Today sees the opening of Liverpool’s year-long stint as Europe’s Capital of Culture, 2008, and one of the Rooney family is nervous. Not the illustrious football player Wayne, late of the blue side of the city, but Helen Rooney, an associate in the Manchester office of national law firm Hill Dickinson.

Rooney — born and bred in Liverpool, but, she says with a smile, “no relation” to the England footballer — is first soprano with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir. “The Phil”, as it is affectionately known, is one of the oldest concert-giving organisations in the world, and the second-oldest in Britain. In a normal year it gives over 60 performances between September and June, but 2008, as Liverpool shows the world its cultural credentials, might just be its busiest year yet.

As a key member of its choir, Rooney will perform at the Philharmonic Hall in just over a week at the world premiere of Kenneth Hesketh’s Like the sea, like time. Currently in the midst of rehearsals, she admits to feeling nervous, but enthusiastic, too: “This is a great year for Liverpool and there are going to be lots of wonderful opportunities over the coming months. It’s fantastic to be involved in showing people what the city is about and with a new conductor, Vasily Petrenko, recently appointed, there are exciting times ahead.”

Singing — and music — has been in her blood since birth. “I started playing the violin when I was four,” she says, “and sang throughout school and university.” She took a Law degree at Manchester Metropolitan University and studied her LPC at the College of Law in Chester, where she was quick to join the college’s Chamber Choir. Almost as soon as she started her legal life, with Liverpool firm Goldsmith Williams, she auditioned for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s choir, nipping out in her lunch hour to do so.

She was accepted immediately and hasn’t looked back since, surviving the choir’s re-auditions every three years. “I’ve been in the choir for 13 years now,” she says, adding that “I’ve worked with some fantastic conductors and have made varied and regular recordings in that time. We’ve also taken various foreign trips.”

Rooney, who joined Hill Dickinson in March 2001, says that the choir’s behaviour on overseas engagements is rather better than that of her namesake’s fellow professionals when abroad, and counts appearing at the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, as well as singing with the St Petersburg Philharmonic in Birmingham, as career highlights.

Until now, that is. Liverpool’s year at the European centre of things seems certain to throw up some treasured memories for the 35-year-old commercial litigator and insolvency lawyer, who confesses that her devotion to the choir does have a fairly substantial impact on her life. “It is time-consuming, yes — we rehearse every Monday night and prior to a performance, we’ll be rehearsing three or four times a week. We’ve got a very heavy programme ahead of us for 2008.”

But Rooney wouldn’t have it any other way. She is passionate about English composers — Elgar and William Walton are favourites — and so enamoured of music that she can often be heard singing around the house. “Occasionally, I’ll find myself getting a bit carried away, humming in the office too,” she says, but one suspects that her colleagues are at ease with this most innocent of peccadilloes.

So, too, that they understand how important singing is to Rooney’s life as a solicitor. “I think you need to have something different in your life, something that provides relief from your day job. Singing, for me, is an incredibly enjoyable pastime. It’s really exhilarating to perform in a concert and there’s a great deal of camaraderie involved in being part of a choir. The whole experience is very rewarding.”

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