OPERA IN MINIATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 16

OPERA IN MINIATURE

\W HEN Gian- Carlo Menotti, the American composer, was pre senting his operas The Medium and The ’TelePhone on the London stage a few years ago he was faced after three weeks with the departure of his American cast. Menott? held auditions for a replacement cast, and the singer he chose to fill the male lead in both operas was. the baritone Donald Munro. But after Donald Munro had studied the: parts and was ready to take over, the operas were taken off by the management, so he diJn’t get the opportunity to sing them on the London stage. Following his return to New Zealand, Donald Munro has sung the leading part, in The Telephone at the Auckland Festival, and has

also sung the lead in the C.A.S. production of La Serva Padrona, which toured the North Island last year for between 60 and 70 performances. With this experience behind him, and the benefit of his many years of operatic singing in Britain, Donald Munro decided to form a_ small professional opera company to put on intimate operas of this kind for New Zealand audiences. He has called the company the New Zealand Opera Group, and they will make their debut on the stage of the Wellington Concert Chamber next week with the two productions he is most familiar with--The- Telephone and La Serva Padrona. Donald’ Munro will sing the leading male role in both es and the Auckland soprano Mary ee plays the feminine lead. David Galbraith, a young Auckland pianist who

recently returned from abroad, will take the silent role of Vespone in La Serva Padrona, and will be the pianist with the augmented orchestra in The Telephone. Both operas will be staged on each night of the season, and one performance of each will be relayed on a YC link, at 8.0 p.m., on Monday, October 18 (The Telephone), and at 8.50 p.m. on Thursday, October 21 (La Serva Padrona). The music for the operas will be played by a small but first-rate orchestra consisting of Ruth Pearl and Ritchie Hanna (violins), Jean McCarthy (viola), Marie Vandewart (‘cello), Geoffrey Newson (double bass), Pat Watters (clarinet), Norman Booth (oboe) and Robert Girvan (bassoon). The three last-named are members of the National Orchestra.

Vonaid Munro called in at The Listener Office the other day to explain his plans for the New Zealand Opera Group. "Our C.A.S. tour of the ‘North Island with La Serva Padrona was so successful, and we had such a spontaneous response from audiences, that I felt that in this kind of , opera we had something which would be accepted by people of all musical tastes, which was good opera and yet had great entertainment value. At the end of last vear I started work on the idea of a small permanent repertory opera group, and after overcoming a lot of difficulties we are now ready to operein Wellington next week. Next year we will go on tour of both islands. Our productions are being put en in association with the Council of Adult Education. When we go on tour we will be self-

contained and very mobile, thus avoiding the costly transport and accommodation problems which usually plague opera groups on*tour. "This opera group I hope will be put on a permanent footing, thereby creating employment for a limited number of artists. Musicians coming back from England have found time and time again that. there’s little to do here professionally, Outside the National Orchestra I think it would be true to say there is practically no musical profession apart from teaching. So we want to create a professional opera. Our plans for néxt year include, besides La Serva Padrona and The Telephone, Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make An Opera, and. Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne and The Impresario, We have a lot of work ahead, we haven’t much money, but we've got terrific enthusiasm." Mr. Munro said that the sets and costumes for Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona were designed by John Holmwood and are on loan from the Auckland Community Arts Centre. The Telephone, of course, was a modern-dress work, in which the main prop was the telephone itself, over which the heroine receives numerous proposals of marriage from her various admirers. Donald Munro comes from Dunedin, and recently spent several years in England, where he sang many times on the BBC Third Programme, played the role of Adonis in a production of Venus and Adonis at the John Blow tercentenary, in Delius’s A Village Romeo and, Juliet under Sir Thomas Beecham, and in Cherubini’s Les Deux Journées. He was winner of the Tagore Gold Medal for the year’s best student at the Royal College of Music in 1941, spent two years with Pierre Bernac in Paris, and worked a season with the Old Vic Theatre Company. Mary Langford, of Auckland, is a winner of the James Stenberg Aria competition, and is well known for her broadcasting work. She was most successfu] as Serpina in La Serva Padrona last vear.