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Articles on Opera Australia

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Opera singer Natalie Aroyan poses for a photograph ahead of the 2020 season launch of Opera Australia’s Attila in Sydney last year. Performances were cancelled due to COVID-19 in March this year. Bianca De Marchi/AAP

As COVID wreaks havoc in the performing arts, do we still need a national opera company?

Opera Australia has been hit hard by the pandemic’s economic impact. It’s time to rethink our approach to funding opera, with a focus on local companies.
The Bell Shakespeare Company – established with support from the Trust – had to end its touring season of Hamlet early due to coronavirus. Brett Boardman

The problem with arts funding in Australia goes right back to its inception

Public funding for the arts was not originally intended to be a permanent arrangement. But some economic fundamentals mean that it’s necessary.
The cast of Opera Australia’s 2018 production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Arts Centre Melbourne. Jeff Busby

A knowing, modern yet mythic production of one of Hitler’s favourite operas

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg) is a long, complex work. An ensemble performance by Opera Australia transports Wagner’s 16th-century guild of mastersingers to a modern-day men’s club.
Peter Coleman-Wright and Merlyn Quaife during a dress rehearsal of Bliss in 2010: it is one of few important local operas over the past three decades to have been staged a second time. Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Friday essay: where is the Great Australian Opera?

Australian operas have been written about many pressing topics - from the Stolen Generations to the Lindy Chamberlain case - but few have been staged a second time. What is going wrong?
Opera is treated differently to other artforms in Australia. AAP Image/Tracey NearmyAAP Image/Tracey Nearmy

Does opera deserve its privileged status within arts funding?

It is a strange reality but opera as an artform is always given special and arguably preferential treatment by governments and other influential forces in Western society. This happens, it seems, regardless…
The voices that can be used in a show like this are not those one would hear in Madama Butterfly. Patrick (Peter Cousens), Ellen (Melissa Madden Grey), The Divorce. ABC TV.

It’s TV! It’s opera! What to make of ABC’s The Divorce

The kinds of voices that can be used in a show like ABC’s The Divorce are certainly not typical of those one would hear in Madama Butterfly. But – and let’s be honest for a second – does it matter?
Rabbits transgresses the increasingly porous boundary traditional opera and contemporary musical theatre to great effect. Jon Green

A genre-hopping triumph: The Rabbits

The Rabbits has adapted Shaun Tan’s evocative paintings and John Marsden’s spare storytelling into a rich and compelling “opera”.
Graeme Macfarlane (Goro) and Hiromi Omura (Cio-Cio-San) in Opera Australia’s Madama Butterfly (2015). Jeff Busby

Is it time for Madama Butterfly to flutter by?

Opera Australia has once again posted a major operating loss and is weathering criticism for its very safe repertoire. Both these points merit consideration in the federal government’s National Opera Review.
Georgian soprano Tamar Iveri wrote a homophobic letter to her country’s president, praising anti-gay violence. Facebook

Tamar Iveri is a homophobe – was Opera Australia right to sack her?

Opera Australia (OA) has dealt with what was becoming a significant boycott threat by sacking the Georgian soprano Tamar Iveri. The company had planned to bring her to Australia to perform the role of…
Carmen’s rhythms set her body in perpetual motion – contagious and seductive. Nancy Fabiola Herrera as Carmen & the Opera Australia Chorus, photo: Branco Gaica

Bizet’s femme fatale: Carmen and the music of seduction

The fictional character of Carmen – the heroine of Bizet’s opera – attracts a range of labels which variously position her as seductress, femme fatale, sex addict, fate/ death obsessed, victim, liberated…
The Valkyries in Opera Australia’s Ring Cycle aren’t the only ones to feel emotional. Jeff Busby

Wagner’s Ring Cycle works people up – but why?

Opera Australia is currently performing Richard Wagner’s most famous work, Der Ring des Nibelungen – The Ring Cycle – marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, at a reported cost of A$20 million…

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