Composer Salina Fisher combines traditional sounds with an orchestra.
I think I have made Salina Fisher blush. I can’t be absolutely certain, because a glitching internet connection means our Zoom conversation is being conducted by audio only, but I have just put it to Fisher that, aged 29, many consider her to be New Zealand’s most important living composer.
“What?!” she says. “That’s a really strange thing to hear.” Fisher’s right, of course, but then so too are those who have showered award after award upon her. A two-time winner of the Todd Young Composers Award (2013, 2014), in 2016 she became the youngest ever winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, our top composition prize. She won again the following year, and should have but didn’t get another for her piano trio Kintsugi. A Fulbright scholarship took her to the Manhattan School of Music, where she claimed the Carl Kanter Prize for the year’s best orchestral composition.
A more reliable indicator of quality, though, is that Fisher’s work is performed constantly all over the world, even though she’s never pursued an international profile.
“I’ve been really lucky that people have wanted to play my music,” says Fisher, who as well as being lucky is also overwhelmingly gifted. “I’m continually amazed when it gets programmed, especially overseas.”
Fisher’s latest, Papatūānuku for Taonga Puoro and Orchestra (“I don’t want to call it a concerto”), gets its premiere closer to home on August 24, during the APO’s In the Elements concert.
Papatūānuku is a collaboration with traditional instrument expert and good friend Jerome Kavanagh. Fisher says it was important to centre the work on Kavanagh’s instruments, rather than writing an orchestral piece then crowbarring in the taonga puoro.
“I recorded Jerome’s puoro and then transcribed them, to understand the pitches and rhythms, inflections and ornamentations he uses,” Fisher explains. “From there I orchestrated around his instruments in a way that supports the puoro and feels natural and, hopefully, nurturing. Jerome is composing and improvising his part, but to write notated music around a non-notated form of music is an interesting challenge.”
Papatūānuku is the third major work featuring taonga puoro with orchestral instruments to appear in this column in 2023. Is this coming together the current direction of New Zealand’s classical music language?
“The movement to revive these traditions plays a crucial role in New Zealand music; these indigenous instruments are unique to this land, and were almost lost forever due to colonisation,” Fisher says.
“I’m drawn to taonga puoro for many reasons including their beautiful sounds and profound connection with the natural world, but at the heart of each collaboration is a deep friendship, and a desire to listen and learn.”
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, In the Elements, Auckland Town Hall, August 24
First published in The New Zealand Listener, August 19-25, 2023
Most will remember her as the broadcaster who fronted TV and radio shows for decades. But she’s changed her tune as Gina. Richard Betts on the reinvention of Leanne Malcolm.
Singer-songwriter Gina Malcolm has just released her second single, ‘Deep Dark Blue’. The words are raw and confessional and wreathed in echo. There are granite slabs of piano, spectral guitar and a ‘Ticket to Ride’-on-medication drum beat. It’s a bit Reb Fountain-ish or, for those of a certain vintage, a less blissed-out Mazzy Star, and it’s quite wonderful. Last December Malcolm released the similarly excellent ‘Don’t Expect the World’, which has an evocative, sepia-toned video, shot in the South Island’s wide-open spaces. Although Gina Malcolm has released just the two songs, there’s enough to suggest she’s one to watch.
You may have watched Malcolm before. Gina’s her middle name; she used to be and mostly still is Leanne.
“Gina’s a way more interesting name,” says Malcolm. “I never liked Leanne.”
We liked Leanne Malcolm, though. She was constantly in our homes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and on and off thereafter, as a TV3 and RNZ National newsreader, presenter of shows including Nightline and the tradies’ nemesis, Target. Leanne was famous. No one knows Gina. If you want people to hear your music, why ditch the advantage of name recognition?
“I wanted to signal that I’m no longer the person I was,” says Malcolm, who recently turned 60 (“Hey, I’m going to own it”). “I’m not a newsreader any more, I’m not a celebrity. I wanted to signal a change, a new focus. I do want people to hear the music but because I’ve been so low-profile for so long, I’m perhaps nervous about the reception. But I’m in a great position in that I’m doing it for me; I have the means to make a video and record songs, and some talented people to work with.”
