Rising Australian opera star Nicole Car is surrounded by romance, both on and off the stage
Rising Australian opera star Nicole Car has returned to Sydney, accompanied by her French Canadian baritone husband and their baby, Noah.
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JUST before rehearsals began for Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin in Berlin in 2015, the French Canadian baritone Etienne Dupuis found that he was looking forward to meeting his Australian co-star and hoping they would “get on”.
Scarcely three years after they took the lead roles in Onegin, Dupuis and soprano Nicole Car are married. Their baby son Noah turned one on Monday. They “eloped” and married in remote British Columbia four months after Noah’s birth.
They’ve come a long way since their first date, when Dupuis asked Car to meet
him outside Berlin’s famous Palace of Tears.
The young couple are visibly smitten at the Sydney Opera House where Car is on a break from rehearsing for her highly anticipated role debut as Violetta in Verdi’s sumptuous but heart-wrenching opera La Traviata. It opens tonight.
For the globetrotting couple, who have just bought a Paris apartment, it’s wonderful to be staying in one city for several months. They are living in a serviced apartment, not far from the Opera House, where Noah is often in the care of doting grandparents.
“(The opera) world can be so overwhelming,” Car says. “It’s nice to come home to the normality that other people have.”
Car’s settled state will not last long. After La Traviata, she undertakes a four-city concert tour with Richard Tognetti’s Australian Chamber Orchestra, Noah accompanying her to some cities and not others.
But the family will all be together in New York in September for a momentous occasion when Car and Dupuis make their joint house debuts at the Metropolitan Opera. In Franco Zeffirelli’s famous production of Puccini’s La Boheme, Car will be the fragile and tragic Mimi. Dupuis will be the painter Marcello whose best friend Rodolfo loves Mimi.
“They (the Met) were like, ‘Etienne, you’re going to be Marcello. Nicole, would you like to be Mimi?’,” Carr says. “I was like, sure! Why not? It’s just another really big tick on the bucket list.”
Zeffirelli’s production, which premiered in 1981, boasts a real horse and a real mule on stage, along with seven principal singers, 80 chorus members, 100 extras and 30 children, says a Met spokesman.
When La Boheme had its Met premiere in 1900, when the company was on tour in Los Angeles, Australia’s legendary Dame Nellie Melba sang Mimi. In the Zeffirelli production’s premiere, the leads were Teresa Stratas and Jose Carreras.
Car’s Met debut will cap off an impressive string of achievements since she studied classical music at school in Melbourne.
In 2007 she won the Herald-Sun Aria, and two years later made her major role debut as Donna Anna in the Victorian Opera’s Don Giovanni.
She became a Young Artist with Opera Australia in 2011. In 2013 she wowed audiences as Micaela in Carmen: Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. She also won the Neue Stimmen (New Voices) competition in Gutersloh, Germany, which attracted 1428 singers from 69 nations.
In 2015 Car debuted at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden as Micaela. When she sang the role of Mimi at Covent Garden last year, The Times’ critic called her “the star turn”.
Car and Dupuis performed together last year for only the second time, when they appeared at Sydney Town Hall in Opera Australia’s concert-style presentation of the opera Thaïs.
In tonight’s La Traviata, Car will partner with Ji-Min Park as Alfredo, the ardent young man whose rich father steps in to prevent him marrying the socially tainted courtesan, Violetta.
Park was Rodolfo in Car’s first Boheme with Opera Australia in 2011. Anna Dowsley, who will sing Flora in La Traviata, is also an old colleague.
“It’s so comforting to know that you’re coming home to a place that’s known you for such a long time and wants you to come back and accepts you,” Car says.
“Especially for a role like Violetta, which is so demanding.”
Opera Australia’s La Traviata, Sydney Opera House; from tonight until March 27, $46-$315, opera.org.au