Pierard matures fast under Dame Kiri's wing

Madeleine Pierard. Photo / Supplied.

London, Sunday 10.30am. Madeleine Pierard sounds understandably distracted on the phone. After Friday night's Rossini at St Martin-in-the-Fields, followed by an Etchingham Arts Festival recital the following day, she is about to fly home for an Auckland Opera Studio production of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito.

In a year of impressive achievements, the biggest comes in September when she joins the Royal Opera House's Jette Parker Young Artists programme.

"It's very exciting," she enthuses. "For two years we are coached by the world's best and can have training in whatever we want, from dancing and languages to fencing and fighting.

"On stage, we cover major roles and play smaller ones with all the big stars. This time next year I'll be playing Noemie in Massenet's Cendrillon, with Joyce DiDonato playing Cinderella. I'll be her sister on stage in the most sublime music. It's completely surreal."

Since moving to London after her 2005 Lexus Song Quest success, Pierard has ascended from mezzo to soprano with a coloratura bent.

"There are no terrors with coloratura," she laughs. "It's one of the only things that comes really easily. It's exciting to sing and exciting to listen to."

Pierard is one of many to benefit from the artistry and generosity of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, who invites young New Zealand singers to work with her on their music of the moment.

"She may say she's not a teacher but she's really a good one," says Pierard.

"She's not afraid to tell you exactly what she thinks. And when it comes to Mozart, this woman has spent a lifetime working with every Mozart expert there is, and has the most amazing wealth of knowledge."

Te Kanawa's advice and mentoring will stand Pierard in good stead when she takes the Concert Chamber stage tomorrow in Raymond Hawthorne's production of La Clemenza di Tito, playing the decidedly feisty Vitellia.

"I feel sorry for Vitellia," Pierard says. "She's a royal who has her right to the throne usurped. Throughout the first act she's portrayed as terribly manipulative, nasty and vindictive and then she spends the second act worrying about it and feeling guilty. By the end of the opera you see just how broken she is and it's so easy to empathise with her."

Here is a soprano who has no worries about balancing Mozart and modern. In August, the soprano joins Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for another airing of Ross Harris' prize-winning Second Symphony and she can be heard in superb form singing the music of Lyell Cresswell on a recent Naxos CD.

Pierard admits her full academic background in composition and the like has given her "a more intellectual and analytical approach", but something has flowed into her attitude to the voice itself.

"Even though I think of my voice as a personal extension of myself in performance, in rehearsal or a coaching session, it's just an instrument. That makes it easier for me to detach myself from my voice and receive criticism without being hurt."

Yet the cool, accomplished Pierard admires singers "who haven't had years and years of musical education and have had to spend hours absorbing the score, and yet are so impassioned in performance".

"I have had to almost force myself to approach things from a completely emotional point of view and Dame Kiri has helped me with that. It's a matter of singing what I'm feeling rather than how I'm feeling."

Now, with Italian bel canto music Pierard has "finally found a repertoire in which I can make my voice soar. Sometimes I think I can just make the voice do whatever I want it to - that's what it's like with bel canto".

How does a soprano who can sing and understand cerebral contemporary cope with music based on harmonies not so much in advance of a three-chord country song?

"When I was learning Rossini's Messe Solenelle, there was so much repetition I thought that if Rossini had had access to Sibelius software he would have just cut-and-pasted and never got out of bed," she laughs. "But in performance it's amazing music."

PERFORMANCE

What: La Clemenza di Tito

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday 18 July at 6pm