... And Another Plans

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32166, 9 December 1969, Page 13

... And Another Plans

Some will wear evening dress, and some jeans when a 28-year-old New Zealand musician, William Southgate, conducts a modern opera at Sadler’s Wells this week.

For the Dunedin-trained Mr Southgate, the gala performance of Menotti’s “The Telephone” by the London Opera Centre will be a major occasion. As conductor he may make or break the evening, reports an N.Z.P.A staff correspondent. But the sense of occasion will not be new to him. His selection to conduct the gala performance is his fourth success in a crowded year of advance post-graduate- study. Mr Southgate this year has won the Ricordi prize for conducting, climaxing two years of advanced study on a New Zealand scholarship to London’s Guildhall School of Music; arranged and directed the music for “Close the Coalhouse Door,” which ran for two months in the West End and was played on national television; and finished second in an international conducting competition at Besancon, France, contested by 40 musicians from all over the world. Mr Southgate travelled to Britain in 1967. “London really is a marvellous place to study music. It’s so full of life and incentive, and I’m sure that's why New Zealanders can do well here if they work hard,” he said. “The real point is that at home one is used 'to the open spaces. Here one can find music, music everywhere. Just to be in a place so f till of music has enabled me, anyway, to work very hard." Mr Southgate is now studying at the London Opera

Centre, where Kiri Te Kanawa also learned her advanced opera, in a former cinema which was converted into the opera school in 1963. He is training as a piano coach and repetiteur, one of only seven persons doing similar work at the centre. Sadler’s Wells this year has made its theatre available to the centre for its

gala night. Mr Southgate is seeking a permanent post at Sadler’s Wells or at Covent Garden, either as repetiteur or as musical director.

“At some stage I will return to New Zealand,” he said, “but to work in either the Garden or the Wells is my ambition. To do that would be just marvellous.”