieder festivals and the Diaghilev Festival in Perm. Her debut solo album, I will walk with my love, made with Tanya Blaich for Orchid Classics, follows a thread of folk-inspired song and myth through Brahms, Mahler, Debussy and Grieg alongside traditional Irish folksong.
