Tattooed Tongan opera singer to headline Festival of Outback Opera
The outdated promotional portrait of Filipe Manu is still widely used because he doesn’t look much like an opera singer in this portrait.
The New Zealand tenor’s black hair curls down to his shoulders in Fabio style; Clark Gable’s mustache smolders on his upper lip; and tight black vest reveals a geometric Tongan shape tatatau It covers his upper left arm and shoulder.
These days, Manu’s hair is cut short, but there’s no way the tattoo is going anywhere. When he travels to Austria in 2024 to sing Ferrando in the Wiener Staatsoper’s production Cosi fan tutte, She shyly approached Melbourne-born director Barrie Kosky to warn him about the ink.
“And he said: ‘Oh yeah? Look at me.’ And he’s like: ‘Great! I don’t care! I’ll put you in a tank top!’”
You don’t have to be an avant-garde director like Kosky to understand how good singers like Manu are for opera, breaking prejudices and finding new audiences.
Manu is a Prince fan, grew up playing rugby union and was the first Tongan to sing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Opera Queensland general manager and artistic director Patrick Nolan says Manu has the “X factor”.
“He has a very beautiful voice, but he also has charisma. When a special singer appears, especially a tenor, word spreads quickly; for some reason good tenors are harder to find.”
In fact, Manu was still studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London when he was invited to make his debut at the Royal Opera House.
Since then, she has performed as a London-based freelance singer at the Opera National de Paris, Staatsoper Hamburg, Gran Teatre del Liceu and Glyndebourne.
Returning to Australia in May, both making headlines Opera Queensland’s Outback Opera Festival He will play Alfredo in Winton and Longreach and at Opera Australia Traviata in Melbourne (sharing the role with Oreste Cosimo).
Strangely, it’s a homecoming of sorts for Manu, who was born in Armidale, whose parents moved there from Fiji with Manu’s four older brothers.
Early memories of Australia center on two photographs: a photograph of his Tongan mother Sesilili leaving the hospital after he was born, and a postcard from the Sydney Opera House.
“For a long time, I thought the Opera House was the New England Hospital,” Manu recalls.
After the family moved to Auckland, Sesilili worked two jobs to make ends meet and secured Filipe a scholarship to Dilworth, a private boarding school for disadvantaged boys.
There he came under the influence of Claire Caldwell, the school’s inspirational director of choral music.
“He took us to a lot of operas. At first it was kind of fun to get out of class, but then I really started to understand it and fall in love with it.”
Caldwell, now a voice teacher and accompanist, remembers Manu’s first visit to New Zealand Opera, performing Verdi’s Macbeth at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theater in Auckland.
“He spent the entire performance leaning forward, hands on his chin, taking it all in. Finally, he turned to me and said: ‘Ma’am, how do I do this?’”
“Singing is very normal in Polynesian society,” says Manu. “Everyone sings in church, it’s as normal as playing rugby, so joining the choir was a natural progression.”
One oft-quoted story has Manu coming to watch the Lexus Song Contest in 2010, still wearing his rugby shorts, after a match. It was the year that Samoan soprano Aivale Cole won first prize.
“I wanted Filipe to see another role model from the Pacific that wasn’t some kind of white privilege,” Caldwell says.
Another of New Zealand’s greatest opera stars, Dame Malvina Major, encouraged him to apply for the University of Waikato’s Bachelor of Music program, where he was accepted as a Sir Edmund Hillary Scholar.
Her studies at the New Zealand Opera School and victories in the IFAC Handa Song Competition and the Lexus Song Challenge took her to the Guildhall.
Opera makes its Australian debut Cosi fan tutte last year and will eventually be able to play Alfredo alongside OA in Verdi’s middle period masterpiece Traviata.
“I remember singing in the choir in New Zealand and singing one of the minor roles in London. And of course, every night, it was the same stage that tested the tenor.”
He refers to the end of the second act, when the rejected Alfredo gambles against Violetta’s new lover, Baron Douphol. “Alfredo sings all these upper notes, fluctuating between these highs and lows… I had to find a new technique and a new way to meet the vocal demands.”
The Outback Opera Festival, now in its sixth year, has two major concerts under the stars: one at a cattle station near Longreach and the other on a prehistoric plateau called Jump-Up at the Australian Museum of the Age of Dinosaurs outside Winton.
Manu will perform repertoire including Gounod’s Donizetti Romeo and Julietand an excerpt from Mozart’s work Mithridate He describes it as “a piece of fireworks”.
“It goes from the lowest notes I have to the highest notes I haven’t found yet,” Manu says.
Previous titles included Kate Miller-Heidke And Sumi Joand the event, where opera stars rubbed shoulders with locals in dusty streets and historic pubs, helped redefine what opera could be.
Which brings us back to tattooing.
“This is part of who I am,” Manu says. “They can make me wear a long-sleeved shirt when they don’t want to.
“It’s a very different climate now than when Dame Kiri Te Kanawa was performing.”
Traviata It will be at the Regent Theater in Melbourne from 8-16 May and Manu will perform at Opera Australia’s 70th Anniversary Gala on 17 May. The Outback Opera Festival will be held in Winton and Longreach between 19-25 May.
Nick Dent is a Culture Reporter for the Brisbane Times covering the arts and things to do in the city.Connect via email.
