Just a couple of weeks after portraying the gardener’s daughter Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro for Opera Australia, soprano Celeste Lazarenko is preparing to step back into servant’s garb as the wily maid Serpina, who schemes to outwit her boss Umberto in Pinchgut Opera’s new production of Maid Made Boss.

Celeste Lazarenko as Télaïre in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux for Pinchgut Opera. Photo © Simon Hodgson

In Pergolesi’s 1733 intermezzo, La serva padrona, Serpina wittily challenges the patriarchy – quite a change of focus from Mozart’s 1786 opera buffa, in which Barbarina is more of a naive pawn in a web of affairs.

Lazarenko grew up in Balmain where she still lives in her childhood home. Before emarking on her musical career, she studied at the Sydney College of the Arts, with the hope of becoming a painter, before she pivoted to master’s degrees in opera at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

During a decade-long stint in the UK, she performed on stages ranging from the boutique to the grand, but after returning here in 2015, her future is now solely focused on an...