A thrilling and feverish Roméo et Juliette at Opera Hong Kong

Since 2006, Opera Hong Kong have collaborated with Le French May Arts Festival, one of Asia's largest and most popular arts events, to produce fully staged works for local audiences. For this year's festival, it's the second time Charles-François Gounod's Roméo et Juliette has been presented (the first being in 2007). In this new production, acclaimed French director and designer Arnaud Bernard has delivered an altogether beautifully tender, feverish and thoughtfully delineated piece of thrilling operatic theatre.

Act IV's wedding scene in which Juliette is forced in marriage to Paris

In Gounod's 1867 version of Shakespeare's story of doomed love, a series of duets and pensive arias clearly bring the focus on the lovers but the turbulent background of two families long at odds with each other is spliced with swathes of tension.

Bernard's choices bring fervency and momentum to this five-act work and allows Gounod's music to appear both completely integrated with the onstage events and its descriptive potential fully realised. Serving the music, conductor Benjamin Pionnier captured the dramatic shifts splendidly with well-honed knowhow. The Fujian Symphony Orchestra played with exacting confidence and pit and stage remained respectful friends throughout the opera's five acts.

Bernard never holds back on the tensions between the opposing Capulets and Montagues. Even before the overture gets underway, the suspense of chase and violence is mounted with exhilarating energy. Combat, whether with swords, knives or open-hand is choreographed with incredible power by Pavel Jancik, and bloodied clothes and faces of the gang-like mass are a constant reminder of consequences past and present.

The entire concept, in fact, is created by Bernard's remarkable jack-of-all-trades adeptness as set, costume and lighting designer. This Roméo et Juliette has a sense of being set in a darkened monumental corner of a modern urban ghetto in which a striking visual clash of time adds to the brooding tension. Hoodies, jeans and military-styled streetwear give contemporary unpretentious directness and the washed-out palette of blacks, whites and greys never confuses who belongs where.

 Vannina Santoni as Juliette and Sébastien Guèze as Roméo

Dramatically variable lighting bathes and cuts a series of vertical grey rendered walls looming up into the fly, the only embellishment a large pedimented Renaissance window. The configuration alters for each act and multiple access points facilitate quick and easy access for the more than 80 cast and chorus members. Bernard knows the ins and outs of crowd movement and is blessed by an exceptional cast who make the leaps, rolls and tumbles about the stage with effortless realism.

The events of each act are precisely timed, sharpening the realism of the impending tragedy, from Act I's "Verona, Oct 4, 21:34" to Act V's "Capulet Tomb, November 16, 3:43". In Act IV's "Juliette's Bedroom, November 15, 6:47" the stage is set aglow with a spread of candlelight and, as if sealing fate, the nuptial bed resembles the plinth of a tomb.

And how the two lovers are portrayed with poignant youthful impetuousness and conviction! As Roméo and Juliette, Sébastien Guèze and Vannina Santoni take love along an increasingly mature and expressive journey. The pairing is striking, their passion burning and their voices blend with effortless liquidity. Early, when Roméo shares a beer with Juliette it's an unexpected comical yet appropriately casual moment. They continue to connect with the audience refreshingly.

Juliette is no demure shrinking violet in the grasp of Santoni. At first mildly tomboyish, Juliette is as much a part of her Capulet gang and possesses as much fighting spirit as any of them. Watching her settle in love with yearning womanly passion brought home the veracity of her immediate and uncensored attraction for Roméo. Santoni's pure and radiant soprano increasingly bloomed with affecting strength as if to trace her transition. There is great amplitude in the voice, dynamic ease across register shifts and careful jaunts across purring ornamented lines, all the while carrying the emotional integrity of the text. Despite occasional untimely aspirations, here was an unblemished performance.

