Sweeney Todd, the finale of Victoria Opera’s Sondheim trilogy, is a hair-raising Victorian-era tale. A homicidal barber, Sweeney Todd is blinded on a quest for revenge against the callous upper class society. He slits the throats of his clientele with the help of his seductive accomplice who bakes the victim’s flesh into pies. This gothic…
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Pinchgut Opera’s upcoming production Bajazet, set to take the stage at Angel Place in Sydney on July 4th, 5th, 7th and 8th, is the first ever performance of Vivaldi’s powerful Baroque opera in the Southern Hemisphere. Even though I’m still new to the opera scene, the idea of a dramatic showcase of the works of one…
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From the newly emerged Sydney Chamber Opera comes Fly Away Peter, an opera inspired by Australian writer David Malouf’s novel of the same name. Elliott Gyger and Pierce Wilcox, the composer and librettist respectively, took inspiration from Malouf’s poetic and stirring words about the landscape of peace and war, of nature and of transcendence, transforming…
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When Georges Seurat completed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1884 he could only have dreamed of the iconic status the painting would achieve. He would, no doubt, have wanted to demonstrate his artistic credentials and silence his many critics. Inspiring a Pulitzer Prize winning musical one hundred years later was…
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‘A modern masterpiece’ is how Victorian Opera describes its new production of Nixon in China. After seeing the production, which showed at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, I can say that the description is spot on. In this exciting adaptation of John Adams’s classic 1987 opera, Victorian Opera brings to life a heroic story that…
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Opera is one of those things you either love or hate. For most members of Gen-y, the latter view prevails; we have all heard the jokes of ‘fat lady singing’ and the likes. Yet, if there was ever an opera to challenge the view of the genre as out-dated and inaccessible, Opera Australia’s production of Salome…
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