Chief among these is Arrowtown musician Tom Maxwell, of the band Killergrams. He and Malcolm have known each other since Malcolm moved to Central Otago in the early-2000s, when Maxwell was a youngster. He moved away, spent time in and around the fertile Lyttelton music scene, returned during Covid. The two re-entered each other’s orbit last year.
Malcolm, who’d had singing lessons and been performing in covers bands, was bursting with lyrics and ideas, and approached Maxwell about collaborating.
“I was terrified,” she says. “It took a lot of courage to show him [the songs]. They’re raw and from a deep place.”
If Malcolm brought poetry and a vision for the songs, Maxwell supplied the means to express them: the ability to put everything in its right place, the added touches that polish a rough demo into a finished song. Malcolm says that as a newcomer to the recording process, it made sense to follow Maxwell’s lead.
“I had to listen and take advice. It would have been dumb to go in there and say, right, I’m doing it this way.”
Maxwell’s way was quiet, restrained and, in the two songs so far released, unashamedly morose. It’s not entirely what Malcolm had in mind, but she found herself persuaded by what Maxwell imagined for her lyrics.
“For me,” says Maxwell, “the idea was to find something that felt authentically Leanne, true and honest. A lot of the poems she’d written were very exposing, very honest. Some were sorrowful. So the idea of fragility was a big part of the project, and we tried to lean into sparseness. That was probably one thing where there was a bit of… not disagreement. She maybe wanted it a certain way and we had to do a bit of convincing that this was the right sound and style to go for.”
Malcolm: “His advice all the way through was to pull back, let the microphone do the work. It was interesting because I’ve always thought the best thing was to belt it out. He kept saying, ‘No, your strength is the slow and meaningful and powerful song.’”
Malcolm initially wanted something rockier.
“I’ll happily admit I’m a bogan at heart and I love playing loud rock’n’roll. I’m a 60s kid, so for me the 70s is my go-to.” She likes a bit of Patti Smith, Jack White, music with a classic sound, and some of that could be on the cards in the future.For now, the rock racket is confined to Malcolm’s weekday show on Radio Central, which has beamed throughout Central Otago for four years.
“It’s great. I still enjoy being behind the microphone. I did TV but radio’s what I love. I don’t know how many listeners we have but it makes me happy.”
Radio Central owner Shane Norton isn’t sure how many listeners Malcolm gets either (“They don’t do surveys down here”) but he says the station receives plenty of positive responses. Sure, listeners recognise Malcolm from her TV days, but she’s one of them now, and the locals are as likely to know her from the school run. Norton met Malcolm because their kids played football together.
“People absolutely love [Malcolm’s show],” says Norton. “We speak to local people down here and the feedback is that people like hearing people on the radio that they know.”
The Leanne Malcolm people know last year turned up in an unlikely place, when she briefly joined The Platform, run by broadcaster Sean Plunket, which has a studio in Central Otago. That was… odd.
“When you’re down here there are no media opportunities,” reasons Malcolm. “Sean said I want you to do a show. I asked if I could make it an arts and music show and he said yes.”
She managed interviews with the likes of Exponents singer Jordan Luck and indie legend Shayne Carter, but the liberal Malcolm was a poor fit with The Platform’s usual diet of contrarian opinion.
“It was a total mismatch but Sean wanted a woman and I think I was meant to be the approachable person in the line-up, I hadn’t been cancelled.”
A disagreement over Plunket’s views on the Christchurch mosque attacks led to Malcolm’s resignation.
At least she had more time to work on her music, making room for the release of ‘Don’t Expect the World’. Coincidentally, Malcolm’s son, Joel, a drum’n’bass DJ who works under the name Altercation, had a new song out around the same time.
“It was the biggest thrill – mother and son on Spotify! He’s super-supportive and loves the fact there’s music all around us.”
The confessional nature of Malcolm’s lyrics must give him pause, though. Unlike singer-songwriters who use real life as a jumping-off point, Malcolm’s songs are deeply autobiographical.
“Sometimes I look at poor Joel and he listens to the songs and the words and he goes, ‘God, Mum, what do you mean by that? What does Don’t Expect the World even mean?’ I don’t want him to think I’m miserable or it was some pointed dig at his dad or anything like that.”
Joel’s dad – Malcolm’s husband – is Philip Smith, head of film and TV production company Great Southern.
