Lockdowns, job loss and university courses struck down: 2020 was a difficult year for Australia’s artists. But there was light through the darkness.
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
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.
Concert halls may slowly be able to reopen – but difficulties will remain.
The Bell Shakespeare Company – established with support from the Trust – had to end its touring season of Hamlet early due to coronavirus.
Brett Boardman
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
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?
Dancers in Opera Australia’s 2018 production of Aida at the Sydney Opera House.
Prudence Upton
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.
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
Amid dwindling audiences and rising production costs, Australian opera is facing its first national review. So what are the solutions put forward so far?
Graeme Macfarlane (Goro) and Hiromi Omura (Cio-Cio-San) in Opera Australia’s Madama Butterfly (2015).
Jeff Busby
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.
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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
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
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…