New Zealand singer returns from New York to sing Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni
Marie-Adele was born in Gisborne to a Maori mother and a European father. He was a teacher – Ian Black – who was born in Fairlie and taught in the South Island before going to Hawke’s Bay, to Te Hauke, where he met and married his wife, a registered nurse. The couple moved to Gisborne where Marie-Adele was born, then to Hamilton where her father, who in his early 20s had turned from Presbyterianism to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, taught at the Church College of New Zealand. But there was also music in the family. “My mother sang and played the organ but my father claimed he couldn’t hold a tune, though he whistled beautifully; his father had a beautiful tenor voice though,” said Marie-Adele. She was only six when her mother died however, and when she was eight the family left New Zealand to go first to Hawai’i, then to Texas and later to Utah for her father to attend the Brigham Young University where he took a doctorate in sociology. Marie-Adele was the only child of his first marriage: he married again – a Canadian – and she has two half-brothers. Marie-Adele is a tall, good-looking woman of distinctive Maori appearance. “I really stood out in Utah,” she said. “It was a very white population when I was young, and attitudes were such that in my teens I was taken as the nanny of my young brothers – it didn’t please me. There were very few Polynesians or black Americans, though a few Navahos and Hispanics. But there were enough Polynesians for me to join Polynesian cultural classes along with Hawaiians, Tahitians, Samoans. I was very grateful to my parents for that chance to learn who I was and where I came from.” She also studied the piano and she sang in choirs. But she had no idea of studying music at university – instead she planned to study public relations. “I loved singing, but had no desire to draw attention to myself. I was very shy and I was just a tall alto in the back row. I’m still shy,” she added, somewhat unconvincingly, “Perhaps that’s why I like wearing bright coloured clothes. I realise that it’s important to get attention if you want to be a singer.” One of the early turning points in her career was leaving high school; all her friends were planning to do vocal studies at university, while her primary study had been piano. “But at the last minute I decided to apply for a vocal scholarship and I was very late; I raced into the university office with my application for an audition, to find the bursar shutting the door; I pleaded with her and she took it. I was the only one to be awarded a scholarship. So I had my first ever vocal lessons at university. “I saw my first opera, La Bohème, at that time, and it had a deep impact – I wept – and I knew then I wanted to be part of that.” Marie-Adele began as a mezzo and she graduated as a mezzo; she married after graduation. Her husband was in finance and for the last two years he has worked for a New York mutual fund company; that is where she now lives. “Graduation didn’t lead to any immediate career, of course,” Marie-Adele said. “My first job was a sort-of custodian on Temple Square – where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang. Frederica von Stade came to sing with the choir and since my boss knew I was a singer I was made Frederica’s personal assistant during her visit. She pulled me into her room and started talking about singing, and what I should be doing – I should audition with Lofti Mansouri (General Director at San Francisco Opera), get into the Merola Programme there; I should be learning with Betty Jeanne Chipman – ‘Everyone who’s anyone has worked with Chipman’, she said. A month later I got my big break, joining the Young Artists’ Programme of Utah Opera. “Then I won an audition to San Francisco and it was there that I was told that I was not a mezzo after all, but a soprano. The other nice thing that summer was that Kiri Te Kanawa was there singing Countess Madeleine in Strauss’s Capriccio. I’d met her earlier, at school in Salt Lake City. She was gracious and nice to me and gave me a lot of time, with friendly advice; and she was supportive of my switch to soprano, for she had done the same in her early years. “Other New Zealanders were there at that time – Sarah Billinghurst, who then went to the Met in New York, and Christine Bullen was running the Merola Programme – she soon left to run the Opera Training Centre at the Paris Opéra.” After completing the Merola Programme, she got the role of Adele in a seven-months tour of Die Fledermaus. Later, a propos of Adele’s Csardas in the Johann Strauss piece, Marie-Adele regaled me with funny Hungarian-accent imitations of Vera Rozsa who gave her coaching for a few months in London. In 1995 she came to New Zealand and sang for Peter Averi, who was artistic director of Wellington City Opera. “I got the role of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro; I was 25, that was a wonderful break, but at the time I thought I was too old. But now people are 30 before they go to the Merola Programme. “Now I can see better. My star is still rising, slowly; I don’t want it to go fast and burn out. ‘A marathon is not won in the first 100 metres’ is a good saying. I want to go slowly, and to last. My voice keeps growing; earlier I had only sung Mozart and I was getting seen as only a Mozart singer, but it takes on a quite different character when I sing Verdi – ‘use the full voice’ Vera Rozsa used to say; and Patrick Summers, musical director at San Francisco, said, ‘when you can understand Mozart, you can do Verdi’.” So unsurprisingly, Marie-Adele’s models are Renata Tebaldi and Maria Chiara... ‘and Callas of course’. “I’m a Verdi soprano,” she said, “and it was all that Mozart that let me do it. My voice is big, but it doesn’t have a lot of heft. Turandot is not in it.” “That Susanna was a big turning point,” said Marie-Adele. “I met John Matheson and Malvina Major – she was singing the Countess, and Rodney Macann, who was Figaro.” It reconnected her to New Zealand too. She returned to Wellington in 1997 to sing Zerlina in a Don Giovanni which, apart from some fine singing, including hers, was the company’s nadir in production terms; and she took part in the two enterprising Martinborough Music festivals, with Peter Coats, that had featured Schubert and Gershwin. Marie-Adele spent two years in Brisbane, worked with Matheson again there and sang with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. She had a bad experience there, with gall stones during a pregnancy, and a botched operation that meant five weeks in hospital. “I was not well and I just wanted to go back to my family and my singing teacher in the States; I lost contracts with the QSO: it was a hard time.” While she was in Brisbane however, she had won the Australian Singing Competition and used the prize money to study with Vera Rozsa in London for ten weeks. It was a great experience. “She talked about interpretation, about stillness; she’s an amazing person, her survival through hair-raising wartime experiences, hiding from the Nazis.” Rozsa had a profound impact on her, through a vivid personality, perceptivity and intelligence and her flair for the dramatic and funny. She seemed genuinely incredulous that Marie-Adele did not already ahee a busy career: “I don’t know why you are not working!” she would exclaim. Since moving to New York four years ago Marie-Adele has sung with Sarasota Opera in Florida – an enterprising, small company that is slowly doing all Verdi’s operas. She sang Lina in Stiffelio; she’s also sung Leonora in both the Italian and the French versions of Il trovatore (Le trouvère). She’s sung Abigaille in Nabucco, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Opera North. A particularly memorable concert was in 2004 at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, and there has been a series of Verdi Requiems, Beethoven Nines, Messiahs and a Judas Maccabaeus with American West Symphony. She was in New York on September 11, getting her small son ready to take to school, and her husband was at work near the Empire State Building. She saw it happen from her apartment on Washington Heights. I could see from her few comments that the emotion of the time was obviously still very close to the surface. Five days later she had an audition and travelled on the subway where people were still openly weeping; strangers were comforting each other and it made a deep impression on her that the whole city was quiet and everyone was behaving with dignity and calm. ‘Why is it that it takes such a shocking event to make people behave in a truly civilised way with each other?’ she asked. |
PLEASE NOTE: Article appeared when performing as Marie McArthur