There will be certain magic on and off stage when Jared Holt makes his entrance for the first night of Southern Opera’s production of The Magic Flute next week.
The New Zealand baritone will sing the role of Papageno in Mozart’s opera of mystery, enchantment and the eternal search for love. He joins James Rodgers (Tamino), Rebecca Ryan (Pamina), Anna Argyle (Papagena), Emma Pearson (The Queen of the Night), and Grant Dickson (Sarastro) in director Linda Kitchen’s new production of Mozart’s blithesome musical romp, an opera described by one musicologist as “sublimely silly but sublimely beautiful”.
“This was also the first role I understudied for in the 1996 Canterbury Opera production,” Holt says. “So this is full circle for me – same role, same theatre, many of the same people. Fantastic. Perhaps I’ll come back to it in another 14 years’ time.”
Jared Holt was born and raised in New Zealand, where he completed a degree in classics and a law degree with honours while continuing to perform in opera, oratorio and recital. In 2000 he won the Mobil Song Quest New Zealand and the Karaviotis Scholarship, allowing him to undertake studies at the Royal College of Music in London. He joined the Vilar Young Artists’ Programme at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2003.
Holt’s operatic roles include Papageno, the Count in The Marriage of Figaro and Zaretsky in Eugene Onegin. Roles at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2003-04 included the Second Philistine in Samson & Delilah, the wigmaker in Ariadne auf Naxos and Junius in The Rape of Lucretia. Holt sang in the Southern Opera’s production of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnol. After the Christchurch season of The Magic Flute, he returns to the Glyndebourne Festival for further performances of Albert Herring. “What is nice is that the Christchurch production involves what is essentially a cast of young New Zealand singers. We can be immensely proud of that,” Holt says. “What I like about Papageno is that he says things might not be acceptable in polite society. “He’s very direct. He says things which others might think but wouldn’t say and I think that audiences warm to that.
“If the prince thinks from the head, Papageno thinks from his heart. He’s a romantic in an earthy, straightforward way. He doesn’t want enlightenment and wisdom. He wants to find the right girl.”
Holt sees The Magic Flute as an opera where a singer must also be “straight up" with the audience. “Many of the lines and music in the opera require a direct interpretation. It’s not up to me to provide you with a reference point to some esoteric Masonic clue, simply to take what Mozart wanted off the page and bring it out into the light of day. Then you see it as you want.
”On the surface, The Magic Flute appears quite straightforward but it is not. It’s a story which appeals to our human nature – and that’s why perhaps singers and audiences keep returning to it…to be transported into another world.”