Sébastien Guèze as Roméo

As Roméo, Guèze similarly grows up on stage in the six weeks the drama is played out. As an almost naive adolescent partaking in errant brawling, Guèze's Roméo seems loosely guided by his peers. After meeting his new-found love, Guèze gradually transforms with resolved manliness, duly characterised by a resonating and richly virile tenor. In the middle and lower voice Guèze's power and shape shine marvellously. The higher range of voice thins out in reaching the top notes but Guèze nonetheless delivers charismatic flexibility.

Guillaume Andrieux, with his perfectly suited rich and volatile baritone, is alight as a hot-headed alpha-male Mercutio. As Juliette's father, Guy Bonfiglio held authority with his robust stony lower bass despite some loss of projection in the upper reaches. Gong Dong Jian shows understated compassion and is impressive in bass sturdiness as Frère Laurent. As Tybalt, Haô Ting displays pent-up aggression combined with agility in body and voice. Other supporting cast give meaty performances with Dominique Chan as a wholesome-voiced Gertrude, Samantha Chong as a chipper Stephano, Sammy Chien as Paris and Apollo Wong as the blustery-voiced and staunch duke. And the Opera Hong Kong Chorus climbed to a new level of refinement with strong and unified support.

Here, in one of the far-from-operatic centres of the world, this Roméo and Juliette is testament to the world-class calibre of performance and staging that Opera Hong Kong offers.


Production Photos: Opera Hong Kong

Opera Australia's thrillingly sung and intelligently staged Luisa Miller in Melbourne: Herald Sun Review

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/opera-review-luisa-miller-opera-australia-arts-centre-melbourne/news-story/17a5713ec8a43b96f513d12359984b09

State Opera of South Australia's world premiere of Cloudstreet soars with understated immensity

It was a hard life of good and bad luck at the rundown house at number 1 Cloud Street, Perth. It was here that two battling families with different backgrounds and ideals serendipitously share an abandoned home where they build their own story of survival and spirit. This story of the Pickles and the Lambs is a journey through the struggles that leave scars on the psyche, our innate nature to try mend relationships and the little joys that catapult us to the stars.

Based on Australian author Tim Winton's novel of the same name, State Opera South Australia's bold and commanding new world premiere production of Cloudstreeet, by composer George Palmer, is a soul-tingling nebulous journey powered by truckloads of feeling.

Nicholas Jones as Quick Lamb and Nicholas Cannon as Fish Lamb

After winning the 1992 Booker Prize, Winton's Cloudstreet has been successfully adapted as a play and a mini-series. Now, Palmer's idea to bring it to the operatic stage seems a natural fit despite the imagined challenges. With guidance and support from director Gale Edwards and Artistic Director of State Opera of South Australia Timothy Sexton's backing, the work's five-year development has resulted in a remarkable piece of engaging contemporary operatic theatre. Set between the 1940s and 1960s, the sprawling story covering around 20 years is condensed into 60 bite-sized scenes across two acts.

Edwards's directorial wand works a treat in moving the drama forward, finding just the right measure of detail and pace to give Cloudstreet an understated immensity. Sometimes it feels that just when it seems to open out and breath, the next scene snaps at the fore, and the connection of the unsettled spirits that reside in the home feels mostly fragile against the more intensely felt 'watery' realm that Fish Lamb is drawn to, but the storytelling is so vividly conveyed by its sensational acting and singing that the work leaves a wondrous taste in its wake.

Palmer's music shows a lyricism and poetically tonal underlay for his own libretto that is lifted from much of Winton's own writing. In this, Palmer's first opera, the music serves the text with open arms, which is possibly why almost no exposed orchestral passages exist. But Palmer's use of robustly threaded solo pieces and striking recitative work marvellously to enliven temperaments while the Aussie accents, the lingo and all the expletives are given an appropriate home in the music, even to the lingual bowels of "I need a pooh".

Antoinette Halloran as Oriel Lamb and Nicholas Cannon as Fish Lamb

On opening night, Timothy Sexton conducted the 30-something-member quality-sounding Adelaide Symphony Orchestra with a gentle unobtrusiveness that, on most accounts, handed the dramatic rendering to the singers.

