KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
What: Julius Caesar
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday 7.45pm
Only four years after winning the last of the Mobil Song Quests, Anna Leese returns to New Zealand, with a press kit that some sopranos would relinquish a Top C for.
Last October, London's Times caught her as Musetta in La Boheme at Covent Garden and declared her "born to play this part".
Taking a break from intensive rehearsals for Auckland Opera Studio's production of Julius Caesar this Sunday, Leese admits it took a couple of months before she realised what an extraordinary break it had been for her, stepping in at the last minute to replace an injured Nuccia Focile in the Royal Opera's production of La Boheme.
"It was a good fit," she laughs. "I was ready for it, and there happened to be a lot of reviewers there."
The singer, who enrolled at the Royal College of Music just four years ago, is now looking forward to a number of Royal Opera roles and, as she puts it, "Musettas around the world".
First up, however, is Handel's Cleopatra in Sunday's Julius Caesar, and revelations have been many.
"I had done two of the arias before, as they are benchmarks for young sopranos. But I didn't realise back then that they were from the same opera."
Now she has immersed herself in the whole piece, she is impressed by the character she will be taking on. "I see Cleopatra as quite masculine in a way, especially for the time," she explains. "She is doing things that are pretty bold, dressing up as someone else to seduce her own lover. She's pretty gutsy."
Once again, direction is in the hands of Raymond Hawthorne, whose brilliant staging of Mozart's Idomeneo in 2004 also featured Leese as the Trojan princess, Ilia.
"In just two days, Raymond set the entire opera," Leese comments. "It is so direct. He gives a strong outline and then we work within that. It's nice to be trusted to fill it out with emotion."
The soprano is particularly taken with Hawthorne's overall concept.
"It's all circular. You are not allowed to walk in a straight line, only in a spiral.
"Everything is always moving and, with only five singers and two actors, it's a really nice way to centre everything."
Her experiences over the last few years have taught her that opera is, first and foremost, theatre.
"You don't really realise how theatrical it is until you get into your first productions.
"It's one thing learning arias at college but when you are doing them within an opera on stage, the first thing is to learn it as a play. Nothing happens with the music until the first meeting with the orchestra."
Singing Mozart with Roger Norrington and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the BBC Proms last year, Leese has become accustomed to working with authentic period instruments, with the music at the lower pitch of C being 415 rather than 440.
"It was Norrington, too, who made me think of Donna Elvira as a bit of a comic figure in the last scene of Don Giovanni," she confesses. "I was making her tragic and he told me to lighten up."
She found the same advice was offered by David Syrus, head of music at the Royal Opera, who suggested she should "lighten the mood 99 per cent of the time.
"After all, the composer didn't write the music so people would have a miserable time. It has to be enjoyed."
