Opera Australia cinema program
Metropolitan Opera in cinema
Paris Opera, Ballet and Britain’s National Theatre

Happy viewing!

Putting the arts – from opera, ballet, and theatre, to rock concerts and live comedy gigs — on screen is nothing new, but recent developments in broadcast technology have made ‘live’ screenings the next big thing. First among trailblazers is New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which launched ‘Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD” in 2006. Initially presented as one-off, real-time satellite broadcasts of live performances, there is now a stable of ‘Live at the Met’ recordings distributed to cinemas around the world.

“It’s been huge”, says Paul Dravet, manager of the Cremorne Orpheum on Sydney’s lower North Shore. “We’ve had events on a Sunday afternoon where 600 people have come to see an opera. It’s unheard of. You don’t get those sort of numbers for those session times, particularly with adults.”

Huge, and growing, according to Dravet.

“We’re seeing a much younger audience coming in, in addition to the opera buffs and the theatre buffs. Word of mouth is obviously strong and they’re just getting better and better. For the last National Theatre production – Phèdre with Helen Mirren — we did extraordinary business.”

But where does this surge of enthusiasm for imported high-end culture leave the home-grown purveyors of live entertainment? Getting in on the act is rapidly becoming a priority for Australia’s flagship arts organisations.

“We view it as an imperative,” says Liz Nield, marketing director at Opera Australia, who recently announced a partnership between themselves, Sydney Opera House and distributors CinemaLive. “La Scala and the Royal Opera House are there – it goes to relevance. We need to be seen in cinemas.”

Their production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro screened in 27 cinemas earlier this year, and they will present 5-7 operas a year for national and international cinema distribution. As of May 2011, their productions will go into a network of over 60 cinemas. The next screening is Rigoletto, screening in July.

The Australian Ballet’s first foray into cinema was in 2007, with Graeme Murphy’s radical rethink of The Nutcracker screening via live satellite broadcast in regional cinemas (in a collaboration with Film Australia and Screen Australia). Phillippe Magid, associate director of the Australian Ballet, confirms that they are now in ‘serious’ talks with CinemaLive and hope to be in cinemas on a regular basis in 2011.

“We’re fortunate that our seasons sell out,” says Magid, “but we still can’t get to every corner of Australia. There are cinemas out there, and people can also stream us live on their computer or download.”

Patrick McIntyre worked with the Ballet on Nutcracker and the subsequent broadcasts of Swan Lake and Firebird and Other Legends. Now, as general manager at Sydney Theatre Company, he is watching developments closely.

“In Australia the challenge is to find the right business model. The Met spends about US$1 million per capture. They’re making a huge investment. But if you’re the Met you can build a business model around your domestic market. Then exporting to Australia is just incremental revenue. Our domestic market is a lot smaller, so constructing a sustainable business model is going to take some nutting out.

“It won’t replace live shows and that’s not the intention,” he says. “We’ve been here before with the invention of the gramophone, the invention of the radio… These are all tools to keep live arts buoyant and sustainable.”

There is, however, a real sense of urgency: La Scala, Milan and the Paris Opera and Ballet already offer their productions in Australia, and the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden has just announced it will present opera in 3D in 2011.

“The international companies are establishing a first mover advantage in the market and that’s a concern,” says McIntyre. “There is pressure to solve these issues so that Australian arts are available as widely as possible.”

“It would be very undesirable if cinema screens offered a range of performing arts experiences, but it was all imported.”

The voices for the affirmative, food and lifestyle bloggista Rebecca Varidel, film producer Heather Ogilvie and film critic and founding father of Urbancinefile.com.au  Andrew Urban , spoke passionately, with their lives and careers as the main exhibits. Rebecca Varidel has posted them here.

Ogilvie’s main point was that the marketing lifecycle of a new release film runs at such a pace that only digital media can keep up. The film comes out, the word of mouth begins via instantly gratifying social media and within the space of a weekend the fate of the film is decided. Rebecca Varidal spoke of the community-building benefits of digital commentary and Andrew Urban thumped down the brutal reality – “print film criticism has left the building” – citing the fact that the Sunday Herald now syndicates content from his online site rather than retain its own specialist critics.

For the negative were three of a dying breed, if you believe the case for the affirmative — career journalists. Arts Editor at the Australian Matthew Westwood, music critic at the Herald John Shand and writer, academic and commentator Catharine Lumby all looked very much alive but, in spite of slick spiels at least two of them weren’t really up for a fight. Westwood took the most brave position, invoking the ‘p’ word – professionalism – versus the ‘a’ word – amateurism, and reminding us that print criticism is, in the end, for the reader, not the writer or promoter or marketing department.

