Forget Love Actually – this is the ultimate Christmas feelgood show

The Nutcracker
Sydney Opera House, November 30
Until December 18
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★

In the Western classical canon, two masterpieces signal Christmas: Handel’s Messiah, and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. This year, the Australian Ballet remounts the 1990 Nutcracker made for the Birmingham Royal Ballet by Sir Peter Wright – the choreographer-director whose name is almost synonymous with wildly successful Nutcrackers.

This version is more compact than Wright’s better-known, grander 1984 rendition for the Royal Ballet, but is still brimming with Christmas magic. The sets are saturated with joyous bursts of colour, dolls come alive, snow fairies flitter in a blizzard, and a girl flies on a magical goose to a fairy kingdom populated by exotic visitors from across the world.

Ako Kondo radiates full star power as the Rose Fairy.Credit: Daniel Boud

And then there is the score, lauded by Sir Simon Rattle as “one of the great miracles in music”, played with sparkling elegance this season by the Opera Australia Orchestra under Charles Barker.

Originally panned by critics at its premiere, it is Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary composition that lifts the story – essentially a frothy children’s tale – into the magical soul-stirring classic The Nutcracker has become. In Wright’s version, the Act 1 Pine Forest scene tears your heartstrings as the music tells you what unexpected joy might be found in one more chance with a loved-one thought dead, but really transfigured: a resurrection where, to quote Tolkien, “everything sad will come untrue”.

On opening night, Mia Heathcote made her Australian Ballet debut as Clara with a gorgeous, warm innocence. Joseph Caley, who has the looks and persona to be cast in almost every prince role in the Australian Ballet repertoire (and usually is) dances the Prince with fitting chivalry. Callum Linnane, almost unrecognisable in a straight-haired wig and fake beard, is one of the best Drosselmeyers I’ve seen: brooding, charismatic and dangerous.

Rina Nemoto is outstanding as the Snow Fairy – glittering poise and crystalline lines – and Ako Kondo radiates full star power as the Rose Fairy. Sharni Spencer, though a little restrained in the grand pas, delivers every little girl’s ballet fantasy in her remarkable Sugar Plum solo, her trademark delicacy honed to pinpoint-precision like a trail of fine diamonds.

The corps require a little more tidiness and theatrical direction in larger scenes – a trait that also showed in last year’s Swan Lake – but otherwise deliver the much-loved Act 2 vignettes with genuine spirit.

All in all, this is a lovely production and capably danced: a welcome cracker of Christmas cheer.

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Waxahatchee
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, December 2
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½

Emotionally vivid and yet never showy, Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee were always fluid in songs that are simply superb. They moved between rock-with-rustic-characteristics and folk with remnants of church out in the open, between straight country traditions that pull from towns as much as plains and pop that linked America’s north-west and south-west, between the lies of constraint and the unstable promises of freedom.

If it could be summed up in one song it might be the loping Lilacs, that had nothing to do with horses, gods or revelation but somehow made you want to grab them all and run out into the world to show, and ask for, love by rights. Or maybe it would be Right Back to It, whose melody hung like a suspension bridge moving in the wind but still solidly fixed. The male backing voice (from drummer Spencer Tweedy in a change from the night’s dominant co-vocalist, bass player Eliana Athayde), brought languor to the fore even in movement, and resonator and pedal steel guitars (Colin Croom) danced elegantly around the banjo (Cole Berggren).

Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee produced one of the best nights of the year.Credit: Mikki Gomez

Elsewhere, they offered songs like Crowbar that were chewy with lyrical density, and others, like Tigers Blood, that had such clarity of imagery you could smell the dust from the floor. They had moments like the sombre but never bleak 3 Sisters, where frankness almost cut (“If you’re not living, then you’re dying/Just a raw nerve satisfying some futile bottom line/All my life, I’ve been running from what you want”), and others like Ice Cold, which was exuberant, revelling on the edge of self-honesty (“You show your face/Keep your eyes shut/Call your own foul/Cheat your own gut”) as much as on the allure of a jangling guitar.

