Shaking off the fusty, elitist reputation of opera has led New Zealand Opera to make some bold choices in recent years – ripping The Unruly Tourists straight from news headlines and co-producing m(Orpheus) with Black Grace founder Neil Ieremia, to stage critically acclaimed hits that appealed to audiences beyond the traditional opera-goer.
Getting a wider range of people to attend the opera is just as important to Brad Cohen, the incoming Tumu Whakarae General Director, who hopes the 2024 season will likewise bring a diverse audience to experience the “emotional volcanoes” that opera evokes.
“We’ve got an opera in English, we’ve got an opera in French, we’ve got an opera in Italian, we’ve got operas from the 19th century and 21st century. We’ve got comedies, we’ve got drama, we’ve got intimacy. Each of these pieces does more than one thing and reaches more than one audience,” he says.
The line-up is small but carefully conceived – the New Zealand premiere of Mansfield Park, a contemporary take on Jane Austen’s novel set to music by composer Jonathan Dove; a local twist on Rossini’s utterly mad Le comte Ory; and a Mafia-infused version of Verdi’s Rigoletto set in 1950s Italy.
For Cohen, the emotional power of each opera is such that they could be set in any number of environments. Rigoletto with its themes of sexual exploitation and abuse of power works in a mid-century crime world setting, but would make as much sense in an Egyptian court or Trump’s America.
“These works are really rich repositories of content that is not immediately apparent, so I don’t have the approach that I am trying to infuse them with relevance,” says Cohen. “All of these works are always relevant – they talk about emotions and conflict and that stuff never gets old. What I want to do is to always go as deep into the work as possible to discover the potential each opera has in itself.”
Beyond the three operas, Cohen is anticipating another successful year of education (Opera in Schools will reach 10,000 children across the country) and community events such as Auckland’s Homegrown.
New Zealand Opera’s incoming director Brad Cohen is keen to nurture new talent and support the development of new operas.
Opera in the Park series. Perhaps most exciting of all is the week-long forum New Zealand Opera will host in April. As far as Cohen knows, it is a world first.
Here, creatives will learn about “the plumbing” of composing an opera, such as how to secure the rights to a story. Relationships will be built, plans set in motion and, hopefully, new talent discovered and nurtured. Ideally, people who have never before considered writing an opera will be inspired to experiment. “For us opera is a really simple proposition,” says Cohen. “It’s the power of the human singing voice telling stories – that’s all it is.”
Discover the 2024 New Zealand Opera season
Photography by: Greg Bowker.
