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New York Times journalists are not known for their effusiveness, but earlier this year reporter Kathryn Shattuck came over all funny about Teddy Tahu Rhodes. “It is easy to be swept away by Mr Rhodes,” Shattuck gushed in the arts section of the Gray Lady, before extolling his “dark, creamy voice and his chameleonic good looks”.

It’s not the first time that Rhodes, a bass baritone from Christchurch, has been the subject of journalistic fawning. The 39-year-old has been described as the Brad Pitt of the opera world and a cross between movie stars Paul Bettany and Viggo Mortensen in other newspapers. But Rhodes finds it bewildering. “I don’t really see what the fuss is about,” he says.
The fuss is about Rhodes’s nearly two-metre presence on stage. And his voice, which he, with typical modesty, won’t describe, but others call warm and lush. It is “a big, rich voice, a classic sound where the diction is so clear”, says Jake Heggie, the American composer of modern operas Dead Man Walking and The End of the Affair – both of which Rhodes has starred in; the lead role in The End of the Affair was written for him . “Where [the voice] comes from nobody knows,” Rhodes says; no one else in his family sings. (His name, Teddy Tahu, is a family nickname that stuck.) His voice was first noticed when he joined the choir at Christ’s College in Christchurch. That led to the National Youth Choir and lessons with Mary Adams Taylor, and at 20 Rhodes won the Dame Sister Mary Leo Scholarship. In 1991, he went to London to do a year’s postgraduate study at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Then, abruptly, Rhodes gave up singing, moved back to Christchurch and got a real job. It was, he says, “a lifestyle choice. I was kind of a rebel. For many years I pushed it away and didn’t want to do it.”

In 1998, while working as a corporate accountant, Rhodes took the role of Marcello in a Canterbury Opera production of La Bohème. When another cast member mentioned Rhodes’s voice to the folks at Opera Australia, he was asked to audition and five short weeks later he was on stage in Sydney. “From there, it’s sort of grown,” Rhodes says, and he now makes his living singing. As a guest artist, he’s called in for the bigger roles in opera houses around the world. He has performed with the Welsh National Opera, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a handful of US houses.
“I love doing the modern stuff,” Rhodes says, and cites his part in Dead Man Walking at the San Francisco Opera and as Stanley Kowalski in André Previn’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Washington DC as highlights.  “I’m more comfortable in a less stylised environment. You dress differently. It makes you feel different. And there’s an opportunity for the audience to be even more engrossed because they don’t know what’s coming.”

Rhodes starred in the BBC’s televised operatic version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and this year won both Aria and Helpmann awards in Australia, where he’s currently recording a Bach CD. Australia is the closest Rhodes has to a home these days; when he’s there he rents a furnished apartment in Sydney. Otherwise, he lives out of a big suitcase, which was lugged to New Zealand this month so that he could do concerts with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia. Early next year Rhodes goes to the Houston Grand Opera for Manon Lescaut, then on to gigs in Vienna and Paris. In 2007, he’ll debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Offers for roles as far ahead as 2010 are starting to come in. “That’s the nature of the business,” Rhodes says. “It’s great to have the work.  “I get a bit unsettled. It’s a self-imposed, singular lifestyle, but I like flying to the next job. I did a nine-to-five job, I know what the hours in the corporate world are like. It seems to me that we in the opera world say, ‘I’ve have a hard day’, but really, it’s kind of not like work.”