Tuning into Verdi vibe

By GILBERT WONG Arts editor

Tracey Collins, the designer about town with hair by Marge Simpson, blurts it out in her enthusiasm: "If Verdi were around now I think he'd be a film director. He would be at the medium that was at its peak in its time. He wouldn't be an opera director. He'd be Martin Scorsese."

To be brutal, she is right. Opera does not come near to matching cinema in terms of audiences or dollars today. Video games might bring in more, but the mass entertainment of our times is the movies.

Collins explains her take on Verdi: "He's very full on. An absolute perfectionist who drove people crazy that he worked with. He'd turn up in the middle of night, demanding the rewriting of librettos.

"He pumped out an opera every nine months while, on the business side, he was a fantastic negotiator who enjoyed the status that his position gave him."

That Collins and her partner in design, Bryan Caldwell, can voice the awful truth goes some way to explain why NBR New Zealand Opera asked them to be the creative team behind their next production, Viva Verdi!.

Collins: "They wanted something more than just a concert. It had to have the energy of a rock concert but not be a rock concert and use the music of Verdi and celebrate his life."

Caldwell admits that neither was an opera buff. They hunkered down to listen to the oeuvre, leafing through librettos in a crash course. "We approached it from our own musical sensibility. We listened to all the operas and pulled out pieces that resonated with us. We started with 30 and honed it down to 20."

Among the selection are arias and choruses from Aida, Otello, Macbeth, La Traviata, Simon Boccanegra, Il Trovatore and the Requiem, but call this a greatest-hits package and the pair protest, saying that some selections are from operas rarely performed. They chose the pieces on the basis of the conceptual framework they had arrived at.

"What we're producing is a celebration of Verdi's life. The story for us is the power of the creative process. We're telling a story of a creative man, his personality, his energy, what it was to be an artist in his time and what it is to be an artist in our time," says Collins.

Don't go to Viva Verdi! expecting a linear narrative or anything resembling a plot. Caldwell says they have drawn on their multimedia sensibilities to create something that owes little to traditional opera structure.

Collins: "We've looked at different art styles and different creative processes.

"We're mostly talking about communication: how do you communicate ideas? We've taken ideas from different times, from painting and aspects of multimedia."

The 50-strong Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus has been divided into five groups: the deconstructionists, colourists, abstractionists, assemblageists and minimalists.

Up front, the principal guest performers - John Daszak and Julia Melinek from Britain and Rodney Macann from New Zealand - represent concepts of Verdi's creative life, whether that was the desire to communicate, the creative urge or the future directions.

This bid to draw in new audiences might just work. But what of the faithful, who have stayed loyal?

Caldwell says they are not setting out to shock.

"We hope they are going to see that there is an understanding of the music in the opera, that we have thought deeply about this but come with different sensibilities."

Collins doesn't pause: "We're trying to honour Verdi. We've locked into the meanings of those songs. For everyone who knows everything about the songs, there will be something there for them. They will see that and even if they don't like it, I hope they respect it.

"In the end not everything you do is going to be something that all people love, but hopefully it can be work that challenges preconceptions about opera."

* Viva Verdi!, conceived and designed by Tracey Collins and Bryan Caldwell, conducted by Nicholas Braithwaite and choreographed by Marianne Schultz, at the ASB Theatre, Auckland from August 18.