Crutchfield, who arrived in red, topped and tailed with a KC trucker’s cap pulled low and silver boots built high, has a voice that works in the same contradictions/combinations: earthy and yet untethered, ready to pull narrower in Ruby Falls and lighter in 365, pulling up a stool to the side for Crimes of the Heart and striding out to us in Fire. And more than is obvious on record, there is a strong seam of sensuality beneath it all that draws us in further

Without any fuss at all, one of the best nights of music this year.

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Joshua Bell in Recital
City Recital Hall, December 2
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★
In addition to his flawless instrumental command and a tone of radiant richness, Joshua Bell plays the violin with deeply embodied musicality and intelligence, transmitting each idea through his instrument to glorious sound unmediated, so that listening is like apprehending a musical thought at the moment of its creation.

This is the quality that makes him one of the truly great musicians of our time. His recital with pianist Peter Dugan began with Mozart’s Sonata in E minor, K. 301, whose first movement is one of those haunting minor key works in which Mozart seemed to push light thoughts aside with sombre contrapuntal sternness.

Joshua Bell: One of the truly great musicians of our time.Credit: Sebastian Madej

The second and final movement, a Minuet, returned to 18th-century elegance but was in no sense diminutive. Dugan’s approach was reserved but Bell had no inhibitions about filling the hall with a big Romantic sound where musical logic dictated it. Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major, op. 159, written within a year of the composer’s death, is something of a rarity on the concert platform, more on account of its difficulties for both instruments than for any want of appeal.

Bell and Dugan made it into one of those miracles of free-ranging musical imagination that Schubert mastered in his later years in which he seemed to reinvent musical form in his own image. Schubert rounded off this fantasy variations on his harmonically inventive earlier song Sei mir gegrusst. Over excellently controlled floating and glittering tremolos from Dugan, Bell sustained long notes of still sweetness and when these ideas returned, Bell found an almost infinite variety of colours to sustain what seemed like an unfolding musical dream.

To mark the centenary of the death of that master of tender nocturnal melancholy, Gabriel Faure, Bell and Dugan gave a musically sophisticated performance of his Violin Sonata No. 1 in A, filling the first two movements with restrained yearning that erupted into vivid feeling. The third movement was deftly fleet and witty, leading to a powerful finale thatsurged between Faure’s subtly reserved melodic style and grandeur reminiscent of Cesar Franck.

In the spirit of an extended encores Bell gave an astonishingly riveting performance of the Sonata no. 3 in D minor for unaccompanied violin, by Eugene Ysaye (his musical “grandfather” in that he studied with Ysaye’s pupil, Josef Gingold) filling the hall with mesmerising sound. They followed this with Bell’s arrangement of Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat and Wieniawski’s Scherzo Tarantelle.

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Force Fatale
Omega Ensemble
The Neilson, November 30
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Omega Ensemble’s final concert for the year moved from the sombre and beautifully contemplative Clarinet Quintet that Brahms pulled himself out of retirement to write for clarinettist Richard Muhlfield, straight to the music of our own time. Far from being filled with angst, the works of the 21st-century – Nigel Westlake’s musically sensitive Piano Trio (2003) and a new work The Next Room by Joe Chindamo – became progressively upbeat.

The first movement of the Brahms Quintet was reserved and quietly sensitive without sweeping emotionalism or forceful defiance. Aided by the intimate performance space of the Neilson at Walsh Bay, the moments of deepest engagement came in the second (slow) movement and the last movement.

In the Adagio the sweetness of violin tone from Emma McGrath blended tellingly with the half-whispered mellowness of David Rowden’s clarinet, while in the finale, these same two instruments exchanged melancholy cadences with a dying fall. The players closed the work in thoughtful quietness as Brahms subtly demonstrates the affinity of themes from other movements, as though to say the finale was a fading memory of earlier music.