He has a point. For while I think everyone would agree with Rebecca Varidel’s rejection of the old-style critic, the god-like voice of authority that has the power to send a show to praise or damn, the new plurality of voices which come flooding out to us courtesy of the interwebs can become a cacophony. ‘No-one wants a dictator’, she suggests, but the other extreme, untrammelled democracy, can be just as destructive — witness our current political milieu, mired in chatter. The point is, I think, that while there will always be a place for criticism, the editor or curator, a person who can sort through the dross and offer guidance through the jungle, is key. That’s what Matthew Westwood and Andrew Urban do, and whether they are in print or media is irrelevant.

Westwood’s other important point is about money. Yes, it’s a dirty word, but it’s a very useful one. Most people who are passionate enough about art to want to write about it start out writing for free. It’s not just to get a free ticket, and goodness knows it’s not for the writing fee, which is inevitably going to be zip, nada, nul at the beginning. They write from the heart, to communicate their enthusiasm, their fascination, their experience of how art changes you. But if they are good at it and go on to make a career of writing they will at some point need to earn a crust. So we reach the point where, for example, Alison Croggon, former Pascall Prize Critic of the Year, is now unable to maintain her blog, Theatre Notes, because she is a busy professional writer.

In the words of Andrew Urban, ‘that content is free is a pernicious notion.’ We like to think of everything on the internet as ‘free’, but it all has a cost, whether you count it in taxes, lost sleep, time or Fairfax share dividends. The financial model of providing content is evolving, whether in print or online, and a lively, intelligent, well-informed arts debate will be shaped by where the money goes.

Digital might be killing print, but digital is not killing the print critic. Print critics are doing their living and dying all by themselves, thank you very much. They’re living by being good at what they do, and dying by being irrelevant / overly opinionated / misinformed / lazy and bad at what they do. The fact that anyone can be a critic online, far from killing print critics, is making them raise their game. And as a by-product of being good, the best print critics end up on line, because that is where the readership is.

Barbara Bonney (left) and Fiona Campbell (right) in Seoul in 2010. Of all four outfits (white tail coat, bias cut oyster satin, black so-tight-can't-sit-down sheath and red satin, this got the most votes)

I had to review the Australian Brandenburg concert for SMH last Friday. It was, as expected, a great concert. I make no secret of the fact that I’m a fan of mezzo soprano Fiona Campbell and have been ever since I saw her in Pinchgut’s Juditha Triumphans. This was my first opportunity to hear her on the concert platform, and it was terrific.

Come review writing time, however, I hit a knotty problem. Campbell is a very theatrical singer, and she was performing operatic arias. To heighten the drama, she had four costume changes during the evening. Would it be frivolous to review the dresses as well as the music?

A bit of a different look for baroque divo and diva

In the end, this is all that 350 words could fit.

But it got me thinking about onstage concert gear. For the diva, a wardrobe full of glitzy evening gowns is de rigeur. For most orchestral musicians, however, the choice is black tie, white tie, or, more often than not, just common-or-garden ‘concert blacks’. These days, as classical ensembles react to the flight-to-hipness, more and more ensembles are getting trendy. The Australian Chamber Orchestra have had Akira Isogawa designing their outfits for nearly a decade now, and Carla Zampatti designs the ladies outfits for the Australian Brandenburg. The Goldner Quartet stick to own choice blacks, while the Australian String Quartet, currently all ladies, go for own choice evening gowns.

Does it matter? Do we like frocking up? And any suggestions for who young artists about town might get to design their costumes?

Ever since I saw Nicholas Carter conducting a Mozart in the City concert I’ve been keen to see what he does with bigger forces. He’s a youngster, by conducting standards, and just about to enter the dreaded grey zone — that period when you are too old to be a ‘young artist’ and too young to have gravitas. I suspect it’s also a period which coincides with mortgages, small children and other major life expenditures. It’s good to see from his bio that he has scored an assistant conductor spot at Hamburg Opera (with compatriot Simone Young). Well, good for him. Not so good for Sydney, which loses a good one.

Orchestra Romantique is an impressive vote of confidence in the talent of Nicholas Carter. A full orchestra — quadruple wind, two harps, serpent and ophicleide — of professionals have given up two weekends to play more music, and they all looked thrilled to be there. As for the music, it wasn’t perfect, but it was a damn fine stab at two fiendish (in every sense of the word) works, with a curio thrown in for good measure.