For the stage, the creative team have skilfully turned Cloudstreet into a meaningful theatrical work with a powerfully raw, mystical and evocative staging that expresses the suggested era at the same time as giving it, much like the story itself, immense timelessness.

Encompassing the stage to provide an open, workable central area and revolve, Victoria Lamb's set design of splintered weather-boarding perfectly captures a sense of impoverishment. Props come in and out and video designer Craig Williams's various projections deftly conjure diverse spatial settings. Nigel Levings's graphic lighting design adds its own gently descriptive angle, incorporating a sky-full of descending light bulbs as well as red when lighting the Pickles and blue for the Lambs - as does Ailsa Paterson's thoughtfully considered period costumes that also tastefully follow this visually coded differentiation.

After a picnicking tragedy by the Margaret River in which everyone's favourite, Fish Lamb, almost drowns, the story, as many layers as it has, revolves around the effects of Fish's subsequent mental impairment on himself and the rippling effect on his relationships.

Nicholas Jones, his luminescent tenor full of vibrancy and power, portrays Fish with astounding pathos and invincibility, painfully yet understandingly bringing us ever closer to his own final walk to his watery Valhalla. Warm and syrupy baritone Nicholas Cannon is equally formidable as his sympathetic brother Quick. Together, their indestructible brotherly tenderness is a compelling view from a deeply personal perspective. In fact, in a dramatic achievement that renders every principal character with depth, the audience is able to see their story through their own spirited and sensitive eyes.

Barry Ryan as Sam Pickles and Joanna McWaters as Dolly Pickles

Pelham Andrews's warm, salt-of-the-earth baritone patiently butters home life as the fatherly stalwart, Lester Lamb. Gleaming  soprano Antoinette Halloran paints a melancholic picture as his wife Oriel, never recovering from her favourite boy's near death from drowning, a death she saves him from but for which his inability to recognise her torments her forever.

Desiree Frahn is a performing standout with what can only be a step into greater things as Rose Pickles, her richly flexuous and emotively tinted soprano affectingly defining her progression from pigtailed bookish young girl living a stolen childhood to resolute loving young mother.

A disturbing aura surrounds lusciously-voiced soprano Joanna McWaters's fulsome portrayal of Rose's vivacious and openly lascivious mother, Dolly Pickles. As her gambling and hopelessly patient husband Sam Pickles, expressive and gravelly-voiced baritone Barry Ryan, who portrayed Scully in The Riders - another Tim Winton novel-to-opera world premiere work successfully brought to the stage by Victorian Opera - gives a solid, grounded account.

Other memorably strong performances come from ardently-voiced bass-baritone Jeremy Kleeman as Rose's dabble with pretentious boyfriend Toby and steaming baritone Don Bemrose as 'magic man' Bob Crab. They are amongst a fine ensemble of Lamb and Pickles siblings who effortlessly make believe their transition believable from childhood to adulthood.

Tears of joy or sorrow will be shed throughout the seven performances of this world premiere season of Cloudstreet through to 21st May. Hopefully, without loss of momentum, the work will find its way onto stages further afield, to be packaged not as uniquely Australian but, as the opera's advertising by-line it says, "A journey of the human spirit". Indeed it is!


Production photographs: Accent Photography

Opera Australia's musically magical Pearlfishers opens in Melbourne: Herald Sun review

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/opera-review-the-pearlfishers-opera-australia-arts-centre-melbourne/news-story/4fcf82b3896a65986e5d2c82b834e6ba

A smouldering La bohème from Opera Australia opens Melbourne's autumn season: Herald Sun review

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/opera-review-la-boheme-opera-australia-arts-centre-melbourne/news-story/285e8a2746289d28505060b6bf5d94ed

An absorbing, poignant and entertainingly piquant JFK at Fort Worth Opera

Daniela Mack and Matthew Worth as the Kennedys with Ensemble, Part 2

In what's surely the year's most anticipated opera world premiere, Fort Worth Opera (in a co-commission with Opéra Montréal and American Lyric Theatre) have carved a piece of operatic history with JFK, an indelibly absorbing, poignant and at times entertainingly piquant work.

