AK03: Homegrown opera scores a hat-trick

By WILLIAM DART

Just when we'd all resigned ourselves to a future with little or no homegrown opera, NBR New Zealand Opera puts its faith behind Michael Williams' The Prodigal Child and manages a hat-trick with three festival performances at Taranaki in March, Christchurch in July and, opening tonight, as part of AK03.

For Williams, it's been "all and more than a composer could ask for".

Although the initial inspiration for the work was his - "simply the idea of a couple's loss" - it was Alan Riach's libretto which put a shape to the tale of a couple anguished by a mysterious visitor and a phantom child.

"Alan added poetry that I wasn't expecting," says Williams, "giving it the darkness that's so much part of its character."

Riach, a colleague of Williams' at Waikato University when the opera was written, is now based at the University of Glasgow, although some Concert FM listeners will know him as the gentle burr and sharp mind behind the series The Good of the Arts.

The Prodigal Child was one of a handful of presentations at last year's Wild Opera, a show-and-tell session set up by the Centre for New Zealand Music and Creative New Zealand. Interest was shown by NBR New Zealand Opera which led to a series of Auckland workshops, in which "the whole thing was cut up", Williams remembers.

"It was reduced by 40 minutes to 20, leaving me to write another 40 minutes of music in three months."

It is not hard to see some of the influences behind the allegory. Britten's Peter Grimes is an obvious one, and Williams admires the English composer for "not trying to be too clever and confuse his audience with techniques they're going to find hard to comprehend. He writes from an audience's perspective".

One of the appealing features of The Prodigal Child is the modest production demands. It requires only three soloists, five instrumentalists and clocks in at around an hour. But this small-scale approach is fuelled as much by artistic choice as by practicalities; Williams prefers chamber opera - "it's more intimate, more able to confront issues. It's a more embracing thing".

It also allows for a sharper focus. One of the main challenges for the composer was sustaining the tone of the piece.

"There's not too much let-up," Williams admits, with a dry laugh, "and it's been difficult not allowing resolution when it might be expected, keeping up that constant layering of tension."

Tonight is the opening of the opera's third season, with Anna Marbrook overseeing Colin McColl's initial Taranaki Festival conception of the opera. The composer is looking forward to hearing a new singer, Australian John Brunato, alongside Joanne Cole and Stephanie Acraman, who have been with the piece since its inception. He has been impressed by the way Marbrook has "had the cast search even more deeply into their characters for their feelings and motivations".

Back in March, it was very much the faith and vision of McColl that made the whole thing work as drama.

"Colin had this special way of manipulating the smallest of movements and expressions. At one point I'd thought of a character as being whimsical; Colin saw her as angry, spitting venom and that's how it was played. He was right."

There are further plans for The Prodigal Child, including a season in Hamilton's Fuel Festival next year.

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

Auckland Festival website