Romping along all the way to 1911

Alex Reedijk

Alex Reedijk, general director of the New Zealand Opera, is all persuasive affability. At the launch of the coming season, held at the Civic Wintergarden, he urges us to come closer to the stage "because it's a good place to be".

The programme is promptly revealed, with two main stage offerings in Gounod's Faust and Mozart's The Magic Flute, last seen in Auckland in 1995 and 1993, the Mozart in an evanescent production by Simon Phillips.

Reedijk says a homegrown production of Flute was considered but both operas will now be imported conceptions, although it is too early for details. The NBR-sponsored opera company must be praying for another Dmitry Bertman, after his phenomenally successful La Traviata.

"There is a little bit of money," Reedijk laughs when I ask about his post-Traviata balance sheet. "The family farm is safe for another year."

Reedijk is also pleased to announce the return of touring opera. After last year's disappointing Cosi fan Tutte, Donizetti's Don Pasquale has been lined up for next year, an opera Reedijk describes as "a perfect romp". Best of all, it will be "a crisp hour and a half, and in English". Conal Coad will play the title role and make his directing debut, and the conductor for most performances will be music director Wyn Davies, whom Reedijk sees as "our overseas ears and eyes. If we find someone who looks promising he can immediately audition them".

Apart from Australian Jaewoo Kim - an impressive Don Ottavio in this year's Don Giovanni, who returns to play Faust - the overseas artists are very much in the spring of their careers.

My money is on Australian Tiffany Speight, Pamina in June's The Magic Flute, praised by one Melbourne critic as "the beating heart" of Australian Opera's recent season of that opera.

While mid-career New Zealand singers are not so evident - Helen Medlyn is Marthe in Faust, Rodney Macann is The Speaker in The Magic Flute - Reedijk is proud that a selection of the company's present and past "emerging artists" are taking key roles, which he considers "a real sign of the programme paying dividends".

He takes a moment to muse whether a one-year immersion programme is better than a long-term monastic approach, but obviously puts his faith in the first. At the launch, solo turns by Malcolm Ede and Paloma Bruce, two of the company's emerging artists, bear out his faith.

Crossing from the Aotea Centre to the Town Hall, May's concert performance of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle will attempt to carry on the spirit of this year's Klinghoffer.

But despite the expressionist splendours of Bartok's score and the promise of Margaret Medlyn and Bruce Martin as the fraught couple, how is it that a 1911 work is as "contemporary" as the season gets, especially in times when new opera is the buzz du jour.

What of all those promises of homegrown opera, launched with Michael Williams' The Prodigal Child in 2003?

"We are busy, but not necessarily visibly busy," Reedijk says. "Two or three projects are cooking away but in order to do a new work you've got to give it time to gel."

The ingredients are here. In the meantime, new operas are being mounted around the country, from Anthony Ritchie's The God Boy in Dunedin to David Griffiths' 3 Franks in Hamilton. NBR New Zealand Opera should be leading the way.