Opening traditional theatres and smaller venues may not be physically or financially viable. But with winter coming and the arts industry floundering, something needs to be done.
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.
Is music the best medium to respond to traumatic events like the COVID-19 pandemic? A recent history of such pieces suggests maybe not.
The National Arts Centre in Ottawa displays the message “Everything will be okay” and a rainbow, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang)
Policy makers and arts sectors together need to reimagine how we might organize contracts, leverage networks and change supports to create more long-term opportunities for arts workers in Canada.
While the name of the season - now online - suggests breaking through opera’s glass ceiling, the violent imagery fits the context of ecological disaster, inequality, mental illness, and dystopia.
Vivaldi’s Farnace is a masterpiece of 17th century opera, but has been largely forgotten. This new production is the best revival production by Pinchgut Opera yet.
Two female models face off in a production of The Magic Flute at Texas A&M University. Above, the Queen of the Night is up to no good, while the passive Pamina awaits her rescuer.
Wikimedia
Princess movies and opera alike reveal the limited number of models available to women. “Le Dernier Sorcier”, composed by Pauline Viardot in 1869, shows that a much richer world is possible.
William Blake’s portrait of the Old Testament Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who in the Book of Daniel ‘was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen’.
Tate Britain
Nebuchadnezzar was a warrior-king of the Neo-Babylonian empire. And now, Kanye West has written an opera inspired by him.
Under director Yaron Lifschitz, this version of Orpheus and Eurydice is interested in exploring the tragedy implicit in this story.
Jade Ferguson/Opera Queensland
This new version of Gluck’s opera, from Opera Queensland and Circa, is raw, physical and confronting. Completely captivating and deeply moving.
Leigh Melrose as Brett Whiteley in Opera Australia’s 2019 production of Whiteley at the Sydney Opera House. The opera focuses on the artist’s addictions and his relationship with his wife.
Prudence Upton
A new opera focuses more on the personal life of artist Brett Whiteley than his artistic creations. As the opera reveals, a life like Whiteley’s does not offer a clear moral message.
Cio-Cio-San (centre) during a dress rehearsal of Opera Australia’s Madama Butterfly at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney in 2019. Works such as this are attracting criticism from some modern audiences.
Stephen Saphore/AAP
Opera companies around the world are grappling with an ever-widening gap between a repertoire frozen in time and an increasingly critical audience.
Juan de Dios Mateos as Cavalier Belfiore and Ruth Iniesta as Corinna in Opera Australia’s 2019 production of Il Viaggio a Reims at Arts Centre Melbourne.
Jeff Busby
Gioachino Rossini’s opera was originally meant as a satire of royalist France. A new production updates the work for a modern audience, setting the drama in a museum where the paintings come to life.
Performers in Speechless, a new opera by composer Cat Hope, co-commissioned by the Perth Festival and Tura New Music. The opera is a response to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report into children in immigration detention.
Toni Wilkinson
Despite the exclusion of their creative work from mainstream opera companies, Australian women composers are creating spaces for themselves, writing work that tackles urgent social issues.
Natalie Christie Peluso in The Children’s Bach. The opera is based on Helen Garner’s novella of the same name.
Peter Hislop
Realism and addressing pressing contemporary South African societal issues have been the focus of local opera since 1995.
John Longmuir as The Captain, Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck and Richard Anderson as The Doctor in Opera Australia’s production of Wozzeck.
Keith Saunders