Many, and I'd say most senior opera-goers, would remember that day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 23rd November 1963. I wasn't yet born but the grainy film footage of President Kennedy's last moments alongside his wife Jackie in an open-top Cadillac, winds one right into the fatal moment. On that sunny afternoon, a man's dream to put man on the moon ended in a tragedy and a media frenzy that sent shock waves around the globe.

An insoluble presence of looming death cuts through JFK but it's also about life, of dealing with ourselves, our relationships. Its strength is in its portrayal of familiar and influential figures of American history that just as easily vape into domestic unknowns we are coerced into relating to. Politics lies at the periphery.

Royce Varek's libretto is woven with poetic universal depth and coloured with composer David T. Little's absorbing music throughout the opera's two parts and its 31 "moments". What Little and Varek (who collaborated on the successful chamber opera Dog Days), have done is master a work focusing on the last evening and final hours when the Kennedy's spent the night in Fort Worth at the Texas Hotel in a creatively fresh take consisting of time-alternating moments.

Daniela Mack and Matthew Worth

For this, familiarity with the the program notes will enormously help in understanding Little and Vavrek's mix of dreams, apparitions and mythological guides. Two prominent figures traverse the work in triplicate roles. The Greek mythological figures Clotho and Lachesis are the Fates who spin and measure life. Both figures transmute as a hotel maid and Kennedy's Secret Service agent and also as Henry Rothbone (Sean Panikkar), President Lincoln's mentally disturbed assassin and his wife Clara Harris (Talise Trevigne). Once understood, these multi-layers can be seen to provide dramatic integrity without strangling the actual "real moments".

Director and designer Thaddeus Strassberger gives JFK hugely touching life with punchy, insightful design and potent directorial handling. As the curtain rises, "TEXAS" spans the stage in large green neon letters in a font referencing the hotel sign. Four neatly furnished rooms in 60s conservative aesthetic comprise the Kennedy hotel suite that rotates on a raised platform - two bedrooms, an ensuite bathroom and sitting room. Other dynamic scenic changes occur including a sensuous moonscape scene and a banquet setting for Jack's address to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. A perceived accuracy in the details of Mattie Ullrich's contemporary 60s costumes create an unmistakable portrait of the Kennedys and the time.

Our first encounter with the first couple is unsettlingly voyeuristic as we look in as witnesses to a personal side of public life. Jack is lying in a bathtub while Jackie is in the adjacent bedroom. Looking out from the hotel room window, the audience is drawn into Jackie's portrait of introspection. Her opening aria, “Midnight Is the Loneliest Hour" depicts the pitiable melancholy that pervades her music and achingly gives the opera its emotional heart. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack immortalises her in a profoundly sensitive and poised performance with her lusciously dark and powerful mezzo-soprano. In Part One's final stages, Mack sings the near tear-jerker, "You Shiver". Limp on the floor beside the bed on which her husband is flaked out, she heart-wrenchingly sings with a devastatingly penetrating vibrato of the masks they wear and of her love for him despite his infidelities.

Katharine Goeldner, Daniela Mack and Talise Carrico

Then in Part Two's "I Have A Rendezvous", searching for an answer as to whether her husband will love her for the rest of his life as she is dresses for the morning's presidential speech, Mack sings in a duet facing her own older self as Jackie Onassis, who mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner portrays with richly compelling class.

Every bit looking the presidential part as Jack, baritone Matthew Worth brings appropriate firm, resonant and charismatic vocal style if at times a little lacking authoritative projection. Jack is a man our equal, as much susceptible to self-doubt, vulnerability and subconscious pain as any of us. While Jack lazes in the bathtub, Jackie enters to check on him and assists in relieving his chronic back pain with an injection of morphine. She, too, takes a hit. This introductory scene virtually reduces them to lost dependant drug users after which they plunge into a series of zany dreams that trace episodes of their life.

