Opera Company To Move This Week

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31411, 3 July 1967, Page 12

Opera Company To Move This Week

The New Zealand Opera Company will move this week to its new national headquarters in Wellington, and in October, New Zealand’s first School of Opera will be opened.

The chairman of directors of the company, Mr J. Hartstonge, said that the decision to found an opera school was taken as the first stage of a four-step training plan for potential New Zealand opera singers. Mr Hartstonge said that the planned tour of main centres in mid-winter, 1967, had been changed in favour of a piano tour of provincial centres—“as a less costly operation in a year of economic stress.”

The company has been invited to appear in both the Pan Pacific Arts Festival in Christchurch and at the Auckland Festival early next year.

It is hoped also, in 1968, to put the remaining stages of the development plan into action.

Mr Hartstonge said that an aspiring opera singer would start at the opera school and, after a suitable period, would gain experience touring smaller centres and possibly schools with a small opera

ensemble of experienced singers.

As the third level of development, the singer would be cast in a suitable operatic role for a piano tour of the provinces and, when sufficiently experienced, would gain a role in full-scale grand opera productions.