Canadian soprano Dominique Labelle is tuning up to open the Shannon International Music Festival this week, she tells Arminta Wallace

Like the seasons, arts festivals tend to turn up year after year with minor variations in the details but much the same overall structure. This year, however, one festival has undergone the sort of change you might associate with a major league tornado or a full-on volcanic eruption. Remember the whole business of "the artist formerly known as Prince"? The Shannon International Music Festival - formerly known as the Killaloe Music Festival - has moved from the small town of Killaloe bang into the centre of Limerick city. It has acquired a new home, St Mary's Cathedral, and a new sponsor, MBNA Ireland.

But anybody who reckons that all this change adds up to second rate, second best or second string should have a look at the festival's extremely tasty programme, which offers an array of contrasting musical styles, works and guest performers, while resolutely avoiding the obvious, the tired or the middle of the road.

One might not, for example, expect to find the Canadian soprano, Dominique Labelle, singing Benjamin Britten's song cycle, Les Illuminations, with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by the festival's artistic director, Nicholas McGegan, at the opening concert on Wednesday evening. On the phone from her home in Boston, Labelle says she didn't expect it either.

"I work with Nicholas McGegan a lot," she says. "I told him maybe four or five years ago that I would love to do Les Illuminations with him, although I never thought he would take me seriously."

But she is delighted to be performing these dazzling settings of Rimbaud poems. "When I sing them I always feel a little bit like a dimmer switch - you know, the one you have to make the light go darker and brighter - which is cranked up to the maximum, even higher than it should be," she says. "Because the colours are very, very bright, very intense. They're very visual."

For her second appearance at the festival, next Saturday evening, Labelle goes right to the opposite end of the musical spectrum with a selection of songs by Scarlatti.

"Ah yes, Scarlatti," she says. "These are songs that we singers all have to learn, you know, when we are students. They're part of the classic Italian song repertoire and all the students have to sing them and most of the time they sound really awful. So I thought, why not take the time to do them very well and very beautifully?"

If her reviews, which stress the musicality and intelligence of her approach, are anything to go by, such is Labelle's approach to all types of music, both on the operatic stage and in the recital hall. On one memorable occasion - the performance of the newly discovered Gloria with McGegan at the prestigious Handel Festival at Gottingen in June 2001 - she was so immersed in the music that she didn't even notice the huge amount of hype surrounding the event.

"I didn't realise how important it was," she says. "They just sent me the music - 'Oh, Dominique, look at this, we're gonna be doing it for the festival' - so I said okay. It was no big deal. It was only when I arrived for the festival that I realised 'wah-ho'. People were waiting with such anticipation, and Professor Marx was there, the man who found the music, and there were lots of musicologists. It was huge."

Irish audiences heard the Gloria at the Killaloe Festival a month later, when Irish soprano Mary Nelson gave the piece (which was hailed in some quarters as "the new Messiah") its Irish premiere. Labelle, who has sung the piece numerous times in the past three years, says that now all the initial fuss has died down, the Gloria is growing and developing in a normal musical way. "It gets better and better. We're making the tempi better, the phrasing," she says.

But is it Handel? An accomplished performer in Handel opera - she has also sung the title role in Rodelinda at Gottingen, and her recording of Arminio won the 2002 Handel Prize - Labelle is as entitled to express an opinion as any of the so-called experts.

"I think it is, yes," she says. "I know some people are not sure. But it feels like Handel. I mean, the voice feels as it does in other Handel pieces. It's very comfortable for the voice. It's well-written. I think it comes from Handel, from what I feel when I sing it."

Labelle first came to international attention as part of the ensemble cast that gave a new twist to Mozart's much-loved da Ponte comedies. It was, she points out, a long time ago (1989 to be precise), but director Peter Sellars's gritty contemporary images have been influencing operatic stagings ever since. This is especially true of his inner-city Don Giovanni with, as Labelle recalls, "the twin black brothers eating McDonalds and throwing French fries at Elvira, and Dona Anna shooting herself with heroin".

For a singer fresh out of music college it was a fairy-tale start to a career. But for Labelle, musical life can't be - and shouldn't be - divorced from the real kind. These days, what's most important to her is a sense of balance.

"I'm finally, I think, growing up and owning my life, and making choices about what kind of projects I want to do," she says. "I have to be a mom and a wife as well, like every working woman. We have to make it work. And it's not so much about being famous; it's about enjoying what you're doing and making music at a very high level while you keep your privacy and have a normal life - doing the groceries, washing the dishes, you know?"

You'll have to conjure up the tea towel, folks, when she sashays into the spotlight in St Mary's Cathedral on Wednesday evening.