The soaring career of Jonathan Lemalu

By HEATH LEES

No one was surprised when 24-year-old Jonathan Lemalu was picked to sing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Olympic Cultural Team in Sydney next Tuesday.

When Lemalu sings, you know instantly that he has a golden voice. But when he talks about music and his own performance, something more important emerges. Star quality.

Part of this comes from a confidence that includes all the usual "know-how/can-do" attitudes that the best students have to develop if they are to get anywhere in today's almost literally cut-throat opera world.

But Lemalu's musical personality is much more fundamental than that. Deep down, he has a musical comfort-zone where he feels like he's joined to the music he's singing and is perfectly sure of what the composer wants from him.

He says: "I need to be true to the music and the way I've learned it. Sometimes in front of a big audience you get up there and you want to sell yourself and your song.

"Suddenly, little tricks steal into your voice, like a tremble here, a different colour there, an emotional surge that you never practised.

"The real test is this: with a big orchestra behind, thousands of people in front and the feeling that everything hangs on it - can you just get up and perform the music the way, in your heart of hearts, you know it should be?

"It's hard but I've stuck at it, and maybe the fact that I've had a few successes means that audiences and juries really do respond to letting the spirit of the music come through almost by itself."

Lemalu's modesty disguises the fact that, whatever the secret of his approach, it certainly works.

It has brought back into his Dunedin home dozens of prizes, from placings in local competitions to winning the Mobil Song Quest in 1998, Australia's most prestigious opera-aria prize in 1999, and coveted trophies from singing festivals and competitions in Britain, where he is now based.

During the past year this big, New Zealand-born Samoan has made his oak-tree voice heard in some of Britain's most famous venues, from the Covent Garden Studio to the Royal Albert Hall.

Lemalu admits that he relies a lot on his natural musical sense.

He is also graced with an enviable ability - an "instinct" he calls it - for picking up languages.

This makes the European languages of opera a breeze for him and a puzzle to his Royal College of Music colleagues in London, who see his obvious South Pacific heritage shining through every aspect of his appearance. In his own description, Lemalu has "the only brown face in the college."

He credits his feeling for music to a Samoan background that automatically included school choirs, church choir-singing and music of all types around him when he was young.

"Dad was even in a band during the 70s, doing cover versions of Elvis Presley hits. Good at it too, he was."

Lemalu reckons his family influence has been most important to him because through his family he learned to have a deeply personal life, yet be good at sharing his emotions as well.

"Singing with true emotion is a very intimate thing," he says. "Sometimes I wonder why singers open up and try to share it - why not just keep it to yourself since it's such an enjoyable feeling? Then I realise that this is exactly what the composer is asking you to do through the music. To share it around. If you don't want to do that, then take up the drums. Singing is not for you."

Support in all its forms is vital, says Lemalu, when a young New Zealand singer suddenly hits the big hard world of the London opera scene. But there are advantages to living in New Zealand, too.

"It amazed me to find that we really get more opportunities back here for high-level professional work, like singing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra or appearing regularly in large venues with big choirs. Many of the final-year students at the college in London are freaked out at the prospect of having to sing with a professional orchestra for the first time."

Contacts made in New Zealand blossom all over again. Lemalu's appearances in New Zealand master classes with visiting singers have made an impression, and in London he finds them happy to talk to him, give him advice and help him to make the vital contacts he needs.

Not that he will find the singing world difficult to join. Already he has offers and high-level contracts for next year and beyond from people who recognise the unique musical sincerity that lights up his work and makes the music come alive through his singing.

Star quality. It will take him far.