Interview with Cathy-Di Zhang

In your video message to Victorian opera earlier this year you mention how special this project is culturally for you. Unpack that for us and tell us why it’s important for these international cultural exchanges to take place, especially in opera.

I grew up listening to the Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto at home! It’s one of the greatest Chinese classical works. I was born in China and moved to Australia at the age of 4, so although I feel quite “Aussie”, my Chinese culture was still a big part of my upbringing and is a part of who I am today.

As soon as I turned 18, I spent a year living in Beijing, learning the language and reconnecting with family that are still there. I also returned to China as part of the iSing! International Young Artists Festival, a cultural exchange between the East and the West, and that is where I discovered and fell in love with a lot of Chinese Art Song and Chinese poetry.

Living in a world of increasing globalisation with lots of things becoming seemingly the same everywhere you go, these type of exchanges are particularly important so we can discover and remember our rich and unique cultural histories. It also helps us come together by having a greater understanding and respect for one another.

Opera is traditionally a European art form but there has been a great emergence of new operas and vocal works in China over the last century. I think this is a beautiful expression of gratitude from Chinese artists and composers – the journey of their initial discovery of European Opera and vocal writing to being inspired by this wonderful art form and subsequently composing their own works and sharing their own stories.

This type of curiosity, new collaborations and new ways of doing opera is what is going to make sure this art form continues to thrive well into the future. Opera always has a way of bringing people together from all over the world and now that it is so easy to be connected, we should take advantage of this!

This is your first time performing with Victorian Opera, and it will also be the first time the company collaborates with Wild Rice. What excites you about this collaboration?

Lots of things excite me about this collab. Wild Rice is one of the leading theatre companies in Singapore and are known for their focus on inventive interpretations, diversity and new works. The legend of the Butterfly Lovers and its subject matter is an old one and so I’m looking forward to working with Ivan Heng in exploring the themes of the work in today’s context.

This starts with a new and considered libretto – written here by young Singaporean playwright and inter-disciplinary artist, Joel Tan. I always enjoy working with straight theatre professionals – the performance of opera has evolved so much over the years and it’s so exciting when we push ourselves to create a show that is both musically and vocally inspired as well as dramatically thrilling, complex and committed.

I’m very excited to be working with Victorian Opera for the first time. Richard and I first met and talked about this opera over 2 years ago now, so I can’t quite believe it’s finally happening! As usual, due to schedules etc., we have very limited time all together, but it’s such a great creative team so I’m very keen for the challenge and seeing what we can dream up! It also helps that I have know both of my cast mates quite well, Haotian Qi and Meili Li. Haotian and I have toured together twice with Opera Australia and Meili is an old classmate of mine from over a decade ago at the Royal Academy of Music, so it’s great to come back together now as colleagues!

You had the opportunity to perform as part of the amazing Aix-en-Provence Festival, tell us about that.

When I was still a student in London, I auditioned successfully to take part in the Mozart Residency at the Festival in 2013. It was an incredible summer programme for 12 young singers from around the world and we just focused on Mozart. As young artists of the Festival, we also got to see everything that was on, met a lot of the world-class artists performing there and got to just immerse ourselves in one of the best Summer Festivals in the World. It was so inspiring and during that time I got to learn from and watch the best of the best. It was therefore wonderful to return 6 years later performing in a show. It was a new production of Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Tony-award winning director Ivo van Hove with a star cast and under the baton of Essa-Pekka Salonen and his orchestra, The Philharmonia. The chorus were the incomparable Pygmalion ensemble so it really was a dream production to be a part of. In addition, Aix has to be one of the most beautiful places to work in the world – especially during the Summer! When not working or seeing other things on at the Festival, I spent many days off discovering the pristine calanques around Provence, drinking Rose and eating beautiful food!

The Boheme on the beach project with the State Opera of South Australia looked amazing. Tell us about this wonderful project.

I believe this was the biggest audience I had ever performed for in an opera! (Over 6000 people!) When Stuart Maunder first asked me to sing Mimi for this “opera on the beach” I thought it was a small, casual gig, and it turned out to be huge! The scale of it was enormous, so big that we had 8 giant screens at various distances in the audience projecting the action from onstage. But it was very special. The sunset at Glenelg was absolutely stunning. I was so nervous beforehand I was dreaming about swimming away but when I got out there, the view and atmosphere of the place was so spectacular that all my nerves just disappeared and it was a truly magical night. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into making that happen. Just bumping in the stage on the beach took weeks, plus the sound was incredible – designed by Jim Atkins plus it was being filmed live on the night – for the projection on the screens as well as for the full opera stream now available on SBS on Demand. It was also during lots of Covid in Adelaide, it was a miracle none of us went down! We were rehearsing on site in the evenings before and there was a lot of wind and it was freezing, but it was just perfect for the performance. We were so lucky! There is something about performing outdoors, that inspires a different feel and experience for us performers and the audience alike. Some of my most memorable performances were outdoors – like this Boheme, or performing at Sunrise at Uluru, in piazzas in the hills of Italy, or in the middle of nowhere in the northern territories whilst on regional tour! Performing in unconventional spaces always has its challenges, but it’s so worth it!

You’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing conductors, like Marcus Stenz and Esa-Pekka Salonen, tell us about those collaborations.

I worked with Marcus and Esa-Pekka for the Mahagonny. Esa-Pekka conducted it in Aix-en-Provence and Marcus at the Dutch National Opera when we took the show there the year after. I remember watching Esa-Pekka conduct a new production of Elektra in Aix in 2013 when I was there as a young artist and being blown away. He is one of the top conductors in the world and I was absolutely terrified during the sitzprobe! He has a way of not saying very much at all but inspiring complete focus on the music from everybody in the room. The sounds and the energy he got out of his orchestra was something else entirely. It was a similar experience working with Ivo van Hove. He manages to draw out completely committed performances from every member of the cast, chorus and actors at all times. Working with Marcus was also so great, he had his own musical vision when we were reviving Mahagonny in Amsterdam, which is always interesting and it keeps things fresh! He was a very kind and generous man and had previously worked a lot in Australia, which he loved! I have been very lucky to have spent so much time abroad, working and studying everywhere and getting to see lots of great artists at work and that has also been the case since coming back to Australia!

Cathy-Di Zhang performs in the Asian premiere of The Butterfly Lovers at Victoria Theatre, Singapore 3 – 6 May 2023.