Peter Tregear
Peter Tregear is a performer, academic, and critic. He has recently been appointed the inaugural Director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne. Published works include Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013).
Just as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for being long ago overshadowed by those iconic sails, and by the internal compromises that mired its construction. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, for i ... (read more)
I confess that I do not share the knee-jerk negative view of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that many of my colleagues profess. His best works, especially those conceived with librettist Tim Rice, stake a legitimate claim on our attention, if only for their consummate skill in identifying and exploring subject matter for music theatre that captures, and holds, the popular imagination.
Their three e ... (read more)
We live in strange days. Matters once unlikely to raise a flicker of public criticism can now quickly became raging bushfires of self-righteous anger. Such is the accelerant power of social media. Our public discourse is, however, rarely the better for it. Subtlety and nuance are all too frequently sacrificed on the altar of a supposed moral clarity that, among other things,sits uneasily against t ... (read more)
Hanrahans are scarcely a new phenomenon in the so-called ‘heritage arts’. Classical music in general, and opera in particular, have been publicly declared to be dead or dying for hundreds of years. But when no less an institution than the Metropolitan Opera starts talking openly about a new ‘global crisis confronting the operatic form’, it might be time for us to take a little more notice. ... (read more)