Firstly, Jack's institutionalised sister Rosemary (Cree Carrico), twirls out from the shower dressed for a dance she demands he take her to. Then, Rosemary takes him to the moon  where his first flirtatious meeting with Jackie is played out. An encounter with Russian premier Nikita Krushchev (Casey Finnigan) follows in a battle of superpower oneupmanship and finally, back in the bathroom, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (Daniel Okulitch) and his cronies invade his bath time with loads of lewdness as Texan cowboys.

Daniel Okulitch and his cronies

Talise Trevigne and Sean Panikkar are a vocally enigmatic and gloriously haunting force as Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone and as Rosemary, Cree Carrico agitatedly twirls and darts with as much amusing vocal shrill as she does about the bathroom. The deeply smokey-voiced Daniel Okulitch puts in grand performance as the lascivious and mocking LBJ, Casey Finnigan is a threatening pushy heavyweight as Krushchev and Brian Wallin is the shinily-voiced, clean-cut and excitable morning reporter.

The well-chosen cast is supported with a splendid strata of sound from the large chorus and the Texan Boys Choir but their presence never overwhelms the stage.

Right from the beginning, as the brief orchestral introduction reveals a mysterious serenity that swells to unnerving gloom, the music spins its effect. As the work unfolds, Little employs engaging diversity in style and orchestration, often giving the solo instrument sympathetic control. On opening night, the score was rendered with a refined ease by conductor Steven Osgood and the large Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.

When the opera is presented by Opéra Montréal I want to be there again and, if not, I have no doubt JFK has the ability to reach globally, just as the shock of the president's assassination did.

Production Photographs: Marty Sohl (top) and Karen Almond 

Well-balanced drama and spectacularity on Sydney Harbour in Handa and Opera Australia's Turandot

Dan Potra's set design for Handa and Opera Australia's Turandot

Now in its fifth year, it was not a case of if, but how soon Puccini's last opera, Turandot, would dazzle Sydney Harbour as part of Handa and Opera Australia's non-perennial colonisation of a prominent position on its shores, a site on which acknowledgement is made each evening to the traditional indigenous inhabitants of the land. Here, with its urban harbour setting of almost unparalleled beauty, Sydney elevates opera to major-international-event status with its mega-build construction for an unforgettable entertainment experience while conjuring the theatre of opera as a unique civic spectacular (one its southern sister can never steal).

I attended the tail end of this month-long season of nightly performances that ring out to propel the art and awe of opera for which it takes regular opera-goers and purists, I presume, a leap of adjustment to acoustic limitations and obligatory spectacle. After last year's brazenly spectacular Aida, this year's Turandot moodily impresses with overall taste.

The experience starts with site designer Adrienn Lloyd's well-grafted layout with the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge in the background. Entering the site through a Chinese inspired gateway, an imposing seven-tiered pagoda of space-capsule-like appearances protected by thorny talons seems to float above a large cloud-like sculptured dragon's head. As the stage comes into view, the perspective widens to reveal set designer Dan Potra's raked stage incorporating a sliced cutout put to effective use, and on which it supports the pagoda to the right, then rises to a rear wall that connects the dragon's head to the left.

It's impressive, made more so throughout the performance by lighting designer Scott Zielinski's rich palette of lighting moods which capture the intimate and grand together with video designer Leigh Sachwitz and flora&faunavisions' visually poetic projections across the wall and tower. Costumes (also by Dan Potra), like the set, suggest a mixed Chinese aesthetic without pinpointing an exact period, altogether feeling dynamically ancient, near and beyond.

