Throughout our careers, we undergo many transitions, progressing through different roles and responsibilities as our skills and experience grow. But what does a transition look like in the career of an opera singer?
Brett Peart has experienced several changes in his singing career and is gearing up to make his greatest shift yet.
It was at the end of high school when he got his start in singing. “I went to do some lessons at a local singing school. People recommended I do some local community music theatre productions.”
Seeing potential for a career in this space, Brett’s next step was to study for a Certificate of Music Theatre at WAAPA. “At the end of that year, my teacher recommended that I try out for the classical course. My plan was to do that for a year and return to music theatre training.”
In his audition for the Diploma of Classical Voice, he was met with an unexpected suggestion from the course coordinator, Patricia Price. “She asked me why I was auditioning for the diploma and not the bachelor.”
“I thought I wasn’t ready for the bachelor coming from music theatre.”
Despite Brett’s initial hesitation, he accepted an offer to join the Bachelor of Classical Voice Studies and Opera, sending him off on a four-year journey at WAAPA.
Entering the course as a tenor, Brett had experience singing “quite high stuff”. Moving into classical singing and opera saw him make new discoveries with his vocal tool. “We found my middle to lower voice, which I hadn’t explored before, and there was some heft and power to it.”
“As I explored that, I thought of myself as a baritone.”
Brett performing in WAO’s The Pirates of Penzance © West Beach Studio.
Throughout his studies, he would regularly receive the same feedback from teachers, which initially took him by surprise. “A few people floated the idea that perhaps tenor or heldentenor work was maybe in my future.”
“I didn’t really know what that meant but, over time, more people mentioned it and I thought, I may as well take a run at it, and I’m glad I did.”
Brett explains that heldentenor is a German term for “Heroic Tenor.”
“It’s a lower set of sound than your average Italianate tenor, it’s a bit heftier. It doesn’t go up to your high Cs as much, but it does go up to a B flat every now and again. People call it a steely or cutting sound.”
The repertoire of a heldentenor isn’t typically approached by someone of Brett’s age, and is considered more suited to performers in later stages of their career.
“For me, as a younger performer, calling myself a heldentenor would be quite ambitious but I do feel like that repertoire feels quite right in my voice and instrument.”
Although he’s not quite ready to claim the title of heldentenor, he’s already embarking on roles that place him within that category, his latest being a soloist in A Child of Our Time.
The performance is a collaboration between the West Australian Opera and the UWA Conservatorium of Music and is a piece of music that Brett describes as “incredibly powerful.”
“It deals with an overarching theme of oppression and presents it as a constant throughout history to different peoples in different times.”
The piece follows Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass”, during World War Two in Nazi-occupied Europe. “It deals with those events but it’s also an abstract timeline where the first part of the piece lays the context, the second part deals with these events and the third act is a hopeful sense of healing from the horror.”
Brett has long admired the piece composed by Michael Tippett, particularly for its use of “African American spirituals”, which he first performed at WAAPA.
“There are these big choruses in the piece which broaden out the picture of oppression to unify the concept. They are so beautiful, bold, complex and powerful.”
From initially performing the choral aspects of the piece, Brett says, “It’s an honour to get to do the piece now as one of the soloists.”
“Getting to hear the whole chorus and everyone performing will be very moving for anyone listening.”
You can hear Brett in A Child of Our Time for one performance only at Winthrop Hall on May 23.