Richard Freadman’s first work intended for a non-academic readership is, in his own words, ‘the Son’s Book of the Father’ and thus belongs to a venerable genre. Freadman, whose contribution to our understanding of autobiography has been acute, is well qualified to draw on this tradition in portraying his own father and analysing their relationship. Along the way, he discusses memoirists su ... (read more)
Peter Rose
In 2001 Peter Rose became the Editor of Australian Book Review. Previously he was a publisher at Oxford University Press throughout the 1990s. He has published several books of poetry, a family memoir, Rose Boys, and two novels, the most recent being Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate, 2010). He edited the 2007 and 2008 editions of The Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.). His newest book of poems is Rag (Gazebo Books, 2023). Peter Rose’s long experience in publishing and the literary world complements the magazine’s history of central involvement in Australian letters.
As with all forms of Australian cultural activity, it would be easy to inflate local critical endeavour (its novelty, its scintillations, its martial tendencies) and to forget that the history of acerbity is longer than that of our peppy federation. Hundreds of years before Hal Porter carved up Patrick White, critics were pillorying artists with a deftness and wit that can surprise modern readers. ... (read more)
Juan Diego Flórez, now fifty, rose to prominence in his early twenties. His first La Scala success, in 1996, was promptly followed by débuts at Covent Garden (1997), the Vienna State Opera (1999), and the Metropolitan Opera (2002), houses where he still performs regularly. His major roles have included Count Almaviva and Nemorino. Alfredo Germont, in La Traviata, is a new addition; he was singin ... (read more)
The ABR/Academy Travel Vienna tour, now drawing to a close, has revealed some of the riches in this monumental city – the architecture, the art collections (especially the mighty Kunsthistorisches Museum and the brilliant, newish Leopold Museum, with its host of Schieles and Klimts), Emperor Franz Joseph’s Ringstrasse, the general ambience of the city, not to mention the Kardinalschnitte at Ge ... (read more)
A week in Paris (Billy Strayhorn’s moody panacea) gave ABR Arts a perfect opportunity to savour some of the city’s abundant musical life. We’ll start with an important revival at the Opéra National de Paris, performed at the Bastille.
Decades ago, during what we might now regard, a little wistfully, as the heyday of the national company, the operas of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) were fix ... (read more)
Saturday. The usual 9 a.m. flight. The man beside me hefts a Gladstone. ‘I haven’t seen one of those in years,’ I say, this being sociable Saturday. I recall a worn one from my twenties owned by someone else. Always empty it went everywhere with him, like a statement of intent. This one
... (read more)
Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.
Peter Porter’s first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, appeared forty-nine years ... (read more)
The fecundity of Gaetano Donizetti in the 1830s – when he was in his thirties – was exceptional, even during those rampant years for Italian opera. His successes were frequent: Anna Bolena (1830), L’elisir d’amore (1832), Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Maria Stuarda (1834), and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), perhaps his finest achievement. Donizetti, who wrote about seventy operas in all before his ... (read more)
for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’ Douglas Dunn
... (read more)
Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–86) wrote ten operas, but only one of them is still performed – La Gioconda – and few attending Opera Australia’s concert performances in Sydney will have heard it often.
Ponchielli – Italy’s leading composer between Verdi and Puccini – was born in Paderno, near Cremona. He was taught music by his father, the church organist. After graduating at the Milan C ... (read more)