“Phil was intrigued and surprised [about the music],” Malcolm says. “I don’t think he knew what to expect but he thinks it’s great. He also thinks it’s quite an expensive hobby. I had to tell him it’s not actually a hobby.”
The family support has been welcome. Malcolm’s had a tough time in the last decade. When we speak, Malcolm’s mother is in the final stages of a terminal illness, and many of Malcolm’s unrecorded songs are a way of processing that. (Sadly, Malcolm’s mother died days before the publication of this story.) Malcolm herself experienced what she calls “a scrape” with breast cancer in 2014. And she lost her father to cancer eight years ago. ‘Deep Dark Blue’ is about him.
“The words describe scattering my father’s ashes in Pauanui. I was very close to him and it was something I’d been putting off. I remember that day; we went out on the boat, it was pretty rough. The ocean was particularly blue, it just looked so deep. There was a feeling of peace, like a lot of people have when saying farewell.”
Malcolm uses universal phrases a lot: like a lot of people; everyone goes through that.
“I’ve had many great experiences and a fair bit of fortune in my life, so to moan about the bad times sounds a bit entitled,” she explains, though it feels like she’s pre-empting any Kiwi tall poppy nonsense too. “I’m not the only human who feels loss and despair; life is a series of obstacles amid the happy, carefree times.”
And although her songs reflect personal experiences, Malcolm says several times that she wants listeners to connect with them.
“I want to release music that people relate to and that gives people pleasure,” she says. “I want to keep producing music and I’d love to play these songs live. David Bowie said something like, the great thing about getting older is you finally become who you were meant to be. I totally relate to that. This isn’t me trying to be famous, I’m just doing something I need to do.”
First published in The New Zealand Herald, Canvas magazine, 7 May, 2023.
Tupac fan Samson Setu thought professional rugby was his future until opera – and his extraordinary talent – led him to the world’s most prestigious stages, writes Richard Betts.
Samson Setu is telling Sunday about his anxiety dream. It’s of a very specific type, that only an opera singer would experience. In it, Setu is not long off the plane from London, jetlagged and bedraggled, when Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, ONZ, our greatest cultural figure, phones. She asks whether Setu has auditioned for the Royal College of Music, as he was supposed to, as he planned, as destiny demands. He hasn’t.
In Setu’s dream, Dame Kiri issues a curt, “Wait there, I’ll call you back.” Not long after, he’s told to be on a plane back to the UK the following day, where, upon arrival, he absolutely will have that audition, even if it – or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, ONZ – kills him.
Of course, it isn’t an anxiety dream; it happened to Samson Setu. That was 2019, when he was a young man with talent but far from the finished article. Having won his audition at the Royal College, these days he’s a rising star of New Zealand opera, yet another Samoan New Zealander with a beautiful voice and the world in his sights. He gives a lot of credit to Dame Kiri for helping his career get to this point – as well as benefiting from her formidable Royal College connections, he received priceless support from the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation that assists young singers – but he was born with that voice. Not that he realised it.
Setu didn’t grow up with classical music. As a kid he liked reggae, especially Bob Marley, and was a big fan of Tupac. The only time he sang was at the Good News Family Church in Manurewa, where his grandfather was pastor.
“We had no choice but to sing or play in the church band,” Setu says. “It wasn’t until high school that someone told me, ‘You know, that voice isn’t normal for a 16-year-old’.”
That was Claire Caldwell, then on staff at Dilworth School.
“Samson walked into the music department and wanted to take music as a subject,” Caldwell, now working at NZ Opera, recalls. “We asked what his instrument was and in this booming voice he said, ‘Bass guitar.’ The singing teacher Ian Campbell and I looked at each other and said, ‘Young man, with a speaking voice like that, you’re a singer’.”
Setu didn’t think so; singing was hardly special.
“Everyone sings in church,” says Caldwell. “So the idea that singing would be anything special is something a lot of Pacific Islands people struggle with. It’s not seen as a skill, it’s too ordinary.”
Caldwell’s faced this dynamic before. As well as Setu, at Dilworth she discovered Samoan New Zealanders Joel Amosa and Filipe Manu, the latter just a year above Setu. Both of them went on to win our most prestigious classical singing prize, the Lexus Song Quest. Even now, Setu isn’t sure singing is anything praiseworthy.