Arnold Rawls (Calaf), David Lewis (Emperor) and Daria Masiero (Turandot)

As the first notes emanate, a crane swings the Mandarin (Gennadi Dubinsky) into eye-popping proximity to the audience. The Emperor (David Lewis), too, is swung into view high above the stage on an oversized chunky couch/throne. That looked just a little too weird. Later, the dragon breathes fire as Prince Calaf (Arnold Rawls) pushes on it to announce his intentions to solve three riddles to win the right to wed Princess Turandot (Daria Masiero). And the icy princess makes her entrance high up in the pagoda, a vertical section of which a drawbridge-like section descends while supporting her as she puts each riddle to Calaf. Then, soon after Act 3 commences post interval, Rawls sings a moving account of "Nessun dorma" accompanied by wowing fireworks. No one was going to sleep through this showstopper.

But it all served the tale of the vengeful Princess Turandot well. In all, director and choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng makes adept use of the broad stage with well-balanced dramatic propulsion and spectacularity, without having the principal characters swamped by the chorus of commoners, who were generally relegated to the background. Executioners are aplenty while nine imperial guards seemed too few but their vigorous dance thrilled. Turandot's handmaids, numbering as many, in contrast danced with gracefully sweeping movement and precision to assist the drama.

One of the unfortunate sides of the outdoor staging is the unseen might and fine musicianship of the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra beneath the stage under the leadership of Brian Castles-Onion. But Puccini's score (and the completed Act 3 by Franco Alfano after Puccini's death) is given thoughtful shape and energetic drive by Castles-Onion, who conducts with five years of experience below deck. Sound distortion can be attributed to electronic amplification which took some getting used to and it was often the lightly orchestrated and vocally gentle passages that worked more successfully. Serving the music and voice will always remain the biggest challenge for the future in engineering the finest auditory results.

As Princess Turandot, Daria Masiero (alternating in the role with Dragana Radakovic) spends most of her stage time holding onto dear life high in her impenetrable-looking pagoda but she commands the harbour with her magnificently dark and powerful soprano. In a glittering gown of ice-blue, Masiero plants statuesque steely imperiousness, then melts into love's embrace even though the two lead characters in this retelling of an ancient Persian tale lack depth.

Arnold Rawls as Calaf and Conal Coad as Timur

Arnold Rawls (alternating with Riccardo Massi) opens his performance with heroism and strength as Calaf, qualities that will melt the princess's heart, singing with robustness and determination despite a slightly raw edge occasionally filtering through. But how Rawls nailed an unforgettable "Nessun dorma" and powered the top range to finish with jaw-dropping length on the "ce" in "vincera". From this point on Rawls maintained vocal splendour and basked in passionate urgency as he eventually takes the princess with a long kiss.

As the pigtailed slave girl Liu, Eva Kong (alternating with Hyeseoung Kwon) makes her every bit a proletariat fighter and unswervingly brave in the face of torture as she protects the prince she has long secretly loved. Kong's consistently nuanced performance was matched by the beauty of her sweet and tender soprano, stealing the night and, deservedly, the audience's heart. Kong's shared moment with Masiero, as Turandot asks what gives her Liu strength, is one of the few poignantly intimate scenes and the two carry it off superbly until Liu's horrific death.

John Longmuir, Benjamin Rasheed and Luke Gabbedy blended better as a trio as the restless dancing, somewhat disenchanted ministers Pong, Pang and Ping, Conal Coad convincingly portrays the prince's blind and beaten old father, Timur, while Gennadi Dubinsky and David Lewis add vocal authority as the Mandarin and Emperor respectively.

But rarely being able to see the faces of the distant Opera Australia Chorus left a divide between them and their strongly voiced delivery. I wanted their mass to swell towards the fore-stage and see the origin of their rousing sound.

The spectacle is over for another year but the event's successful blend of music, drama, entertainment and creative splendour will certainly keep audiences coming back and see new arrivals eager to experience it all. It can only spell a win-win combination.


Production Photos: Prudence Upton