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Opera

Antarctica 

Sydney Chamber Opera
by
10 January 2023

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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A Christmas Carol 

by
16 December 2022
1843 was quite the year in Christmas lore. It can boast both the first Christmas cards, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, and the first edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Our passion for the former may have ebbed a little in the age of digital communication, but Dickens’s novella – albeit most commonly in one of its many theatrical adaptations – continues to draw our interest. Melbourne is currently hosting the Old Vic production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation at the Comedy Theatre (with David Wenham as Scrooge). Now it also has an opera première: composer Graeme Koehne and librettist Anna Goldsworthy’s version for Victorian Opera. ... (read more)

Siegfried 

Melbourne Opera
by
26 September 2022

The past few weeks in Melbourne have seen a series of extraordinary musical events that collectively represent the ultimate triumph of the creative spirit over the forces of pestilence – something that applies equally to audiences as well as performers. There is certainly, hanging in the air, a palpable spirit of communion and fulfilled expectations from our re-emergence from the stygian isolation of Covid lockdown into the iridescent aura that only live performances can achieve. In Wagnerian terms, we are all Brünnhildes, reawakening from lengthy slumber to joyfully hail the sunlight. As it was – in life and in art – at Sunday’s magnificent performance of Siegfried.

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The Human Voice and The Call 

Opera Queensland
by
26 September 2022

Opera Queensland’s third mainstage production of the year, presented in partnership with Brisbane Festival and in association with Fluxus, is a double bill of two one-woman operas where a single phone call changes the course of each character’s life. First came Francis Poulenc’s The Human Voice, followed by the world première of The Call.

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The recent speech by young Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg has provoked much comment and controversy. It also caused me to ponder the future of our planet and how our cultural lives will be affected by the environmental changes that will inevitably take place by the middle of the twenty-first century ...

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Géraud Corbiau’s rather schlocky biopic, Farinelli (1994) covers an important phase in the career of this most celebrated singer of the early eighteenth century. The establishment of the Opera of the Nobility in the 1730s, with Niccolò Porpora as the main composer, was a direct challenge to Handel’s ...

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Let it be said – indeed proclaimed – that Opera Australia’s new production of Wagner’s paean to life and art and love is musically as close to a triumph as it could have been. If, by the end, you feel the outside world is a better place than the one you temporarily abandoned six hours earlier, then Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has surely wrought ...

A major new exhibition opened at the end of September at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The first of the three qualifying terms needs little explanation as a potential subject; as the title of Peter Conrad’s book ...

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There was a time not that long ago when the arts pages of quality daily newspapers were regarded as essential reading as much for those inside the arts industry as outside it. Just as these newspapers were themselves papers of record, their arts pages existed primarily to record and sustain ...

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There is a kind of dread in the heart of any reader who approaches a philosopher in the act of pronouncing on a great work of art. Many a filmmaker’s oeuvre and ...

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