Nick Byrne (who is one of the driving forces behind Orchestra Romantique) found an ophicleide in the Sydney Symphony crypt, presumably the same one that Cliff Goodchild (Paul’s dad) had. Cliff told me he got it from James Waldersee, and that it had ‘Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 1910′ engraved on it. (Is it the same one, Nick?) Anyway, having found the ophicleide, the obvious next step for Nick was to find a way to get it back on the stage. This concert featured Jules Dermersseman’s Introduction and Polonaise for Ophicleide and Orchestra, with Nick Byrne as soloist.

It was a very likeable but – I have to admit – not totally convincing work. Nick Byrne produced a lovely, sweet sound, like a cross between a French horn and a bassoon in character, but when the score called for virtuosic flourishes the notes got a bit lost. I suspect the real problem is that the ophicleide is not really a soloistic instrument – it doesn’t have the volume or the extremes of range of its successors so, like some Australian fauna, it has been superseded by its more in-your-face cousins, like the saxaphone, tuba and cane toad. Where it does sound great is in the timbral mix of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz keeps his ophicleides and serpents in reserve till the chilling final movements, but when he uses them they add a whole new colour .

As for the performance, I’m not going to pick it apart or make comparisons with other orchestras. Apart from anything else, Paddington Town Hall is a very different space to, say, the Opera House Concert Hall. What I will say is that Nick Carter brought it all together, in all its complexity, with a hugely impressive flair, allowing this band of fine musicians to play their hearts out. The violins in particular had a heavy load to carry — only seven desks versus all those brass. Kristian Winther is a fine leader, and their chords in the ‘March to the Scaffold’ had a wonderful, thick bloom to them. They also took on the overture, Carl Maria von Weber’s Overture to Oberon with fearless gusto — and there is plenty to fear in there. It sounded great.

Meanwhile, at the back of the hall the brass and wind looked and sounded like they were having a fun time. The period trumpets and trombones, combined with ophis and serpent, introduced a gritty, rumbly texture to the grand welter of sound, like the throaty roar of an old sports car. And as the daughter of a bassoon player, I can confirm that every single note of that dastardly solo was there, played by Andrew Barnes and his crack team with almost gleeful virtuosity.

Congratulations to all, and let’s hope that this brave new orchestra can continue to build on its encouraging beginnings. And can I put in a request? Loved the ophicleide, loved the serpent. Next time, can you dig up a sarrusophone?

Paul Dyer introduced his guest directors, Guido Morini and Marco Beasley (aka Accordone) by way of a charming story about a concert in a tiny mountain village in Italy, reached by bus, funicular and a great flight of steps. There was wine, there was song — it all sounded very picturesque. Perfect Brandenburg fodder, in fact, for while there are many words you can apply with confidence to their performances — virtuosity, scholarship, beauty, etc. — their performances also tend towards the picturesque. That is not meant to be a criticism or a faintly praising damnation. It is just that, from my observation, the regular Brandenburg audiences have come to expect performances that are thrilling but also –  how shall I put it? — comforting, a source of consolation or even escape from the big, bad world.

With Accordone, you got all the usual stuff — brilliant performances all round, and I didn’t have space to say how brillianty the fiddles played, or the lutenists for that matter. But from the very beginning, there were questions in the air, curly, disturbing questions to rattle the mind.

The opening sinfonia, for example, was a fine example of seventeenth-century Italian operatic writing. Except that it wasn’t. Instead it was a dead-pan, historically-informed, no vib rendition of a 21st century work modelled on a 17th century work. Which makes the whole authenticity argument a moot point. I’m trying to work out why I found this use of “recycled materials and traditional skills” (as they put it) so disturbing. Somehow, it felt like it was on the edge of a con – the old argument that the closer you get to reproducing something exactly, the more sophisticated, the more duplicitous even, the work is.

Later in the performance came more original music from Accordone, from another opera — they’ve written three already! — called Solve et coagula, a curious tale based on the life of Raimondo di Sangro, an 18th century Neapolitan scientist, alchemist, inventor and all-round strange fellow. And strange it was too. Not, thank goodness, a reproduction antique, but more a baroque re-imagining. Baroque in the sense of mannerist, rococo art, rather than in the musical sense. I found the first extract a bit lugubrious for my taste, but fun, with a touch of the Michael Nymans about it. And I loved the little lyric Luna, which had the stillness of music by Arvo Part.

I’m don’t mean to pigeonhole the music by these comparisons, or for that matter suggest they were less than original. Rather that I found them more honest in the way that they used tools of the past — musical forms, instruments, language — without hiding their contemporary sensibility.

