Voice ditches Cinderfella image

By WILLIAM DART

Countertenors are no longer the Cinderfellas of music. High-profilers such as Americans David Daniels and Brian Asawa are divos on the international opera stage while German Andreas Scholl even came up with a crossover hit in his Wayfaring Stranger album.

Aucklanders can experience the magic of this special voice when Australian Graham Pushee guests with the NZSO Chamber Orchestra on Saturday night.

Pushee is one of the world's finest, and some will be aware of him in the title role of Australian Opera's production of Handel's Julius Caesar, having watched the video recording. He has sung and recorded composers from Handel and Vivaldi to Cavalli and Britten, under conductors such as Helmuth Rilling and Rene Jacobs.

It was an alert music teacher in Sydney who realised where the young Pushee's talents lay. "When I was singing with the tenors in the school choir, I was always flipping into falsetto. So I was given some Alfred Deller records and put in with the altos, which was much more comfortable."

After study in Europe, it was opera that proved the irresistible lure, and Pushee sees this art form as being at the heart of the Baroque revival. "We've come a long way from the stand-and-deliver approach of 15 years ago. Directors go for more of a dramatic approach which makes the operas more relevant; the audiences can sense and feel the despair of these characters, whose names might be Cleopatra and Sesto, but who could be living today."

On Saturday Pushee is offering two selections from Julius Caesar, including Dall'ondoso periglio which he describes as "the beach aria. Caesar is washed up on the shore and sings this wonderful aria about the meaning of power and position."

How does he feel about delivering such vivid and theatrical music in a concert hall, rather than on the opera stage? "The music's the same," he muses. "It's just that your costume is a set of tails rather than a toga. The concert setting can actually help rather than hinder in terms of conveying the emotions and creating the character."

Pushee has played the Roman emperor from Paris to Houston, where the Wortham Centre had "a strange, deserted feel until you go out there on stage and realise the theatre is glittering with oil barons and their wives who have donated millions of dollars to the Opera House."

Although Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream and Death in Venice are in his repertoire and he's "dabbled in a bit of Schubert lieder", Pushee is content to focus mainly on the 17th and 18th centuries. There have, however, been a few colourful diversions along the way. One was a brief flirtation with the rock musical - a show called Freudiana in Vienna, which he remembers as "a little relentless, doing seven performances a week, although it was nice being close to the rest of the cast, as opera singers can be reclusive."

Another role in Tatiana, an avant-garde opera by the Italian Azio Corghi, put him on stage with "loudspeakers, an enormous amount of percussion in the orchestra and not many melody instruments. There were 100 extras, the La Scala chorus and the Swingle Singers who were doing their usual thing through individual mikes."

In Auckland, the forces will be more modest and the fare rigorously acoustic. Let's hope the singer's fine recordings are available somewhere in town ...

* Graham Pushee with the NZSO Chamber Orchestra, Town Hall Concert Chamber, Saturday at 8pm.