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The press release from the Auckland Philharmonia is a fanfare of optimism: "Six New Zealand Composers Given a Voice." This exciting new initiative by the APO and NBR New Zealand Opera pairs six composers and six Dame Malvina Major Emerging Artists in a project that will culminate, come
September, in a composers' workshop with a difference. The result will be six 10-minute pieces for solo singer and orchestra.
Lee Farley, the orchestra's education manager, explains how the project came about through "heaps of community consultation and research". Some of the composers and singers have just met, Farley says, but MIDI files are already flying back and forth.
John Rosser, of NBR New Zealand Opera, played a key role in the selection process and is proud of "the uncanny fit between composer and singer" - even down to the composers asking for three sopranos (Barbara Graham, Barbara Paterson and Julia Hill) and three baritones (Hadleigh Adams, Michael Gray and Matthew Landreth).
Some composers looked beyond our shores for their inspiration. Aucklander Jeff Lin will tackle a 10th-century poem by Li Yu while Penny Dodd, best known as Helen Medlyn's able pianowoman, ventures to Ancient Greece, sampling Medea's liberating Soliloquy from the play by Euripides.
Matthew Crawford turns to a poem by Karlo Mila, which he describes as "a personal reflection on the situation she's found herself in while examining her heritage".
Mila is a powerful force in Pacific poetry and "having a singer in front of the orchestra will make for a very human experience", says Crawford.
Senior composer David Hamilton, working towards an opera based around the Erebus disaster of 1979, is looking forward to "creating something specific that could also have the chance of being programmed or becoming part of something larger".
Hamilton's allotted baritone, Hadleigh Adams, grew up in high school singing David Hamilton's music. "It's such a huge honour to have a piece written by him for my voice."
The other senior composer of the group, Dunedin's Anthony Ritchie, will set Hone Tuwhare's Rain, which has special significance with the poet's recent passing.
"The poem is about death really," Ritchie explains. "Tuwhare talks about how if he were blind, dead or unable to hear anything, the rain would still wash over him."
Ritchie has already had a number of operas staged, including his 2004 The God Boy. So too has young Auckland composer Anthony Young; a chamber opera Through a Window as well as an impressive cycle of Jean Toomer songs, premiered in 2006 by Claire Nash and the Auckland Chamber Orchestra.
Young will bring the words of Canadian playwright Leanna Brodie to musical life with Hamilton soprano Julia Hill, and welcomes the immediacy of the commission and "writing instinctively for the voice".
Young and Hill were in the chorus of NBR NZ Opera's Turandot last year and he sees his colleague as "a soprano with a wonderful velvety tone which I really like working with".
Admiration is mutual. Hill, already looking at Young's opening pages, finds her composer has "his own modern twist on a late romantic style. The colour and emotion will be in the orchestra, with simple, clean melodies I can relate to".
Perhaps in September we will see a taste of a full-scale opera yet to come; perhaps a far-sighted orchestra might feature one or more of the offerings in a future programme. The project is inspired; the potential unlimited.
