If music be the food of love, play on

The New Zealand Opera School enchants at the river.

In 1965, during a mild thaw in the Cold War, I visited several Iron Curtain countries under the auspices of the US Air Force and saw something remarkable. In a Budapest night club, I watched a young woman on a small stage stand almost saintly still and sing Petula Clark's Downtown as if it were an anthem.

It was indeed an anthem, as the rapt faces in her young audience gave evidence. That lyric, "the lights are much brighter there", contrasted with the grey world outside and it gave the pronounced impression that with these young people and their hunger for that music's gift, the Soviet empire would soon crumble. It took only 25 years.

Music and art strike fear into the hearts of despots, as their themes bypass the filters of propaganda and speak directly to our souls to nourish the human desire for freedom and dignity.

In our peaceful, democratic city, we can take pride in our blessings of arts and music. We ought not take those gifts for granted as they come to us through the efforts of many.

We are the beneficiaries of an opera school that brings together students whose first steps are aided by tuition from internationally recognised tutors and coaches, artists in their own right.

Anyone who has attended the master classes at Collegiate has witnessed the work of tutors such as Paul Farrington. His students are enabled to express their bettered voices through what seems like magic. That's because the discipline and knowledge expressed through great teaching skills looks so effortless it appears magical.

The NZ Opera School was founded and led by Donald Trott. His deep roots in this city, where he was born, raised and educated, his passion for singing, and his management skills brought the vision of such a school for young voices to reality. The idea was conceived in Auckland, but the ideal circumstances of Wanganui brought the birth of the school here, where it thrives.

The guiding philosophy - made possible through the many hard-working volunteers of Wanganui opera week - is to make the music available to the entire community. That was how the student singers came to be at several restaurant venues, so well recorded by this newspaper.

This year, for the first time, our river became the site of a concert, exciting as it was innovative, the music warming the heart as people picnicked in cold winds.

The final Saturday evening gala surpassed some of the greatones of years before. The singing, at the highest standard, was enhanced by the stagecraft of director Sara Brodie, assisted by Kararaina Walker. Their intent was to emphasise the universality and particularity of opera in tying together the peoples of our area and the significance of the river which runs through it.

The performance took the form of encounter between European settlers and Maori, especially of the Whanganui iwi.

Putiki Wharanui were onstage as partners in performance, interweaving Maori ritual and operatic aria. While the arias were mainly from classic opera, the staging was a brilliant conception that allowed the audience to experience those musical expressions of love and loss, honour and challenge and tragedy as recounting the history of the races and their meeting in this land.

Classic opera was made into our common history and the history as staged made into a recitative opera of its own. This operatic collage exalted the music and lyrics' beauty, lifting it from its original context to graft it on our river and peoples.

From the Maori chant, this elegiac couplet: "May the cry of the cuckoo signal a change for the better; Draw together, become intertwined." Nothing says it better.