[11] When the Wellington and Auckland companies merged, NBR's million dollar sponsorship was possibly the largest in the history of the NZ performing arts.

Italian soprano Nuccia Focile played the Countess and Wendy Dawn Thompson was Cherubino, with Aidan Lang directing his first production for the company.

[17] New Zealand bass Wade Kernot and Australian soprano Emma Pearson (married in real life) sang the lead roles of Figaro and Susanna.

[21] In 2008 the company took a touring production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel to 15 venues the entire length of New Zealand, from Kerikeri in the north to Invercargill in the south.

[22][24] Australian director Patrick Nolan staged Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in 2009, with Anna Leese as Tatyana and Russian tenor Roman Shulackoff as Lensky.

[26] Eugene Onegin was described as the "most polished, most evenly cast production" yet from NZ Opera,[27] and Anna Leese was called "one of the great female voices to emerge from New Zealand".

[28] In 2011 the company staged Handel's Xerxes, with costumes by Trelise Cooper,[12] and a double bill of the one-act operas Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.

The 2012 production of Rigoletto again starred Rafael Rojas, as the Duke, and critic Lindis Taylor noted the company's "continuing practice of using too many singers from overseas, when New Zealand boasts of producing so many who are gifted".

In an update critic Ian Dando described as "ill-advised", the Don is dispatched to Hell at the climax not by the animated statue Il Commendatore, but by a man in a blue suit.

"[35] For the 2019 Auckland Arts Festival the company staged The Barber of Seville, and put on productions of Don Giovanni and Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw, directed by newly-arrived Thomas de Mallet Burgess.

[40] It began by staging Francis Poulenc's 1958 one-woman opera The Human Voice in six different hotel rooms around New Zealand to an audience of around 20 each time.

[46][47] Sarah Castle and Paul Whelan, New Zealand singers normally based overseas who had returned home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, sang Juno and Cadmus respectively.

[47] The company's 2021 season opened with Ihitai 'Avei'a - Star Navigator, a new work by Tim Finn with monologues from Tahitian novelist Célestine Hitiura Vaite.

[52][53] Less than two weeks later three of NZ Opera's board members – Murray Shaw, Witi Ihimaera, and Rachel Walkinton – resigned in protest at the artistic direction of the company.