In a totally different style Nigel Westlake’s Piano Trio also explores reflection starting with quietly murky arpeggiated textures before erupting into energetic vigour (the piano here was incisive and precise though slightly overplayed). The second movement is the soul of the piece with gently pressing phrases from violin and cello against luminous harmonies, while the finale created moments of delight in the crispness with which the players exchanged staccato and pizzicato points in cross-rhythmic counterpoint. Westlake also ends the piece quietly as though receding into starlit darkness.

Joe Chindamo’s The Next Room begins with soft welcoming music and the first movement moves through a series of imaginative textures over an evolving harmonic pattern, somewhat like a chaconne. Although Chindamo stated the second movement was a musical obituary for his beloved dog Louis, for me the atmosphere had the freshness of morning with half-light and quiet droplets. The last movement had the same imaginative changeability and inventiveness of texture as the first, like a breezy set of variations, bursting with enthusiasm for life.

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TROYE SIVAN
Sydney Opera House Forecourt, November 28
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★

Sydney’s Grand Dame is no stranger to raunch. But with Troye Sivan’s banging opener Got Me Started through to encore-closer Rush – both of which deliver on the promise of their titles – there’s not much room for subtlety or subtext in a show whose entendre is explicitly single. Simulated sex, grinding gyrations and an extended pash between Sivan and a male dancer typify a very physical show that starts cheeky and ends, in Sivan’s description, feral.

Physical is also the reaction of an audience who are revellers in the best-appointed nightclub in the world. The ‘On the Steps’ shows are becoming a defining opening event to the Sydney summer, while a signature passing rainstorm only adds to the sweat and slide of the party. And there is much to celebrate: fresh from his ARIA success and from co-headlining the Sweat tour with Charli XCX, this is a homecoming for an Australian aesthetic enriched with a modish northern-hemisphere hyperpop sensibility.

Troye Sivan brings gyrating to the Sydney Opera House steps.Credit: Martin Philbey

In all of this, the music is at once central and peripheral: central as it sets the club atmosphere but peripheral in that most of it is pre-recorded. This manufactured quality is exaggerated by a video feed out of sync with the sound, making it look like Sivan is lip-syncing (he isn’t, mostly) but no one seems to care. As the too-short (one hour) set moves to its crescendo of Brat cuts 1999 and Talk Talk, the singing is as much from the crowd as it is from the stage, and so the artistic purity of the vocals is hardly the point.

Sivan does try to transcend the bump and grind of the immediate and obvious. His dancers and choreography are informed of a rich heritage of queer iconography, nodding in the direction of Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga, while the biggest stylistic debts are to Charli XCX and Madonna. His drag routine on One of Your Girls combines the sound of the former with the look of the latter’s Gaultier bustier phase and, while he falls short of their genius, he is a match for their ambition, both blonde and bratty.

HOLIDAY INN
Hayes Theatre, November 27
Until December 22
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★½

This is where the name for the hotels came from. All 1100 of them. Inspired by the 1942 movie starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, which was blessed with the music of Irving Berlin, the hotel chain arrived 10 years later. Six more decades would pass before the film, primarily remembered for containing probably the biggest hit record of all time, White Christmas, spawned this stage musical.

The film, already frothy, was milked, pasteurised, homogenised, condensed, skimmed and made so light that both the narrative and the characters are furiously trying to disappear entirely. Writing it was reportedly a rush job, and if that’s true, it shows. The story is so poorly crafted that two of the characters we think we’re going to be following, the cocky Ted (Jacob Steen) and the footloose Lila (Emma Feliciano), suddenly disappear for half the show, leaving you with a fresh plot centred on the rather wet Jim (Nigel Huckle), a performer turned wannabe farmer.

Holiday Inn is blessed with some of Berlin’s greatest songs.Credit: Robert Catto

But, praise be, we have Berlin’s songs.

