The Call and The Human Voice star Ali McGregor and Alexandra Flood respectively, with both shows featuring charismatic solo sopranos exploring in completely different ways how one phone call can irrevocably change the path of your life.

McGregor told InQueensland that from the moment she heard Auburn Sheaffer tell her story on The Moth podcast, she knew she had to enable its metamorphosis into opera.

“This was an American woman who told this story and it just stopped me in my tracks,” McGregor said.

“It was a story that I really related to, a story about being at a very low point in your life and for someone to just be there and to listen and not judge was what really turned her life around.

“There is a twist in the end as well, but in a sense what the story is about is forgiveness, and forgiving yourself and allowing yourself to move on from pretty bad life decisions.”

Through the wonders of Google, McGregor tracked down Sheaffer for permission to use her story, then brought together an all local team of exciting multi-award winning young composer Connor D’Netto with librettists Keir Nuttall and Kate Miller-Heidke to transform it into the gripping musical drama that became The Call, in which she stars.

She said she has long wanted to work with dynamo young Brisbane composer Connor D’Netto and this gave her the perfect opportunity.

“I just gave that baby away and walked away knowing that was in safe hands,” McGregor told In Queensland.

“And then coming back to this fully formed score – I think Kate and Keir came to us with a first draft and I believe we have possibly changed one word, literally one word. It was so perfect. That first draft was pristine.

“It’s a really well written, well structured. And look, Kate will say herself that the source material was really fantastic. Auburn has created these beautiful turns of phrase that Kate’s lovingly taken word for word and then grown into a whole song or lent into that as a theme. They’ve come up with something really quite spectacular.”

Soprano Alexandra Flood has also been challenged by the process of reimagining second show on the double bill, The Human Voice, a far-from well known one-act opera by French master Francis Poulenc.

“The original play was written in the ’30s and then the opera in the ’50s, and now putting it on today, what we want that single female voice to say has really evolved over the 20th century and especially over the past 10 years here in the modern world,” Flood told InQueensland.

“And so I think it is innovative in the sense that it’s presenting an established model but with a new lens.”

The Human Voice tells the story of Elle (soprano Alexandra Flood), and the last conversation she has with her lover.

“The idea of them being on a phone call and getting disconnected all the time and the comment that she makes, very poignant comment, that the phone could be a silent weapon, a weapon that doesn’t leave any traces,” she said.

“I think that sort of element is what is able to locate the piece in the contemporary space, because that means that’s so true for us, this idea of missing nuance in human communication because everything is reduced to emojis or full stops in a text message rather than the thousand things that can be said with the single glance.”

In The Human Voice, Flood will be accompanied by a full strength Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by rising star in the international music scene, Zoe Zeniodi.

She said she’s thrilled that Opera Queensland has given her such support to star in this one-woman show, and the artistic licence to really explore the work.

“This is the first experience that I have of truly being part of one very small cog in a massive creative process. And it’s been wonderful,” Flood said.

“As a young woman, I’m 32 and I’m sort of still at the beginning of my opera career, to have a director trust me in that way and also value my intellectual input as well as my vocal input is hugely meaningful and relevant. If you’re going to do a piece about a woman’s story, you want the woman’s voice to come through.

“And one thing that’s important to know, even though we’ve been calling this a one-woman opera, at least in our conversation now, this is called The Human Voice; this isn’t The Female Voice. This is an experience of rejection of heartbreak, of grief that anyone of any gender can understand.

“It just happens to be that the female voice is the vehicle for communicating this experience, but this is absolutely universal. So I think that’s important for people to know.”

McGregor is excited to be part of such an imaginative and innovative double bill for the Brisbane Festival. She said making new opera and reinvigorating the genre is now her focus.

“It’s kind of what I want to do now. And I don’t always want to perform in them. I really want to create new work and also be creating work for established Australian creatives,” she said.

“At the moment, there’s a real lack of opportunities for established and early career and mid-career artists. And so I’m really passionate about finding people from other worlds and bringing them into opera’s scope because I think opera can, you can be in a little bubble sometimes, and it’s good to burst that.

“From the very beginnings of opera, it has changed and evolved. And I feel sometimes that some opera goers and opera creators, it’s plateaued a little bit. And I think there’s really room for us to keep opera evolving and to keep it really relevant.

“And I’m really excited that Opera Queensland have got behind this project in particular. But to just find ways, new ways of delivering opera, new ways of telling these stories, I think that’s really important that we keep it viable. A lot of people are always saying opera’s dead, but I don’t think it is. I think we can revive it. We’re getting a little CPR in this production.”

The Call and The HumanVoice will play in QPAC’s Concert Hall from September 20 to 24.