It was a sunny Sunday in summer 2013. I was spending the weekend with friends in Launceston and popped into the Queen Victoria Museum to view the collection. On the way out I stopped to buy a couple of postcards and as I was paying I noticed a modest flier on the desk announcing a concert by a local countertenor. There was a photograph too of a young man who resembled Daniel Radclife in the Harry Potter movies, earnest, nerdy and with those thin-rimmed round spectacles that suggest scholarly intensity. His name was Nicholas Tolputt, a Launceston lad.
Now one doesn’t encounter Nick’s voice type very often and I was intrigued. Put simply, a countertenor is a male whose natural voice is that of a baritone but who, with training, can produce a falsetto sound that approximates to that of the castrati, the neutered male sopranos who were superstars of baroque opera.
I took one of the flyers with me back to Kempton and noted the date. My first thought was to ask a friend to attend and report back to me on the performance but the friend in question was out of the state on the appointed day. I pondered going up north but didn’t fancy the drive. Could there possibly be a potentially first-class opera singer lurking in Launceston?
Will I go? Won’t I go? Well, curiosity triumphed. At noon I booked a place on the 3pm Redline bus and a room in a B and B, called a Launceston antique dealer chum and invited him along to the concert and up I went.
St John’s Anglican Church was packed for the concert. Clearly young Master Tolputt (he was all of twenty-one at the time!) had considerable community support.
As the lights dimmed I whispered to my companion: “This will either be horrible or a revelation.” Tolputt launched into his first aria, Venga pur from an opera called Mitridate Re di Ponto, which the 14 year-old Mozart wrote in 1770. It was both a work and an aria I knew well having presented a production from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in the Sydney Festival 2000.
Tolputt was maybe three minutes into the aria when I nudged my companion and gave him a furtive lap-level thumbs up to signal approbation. Here was a fine voice indeed.
Subsequently I invited Nick down to Hobart for a special concert for supporters of Hobart Baroque. Again he wowed the audience. Not only does he have a lovely voice but he also has a knack of communicating quickly and positively with his listeners.
He participated in the two editions of Hobart Baroque, understudying one of the two American countertenors in Orlando in 2014, but Tasmania is too small a place for an artist with Tolputt’s talent and ambition. He moved to Melbourne for further study and performance experience, studying at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music where he acquired a degree and became the first countertenor to win a scholarship with the Melba Opera Trust.
Melbourne too couldn’t offer him the opportunities that he might have in Sydney and he moved to the Emerald City last year. I cast him in Brisbane Baroque in 2015 and, in a larger role, in this year’s event.
In late May, I saw him perform at a black-tie fund-raising event with other aspiring artists and he really stood out. Gone was the slightly scruffy look. The Harry Potter specs were gone, replaced I suspect with contact lenses, his hair was brilliantined, he had a smart new outfit of white tie and tails and a new assurance, looking every inch a professional. It was an impressive physical transformation but more importantly, his voice has new power and colour.
Right after Brisbane he won the 2016 Sydney Eisteddfod Opera Scholarship, commanding, as one commentator put it, “the audience’s attention with his angelic vocals” and displaying “a breadth of emotion in his expressive performance of I Know a Bank where the wild thyme grows from Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Handel’s Stille amare from Tolomeo.
These were the two arias he sang on Thursday evening in the finals of the Australian Singing Competition, held in Sydney and broadcast nationally on ABC Classic FM. This is our country’s most important singing competition and the jewel in the crown is the Marianne Mathy Scholarship, named in honour of a distinguished singer and teacher who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in Sydney where she became the country’s most respected mentor of young singers.
First awarded in 1982 to New Zealand soprano Nicola Waite, the Marianne Mathy Scholarship, also known as The Mathy, is one of the longest-running, recognised and respected scholarships of its type in Australia and New Zealand and to the list of young singers who’ve won this award must now be added that of Nicholas Tolputt who carried off this year’s award.
When I first spoke with him almost five years ago after his Launceston debut he said his ambition was to travel overseas and study with Andreas Scholl, the foremost countertenor of our time.
With almost one hundred thousand dollars in prizemoney in his kick, he’s about to realise that dream.
*Leo Schofield AM (born 6 May 1935) has served a long career as an advertising professional, journalist, creative arts festival director, and trustee of arts and cultural organisations.
• Estelle Ross in Comments: I have seen several of Nick’s concerts, he has a fantastic voice and is also a very charming young man. What a great opportunity he now has to study overseas with Andreas Scholl …
• Susie Clarke in Comments: Thank you Leo for writing such a great article about young Nicholas Tolputt. Yes, it was in July three years ago when we ( Don Wing, retired MLA, Kerry Finch, member for Roseveares, Di Bucknell, Kerry’s assistant ( now retired) and me, Susie Clarke) put on a concert for young Nic at Holy Trinity Concert! I knew Nic for several years and he was then a baritone and enjoyed playing major roles with Encore at Launceston’s Princess Theatre. It was his brilliant singing teacher Benjamin Martin who suggested he should try changing from being a baritone to counter tenor, and he was 100% right! I was so pleased to greet you at the door of Holy Trinity church that July evening 2013. Things certainly have changed for our young Nicholas since then! Thank you Leo for your continued support and encouragement for Nic …
