Last concert tour with Amici Forever

Tsakane Valentine, David Habbin, Geoff Sewell and Jo Appleby at their hotel yesterday. Picture / Kenny Rodger

This is not the end, says Geoff Sewell, but the beginning of "a new adventure".

He and the other three members of the big-selling "popera" group Amici Forever were in Auckland yesterday on the eve of his last tour with the group.

The Hawkes Bay-born former accountant last week broke the news that he is quitting the group to devote himself to his 2-year-old daughter Sienna, diagnosed as autistic in early December.

She needs intensive input from Sewell and his wife, Simone Lanham, to overcome the social and communication barriers posed by the incurable condition.

Sewell, 31, who will be replaced in the classical cross-over group by Brazilian Italian baritone Bruno Santino, says the support he has received from all over the world since making the difficult decision has been "mind-blowing" but welcome: "I never expected it."

He and his colleagues - English singers David Habbin (tenor) and Jo Appleby (soprano), and Tsakane Valentine, a South Africa-born soprano, met the Herald in a bar at Metropolis.

All four are more slender than their pictures suggest, the two women whippets. They are open, chatty and quick to laugh, something they deliberately transfer to the stage.

They are also quite taken by the prospect of performing in three vineyards. Quips Sewell: "We always sound better after three bottles of wine ..."

The quartet perform at New Plymouth's Bowl of Brooklands tonight, with steelworker-turned-"people's tenor" Russell Watson.

Shows follow in Christchurch and Wellington, and there are three among the vines in Queenstown, Napier and Auckland.

Expect a "really funky and sexy" experience, says Appleby - more so, she says, than the last New Zealand trip in 2004. New Zealand touches in this tour include the song Hine e hine, written in 1905 by Princess Te Rangi Pai and covered by Kiri te Kanawa.

Amici don't want to give away too much of the rest, but say there are two new songs - Queen anthem We are the Champions and the ballad The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a collective favourite.

Purists may cringe, but the four are blase about the marriage of tradition and the 21st century. Traditionalists, says Habbin, "are completely entitled to their opinion, but [Amici] is a different side of the music world".