“Singing and dancing enrich our culture, so to be able to make money off it is a cheat code,” he says, bursting into laughter. “‘You sing for a living? That’s what we do every other day.’ I’m like, yeah, I know, it’s not right.”
An unlikely opera star
Except most people don’t sing the lead role in m(ORPHEUS), NZ Opera’s post-modern remake of Orfeo ed Euridice, which plays in Auckland and Wellington between 6 and 23 September. Christoph Willibald Gluck’s work, an operatic staple since its 1762 debut, is being given a 21st-century polish by Kiwi composer Gareth Farr, who has reorchestrated the piece for just 10 instruments, and not the ones in the original work. It’s a big sing. Setu’s character – Orfeo, the musician who descends into the underworld to rescue his wife Euridice – is on stage almost the entire time, and consumes much of the first act’s music.
“There are parts that are tricky to navigate,” Setu says. “It’s going to take some time singing the role into the body but we have a long rehearsal period, so that will come.”
Setu isn’t the singer you’d expect to hear in this role. Orfeo was written for a much higher voice, and is mostly performed by a mezzo-soprano or counter-tenor. In this production the vocal line will be adjusted to meet Setu’s molten chocolate bass-baritone, so it should sit nicely within his range. But this production is being directed by Neil Ieremia, leader of the acclaimed dance troupe Black Grace. No one yet seems quite sure how that will play out on stage, but expect rhythm, momentum and a few contemporary dance moves.
Claire Caldwell reckons Setu will be fine.
“There’s a grace in there,” she says. “I’m excited to see how that’s brought out in this production. You don’t necessarily look at Samson and think he’s a dancer.”
You don’t necessarily look at him – powerfully built, long-haired – and think he’s an opera singer, either. He almost wasn’t. In his third year as a music undergraduate at the University of Otago, he threw it in.
“I was enjoying the singing but it was everything else,” Setu says. “We were encouraged to network or schmooze, and I didn’t know the slightest thing about any of it. A lot of the people were from a completely different demographic to me; we had nothing in common, so I would struggle to make conversation and to answer questions that seemed intrusive.”
With hindsight, Setu realises that in those moments he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t and the solution was simply to be himself. He says these days he’s much more comfortable in that world. At the time, though, he couldn’t stand it. Call it a crisis of confidence, call it an almighty strop, but Setu escaped to Brighton, England, where he pursued a long-held dream to play professional rugby. He was offered a contract and only returned to New Zealand to pack his things. Setu’s mother staged a last-ditch intervention – “She convinced me that I should see the study through” – and instead of quitting altogether, he transferred to Auckland, where he found the support he needed among fellow vocal students with shared Pasifika backgrounds, and in singing teacher Te Oti Rakena. It was Rakena who assured Setu he was good enough to sing professionally.
“[Rakena] instilled a lot of confidence in me and reminded me, in his words, ‘You’re good enough to go far, to go beyond these shores; just give me a couple of years.’”
Working with the best
In a couple of years Setu was in London. The experience was cut short by Covid, but Setu got a lot from his time at the Royal College of Music.
“You work with some of the best teachers and technicians in the world. Some of the coaches at the college were also coaches at the Royal Opera House, so you can only imagine the amount of information we absorbed.”
His London adventures coincided with those of old schoolmate Filipe Manu, the exciting young soprano Madison Nonoa, who sings the role of Amor in m(O)RPHEUS – “She’s a Samoan girl, so we have those automatic connections” – and tenor Manase Latu, one of the vocal students Setu bonded with when he transferred from Dunedin back to Auckland.
“Manase and Filipe were living in the same building; being able to walk to Covent Garden was awesome. I thought I would be overwhelmed but it was amazing.”
If Setu liked London, he absolutely loved New York. He was there having won a place on the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. On the same course was Manase Latu. The pair shared the experience and an apartment, living together on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“Catching the train to the Met every day, you’re not running low on inspiration,” Setu says. “To be able to walk those halls so many great singers have walked before you, it’s such a cool experience. To be able to watch any opera any day of the week. I was blessed to have that opportunity, and to share it with my best mate Manase again, you couldn’t script it.”
“He was an absolute pain!” says Latu with a belly laugh. “He was good for me because he’s one of the cleanest people I know. Very organised, very structured; he likes his routines.
