By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Snow Concert Hall is about to make a rare foray into opera this weekend with a planned gala featuring two of Australia’s most respected operatic stars, soprano Cathy-Di Zhang and mezzo soprano Helen Sherman.

Both singers have huge followings. Zhang has played many of the big roles, including both Mimi and Musetta in La bohème, Micaëla in Carmen, Euridice in Orphée and Zerlina in Don Giovanni, as well as Zhu YingTai in Richard Mills’ work The Butterfly Lovers.

Sherman, who trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, has sung at Royal Opera House and Royal Albert Hall and represented Australia at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. Roles have included the pants roles of Sesto in Mozart’s final opera La clemenza di Tito, Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro for Opera North, as well as Dorabella in Così fan tutte and the title role in Carmen.

Together, Di Zhang and Sherman will sing demanding duets by Mozart, Bellini and Offenbach and, separately, many of the arias audiences know and love, not least Puccini’s Un bel dì vedremo from Madame Butterfly, Dvořák’s Song to the Moon from Rusalka, Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen and Rossini’s Una voce poco fa from The Barber of Seville.

The demanding program will feature pianist Thomas Victor Johnson, now répétiteur with Opera Australia and vocal coach at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, but previously on the music staff at Staatsoper Unter den Linden under Daniel Barenboim. Johnson was the 2018 winner of the Richard Bonynge Accompanists Award at the Sydney International Song Prize.

When I catch up with Sherman by phone at her home in Mosman, Sydney, I find her swotting up for two nights of Mozart’s Requiem at Saint Paul’s College, Sydney University, for the Snow Concert Hall program to come and for a Willoughby Symphony Choir performance of Vivaldi’s Gloria on May 31, the day after she returns from Canberra. She is also in rehearsal for Opera Australia seasons of The Merry Widow and Rigoletto.

Sherman is often regarded as a British soprano because, after attending the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester on a scholarship, she received another scholarship, found an agent, married a British structural engineer, had a child and stayed on for 15 years.

“There’s no professional competition in our marriage,” she reports happily, observing, “the music profession is very full on and having another musician in the family can be very destabilising.”

Now her five-year-old child is attending Mosman Public School and “having a wonderful time”. Sherman also appears to be having a wonderful time herself, enjoying, like many opera singers, an extraordinarily varied career doing a bit of everything.

“It keeps you fresh working with different people all the time,” she says.

This will be her first time performing with Zhang, whom she has known for many years through Opera Australia, where they have both performed but never crossed paths professionally until now. She describes the Snow program as “lively”.

Far from being a casual repetition of the great hits, she says the concert format gives singers a chance to see things in context.

“It’s wonderful to bring a lot more detail, all the little motifs … it also gives you the chance to perform little cameos, showing different facets of opera characters.”

She particularly thinks of the character Sesto, where she plays the role of a young man, or Carmen, where she gets to play a vamp. Another advantage of the concert format is that the variation in characters and arias allows singers to explore their voice type.

“It’s more intimate than being on the opera stage. You are closer to the audience. It may be out of sequence, but it’s more intimate.”

Opera Gala, Snow Concert Hall, May 29.