Return of the prodigal son

By WILLIAM DART

Paul Whelan, back in New Zealand to head the cast of Michael Williams' new opera, The Prodigal Child, at the Taranaki Festival, cheerfully admits he's become "very good at packing my bags". Since carrying off the Lieder Prize at Cardiff in 1993 put Whelan's talents on the world stage, the 36-year-old has become hot property in opera houses and concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic.

Looking back at Cardiff, he remembers it as "lots of hard work. I thought of it very much as an audition rather than as a competition - just about presenting myself well on TV."

Ironically, although he won the Lieder Prize, he finds himself more on the operatic stage. "Only a few people, like Ian Bostridge, can make a career in lieder. It's much easier to make a living in opera."

Whelan's operatic break came seven years ago, when he played the title role in Peter Maxwell Davies' The Doctor of Myddfai, "a science-fiction-type crazy idea set in a little village in Wales, with this mysterious disease spreading across Europe. It was like something out of a George Orwell novel with themes of Aids and environmental pollution."

Maxwell Davies was the first composer Whelan worked so closely with and it was a revelation.

"He was so easy-going. If the music didn't fit into your voice he was usually happy to change it. Composers tend to be like that. We revere them after they're dead but really they're just working musicians who want to make the best and most musical piece they can."

Whelan has been in intensive rehearsals for The Prodigal Child, which has its premiere at the Taranaki Festival next Tuesday. The part of Albert is under his belt ("a character who is living a life of quiet desperation"), and Whelan finds Williams' music "lovely, and very accessible".

Considering the sombre tone of this score - fashioned to a dark, poetic libretto by Alan Riach - it's not surprising that Whelan's favourite music is "early 20th-century Eastern European sort of stuff. Recently I saw Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle at Covent Garden and it just blew my mind. It is such intense, searing music. It is tonal enough to be able to understand and listen for tunes but strange enough to be haunting."

On the lighter side, the 1.9m Whelan has lately gained something of a reputation for stretching the legal limits of costume on stage. He has been a loin-clothed (and gloriously voiced) Jesus in Deborah Warner's controversial staging of Bach's St John Passion for the English National Opera, and his Schaunard in the same company's production of Leoncavallo's La Boheme had such an alarmingly scanty change of costume at one point that a London review made reference in its headline to "Star-spangled underwear".

"They keep making me take my kit off. I had to do it last week in Pittsburgh for A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was Demetrius and when Lysander and I got the love potion in our eyes we had to rip our shirts off again."

Stripping off involves some non-vocal disciplines. "I have to keep fit, which is a pain sometimes. I'm hoping that I'll be able to move into old man roles eventually, so that I can eat a bit more."

After he leaves New Zealand, Whelan will be more soberly attired when he tackles a succession of oratorios and cantatas - from Elgar's The Apostles with the Huddersfield Choral Society to a Brahms Requiem in Salt Lake City and Schoenberg's Gurrelieder at the Bolshoi.

But most exciting of all is a concert performance of Tristan and Isolde in Georgia, in which he sings Kurwenal, "because it seems that Strauss and Wagner is where my voice is heading".

Before he does this, he's hoping for a few chats with Sir Donald McIntyre. "He's quite a good friend, an amazing singer, and such a symbol for us all. Just recently I listened to him in the Patrice Chereau Ring cycle, giving out some of the best noises I've ever heard."

We in New Zealand experienced McIntyre doing Wagner only relatively late in the singer's career, in Auckland Opera's 1992 production of The Flying Dutchman. Let's hope that, if Whelan turns to Wagner, we get the chance to enjoy the baritone in his prime.

Whelan is optimistic. "From what I hear and read, the arts seem to be flourishing in New Zealand and it's one of the few countries where they are."

Would that they flourish enough to fund some Wagner productions in the not-too-distant future, with Paul Whelan in the line-up.

* Paul Whelan stars in The Prodigal Child, composed by Michael Williams, libretto by Alan Riach, in the NBR New Zealand Opera world premiere at the Taranaki Festival, March 4-6, St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, New Plymouth.