Beyond White Christmas, the film bequeathed the world Be Careful, It’s My Heart, which was its intended hit, and some rather more forgettable ones. It seems, however, that creators Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge had the run of the Berlin catalogue, so the score is immeasurably fattened up by the likes of Steppin’ Out with My Baby, Blue Skies, Heat Wave (apposite on this night) and Cheek to Cheek. Precious few modern musicals can boast such a roster of timeless songs.

First-time director Sally Dashwood has assembled a cast that does justice to these songs, including Huckle, Steen, Feliciano, Paige Fallu, Matt Hourigan and Niky Markovic, and the dancing (with choreography by Veronica Beattie George) also has its moments, notably from Steen and Feliciano. But saving the characters from our indifference is not just beyond Dashwood and her performers, I dare say it would be beyond the best in the world. The exception is Mary McCorry, who genuinely sparkles as Linda Mason, the second woman in the story who must choose between Jim and Ted, and the one character with a semblance of three-dimensionality.

Brendan de la Hay’s costumes include a standout moment when the men wear Magritte-like cloud-patterned suits for Cheek to Cheek (“I’m in Heaven”), although the on-stage band is less assured. Abi McCunn has generally done a shrewd job of shrinking the original orchestrations down to just a quintet, led by herself and Dylan Pollard, but the music is blighted by some flat notes from the horns and by several rhythms sounding wooden rather than lithe.

Nonetheless, it’s nearly (a non-white) Christmas, and fans of Irving Berlin may be happy to turn a blind eye to the narrative inadequacies, and if the band can be polished up to the standard of the singing and Veronique Bennett’s lighting, wallow happily in some of the finest songs ever crafted.

Vasily Petrenko conducts The Rite of Spring
Opera House Concert Hall, November 27
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

History has not recorded the impressions of the 77-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns as he sat through the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913, but, given his vitriol against modernists such as Debussy, one suspects he had more sympathy with the rioters than the supporters.

Stravinsky’s opening bassoon solo embellishes a melodic pattern (using scale degrees 8, 7 and 3) used by Saint-Saëns in his famous melody for The Swan and also in the central section of his Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, but one doubts the older composer would have been much mollified by this.

Vasily Petrenko’s pointed gestures and mercurial energy were virtuosic.

In the first half, cellist Johannes Moser played the opening theme of this concerto like a torrent down a river bed, eddying haltingly at the bottom, before surging forward with pent-up momentum. Moser lingered over the second theme, and after the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under conductor Vasily Petrenko established the rhythm of the central minuet with the lightness of delicate clockwork, he broadened expansively before ushering in the finale with renewed intensity, all the while coaxing his 1694 Guarneri cello with nuanced expression and deft virtuosity.

For an encore, he joined the SSO cello section for a warmly mellow arrangement of the sarabande from Grieg’s Holberg Suite.

Before this came Elizabeth Younan’s short fanfare, Nineteen Seventy-Three, written to celebrate last year’s fiftieth anniversary of the Opera House. The opening had arresting vigour with weighty, well-orchestrated chords in agile jazz-like rhythms. The next idea was lighter but cut across with string chords in irregular strokes that brought to mind famous passages from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which we were to hear shortly.

It built to a broader chorale-like idea, followed by a quieter interlude. After the broad theme returned the piece wound up, almost too quickly from my perspective, since Younan had demonstrated sound craft in writing for the orchestra and in developing ideas.

After Matthew Wilkie’s transparently quiet opening bassoon solo, it was a special pleasure to hear the awakening opening section of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the clarity of the Concert Hall’s new acoustic. As each new instrument joined, seemingly contradicting the previous ones in rhythm, metre and key, it was like an assembling of vivid individualists whose differences were yet to be resolved.

Petrenko’s pointed gestures and mercurial energy were themselves virtuosic, resulting in a totally captivating performance from the SSO, outlined by sharply defined edge and accent and starkly etched instrumental blends coalescing with distinctly coloured clarity.