Sherborne-born opera director Andy Morton has gone from singing in the chorus of Dorset Opera to directing spectacular productions on Sydney Harbour – one of the world’s most iconic operatic stages.
Opera Australia’s harbour productions are now being broadcast around the world, bringing Morton’s work to audiences who may never have the chance to experience them in person. And Sherborne-born singer and director Andy, who directs L’Elisir d’Amore at this year’s Dorset Opera Festival at Bryanston, co-directed Carmen in 2017 and took the reins of La Boheme in 2018. Carmen was the first opera Andy ever saw, when his mother took him to London as a teenager.
He was a student at Sherborne School, where his father taught, and got involved in opera when he joined the chorus of Patrick Shelley’s Dorset Opera, which was then based at the school.
After studies that included Spanish at Cambridge and singing at the Guildhall, Andy determined to follow a singing career, but discovered his “adult” voice sat right on the cusp of the baritone and tenor range – a difficult place for a budding opera singer. In his 20s he moved towards directing, spending almost a decade assisting many productions, some of them famous, at English National Opera and other major houses. In 1996 his Spanish came in useful when he was invited to assist Francesca Zambello on Florencia en el Amazonas, a new Hispanic-inspired opera by Daniel Catan, premiered in Houston and then toured to Seattle and Los Angeles.
The move to Australia
“But then I decided I must sing again,” says Andy, who returned to the UK after the huge success of the Marquez-inspired opera, and began auditioning again, this time in musical theatre “where my voice was most suitable.” After working for Cameron Mackintosh’s musicals in the West End, he joined the cast of Jerry Springer – The Opera, where he met mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg. It was via Lore that he was introduced to Tina Ellen Lee, director of Dorset-based Opera Circus, and with that company he worked on Differences in Demolitions, an opera set in Bosnia by Nigel Osborne, developed in Dorset and later performed in London, Edinburgh and in Mostar and Sarajevo.
During this period in his life, Andy decided to leave London and relocate to Bristol. The move was more radical than he anticipated.
On his first night in his new city, his friends threw a party where he met a New Zealand-born defence engineer Kelly – his future wife. Kelly’s employers offered her a very good job in Australia, but she turned it down while Andy continued his singing career. Then in 2012 another job offer came up, and the family decided to move to Sydney, where Kelly “did the proper job” and Andy joined Opera Australia, first as an assistant director and later getting his own productions. He worked with David McVicar, reviving his productions and has been involved in seven Sydney Harbour productions, co-directing Carmen (the first opera he ever saw, as a child, in London) in 2017 and taking the reins of La Boheme in 2018. His first solo production in the Sydney Opera House was Bluebeard’s Castle in 2019.
Andy is now back in Dorset directing L’Elisir d’Amore, drawing on his own roots to reimagine Donizetti’s Italian comedy in a rural Dorset setting: “I started thinking how the very Italian story might work in rural Dorset – I’m a Dorset boy, after all,” he says. “Of course the first writer you think about is Thomas Hardy … and there are some similarities between Donizetti’s story and classic Hardy…”
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