Interestingly, there was some juicy reactions from audience members behind me. “What were they thinking?” and “This’ll lose them subscribers” were two comments overheard. I’m sure they weren’t speaking for the whole audience, but there were a fair few empty seats after interval.

As I said in my review, the early leavers missed out. There was nothing to scare the horses in the second half, and plenty to delight. The three frottolas (two from the 1500s, one from the 2000s) were just lovely, and Marco Beasley stole the show with Le canzone del Guarracino, a patter song to rival the best of G & S. As for the final encore, a Neapolitan soldiers’ song, it was a real coup de theatre to have everyone on stage down tools and sing lustily, not like choirboys,  in four part  harmony.

So… what started as a quaint story of rural Italy turned into a murder mystery and ended up with a Neapolitan street fight.

Accordone push the boundaries musically, historically and aesthetically. It won’t please everyone, but the Brandenburgs can and should try it more often.

I was reviewing, so I was listening actively. But in one of those lapses of concentration we all get, my mind wandered off to have a little silent chat with Cedric Tiberghien’s page turner.

My mind: “Don’t you think you should be getting ready? It’s a fast tempo and he’s already at the top of the page.
[Page turner does not move]
MM: “I really think you should be getting ready now…”
[Page turner does not move. Tiberghien blazing through some thickly scored passagework]
MM: “I can’t watch” [hides eyes]
[Page turner rocks lightly off chair, reaches across top of score, flicks page across and lightly runs down the side of the new left hand page before sinking back into chair in one fluid movement. It goes without saying that Tiberghien continues playing.]

The thing is, I cannot turn pages, and believe me, I’ve tried. In a lifetime in arts administration I have discovered many talents, including procuring a harpsichord in London at 11pm at night, repairing a conductor’s glasses, and enlarging 42 8-page orchestral parts with only the aid of a basic photocopier and some sticky tape. But page-turning? That totally stumps me.

“But you read music”, I hear you say. “How hard can it be?”

Believe me. It’s hard. My last experience of page-turning was at a vocal recital, where I was drafted in at the last minute. It was a Mozart aria. I was early for the first turn, but luckily the pianist was a good improviser. I left it a bit later for the next, until his eyes started popping out of his head, cartoon style. By the third turn I was in such a state of terror that when I grabbed the corner of the page and whipped it across I was gripping it so tightly  I ripped the page out of the score, and the score off the stand. Sweat broke out visibly on the pianist’s brow as he busked for  four bars while I got things back on track. Thankfully, the end of the piece was nigh.

He never asked me to page turn again.

How can something so simple be so hard? What qualities do you need to be a good page-turner? Whatever they are, I clearly don’t have them. But the graceful but nameless figure tucked away behind the pianist last Saturday certainly did. Brava.

Two reasons.

First, when Bliss premiered in Sydney it was a happy ending after ten turbulent years for Australian opera. There was the stormy 2002 departure of Opera Australia’s music director Simone Young (who commissioned Bliss); a two year interregnum which resulted in bitter, grubby in-fighting and grown-ups behaving badly; and the sudden, tragic death of the new music director Richard Hickox, who had picked up the languishing Bliss commission and driven it forward with passion. As Dean says in his interview with The Guardian, it was difficult to dedicate the premiere to Hickox: the hero’s near death from a sudden and unexpected heart attack in the first scene is too close to real life. But it should have been, and I hope the Edinburgh performances will be an opportunity to remember and celebrate Hickox’s brave music instincts.

All this real life drama heightened the onstage expectations to dizzy limits. There was a palpable sense of relief when the great and the good saw the show, and deemed it good. I’m keen to see what the wider world, unencumbered by back story, get from it.

Second it’s tempting to laud Bliss as a great ‘Aussie’ drama. The accents, the lingo, the nostalgic references to 80s Australia are an indispensible part of the story. But it takes more than a sprinkling of ‘drongo’s and ‘g’day’s to make a cultural identity. I think, in my heart of hearts, that Bliss owes much more to Europe, to European literature and music and the grand operatic tradition. When I first heard Dean’s music — it was Ariel’s Music, on the radio — I found it immediately engrossing and original. I immediately wanted to hear more. But never really thought of it as Australian.

Tell me, Edinburgh Festival goers, what do you think of Mr Dean’s music?

Finally, good luck to everyone involved and, to the audience, enjoy. And if you want to know more about the response to Bliss in Australia, Sydney’s resident opera tragic, Sarah Noble, aka @primalamusica, gathered up a grand fistful of links to all the blogs and mainstream reviews. It’s well worth a look, if only to see the photos from the Bliss 80s theme night.

