PERFECT LOVE
Pene and Amina share their real- life fairytale romance
Their opera careers are taking off and they’re booked to sing with companies all over the world.
But for Pene Pati and his wife Amina Edris, one of the highlights of this year will be performing an opera together in New Zealand and playing each other’s love interest.
“This is a first for us where we’re both playing main characters who fall for each other and it’s going to be interesting,” laughs Pene, who is one third of popular opera trio Sol3 Mio.
He’s starring as lovestruck Nemorino in New Zealand Opera’s production of The Elixir of Love, while Amina, his wife of two years, plays Adina, the object of his affections.
“It’s really funny and there’s a lot of banter,” says Pene.
“A bit like us in real life.”
The good-natured chatter that has contributed to the success Pene and the rest of Sol3 Mio – his brother Amitai Pati and cousin Moses
MacKay – have had over the last seven years is also evident between the husband and wife.
“It will be nice to use our natural chemistry,” says Amina (28).
“We do banter a lot, that’s what we are like, although the characters are quite different to us in real life. Adina is meaner than I am.”
“Oh, is she?” chips in
Pene (30).
“Yes, she is,” says
Amina, giving her cheeky husband that wifely,
“behave yourself” look.
“They like to push each other’s buttons, which will be a fun thing to do on stage.”
“It will,” agrees Pene.
“Of course, we do do that in real life. Actually, it’s usually me who starts it.
I push buttons and she pushes back. I’m just naturally annoying.”
They’re looking forward to performing the romantic scenes in the opera which, in this version, is set in a rural Antipodean town around the turn of the 20th century.
The couple aren’t concerned that they’ll find the scenes hard to do if they happen to be annoyed with each other. “You forget about anything that has gone on beforehand once you get on stage,” says Pene. “I’ve had times with Amitai or Moses where we’ve launched at each other before a show, but when you get out in front of an audience, the music takes over.” “I think we’re just going to have a lot of fun doing this,” tells Amina. “It’s extraspecial that our first leading roles together are in an opera that’s back home and our families are going to get to see us.”
Pene has wanted to perform with NZ Opera since he saw their 2008 production of La Boheme, a life-changing moment that convinced him to chase a career as an opera singer. Both he and Amina grew up in families that were musical but didn’t listen to opera, and they didn’t discover their love for this particular style of music until they went to university.
Samoa-born Pene and
Amina, who emigrated to New Zealand from Egypt when she was 10, have both won awards for their singing at competitions around the world, and were invited to do a prestigious two-year Adler fellowships with the acclaimed San Francisco Opera. And they’ve both always been keen to sing with our national opera company.
Two years ago, NZ Opera’s general director Stuart Maunder asked Pene and Amina if they’d be interested in performing with the company and, if so, what opera they’d like to do.
“We said The Elixir of Love because it’s beautiful music, light-hearted and fast-paced, and there’s always something going on,” explains Amina.
The tenor and soprano welcome any chance to perform together because they know that there are going to be times when their careers will take them to opposite sides of the world.
“We are lucky to be
signed to the same agency and they understand our dynamic,” says Pene.
“They always endeavour to get us to the same part of the world at around the same time, or at least overlapping times.”
They have learned to cope when they are apart, says Amina. “It would be different if one of us had a regular nine-to-five job and the other person was always off travelling. The fact that we do the same thing makes it easier to understand why we have to be apart at some points. Thankfully, technology makes it easier to keep in touch.”
The pair met at a week-long singing course in Christchurch in 2011. “When I introduced myself, he asked where my name was from, and I said I was Egyptian,” recalls Amina. “He said, ‘So do you speak gyptian?’ I was like, ‘Dude, what is wrong with you? It’s Arabic!’ I think he liked my sass.”
The couple began spending time together because Pene’s cousin Moses was dating Amina’s room-mate, and Pene would honour “the bro-code” and leave the pair alone in the room he and Moses shared.
“I’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to go and just, um, have a look at the kitchen or something’, but then I ended up hanging out a lot with Amina.”
Amina liked Pene and was disappointed when he didn’t kiss her goodbye at the end of the week. Pene, meanwhile, was very taken with Amina and when she phoned him shortly after leaving the course, he thought his luck was in.
“I saw it was her calling and I said to my friends, ‘Boys, this is it, here we go,’” remembers Pene. “And then she said,
‘I’ve left my phone charger behind, is it there?’ Not what I was hoping for…”
However, it was the start of a text friendship that blossomed into love. Pene is very thoughtful, says Amina, and in fact one of his loving gestures was so elaborate, she was sure it was going to be followed by a marriage proposal.
The pair were based in
Cardiff, Wales, where Amina was doing a master’s degree at the International Academy of Voice – where Pene, Moses and
Amitai also studied – when
Pene organised a treasure hunt because he was going to be away for Valentine’s Day.
The first clue took Amina to their favourite café, where he’d paid in advance for coffee and a brownie, and left a box for her with staff.
“It had a clue in it for the next thing, which was a Thai massage place we used to go to, where he’d paid for me to have a massage,” says Amina. “And there was another box there with the next clue…”
“You’ve left out the best bit!” says Pene. “In each of the boxes was a photo of me in each spot. So when she was having coffee, there was a photo of me having a coffee in the same place, like we were there together.
“I’d spent all this time running around setting it up before I went away to London to record an album with Sol3 Mio and she was getting mad at me because I was disappearing all the time.”
“It was very romantic,” concedes Amina. “It ended with me having dinner in an Italian restaurant with a group of my
friends, and he’d gone to so much trouble to organise everything that I became convinced he was going to propose the next time we were together. So when he got back and he took me to my favourite restaurant to have steak, which is my favourite food, I thought, ‘This is it!’”
But there was no proposal that night. “I was so mad at him, I thought, ‘How can you do such a big romantic thing for Valentine’s and then not follow it up with a proposal?’” Amina says.
“It didn’t even cross my mind,” shrugs Pene. “That was just normal for me. What can I say, I’m a romantic guy. And then we had a nice steak.”
When he did get around to proposing in December 2014, it was a spectacular event.
Sol3 Mio were performing at their Christmas in the Vines concert at Villa Maria Winery in Auckland, and Pene popped the question to Amina in front of the 7000-strong audience. She had no idea what he had planned.
“He’d ignored me all day and I wondered what I had done,” recalls Amina, who performed in the concert.
“After I sang, I got changed into a summer dress with annoying heels that kept digging into the grass, so I took them off and was walking around backstage with no shoes on. Everyone insisted I go to the side of the stage to hear him sing You Are My Heart’s Delight, which he dedicated to me whenever he sang it. But that night, he didn’t dedicate it to me and I really thought I must have done something wrong.
“Then he asked me to go on stage and next thing I knew I was standing there in bare feet and he was singing to me. Then I saw there was a slideshow of photos of us on the screen and when I saw that, I knew what he was doing.”
Pene continues the story, “Earlier in the day, we’d given glow sticks out to people in the middle of the audience. At a certain part of the song, the words came up on the screen telling them to hold up the glow sticks, and when they did, it formed a heart shape.”
Pene had flown members of Amina’s family – who are now based in Melbourne – to Auckland for the show and they, along with his family and close friends, walked on stage to present her with red roses.
And then he got down on one knee, pulled out a ring and asked her to marry him.
“People asked afterwards if I felt pressured to say yes, but I didn’t at all,” Amina says. “He wouldn’t have done it if there was even a slight chance I was going to say no. And that wasn’t going to happen – I’d been waiting for this!”
Pene says it was just as well Amina said yes because “there was no plan B!”