NZ Opera

Three companies, one national brief

New Zealand Opera was assembled in 2000 from a merger of Opera New Zealand — Auckland Opera until its 1995 renaming — with The National Opera of Wellington, formerly Wellington City Opera. The stated reason was financial rather than artistic. The National Business Review then bought naming rights for $1 million over three years, and the company performed for over a decade as The NBR New Zealand Opera; when that sponsorship ended in 2014 it reverted to NZ Opera. A further merger with Southern Opera in Christchurch in 2012 gave it a footing in all three main centres, and that three-city pattern still governs how seasons are built and toured.

Leadership has turned over roughly every four years and has repeatedly fed the company's people into larger houses abroad. Jonathan Alver ran the merger until 2002; Alex Reedijk followed until 2005, leaving for Scottish Opera; Aidan Lang held the post from 2005 to 2014; Stuart Maunder from 2014 to 2018, departing for State Opera South Australia — the company NZ Opera now co-produces with; and Thomas de Mallet Burgess from 2018 to 2022, who went to Finnish National Opera. Brad Cohen, a conductor as well as an administrator, took over in late 2023 and conducts from the pit as well as programming the year.

The money is public and thin. By 2019 Creative New Zealand was providing $2.7 million a year, topped up by roughly $1.24 million between the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch councils. That figure explains a great deal about the shape of the seasons: short runs, concert stagings, shared productions with Australian partners, and touring that has to justify itself in more than one city.

The 25th year, and the programme that came out of it

2025 marked 25 years of the company in its current form, and the piece that came out of that anniversary was Toiere, a concert built around operatic arias sung alongside waiata in te reo Māori. It was first performed at Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival in March 2025, hosted by Kawiti Waetford (Ngāti Hine, Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāpuhi) with Robert Wiremu as musical director, and was subsequently broadcast by SOUNZ and RNZ. It is the clearest example of the company's argument that it should be programming work that is specific to where it sits rather than importing a repertoire wholesale.

The 2026 season was announced on 10 November 2025 under the title Made In Our Light. Cohen's framing at the announcement was that after 25 years the company knows what it is, and that it is 'committed to widening the reach of our work to engage with more communities' while 'complementing the classics of the repertoire with innovative programming'. On the funding, he was blunter: 'We persist, because we believe in the power of the voice singing stories.'

Around the four ticketed mainstage events sit the things that carry the company's public brief. Two free Opera in the Park concerts opened the year, at Vellenoweth Green in St Heliers on 24 January and Auckland Botanic Gardens in Manurewa on 31 January. RED!, the annual opera-in-schools piece, toured schools and community venues through the first term under director Jacqueline Coats. A concert performance of Madama Butterfly at Auckland Town Hall on 25 July, conducted by Giordano Bellincampi with the Freemasons Foundation NZ Opera Chorus, gave the year its large-scale Puccini without the cost of a full staging. Toiere returns on tour across the motu.

Bluebeard's Castle: an hour, no interval, no gothic

The production that set the tone for 2026 was Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, given two performances in the Great Hall of Auckland Town Hall on 13 and 14 March as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. It ran an hour straight through, sung in an English translation by Daisy Evans, who also directed. The staging was originally conceived by Evans with Stephen Higgins and developed through Theatre of Sound and Opera Ventures, and it discards the castle-and-locked-doors reading entirely: the seven doors become the failing memory of a woman living with dementia, and Bluebeard becomes her husband and carer. The festival carried an advisory for the subject matter and recommended it for ages 15 and over.

Lester Lynch sang Bluebeard and Susan Bullock sang Judith, with Cohen conducting the Auckland Philharmonia, sets and costumes by Adrian Linford and lighting by Jake Wiltshire. Reviewing the opening night for Bachtrack, Simon Holden called the result 'nothing short of devastating', crediting the two singers with carrying a reading that turns Bartók's psychodrama into a study of memory and concealment.

Figaro reaches Wellington, five years late

The Marriage of Figaro played the St James Theatre in Wellington on 17, 19 and 21 June, with James Judd conducting Orchestra Wellington. The production is Lindy Hume's, designed by Tracy Grant Lord, lit by Matthew Marshall and choreographed by Taiaroa Royal; it had been delayed for around five years by the pandemic before the capital finally got it.

The cast was led by Julien Van Mellaerts as the Count, Felicity Tomkins as the Countess, James Clayton as Figaro, Sophie Sparrow as Susanna and Cecilia Zhang as Cherubino, with Kristin Darragh, Andrew Collis, Andrew Grenon, Sarah Mileham and Joel Amosa filling out the house. Reviewing for Five Lines, Elizabeth Kerr called the staging 'brilliant' and 'a gorgeous production', noting that Hume keeps the farce moving at breakneck speed without losing the opera's harder material on power, class and gender, and that Grant Lord's transformable lightbox pillars suggest the rooms and gardens of a large estate without literal scenery.

The production's weight fell deliberately on the servants and the women rather than on the Count, which is the reading most houses have arrived at in the last decade, and it was received by a Wellington audience that had been waiting a long time for it.

Where the company stands in September 2026

The current work is Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, which opened at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre in Auckland on 23 September — the first time the piece has been staged in New Zealand in 24 years. It is a co-production with State Opera South Australia, directed by Stephen Barlow with sets and costumes by Yannis Thavoris and Benjamin Bayl conducting. The setting is moved to a contemporary luxury resort attached to a jewellery house, where the opera's tests of loyalty play out among people whose standing depends on appearances.

Casting was the story going into the run. Three of the four principals are Māori or Pasifika singers: Sāmoan-New Zealand soprano Madison Nonoa as Léïla, Tongan-New Zealand tenor Filipe Manu as Nadir, and bass Anthony Robin Schneider as Nourabad. Māori baritone Phillip Rhodes was announced for Zurga but withdrew through illness, with the Australian baritone Samuel Dundas taking the role; the company's production page now lists Dundas. Writing in the New Zealand Herald on 11 September 2026, Rhodes put the casting plainly: 'The more and more brown faces we see on our stages, the more doors open.' Nonoa described singing at home in front of family as a particular kind of pleasure, and Manu — for whom this is a first opera in New Zealand in roughly a decade — has spoken about the value of bringing work made overseas back to the country it came out of.

Manu, interviewed by AA Directions ahead of the run, described the training as closest in kind to that of an elite athlete, and his Nadir as a man who 'leads almost entirely with emotion and instinct', caught between loyalty and desire. He has also said his ambition is to see the first opera written and performed entirely in Tongan — a fair indication of where the singers the company is now building around expect the repertoire to go.

What it costs and what is next

Tickets for the Auckland run are listed by Auckland Live between $40.27 and $264.05, with an AA membership discount of 15 per cent on selected adult seats. Children aged 14 and under must be accompanied. The production then moves to the Isaac Theatre Royal in Christchurch on 14, 16 and 18 October with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, which is the whole of the company's 2026 mainstage year after that.

The pattern is consistent: three or four performances per city, orchestras borrowed from the region, one production shared with an Australian partner and one imported staging restaged for a festival. Cohen has used the season announcements to argue publicly for more government funding so the company can put productions in front of more of the country. Until that changes, the realistic measure of NZ Opera is what it does with a handful of nights in three cities — and on the evidence of March and June, that has been enough to carry serious work.