Eminent baritone became administrative stalwart

Graeme Gorton

opera singer, arts administrator b May 13, 1930 d November 3, 2022

Graeme Stuart Gorton, eminent opera singer, music administrator and much else, was born to a long-established Southland family in Invercargill.

Wherever he lived subsequently, he remained loyal to his roots and was inordinately proud of having been in the Southland Boys’ High School first XV. A surprise to those of us who never knew him to have hair, he was then known as ‘‘Curly’’.

Despite tough times for many families during the Depression, he enjoyed a happy, lively childhood. These were the days of much home-grown entertainment and Gorton had success in several singing competitions from the age of 9.

On leaving school, he took various clerical jobs and moved to Dunedin, where he did some live broadcasting on 4YA with the legendary Gil Dech and, more importantly, had singing lessons with Donald Munro, the Mosgiel-born baritone who, after study and a professional career in the UK, returned to New Zealand to found the New Zealand Opera Company in 1954.

After modest beginnings, the company flourished and was soon able to mount full-scale productions with full orchestra, a great emphasis being on touring.

Life is always precarious in the performing arts, but in the 1950s and 1960s there was also a kind of buoyancy.

Things were under way and everything was looking up. As well as mounting main-bill productions in the cities, the company ensured that no place, be it ever so remote, from Tīrau to Tuatapere, needed be deprived of this vital art form.

Into this all-hands-to-the-pump life on the road, Graeme Gorton fitted perfectly: he had developed into a first-rate operatic baritone and actor, but was also the sort of practical man always on hand for loading and unloading the van, building the set and packing up afterwards, dealing with all the inevitable glitches in a wide variety of theatres and village halls.

In 1959, he was a national finalist in the then Mobil Song Quest, where he was immediately smitten with a fellow finalist, the accomplished soprano Angela Shaw. At first she rebuffed his advances, believing that he was married, but after she was disabused of this misunderstanding things flourished. It was a longer engagement than he’d hoped because Angela was already booked to go to London for further study and to try her luck as a performer.

Already they had toured for the company and eventually clocked up no fewer than 100 performances of La Traviata together. Angela went to the UK while Graeme remained in New Zealand, touring with the company until he joined her later, doing some study himself and finding work at Glyndebourne and with the English Opera Group.

For him a highlight was working with

Robert Louis Stevenson dies, aged 44.

1910 – Freda du Faur becomes the first woman to complete an ascent of Mt Cook/ Aoraki.

1926 – Mystery writer Agatha Christie, left, disappears after driving away from her home in Berkshire. She turns up 11 days later at a hotel in Yorkshire. She never explains the disappearance.

1947 – A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, premieres on Broadway.

1960 – The 40-hectare Island Harbour opens at the port of Bluff, having taken eight years to build. 1964 – Police arrest about 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a sit-in.

1967 – Surgeons at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, led by Dr Christiaan Barnard, perform the first human heart transplant. Louis Washkansky lives for 18 days with the new heart.

1975 – Communists take control of Laos and declare an end to its 600-year-old monarchy.

1984 – Up to 16,000 people are estimated to have died and thousands more are injured after a cloud of gas escapes from a pesticide

Benjamin Britten and it meant a great deal to him when he was baritone soloist in the first New Zealand performance of Britten’s War Requiem. He was later fetched over to Adelaide to do a rescue job on a performance of the Requiem there.

He and Shaw were married in London in 1962, then returned to New Zealand for the birth of their son. Throughout the 1960s, though having to juggle with family commitments, they were absolute mainstays of the Opera Company.

Equally adept at the dramatic or the comic, Graeme covered the whole canon of leading baritone roles: Marcello in La Bohè me, Rigoletto, Baron Scarpia in Tosca, Il Conte di Luna in Il Trovatore, Dulcamara in L’elisir d’amore, Malatesta in Don Pasquale, Sharpless in Madama Butterfly and many others.

A highlight of his concert career must have been singing the solo in Sir William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, conducted by the composer in Christchurch.

But in the early 1970s the NZ Opera Company ran into difficulties and, amid much acrimony, collapsed. From its ashes rose the appropriately named New Opera Company with Gorton as its administrator, but its success was shortlived. At the same time he was the administrator of the newly founded Wellington Regional Orchestra (now Orchestra Wellington).

But it was clear that significant funding for a national opera was unlikely at the time and Gorton accepted a position as southern regional manager of the QEII plant in Bhopal, India; the Band Aid fundraising single Do They Know It’s Christmas? is released in the UK.

1992 – The first telephone text message is sent by British engineer Neil Papworth, who transmits the greeting ‘‘Merry Christmas’’ from his work computer in Newbury, Berkshire, to Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis’ mobile phone.

2007 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez loses a constitutional vote that would have let him run for re-election indefinitely.

2018 – Ryan Kaji, 7, is declared the year’s highest-earning YouTube star, with US$22

Arts Council, first based in Dunedin then Christchurch.

Angela became manager of Canterbury Opera in the 1990s while Graeme undertook several administrative positions, notably as manager of the newly refurbished Theatre Royal (now the post-quake Isaac Theatre Royal).

Another job which demanded all the tact and diplomacy of the shrewd old campaigner was in chairing the committee to bring about the amalgamation of the two large Christchurch choirs, fierce rivals for decades. Though still in his prime vocally, he deliberately curtailed his own singing career in favour of greater stability, but he never really stopped. He did a number of rescue jobs and his class and sheer professionalism, even in minor parts, were always much in evidence.

The Gortons moved to Wellington to be nearer family and it wasn’t long before Graeme’s administrative skills were required to chair the Orpheus Choir which was in need of his guidance.

He was before everything else a dedicated family man, the most devoted husband, father of three, grandfather of six, great-grandfather of two.

Those of us lucky enough to have known him as a performing colleague remember him fondly as a real professional of the theatre, a fine performer, of course, but also a generous friend, ever supportive and good-natured, a fair-minded and astute administrator, a safe pair of hands. Would that there were more people like him. million, for his channel Ryan ToysReview. 2019 – Kamala Harris ends her campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president.

Birthdays

Joseph Conrad, Polish-British writer (1857-1924); Richard Pearse, NZ aviator (1877-1953); Andy Williams, US singer (1927-2012); Jean-Luc Godard, French director (1930-2022); Kevin Fallon, NZ football coach (1948-); Ozzy Osbourne, UK singer (1948-); Julianne Moore, US actor (1960-); Stephen Donald, All Black (1983-); Amanda Seyfried, US actor (1985-).