When a 59-year-old racks up 751 performances in a year, you know that commitment is not an issue. Indeed, as Opera Australia heads towards its 60th birthday this winter, that energy will again be on display as they mount no less than three productions in the month of May.
Of course, opera buffs understand this kind of passion; after all, the form is renowned for its big emotions and epic drama, and May's trio promises to serve up all the doomed love and soaring arias your heart can deal with. From the much loved La Boheme to the relatively obscure early Verdi work Luisa Miller and the mysteriously 'incomplete' Bizet piece The Pearlfishers, Opera Australia's cast and crew will barely get a night's rest.
"My dad was picking me up in an hour's time and I was just hanging about and went across to the music school and bumped into the Head of Music..."
However, as baritone Andrew Jones reminds us, "This was the rock music of its day, really, and was very popular." Thus, hectic touring and show schedules are not uncommon for opera companies.
Curiously, as a teenager Jones was himself in a rock band before serendipity delivered him to the world of Puccini and co. In fact, Jones' twist of fate story could easily have been torn from an operatic libretto.
It began when the 17-year-old Jones went to enquire about acting courses at VCA. "I went to their open day in year 12 and they told me I was too young — 'Go away and get some life experience. Come back when you're twenty-one' — So I was at a loose end. My dad was picking me up in an hour's time and I was just hanging about and went across to the music school and bumped into the Head of Music and y'know, told him my story and he said 'did you do any singing?' and I said 'yeah, I've done school musicals and that' and he asked me if I'd ever consider training my voice. So he played a few scales and I sang along and he said 'I think there's a pretty good voice there' and that was how it all started."
Since then Jones has made quite a success of his trained voice and will return to his native Melbourne in May to sing the part of Marcello in Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme. "It's a fabulous opera," he enthuses. "There's many show stopping tunes and fantastic arias and it's very emotive."
Despite getting patchy reviews when it premiered in Turin in 1896, the tale of young bohemians living (and dying) in Paris' Latin Quarter was an almost instant hit, so much so that by July 1901 it was making its Australian debut at Melbourne's Her Majesty's Theatre. "Everybody keeps on wanting to re-do it," Jones explains. "Like, with West Side Story and Moulin Rouge. Y'know, there's poor starving students everywhere around the world wanting to go on adventures and discover themselves, so it's a really relevant story still."
As with ballet and theatre, the 'relevance' question is never far below the surface. Opera Australia's mammoth 700-plus 2015 performance roster, (which included main stage, festival and school performances, among others), would suggest that opera's lifeblood is still flowing strong. "Once people have a taste they realise it's something extraordinary," Jones concludes. "The sets are very elaborate and expensive, the orchestras are massive and everything is really on a grand scale."
