Category Archive: OPERA
150th Bayreuth Festival
(18, 19 & 20 August 2026) The Varnished Culture finally got into Bayreuth (two trains, one bus via Pegnitz) and stayed at the funky Liebesbier Urban Art Hotel. The original Festival took place from 13 to 17 August 1876. The beautifully-mad King Ludwig funded the Festspielhaus. Wagner, writing in his autobiography (Volume 2), said “the dangerous road along which fate beckoned me to such great ends was not destined to be clear of troubles and anxieties of a kind unknown to me heretofore, but I was never again to feel the weight of the everyday hardships of existence under the protection…
Continue Reading →Faust 2026 – Co-opera
"Faust" by Jean-Paul Laurens
Adelaide, 24 May 2026 (Directed by Nicholas Cannon) We had last caught Gounod’s rather strange take on the Faust legend in Sydney over 10 years ago. Co-opera is somewhat of a boutique company, formed in 1990, that takes the art form on the road and provides opportunities for young aspirants. At the rather unusual venue of the observatory on Hackney Road, the auditorium more apt for dinner theatre than opera, a group of young players (see credits below) belted out Gounod’s pretty music with gusto. Very ably supported by a solitary piano (kudos to Sachiko Hidaka), and with innovative use…
Continue Reading →Simone and the Valkyries
Die Walküre, Sydney Opera House, 15 November 2024 (Simone Young, Conductor /Sydney Symphony Orchestra/Stuart Skelton, Siegmund/Peter Rose, Hunding/Vida Miknevičiūtė, Sieglinde/Tommi Hakala, Wotan/Alexandra Ionis, Fricka, Roßweiße/Anja Kampe, Brünnhilde/ Helena Dix, Helmwige/Madeleine Pierard, Gerhilde/Natalie Aroyan, Ortlinde/Deborah Humble, Waltraute/Margaret Plummer, Siegrune/Kristin Darragh, Grimgerde/Liane Keegan, Schwertleite) The Sydney Opera House does not have the capacity to mount a proper Ring Cycle, but its beautiful concert hall can put on a brilliant concertized version, and Die Walküre offers a chance to savour the key spoke in Wagner’s wheel without the distractions of the monumental amount of staging required for a full-scale production. Instead there were…
Continue Reading →The Ring in Brisbane
(Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Second Cycle: 8, 10, 12, 14 December 2023) Like Wagner’s monumental work, the first ever staging of The Ring in Brisbane grew in the telling. It was commissioned in 2017, and advertised in early 2019, with bookings in a ‘shuffle format’ scheduled from 13 June of that year, for performances in November/December 2020. Then a Sino/American research project let a bat loose from Hell, and gross inconvenience, and death, ensued. The Ring was set aside, although not as long as Wagner did while he fretted, and tinkered, and researched. With a revised cast, it was…
Continue Reading →Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold
(Palace Nova, October 2023) Reviewed by Philippa Thomas Barrie Kosky’s Das Rheingold worked superbly in the live screened London Royal Opera performance seen by some lucky Adelaide Wagner lovers at our Palace Nova Prospect cinema this month. The screening included a short explanatory interview with Kosky and conductor Antonio Pappano, where Kosky explained that his own planned Ring cycle deals with “recognisable human beings with all their flaws” within a context of “the unexplained“. His stress is on the origins from Greek tragedy rather than Norse mythology. Many opera critics have reviewed this production positively – both Pappano’s conducting and…
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