Hitting the high notes: opera graduates off to world-leading UK schools

It was a once in a lifetime chance and the stakes were sky high.

Four University of Auckland music graduates travelled to the UK last December to audition for several of the best and most competitive music schools in the world, against some of the best in the world.

And they all got accepted.

Jack Doyle, Alanah Jones, Holly Evans and Anh Thu Nguyen, students of the University’s Associate Professor Te Oti Rakena and senior lecturer Dr Morag Atchison, will be UK-bound again in September when they all start masters programmes in opera performance.

Jack will attend the Royal College of Music, Alanah will go to the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Anh Thu will join the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, all in London, while Holly will study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

However, the international fees are eye-wateringly high and while they’re all being helped by scholarships and additional funding, they do have a shortfall.
 

So they’ve decided to stage a series of fundraising concerts, the first of which is coming up on 22 March.

“Our show ‘England Bound’ is a collaboration with the Auckland Opera Studio in Eden Terrace,” says countertenor Jack Doyle, who recently won the Nicholas Tarling Aria Competition.

“It’s in a private studio space which is very cool because they’ve completely transformed it to feel like an intimate apartment with a big grand piano and red curtains. It’s a lovely space to perform and seats about 150.”

The concert will feature the “full span of the operatic repertoire,” he says.

As a countertenor (high-voiced male singer) Jack will sing works from Handel and Purcell. Anh Thu, as a full lyric soprano, will focus on romantic classics from composers like Puccini. Holly, a light lyric soprano, will be doing some Mozart and Britten and Alanah, a lyric coloratura soprano, will sing Baroque, bel canto music, and even some jazz.

The four will also sing some duets and a quartet.

Jack, who began his undergraduate studies as a baritone (lower male voice), made the full, and unusual, transition to countertenor in 2025 after years of singing that way in casual situations like parties.

“It was literally my ‘party trick’, almost like my body was telling me that this was my voice before my mind even knew,” he says.
 

Coming from a musical family where both his parents also trained as opera singers in London, Jack completed a conjoint Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Commerce last year “just in case music doesn’t work out”.

Jack’s Royal College audition was both exhilarating and highly nerve-wracking, he says, and involved making it through two ‘rounds’, the second performed in front of tutors in the school’s own venue, the Britten Theatre, designed in the Italian style and featuring a three-tiered auditorium and a sea of red seats.

“I walked into that theatre, and the second I started singing I knew this was where I had to be.”

He says he knew it was “so high stakes” that it became almost surreal and that freed him up to give it his best shot.

“The really great thing was they usually don’t tell you on the spot if you’ve got in, but in this case, they looked at each other after my second audition, and one said, ‘We normally let people know later, but we just want to tell you now, you’re in!”

He says he “floated” back to the flat in Bethnal Green he was renting with the others from Auckland and shared the news with his “Kiwi family far from home”.
 

And even better, he says, they all had plenty of reasons to celebrate as each of them were doing their own auditions and later hearing the unbelievable news that they’d all been accepted.

“We never dreamed we’d all make it, we were expecting at least some, or all of us, might not, it’s just so competitive,” says Jack.

“I’m so looking forward to this next step in my training, and I know we’re all thrilled it’s happening for us at the same time so we can support each other.”

Dr Atchison says she and her colleagues in the University’s music department are “so very proud of the group’s amazing achievements to get into some of the best music schools in the world”.

“They all have very bright futures,” she says. A fifth student, baritone Blake Scanlen, is off to the University of York to do ensemble singing.

What: ‘England Bound’ fundraising concert

Where: Auckland Opera Studio, 2 Glenside Crescent, Eden Terrace

When: 22 March from 5.30pm to 7.30pm

Accompanist: David Kelly

Tickets: $65 for adults, $25 for students, available on the Auckland Opera Studio website.

Listen to Jack Doyle singing in the recent Nicholas Tarling Aria Competition, where he won the Scholarship Division with Handel's 'Stille Amare'.