On a Golden Note /
Haydn Rawstron takes us inside his musical world at Landsdown House
Rehearsals are in full swing at Lansdown House in Tai Tapu as The Narropera Trio prepares for its April 2020 season. We meet one of the trio’s founding members, Haydn Rawstron, to learn more about his love for this beautiful historic property and the unique art form.
Autumn
brings a rare opportunity for concert goers and music lovers to experience an afternoon or early evening of narrated salon-style opera, known as Narropera, at one of Canterbury’s most historic properties, Lansdown House and Gardens.
The genesis of Narropera lies in the Canterbury earthquakes. Christchurch was left with virtually no performance venues, prompting the trustees of the John Robert Godley Memorial Trust to open Lansdown as a concert venue. Its large Golden Room was deemed ideal for chamber music. Inspired by the potential of the venue, soprano Dorothee Jansen and her husband, musicologist Haydn Rawstron, began experimenting with the idea of presenting a novel condensed form of opera with narration that could be easily understood and appreciated. Their first narropera – an adaptation of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – was performed at Lansdown in February 2013.
Since then, they have successfully exported the form to England and Europe. Over the past year, The Narropera Trio has performed on the Isle of Man, in Kent, Oxfordshire, North Germany and the Rhineland at notable venues including Bonn’s Chamber Music Hall and the majestic rococo Upper Library at Christ Church, Oxford. ‘All performances have been enthusiastically received, with no exception,’ says Haydn, adding that this new art form has also been ‘astonishingly well received’ in Germany, where opera is a revered pillar of national culture.
By the end of 2019, the trio’s total number of narropera performances had reached 95. ‘Every performance is a highlight at the time, though the performances since 2016 with our permanent violinist, Floriane Peycelon, have been really special because we work so well together.’
The soft light of autumn falling across Lansdown House and Gardens marks the return of Narropera to its place of origin in the Golden Room, notable for its high coved ceiling, chandeliers and gleaming timber doors and panelling. Lansdown is steeped in Canterbury history. The property’s first owner was William Guise Brittan, the first person to buy land in the Canterbury Association settlement scheme. His 10,000-acre leasehold estate was originally called ‘LansdownHalswell’ with ‘Lansdown’ named after Lansdown in Bath, England and ‘Halswell’ after Edmund Halswell, a member of the Canterbury Association. Brittan built a substantial home there and laid out extensive gardens of exotic trees and shrubs. After Brittan’s house burnt down, the estate was bought by Edward Stafford (New Zealand’s longest serving prime minister in the 19th century). Stafford built a large twostorey home using newly-worked basalt stone from Halswell
Quarry, as well as recycling the stone and bricks from Brittan’s ruin. Stafford’s Lansdowne Homestead (he added the ‘e’ to the original name) was built 400 m downstream from Brittan’s ‘Lansdown’ and it is almost certain that Stafford transplanted Brittan’s exotic trees and garden plants to create the ‘instant ’ landscape around his new home, which became known almost immediately as ‘The Garden of Canterbury’. This historic garden survives today in Lansdown’s present three acres and immediately adjacent neighbouring properties. Stafford’s home was demolished in 1960, with its basalt, slate and historic bricks worked into the third Lansdown House, designed by notable Canterbury architect Heathcote Helmore.
In 1995, when Haydn bought the property for the John Robert Godley Memorial Trust, he reverted to Brittan’s original name, ‘Lansdown House’. Haydn had set up the trust in 1993 to support Canterbury’s heritage and music, and in 1995, he loaned the entire purchase price of Lansdown to the trust, interest-free. Further such loans and income have enabled the trust to restore Lansdown’s gardens and elsewhere to support its musical/heritage objectives: principally, the
Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, the Christchurch Cathedral Choir and its funding of the heritage publication ‘Godley Gifts’, in a limited edition.
