IF you had asked opera singer Wendy Dawn Thompson during the worst days of the pandemic the one piece she would like to sing if she had the opportunity to perform again, Mahler’s Song of the Earth was it.
So even with a long flight to get back to New Zealand, Thompson was not going to let the opportunity go by to perform it for the first time since the pandemic, especially as it is rarely performed due to the number of orchestral players needed.
"For me personally it is very significant. It is very healing; it is about redemption and unity with one another and the world. You don’t have to look at it that way but that is how I feel about it. It means a tremendous amount to me personally."
This weekend she will perform the work alongside tenor Simon O’Neill with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra conducted by New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s music director emeritus James Judd, with her parents in the audience. It will be the first time in about 10 years her parents have seen her sing.
Thompson first came across the piece, which is made up of six songs inspired by a collection of Chinese poems written between AD600 and 700, when she was a student studying music in Wellington.
"I’d never heard of [Mahler]. Since then I’ve sung hundreds of his pieces but this piece is like the peak of Everest of his works for me."
The final movement is about 40 minutes long, with just Thompson and the orchestra performing.
"I’ve performed it before but it is something I never underestimate. It’s like doing a marathon. The amazing thing is it is the most incredible, all-encompassing piece.
"I find the music very moving and cosmic is the best word to describe it."
Preparing for the work has required a lot of time alone in a room with a piano.
"Hours, hours and hours. What the audience sees is the culmination of years of working on my instrument, my voice, and for this piece specifically it is months and months of practise."
Thompson’s goal is that the audience on Saturday night has no idea how much effort it takes to perform the piece. Part of that is perfecting the German language and learning the musical "stuff".
"They don’t want to see all the work. But really it is months and months of work to get to the point where you can sing it without it looking like it is any effort at all."
Despite the effort, Thompson says there is no doubt it is worth it.
"Personally it is worth it. You know the connection you feel with the audience, the connection you feel with the fellow musicians you are performing with. There is no question for me that it is transformational even if it is, to use a German word, an ‘augenblick’, a single blink of an eye."
Its importance to her is also highlighted by the fact she is leaving the daily 25degC temperatures of her home in Brunei, a sovereign state on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia, for winter in New Zealand.
"I’ll be looking for warm places, a steam room for sure, maybe a pool, a heated one.
"I’m really looking forward to coming to Dunedin. I always like doing a bit of shopping and listening to a bit of Dunedin music."
Thompson, her two daughters, now aged 7 and 9 years, and husband, moved to Brunei in 2017, where her husband teaches at an international school.
It has provided the girls with a unique cultural experience with the youngest, just 18 months old when they moved there, thinking it was totally normal to have monkeys in the back garden.
"I love hot weather. It’s such a thrill to be somewhere warm and completely different. We are so used to it now, it’s just normal life."
As Thompson travels so much for her job, it does not matter where she lives as long as there are good international travel links.
"That was the theory - wherever I live I go away for work, whether it’s to Australia or New Zealand, I go wherever the work is. That is freelance work."
Opera singing is a career Thompson has wanted ever since she was a pre-schooler.
"I don’t know why it happened. Growing up in Christchurch it was all I ever wanted to do. I don’t know how it got into my head that I was going to be a classical singer - I always knew it was going to be classical not pop - my parents aren’t musicians, we didn’t even have a stereo."
She told her parents when she was 4 years old that she was going to be a classical singer and her mind never changed. She went on to sing in choirs throughout her school life.
"I absolutely loved the feeling, loved making music, making music with others, the feeling of wholeness it gave me was fantastic.
"It just so happened that I’d already decided music was going to be my thing."
She has been "single-minded" in her pursuit of the career ever since studying music Victoria University of Wellington, taking part in the Dame Malvina Major Emerging Artist scheme at New Zealand Opera before moving to Britain in 2000 to complete postgraduate courses at the Royal Northern College of Music and Royal College of Music.
"I wasn’t very talented, let’s be clear about that. I wasn’t the most talented singer at all, I was just very determined.
"People think you are an opera singer because you have an amazing voice. I have worked very, very hard at my singing but I wasn’t some sort of child genius."
Even though she won the New Zealand Young Performer of the Year Award in 1998, some of New Zealand’s top singers advised her not to go to Britain to study.
"They have subsequently apologised. But I understand why they said that. It is not an easy life being self-employed, you have to not only have the talent but the determination.
"I say to young singers you only do this if it’s absolutely the only thing you want to do. The ups are awesome but the downs are also part of it."
In her final year of study, Thompson won the 2003 Kathleen Ferrier Prize and made her operatic debut with Garsington Opera as Dorabella in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.
"It’s the storytelling. I didn’t used to understand why I loved it so much. I’m not an extrovert by any stretch. It’s the getting up in front of people and sharing a story.
"It’s a pretty weird thing to get up in front of people with an orchestra and sing in a language you don’t speak but trying to bring the message the composer and the poet were trying to write about, the human experience, using my experience to share that with an audience - there is something magical about it that I can’t get enough of."
She also likes the "boring stuff" - sitting in a room and just "bashing notes" - as she learns and memorises music for hours on end.
"The pay-off is getting to share that with an audience."
Before she performs she concentrates on her breathing and remembering while her body is telling her it is a life and death situation as the adrenaline flows it is not.
"Sometimes it feels like I’m going to the shop but I certainly know before this experience I will be feeling pretty excited."
While early in her career she bought into the glamour of the opera singer’s life, over time she has realised the job has more in common with athletes than glamour.
Thompson is known for her wide-ranging repertoire that includes playing the role of Teresa Salieri in Amadeus at London’s National Theatre, Charlotte in Werther at Vilnius City Opera or Magdalena in Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Her operatic appearances have seen her shooting across the stage on a Segway, climbing 3-metre walls, singing in the rain, balancing on top of a caravan and adorned in motorcycle leathers from top to toe.
Thompson represented New Zealand in the final of the 2005 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
The highlights of her career so far might not seem that exciting to other people, but Thompson is proud of the work she does with the Birmingham Opera Company.
Its performances involve working with volunteer performers, actors, choristers and dancers and the operas are done in promenade.
"So instead of the audience sitting down in a theatre the audience is as close as you would be in a pub. You are sitting next to someone who is singing. It goes back to that thing of storytelling, of it being real and human and it is not some artefact in a museum that some people think opera is.
"To me it’s immediate, it’s storytelling. So for me when I get to sing for an audience that is right next to me, that is some of the most exciting performing that can be for them and for me. It’s just brilliant."
Performing in such a way means she can tell if the audience is with her or not which is something that is hard to tell in a more traditional theatre experience.
"It’s something else when you are looking someone in the eye. It’s about communication which is important to me."
To see:
Song of the Earth
Dunedin Symphony Orchestra
Dunedin Town Hall, June 24