But what about the show?

It’s been a long time since I sat through an entire Gilbert and Sullivan show. It’s not that I don’t like them; I just like other things  better, and when you’ve got eight shows to get through in the Winter Season a couple sometimes slip through the cracks. In fact, I think the last time I ‘did’ G&S I was playing the violin in a tiny theatre somewhere near Bondi Junction. I remember then being blown away by the beautifully turned tunes. It was Mikado and that sixth leap at the beginning of ‘Tit Willow’ totally charmed me.

But back to Opera Australia’s The Pirates of Penzance. It’s a classy production. Not lavish, mind — the 2D ships and trees  are clever and effective but they strike me as designed with touring in mind.  The costumes are quaint but nothing like the over-the-top confabulations of their Gondoliers production. But the main ingredients — the music, the performances, the direction — are hard to fault. I mean, Anthony Warlow giving it all he’s got, Peter Carroll hamming it up, and the Opera Australia chorus doing the pirate thang… What’s not to like? Opera-goers could quibble about the amplification, which sounds tacky until you enter into full suspension of disbelief mode. Or about the quality of the voices, which are not all full-blown operatic blasters (although Frederic and Mabel deliver a very touching duet).

In the end, I suspect the main objection of naysayers is the repertoire itself. Gilbert and Sullivan. Eeoo. Patter songs. Double ick. Corny jokes and double time reprises. Yuck-O. Why does Australia’s national opera company stoop so low?

I’ll tell you why. Because Gilbert and Sullivan are the genii of the genre, because their work deserves (and rewards) performances of the highest calibre, and, most of all, because no-one else is doing it. Since the demise of Kookaburra, Opera Australia is the only professional company creating new productions of musicals (rather than cookie cutter restagings from the various really useful mackintoshs). It is also the only company with the infrastructure — an ensemble company, a full orchestra, set building / costume making / facilities — to be able to create new work, perform it to a high standard, keep it in repertoire and get it to a wide audience. The fact that they do it alongside a smorgasbord of opera from Monteverdi to Mills is, to my mind, a demonstration of how versatile their artists can be. I mean, it’s all very well singing Dove Sono like an angel – Mozart’s good like that — but can you spit out a million words a minute and do the pirate dance and win the juvenile lead’s heart all at once?

I’m not sure when my next G&S will be. I’m a bit more of a Lulu person, myself. But I’d hate to see Gilbert and Sullivan become strictly am-dram material. The am-dram classics are classic because they’re wonderful pieces of theatre (which is why STC is doing Our Town this year). And while no other professional company is keeping the good ship G&S afloat, I’m delighted that Australia’s national opera company is playing its part.

Sydney Symphony, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, August 11

Alexander Scriabin was a synaesthete: his brain’s perception of pitch somehow overlapped with his perception of colour, leading him to associate certain keys with specific colours. In his third symphony, The Divine Poem, therefore, the first movement is a red C minor, while the second is a whitish-blue E major. According to Scriabin’s lover, the symphony also embodies a pantheistic program of self discovery, leading from conflict to sensual intoxication to ecstatic freedom. In this performance, however, the massive gestures and dense-patterned passages swept away a need for structural and harmonic explanations. The music just happened.

Sydney Symphony powered through the fifty-minute work with impressive stamina and virtuosity. Much credit for this must go to conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who seems to anticipate every twist and turn of the score with a tiny gesture here, or an encouraging glance there. With this little power pack at the heart of the ensemble, every musician was on song. The horns were a mighty force, the trumpets soared valiantly and concertmaster Michael Dauth gaves a mesmerising solo, rising clear and fresh up out of the melee.

Writing music must seem like a thankless task at times: you invest all your creativity into a work, hear it once then, in most cases, see it sink without trace. The music of Ross Edwards, however, bucks this trend. His violin concerto Maninyas was written back in 1988, and has become a signature work. To hear the dedicatee, Dene Olding, playing it with the original orchestra, Sydney Symphony, twenty years on, is a real treat. Edwards’ writing for the violin is satisfyingly idiomatic, and Olding played with a flamboyant ease which made it sound almost like he was inventing it on the spot. The orchestra handled the elusive, tricky rhythms with assurance in this fine performance.

The concert opened with a high-energy orchestral rumpus, Dvorak’s Carnival Overture. In spite of the festive atmosphere of the music, this was a tightly controlled and largely impeccable reading, with piccolo and percussion highlighting the frantic rush of notes.