Haydn’s connection with Lansdown goes back a long way. Born in Darfield Hospital when his parents were farming at Windwhistle, Haydn soon moved with parents and brothers to a farm on the Old Tai Tapu Rd, directly opposite Lansdown House and Gardens. To this day, the Rawstron family still lives and farms adjacent to Lansdown. ‘I therefore grew up in the shadow of the two-storeyed Halswell Quarry stone house and its vast garden, which was then even larger than the property’s three acres of garden today. In the early 1960s, we lived through the demolition of Stafford’s 1870 “Lansdowne” house and watched Heathcote Helmore’s house being built on the same footprint from the original 19th century materials.’
In his youth, Haydn’s flair for music saw him leave the family farm to take a degree in musicology at Oxford, specialising in opera. For more than 30 years, he ran a European-based agency to foster the careers of international opera singers, conductors and stage directors and, in 2009,
Haydn’s flair for music saw him leave the family farm to take a degree in musicology at Oxford,
specialising in opera.
received the New Zealand Order of Merit for his cultural and heritage work on behalf of New Zealand in Britain.
Haydn’s wife Dorothee is a seasoned German-born soprano, who has sung in opera houses, symphony concerts and chamber music halls across Europe and Australasia.
As a couple, they have devoted years to opera – and to Lansdown. When the property was acquired in 1995, Haydn recalls that both the gardens and house interior were in a dreadful state. ‘It took us 15 years to restore the gardens. As for the house, Helmore’s classical frame enabled us to gut his original arts and crafts interior, to rearrange all but one of his original internal walls, to raise the ceilings to four metres and to create several beautifully proportioned “Georgian” rooms.’
‘The Golden Room’ was created by converting the home’s formal dining room, lounge and hallway into a single unified space. Steel framing was installed throughout this room to support the heavy slate roof. ‘This engineering feat was one of the factors which saved Lansdown House from any structural damage in the earthquakes.’
Haydn and Dorothee installed the home’s new kitchen, twice the size of the original and beautifully crafted throughout. Fitted out by Hardie and Thomson, it includes a reconditioned 4-door AGA imported from Britain and recycled tongue and groove kauri floorboards.
Lansdown Garden is a marvel in its own right, boasting what is thought to be the tallest Japanese pine in Australasia, along with historic oaks, mature macrocarpas and many beautiful specimen trees.
Since Haydn and Dorothee first trialled the concept of narrated opera here in 2013, Haydn has arranged and developed a repertoire of seven narroperas: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito; Weber’s Der Freischütz; Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto and Nine German Arias.
The globe-spanning lifestyle this couple share as members of The Narropera Trio is glamorous and yet also hard work. Narropera is a completely new genre and to create it repertoire and performance-style requires much research, musical arranging and scriptwriting, combined with refined singing, skilful playing and the art of rhetorical speaking. ‘The narrative of a narropera evolves, between performances over at least six months, as constant “work-in-progress”…Then, each narrative needs to be translated, and often reshaped, into idiomatic German, before the task of working the 40 to 50 minutes of spoken German narrative into the muscles of my mouth, a labour of many weeks!’
On top of that, there are 12 hours of intensive musical rehearsal every week. Then comes the pleasure of seeing how much audiences enjoy the result. ‘The joy we get from narropera fully compensates for the hard work.’
The new Marriage of Figaro promises to be an exciting opening for Lansdown’s Narropera 2020 season. The Narropera Trio last performed this new version, in its raw original state, in April 2019 at the very end of the last Lansdown Festival. Since then, it has been developed and refined in a series of European performances. It includes little known changes that Mozart and his librettist made to the original version of the opera and, with New Zealand Opera planning a production of The Marriage of Figaro in mid-2020, this narropera will provide a great opportunity for people to get to know ‘Figaro’ rather better, in preparation for the fullscale version. At Lansdown, ‘Figaro’ narropera performances will be held on Friday 3, Sunday 5, Saturday 18 and Friday 24 April (starting 4 pm or 6 pm). Weber’s magical Der Freischütz will be performed on Saturday 11 April (4 pm start). Those attending will be able to enjoy a picnic in the garden before the performances, weather permitting. For bookings visit courttheatre.org.nz/lansdown.