When David McVicar’s scintillating production of Mozart’s opera, Così fan tutte, returns to the Sydney Opera House in August, it will be conducted by a leading maestra, Zoe Zeniodi, the first Greek conductor to grace the pit.

The trademark realism of all McVicar productions will be on show in what is considered the most improbable of operatic plots – and that’s saying something – as he makes magic out of a joke about fidelity and sex that goes too far.

Briefly, Don Alfonso makes a bet with Ferrando and Guglielmo that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, cannot be faithful to them. Their maid Despina advises them to find new lovers. Ferrando and Guglielmo turn up, now disguised as Albanians, and the plot gets even sillier. 

But pianist-turned-conductor Zeniodi, who also conducted Cosi for Queensland opera last year, has a soft spot for a work that has such a different take on love, even though its title, Così fan tutte, has the sexist meaning of All Women are the Same or Thus Do They All.

Most people think Cosi is a comedy, but Zeniodi believes that McVicar has found the drama and the sense of what happens between the lovers at a deeper level.

Nicknamed “Ms Dynamite”, Zeniodi is one of the five female conductors featured in the 2023 film, La Maestra, but hers hasn’t always been an easy path. 

With a doctorate from the University of Miami and qualifications from the Royal College of Music and the Mozarteum in Salzburg, she’s been conducting operas all over the world. 

She now joins a formidable line-up of women conductors – the others are Teresa Riveiro Böhm, Lidiya Yankovskaya and the CSO’s Jessica Cottis – to hold the baton for Opera Australia this year.

Globetrotter she may be, but Zeniodi proudly calls Athens home.

Her complex schedule means dividing her time between Greece, where their twins (one boy and one girl) mostly live, Australia and the UK, where her husband, a psychiatrist working for the NHS is based. 

“I spend half the year travelling, but my husband sort of commutes to Greece and I have huge family support in Athens,” she says.

“My job is my job, but I don’t want my children to miss out… my husband can move about and we can enjoy long Greek summer holidays.”

There are not many female Greek conductors, she says, and fewer who conduct opera, but things are changing and, she believes, people are all past the point of talking about minority “outsiders”. 

In 2015, when she was pregnant, it was different and, although people were careful what they said, she was aware she was often let go because of pregnancy. But back in Greece, she found inspiration and community.

Opera has brought her to Australia, first in Queensland during 2022 and 2023 and now, in a one-off arrangement, she’s been invited to conduct for Opera Australia.

“I’m in love with Australia,” she says. 

“I feel at home here, it’s my third time in the country and I will keep coming so long as they invite me.” 

Besides which, it’s a treat to be conducting McVicar’s very famous production.

It may be McVicar’s stage production, but musically, as she says, “you leave a stamp; you leave a small part of yourself as the audience and the artists join forces”.

Mozart, she believes, understood life totally and especially in Cosi, written towards the end of his life, he had important things to say about humanity. 

“But he said them in an easy way, and with so much acceptance… it is an intimate work about small people, but Mozart has developed a language so deep,” she says.

“The duets and the sextets reflect what it is to fall in love.”

Now that she has a chance to do Cosi for a second time in Australia, she can refine her views. 

“Different productions bring a different type of risk… I feel I am now able to go deeper into Mozart’s view of humanity.”

Così fan tutte, Sydney Opera House, until August 17.