Could there be a more fitting place to listen to opera than in a natural amphitheatre named after the great Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba, set amidst the lush rainforest of the Otways Ranges?

 Melba Gully, just past Cape Otway on the Great Ocean Road, is one of the last surviving pockets of dense rainforest in the Great Otway National Park; and on Saturday October 25 it will host an outdoor concert, Opera in the Otways.

Among those appearing on the bill is Melbourne-based opera company Pot-Pourri, founded 21 years ago by Tania de Jong.

De Jong, a soprano, believes that the experience of performing outdoors makes beautiful music even better.

“I think a lot of people don’t necessarily want to go into a concert hall or a theatre, but when they’re enjoying really high calibre music in natural surroundings, it makes the experience doubly magical,” she tells Canvas.

“Just to be surrounded by nature in this beautiful, amazing gully … to be sitting out there having a picnic or lying on a blanket with your loved one, revelling in beautiful voices – there’s something much more freeform about it than sitting on a chair in a theatre,” she laughs.

A quartet, Pot-Pourri features Rebecca Bode, Jon Bode and Jonathan Morton performing alongside de Jong, accompanied by Rebecca Chambers on piano. Appropriately, for a group named after a fragrant blend of dried plant materials, their performances cover a broad range of styles and genres, from traditional opera to Broadway tunes and musical comedy.

“We find that opera buffs get into the musical theatre numbers, [as] we do interesting arrangements of many. And a lot of the musical theatre people who didn’t think they liked opera actually end up really getting into it,” de Jong says.

“It’s all about great singing as far as we’re concerned. And we do a lot of crossover as well; a lot of international hits by the likes of Josh Groban and Andrea Bocelli, Ennio Morricone, those sorts of artists. You wouldn’t call them musical theatre or comedy or opera; they’re international songs that have become hits. We love singing those songs too.”

Music is paradoxical in that it’s one of the hardest arts to master, especially in terms of playing an instrument or composing a truly great song; but conversely it’s also the most accessible, with a truly great song able to stir strong emotions in people more easily than would a painting or a play.

Given that she’s been performing since she was eight years old, how does de Jong define a great song, or a great piece of music?

 “A good song for me is one that makes my hair stand on end and gives me goose bumps,” she answers. “It has usually got a sweeping melody somewhere in it, and for me - being a soprano - it [needs to] sit high enough for my voice that I enjoy singing it, technically speaking.”

But it’s not just de Jong who enjoys such songs, judging by the fact that she was honoured with membership in the Order of Australia, as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List earlier this year for service to the arts.
“That was an amazing surprise, an incredible honour, completely unexpected,” she enthuses.

“I guess since the time I was 20 I’ve devoted myself to making music and opera and musical theatre accessible to people in different ways; and of course founding The Song Room, the charity I set up ten years ago. It’s nice to think you’ve brought music and opera, the magical creativity of the performing arts, to a whole range of people, from really young children to people in the country who never see it.”

Opera in the Otways, Melba Gully Rainforest, October 25, 1 – 6pm.
www.otwaysopera.com.au