Michael Halliwell
‘First come, first served’ is just one of many clichés suggesting an event occurring first will probably trump similar events that have the misfortune to be ‘pipped at the post’! Such was the bitter experience of the Italian opera composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) of I Pagliacci fame.
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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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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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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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No Autographs, Please!: A backstage pass to life in the chorus – the stars who take their bow from the second row by Katherine Wiles
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
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Picture the scene …
A space. Empty. A fall of white ash which covers all surfaces, enveloping in a fine whiteness. A party of futuristic explorers trudge through the frozen steppes. They are in the colours of artificial, twenty-first century Antarctic wear – bright red, yellows oranges. they come across a figure, buried in the whiteness, near to death, frozen. It is a girl, dressed in nineteenth-century clothes – sepias, browns, deep greens. They warm her, wrap her in insulative blankets. She begins to stammer out her story, a fantastic tale …
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To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)