JANE HARDY INTERVIEW

Jane Hardy

is a feature writer who has interviewed a few of the big names from Arlene Foster to Mrs Thatcher.

OPERATIC FOR THE PEOPLE

Cameron Menzies, new Artistic Director of Northern Ireland Opera talks to Jane Hardy about his ambitious plans, the new production of La Boheme and Dolce & Gabbana shoes.

Talking to Cameron Menzies, new artistic director of NI Opera, in the atmospheric surroundings of the 19th century, semi-restored Carlisle Memorial Church, he brilliantly sums up the appeal of his genre: “Opera changes the air, it alters the vibration with an audience.”

He elaborates by saying that when his company presented a live performance during the summer recital series with a couple of the Opera Studio alumni, Elaine McDaid and David Corr (last year’s winner of the Festival of Voice), the sense of engagement was palpable.

“It’s important to bring live performance back, to get that energy again. Acoustically, this church, which was built in the 1870s, is perfect. We’re talking in it now, and there’s no booming. “

The company is presenting its first fulllength opera for over a year and a half in this venue. It’s Puccini’s La Boheme, and it’s also the first opera with NI Opera directed by Cameron Menzies, who arrived in post during lockdown in March. As Menzies reveals, there will be family and friends bubbles, there will be safety, but above all, there will be great music. It’s not hard to work out why the opera about bohemians struggling to earn a living in Paris, with a backdrop of consumption which kills off lovely Mimi our heroine, was chosen. Other operas were in the frame apparently, but this won out. “Yes, I thought of one or two others, but La Boheme was the right choice as it’s about a group of people finding themselves, and finding their way through.” Something we have all been doing in the plague year.

The fit of venue and opera is also great, as Menzies explains. “It’s been through a lot, has fallen on hard times and that works. We can also control it both sides of the fourth wall.” Cameron Menzies, who is directing, has set it post-World War One. “I’ve moved it from the late nineteenth century, as it sets it in a more fragmented world with a class system breaking up. Mimi has her embroidery and crafts but isn’t aristocratic. The costumes are more interesting too.” The sense of a world order breaking, leading to a new age, will be reflected in the cast’s bohemian rags and tatters.

The cast is stellar and includes American tenor Noah Stewart as Rodolfo. NI Opera are pretty excited about having secured this great, charismatic singer from Harlem. I wonder whether the casting of a black American Rodolfo will shift the emphasis or are we hopefully colour blind in terms of performance now, post-Hamilton? “We’ve got him because he’s a superb singer, a class act. Also, in Paris in the early twentieth century, Americans had come over and colour really wasn’t an issue. Think of performers such as Josephine Baker.” Listening to his Nessun dorma, you get the point and start counting the days to his account of Puccini’s Che gelida

Cameron Menzies directing the new NI Opera film ‘Old Friends and Other Days’ in Carlisle Memorial Church. Photograph: Ste Murray

manina (Your tiny hand is frozen), one of the great Romantic era love arias.

The cast also includes soprano Gemma Summerfield in her first outing as Mimi; soprano Emma Morwood from Belfast, making her debut with the company as Musetta; and Ukrainian star Yuriy Yurchuk as Marcello.

Menzies pretty much defines eclectic. He has directed operas about netball, and wrote an operatic work about the effect of HIVAids on Australian sufferers which involved extensive interviewing. He works with Diva Opera company and earlier this year, put on touring productions of Carmen and Don Giovanni (“traditional versions”) which have toured to the south of France. And he has, in his home country, put on top- end fashion extravaganzas as well as operas, theatre productions, films. The outfit he is wearing which complements the old gold and faded colours on the back wall - originally the altar backdrop with the biblical message “Do this in remembrance of me” - is a mix of labels. “My gold shoes are Dolce & Gabbana, the jacket is from what you call a charity shop and we call an opp (opportunity) shop in Australia. You’d almost think I’d chosen them on purpose.”

Menzies got into opera early when his father, Scott, took him to see traditional productions of Il Trovatore and other repertoire favourites. “If you lived in Sydney, you passed the opera house which looked magnificent. Inside, it was even better. Hearing the music, I knew opera was for me.” One of the projects Cameron Menzies is most excited about at NI Opera is the opera on homelessness they have commissioned, designed to appeal to young people. “It’s written by Fionnuala Kennedy, a very talented writer, has no title as yet but is based on interviews with young people living on the streets. We wanted to get their voice and won’t shy away from using their language, including swearing.” The production, due to be workshopped early next year during the Children’s Arts Festival, will shake up our idea of what opera is. This ornate art form that often tackles extremes of human experience with trills, many noted or melismatic word settings and sumptuous harmony, sometimes seems out of reach. But accessibility is opera’s current watchword with a new programme Take me to the Opera from Zeinab Badawi airing on the BBC recently.

Although the paternal influence on Menzies’ taste was strong – “my dad liked everything from Rod Stewart and Elton John to musicals and opera” – Scott Menzies had no arts background but was originally a star rugger player in the national team. Then he became an accountant.

Cameron Menzies, who is distantly related to Sir Robert Menzies, Australian PM twice in the forties and sixties, hit the ground running in March when he arrived in Belfast. It’s a city he hasn’t been able to get to know fully during the Covid-19 constraint. “I haven’t seen it yet but sense a place that I am going to like.” He left behind in Australia his partner and two grown up children, Ethan (23) and Piper (21), both creative. He says proudly that his son is very musical, plays in a band, and that his daughter is a designer, creating top-end shop window displays. Cameron Menzies keeps in regular touch and makes daily phone calls home from his city centre base.

Off duty, he admits to one guilty TV pleasure. “Lower Deck, about the people who work on the yachts of the rich, I love it.”

Artistically, these are tough times. So as Menzies works round the clock on La Boheme, what would he like to see as a spectator coming out of the pandemic? “We need a mix of things: variety, opera, ballet, fashion, we need distraction, entertainment.”

For sheer entertainment, this month’s production of La Boheme should be just the ticket.

“If you lived in Sydney, you passed the opera house which looked magnificent. Inside, it was even better. Hearing the music, I knew opera was for me.”