Opera-singing sweethearts Amitai Pati and Adela Zaharia: ‘It’s much more interesting when you actually feel those feelings you're singing about’

Home from Paris for a few months, Samoan-Kiwi tenor Amitai Pati is making the most of mince-and-cheese pies as he prepares for NZ Opera's Auckland performances of Rigoletto.

Back in July, he and his partner Adela Zaharia - a Romanian soprano - performed their first-ever recital together at Auckland's Holy Trinity Cathedral.

It was a very special moment for the couple, Zaharia says, and the audience definitely knew something was up between them.

"[As a singer] it is much more interesting and dramatic and fiery when you actually feel those feelings you're singing about and you don't have to act and you don't have to play. So of course the people, the audience, feel that and it touches them differently," she tells Saturday Morning's Mihingarangi Forbes.

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Singing an opera is a bit like running a marathon, Pati says, in that you have to try and keep yourself at a consistent pace throughout an entire evening.

Despite a predilection for pies, he says being in good shape is key to pulling off a role like the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.

Usually portrayed as "this big playboy philanthropist guy, all the money in the world, all the women in the world, basically just gets his own way", NZ Opera's 2024 version of the Duke has more of a character arc, Pati says.

"He's very playful at the beginning and he knows what he's worth and he knows what he can do, how powerful he is, but during the show, you see slight hints of him not actually getting his way. The cool thing is that I get to be the bad guy but also get to act like I don't always get what I want, which is usually [how his character is depicted] in other productions."

Zaharia - who has performed in Rigoletto many times herself - says she was surprised to be nominated for Best Female Singer at this year's International Opera awards, because most of the five other international sopranos in the category have a "much stronger" PR and marketing strategy.

"I don't focus very much on [that]. I like to focus on the art."

Pati says the same was true of Terence Maskell - the South Auckland singing and piano teacher he credits with setting him up to be the musician he is today.

"He made sure that he got the most out of every single student that he taught which is, I would say, the reason why the choirs back then were so successful. Even now if you go back to Aorere College you can see all of their gold medals and plaques on the wall, just as a testament to what he did for the school in terms of music."

Amitai, his brother Pene Pati and their cousin Moses Mackay

were only teenagers when they formed the super-successful operatic trio Sol3 Mio.

It came together quite spontaneously one night Pene was struggling through a guest performance at Whanganui's NZ Opera School, Pati says.

Battling a hangover which made it hard to deliver more than a couple of arias, Pene made a beeline for his brother and cousin.

"He pulls Moses and I to the side and he says 'Look, guys, you have to help me'. Within the space of about 25 seconds, he had organised how we were going to sing his final piece, which was also [the 19th-century ode to sunlight] 'O sole mio'.

"I remember standing in the wings thinking 'This is ridiculous. I don't know what to do'. We'd never actually sung this in public before, let alone organised anything like this before. Just tell us what to do. And that's exactly what he did."

At the end of the trio's first-ever set, an audience member piped up with 'Hey, you guys should form a group!', Pati says.

"We thought 'Yeah, this would be great. Yeah, why not?"

In a twist he describes as "insanely cool", Pene is up for Best Male Singer at the International Opera Awards.

"This is the sort of thing that we envisioned when we first started getting into opera so the fact that he's actually up there, I'm super proud of him."

One day, if their schedules ever allow, Pati hopes to perform in an opera production alongside his partner, his brother and his brother's wife Amina Edris - an Egyptian soprano.

"Of course it would be a dream for us. Of course it would be a marketing dream. The problem is that we are all so busy that it's almost impossible to find a time slot for all four of us."

In the meantime, he encourages Aucklanders to come and heckle the unscrupulous Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.

"Come and boo me, please. I'm playing the bad guy. I want people to come and throw things at me. And if that happens then I've done my job, right?"