Op' Stars - Mobil Song Quest 2000

I shine my shoes, yeah. I clean my shoes really well.

– Finalist Jared Holt on what he does to steady performance nerves

You play with people's lives, and to a certain extent their aspirations, and we try to be as positive as is possible.

– Competition organiser Diana Cable on delivering the happy, or sad news to semi-finalists

As society changed, so did the competition. Ensembles and Gilbert and Sullivan sections were some of the developments that were rather short-lived, but the influence of one singing teacher in Auckland, Sister Mary Leo, and the success of many of her students, helped to shape the competition into a more serious and perhaps more sought after prize.

– Excerpt from the Lexus Song Quest website (formerly the Mobil Song Quest)

The kind of stuff that people are humming now that they hear on commercial radio, people were doing the same stuff when opera first came out. It was the common man's music; you'd be out in the fields, you might even be humming Marriage of Figaro...

– 2000 Mobil Song Quest semi-finalist Andrew Conley rejects opera's elitist tag

Death and gloom...I do a lot of death and gloom!

– Finalist April-Marie Nehu on the subject matter contraltos often deal with

A singer must move the audience, must communicate that piece, whether it's a laugh, whether it's a tear...

– American baritone and judge Sherrill Milne on what he's looking for in a winner