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Opera

The Marriage of Figaro 

Opera Australia
by
04 August 2025

Sydney has had its coldest July in decades, and the rain it raineth every day, but this did not deter operagoers from savouring two further offerings in the winter season: a fine revival of what must rate as one of Opera Australia’s best Mozart offerings, and a new production of Antonín Dvořák’s melodious fairy tale.

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Rusalka 

Opera Australia
by
21 July 2025

A week ago, on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, a desperate tenor killed his soprano lover in a blind, frustrated fury. This week the tenor hero is killed – if that is the right way to characterise it – by the soprano who loves him, but a different complex of emotions accompanies this operatic death as he dies blessing her.

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Carmen 

Opera Australia
by
14 July 2025

It is noteworthy that two of the operas in Opera Australia’s current season, Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s La Bohème, are among the five most performed operas, perhaps only rivaled by Verdi’s La Traviata. The website Operabase, viewed by many as the most authoritative opera performance information site, lists these three with Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Puccini’s Tosca as the top five. Director Peter Brook, when asked in 1983 about his choice to stage a new Carmen rather than any other opera, observed: ‘Out of the ten most popular operas, there is one that is the most popular – Carmen. And it’s not only an opera; it’s a phenomenon.’

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Aphrodite 

Sydney Chamber Opera and Carriageworks
by
25 June 2025

Operas come in all shapes, sizes, and venues. Having just returned from a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to see the final performance of an outstanding production of American John Adams’s new opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, it was quite an adjustment to see fellow American Nico Muhly’s latest opera, Aphrodite, commissioned and staged by Sydney Chamber Opera at their usual venue, Sydney’s Carriageworks. Adams’s opera calls for many soloists, supplemented by a large chorus and orchestra; Muhly’s work involves two singers and seven instrumentalists. The Metropolitan is the largest opera house in the world; Carriageworks is rather more intimate.

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Samson et Dalila 

Melbourne Opera
by
03 June 2025

‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.

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Winton is an elegant, aspirational town proud of its heritage. Sheep and cattle are the predominating industries and yet the town hosts fifteen significant annual events, including Way Out West, and a series of writers, opal, and film events. For the last five years it has hosted Opera Queensland’s Festival of Outback Opera. ... (read more)

Whither (or whether) Opera Australia?

by Robyn Archer, Michael Shmith, John Allison, Peter Tregear, Michael Halliwell
06 March 2025
These are challenging times for Australia’s national opera company, and not just because many critics and operamanes question whether Opera Australia is in fact remotely ‘national’ in terms of programming. Since 2020 the company has recorded consecutive operating losses. Recently, it lost its artistic director (Jo Davies) and its CEO (Fiona Allan). Reviews of some of its 2024 productions were lukewarm at best. ... (read more)

Innocence 

Adelaide Festival
by
05 March 2025

Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.

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Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Melbourne Opera
by
17 February 2025
There is something inherently self-defeating in the famous quote about Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg being ‘the longest single smile in the German language’. Certainly, in some productions I have seen over the years, that smile has curdled into a rictus of silent suffering that comes when something is taken too seriously, thereby depleting the opera’s natural musical and dramatic energy. ... (read more)

Julius Caesar 

Pinchgut Opera
by
22 November 2024
When I was a young opera student in London many years ago, it became clear to me that there was a definite, if unwritten, vocal hierarchy. My performance interest was in the major composers of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, beginning with Mozart, but then Italian operas by Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini, culminating in Verdi and Puccini, with the occasional French opera as part of the mix. If one was lucky to have a voice with the capacity to sing these roles, this became the focus of all one’s attention. ... (read more)