“It was nice to have the support of someone who knows you inside out, and also that ear of someone who’s heard you from where you began and seen you evolve and develop. He’s a kind person, really generous and not only with his time. Samson’s left a big hole in our friend group in New York. He was the one who brought us together; he was the glue.”
Southside pride
Days after this interview, Setu and Latu jetted to Croatia to tour with their vocal quartet The Shades. The group is completed by Ipu Laga’aia and Taka Vuni, two more singers from the Auckland University band of brothers.
“We were the only Pacific Island boys in the class,” Setu recalls. “I think the first week someone said, ‘You guys want to go for a jam?’ We went to a practice room and sang Franz Biebl’s ‘Ave Maria’. It was perfect for us. We went, ‘This is cool, we should hang out more.’ [With The Shades] we try to combine classical music with popular songs, so people can see there’s fun in opera.”
When Setu returns from Croatia, he’ll be too busy for fun. He’s got m(O)RPHEUS, and then he’s moving to Switzerland as a contracted singer at Zurich Opera House. This is the beginning of his career proper, where he will sing every week to filled halls.
“Zurich’s a good place for young artists,” Setu says. “Literally the day I signed my contract, they had already assigned me three roles for the season. That’s what you want, as much stage experience as you can get. You can only learn so much in a practice room, you’ve got to be out there doing it.”
London, New York, Zurich – they’re all a long way from Manurewa, but at Setu’s request, we’re conducting this interview in Brown Pride gym, Manukau, not far from his childhood home. Why?
“For me, keeping fit and singing go hand in hand, and my love for both is equal,” he says. “To be in this gym in particular is a positive, something coming out of South Auckland. I remember hearing [co-founder] Johnny [Timu] on a podcast and him and his boys saying, ‘Let’s make something positive in this community,’ and the gym is a product of that one whiteboard session. It’s more than just a gym, it’s a beacon of hope for young kids coming up in South Auckland. And my story is similar in a way; I never thought I’d be singing opera for a career or living in New York, London. If you’d told this Manurewa boy I’d be overseas singing opera, I would have laughed.”
NZ Opera’s m(ORPHEUS) runs in Auckland from 6 to 10 September, and in Wellington from 20 to 23 September.
First published in The Sunday Star Times, Sunday magazine, 23 July, 2023.
He was a jovial man with shaggy, sandy hair. I remember big hands and a bulbous nose but it’s been a while so perhaps that’s my memory playing tricks. His name was Tony Brooker – always Mr Brooker to me – and I knew him really well and not at all.
Mr Brooker died recently. Roger Marbeck of Marbeck’s record store reckons Mr Brooker was 92; I think he was 89. We may both be wrong. I don’t even know what he did for a living and yet I knew him intimately. For more than 10 years he was a customer of mine at various record stores. He came in at least once a week and always bought something, and his music buying pre-dated our association by decades.
By the time he died, aged 92 or 89 or neither, Mr Brooker had compiled one of New Zealand’s finest classical music collections.
He was a proper collector. Mr Brooker owned complete sets of Bach cantatas (more than 200 of them) and Haydn symphonies (more than 100 of them). He had the full Schubert lieder, 600 perfectly crafted songs in a language that I’m pretty sure Mr Brooker didn’t speak.
He went off on tangents, too, following history and geography and whim. Music of the Iberian diaspora was a passion, and he loved his late-Romantic Russians and his Italian Baroque vocal music. He bought more Telemann than I knew existed, literally hundreds of CDs, some of them almost certainly rubbish but that’s collecting for you.
In all he had 35,000 CDs and LPs. Each one had a little sticker on it, where he recorded every occasion he pulled it from the rack to listen. I remember him telling me that he’d reached a point where he knew there were many albums he would never hear again. There was just so much, and always more on the horizon.
So when Roger Marbeck tells you that Mr Brooker’s entire collection has been dropped at a junk shop, $2 a disc – well, you would, wouldn’t you? And you’d tell everyone you know who might care, wouldn’t you? (Though only after you’d spent 10 hours over three days picking through.)
So now I own another 250 CDs that I can’t really afford and that I don’t really need and that I absolutely do not have room for. And on the back of each one there’s a little sticker, telling me the last time Tony played it.
First published in The New Zealand Listener, January 14-20, 2023
Kiwis on Tour 