New Zealand popera star Hayley Westenra has teamed up with a legendary Italian composer for her latest album. She talks to Scott Kara.
The maestro - as Hayley Westenra refers to Italian composer and songwriting great Ennio Morricone - was quite taken with our mega-selling soprano when he heard her voice.
She first met Morricone four years ago when she was invited to Sicily to meet him after a friend had played him
some of her songs. He liked her voice, her "perfect intonation", and it turns out he was thinking about a collaboration.
"But it just didn't happen, which was fair enough," says Westenra on the phone from her home in London. "It was exciting enough just to be out there to meet him, and he was holding a concert in this beautiful outdoor amphitheatre, so I was quite happy with that."
The pair had no contact until last year when it came time for her to start coming up with ideas for her fifth studio album - and Morricone's name came up again.
"I thought maybe he'd like to contribute a song to the album but he was interested in doing a whole album - and the next minute I was flying to Rome to meet him at his apartment in the centre of Rome with beautiful views across the city, and he made us all coffees. It was overwhelming."
She still sounds a little in awe of actually having worked with him. He is, after all, a prolific and pioneering music legend, who has written some of the most iconic film soundtracks, most famously 60s spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West, as well as pop songs, and, fair to say, a bit of fluffy wallpaper-type pap too.
At 24, Westenra is an accomplished and hugely successful singer in her own right, with more than three million album sales worldwide. But the Kiwi singer - who has been dubbed "popera" in the past - teaming up with 82-year-old Morricone does make for an odd combo.
"It's a bit different," she laughs of the collaboration. "I had to pinch myself."
She admits her initial meeting with him to talk about the album was intimidating, and at times she wasn't sure if he was happy with her ideas.
"He's 82 years old, he wears big spectacles, and he's very direct when he speaks, which is the Italian way I guess. They don't hold back. And I didn't know what he was saying [at first] so I had to wait for someone to translate for me."
But she believes she won him over by surprising him with her "feisty" rendition of a special song (which she doesn't want to reveal because it may come out at a later date).
"He said, 'Right, come over to the piano and prove yourself'. He'd heard my albums but I don't think he thought I had that feistiness in me."
Though that song didn't make it on to the album, Westenra's frisky, more gutsy side - that fans may not have heard before - comes through on the swooning Metti Una Sera A Cena, and Portuguese track Amalia Por Amor, a tribute to Fado singer Amalia Rodrigues.
"I had to really go for it and be really brave and throw myself into [Amalia Por Amor] and it was a very new and different style for me to be singing. I'm proud I managed to get it down on record."
Paradiso, which was recorded in Rome with Morricone's orchestra "and his entourage buzzing around", is a diverse album made up of versions of classic Morricone songs, including a version of the stunningly sad Once Upon a Time in the West, two tracks from the film 1988 film Cinema Paradiso, and new songs Gabriel's Oboe (Whispers In A Dream) and La Califfa, which Westenra wrote the lyrics for.
It's fair to say the album took her places she never thought she could go - yet it's still a sitter for the perfect Mother's Day present as well.
"He's given me the chance to explore the entire rainbow of emotions, which is incredible. And recording the album took a lot out of me, and it was exciting to have that opportunity to put all my emotions down on record. As a singer his music is a wonderful vehicle for expressing one's emotions, because it is so moving. This album stretched me to my limits. You have to be real when you sing, and I think the fact I haven't been through a music school - even though I kind of wish I had done more training - means I won't be able to sing certain types of music but it also means my voice and my singing is very natural. Generally I'm not thinking about technique, I'm totally singing in a way one would sing naturally. Singing is a little like acting in a way. All the best actors are just in the moment and not analysing what they are going to do next, they just go through the emotions."
The release of Paradiso marks roughly 10 years that Westenra has been in the music business since starting out as a fresh faced 13-year-old singer and later releasing international debut Pure in 2003. And now, with millions of album sales and performance spots with Jose Carreras and Andrea Bocelli behind her, she's still "living the dream".
"And I feel very fortunate to be still getting opportunities like these 10 years on. It keeps getting better really. Sometimes it's quite easy to get caught up in the stress of the job and I do have to remind myself to just enjoy it and that it's just entertainment."
LOWDOWN
Who: Singer Hayley Westenra
What: Paradiso, out now. Her fifth studio album is a collaboration with Italian composer, songwriter, and soundtrack legend Ennio Morricone
-TimeOut
