KEY POINTS:
Linda Kitchen's first taste of opera, as a young girl, was a touring Glyndebourne production of Don Giovanni. "I thought this was the most wonderful music," she says, suddenly bursting out with laughter, "but why were they just walking around the stage gesturing?"
At this point I half-expect the diminutive soprano, this Julie Walters with a top C, to launch into Zerlina's Batti batti aria.
But, if so inclined, perhaps she would have chosen an aria from Mozart's La Finta Giardiniera, which she is directing for Opera Unleashed and which opens as part of the Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival on Monday night.
Twenty years ago, Kitchen played Serpetta, the maid of the piece, for Opera North and she knows the charms of this opera buffa about a gardener's girl who is not quite what she seems.
"You think of early Mozart as being simplistic but there's such intensity in those accompanied recitatives," she says. She explains how she has approached the opera's hero Ramiro's three big arias, not so much through what I suggest is deft stage business but simply "something for the singer to latch on to".
Kitchen knows the opera business from the inside, having joined the Glyndebourne chorus straight from her training at the Royal Northern College of Music. Her first big break came playing Amor in Peter Hall's production of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. She recalls a wild take on Cavalli's La Calisto, which had her swimsuited up as a beauty queen.
"Some people are against updating opera, but it can work for the singers, who can feel more attached to the material. You can get very stuck on the whole gesture thing. I was lucky being brought up in a tradition where you learned stagecraft and movement. It means you can get to the nitty-gritty of a character."
Kitchen did just this when she directed Puccini's Sister Angelica for Auckland's Opera Factory two years ago. Included as part of the staging was a specially shot film in which Angelica and her fearsome aunt were seen battling over a baby.
"I know it's only a short opera, but the music is so dramatic," Kitchen explains. "It was wonderful to be able to present Angelica's story by seeing what was going on before the opera started. I like to invent things and entertain, I just hate being bored in the theatre. I don't care if someone doesn't agree with what I'm doing but I would hate to present something that was boring."
The same brio and resourcefulness marked her production of Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges for Opera Factory later in 2007.
"It was a matter of finding the threads between all those characters. Working with singers playing an inanimate object like a clock or teapot, you could be quite inventive."
Although Kitchen has retired from singing, in 2005 she took on the non-singing role of Marlene in Gerald Barry's opera based on the Fassbinder film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
She played a key role and received plaudits from more than one critic. "I was a lesbian slave. I don't know how many of those there are in Auckland."
Contemporary frissons have been put aside this year, which is shaping up as Kitchen's Mozart year. Later on, she travels to Christchurch to direct Southern Opera's The Magic Flute.
"I've played Papagena and Pamina before," she explains, "but I didn't realise how difficult it was when I was in it." Somehow I suspect that the various threads of the opera's fantastical narrative could have no better weaver.
Performance
What: La Finta Giardiniera
Where and when: Hamilton Gardens, Monday-Wednesday at 6pm
