Sydney Chamber Opera gives us dark songs and stunning images

Sydney Chamber Opera’s new show is a riveting 90 minutes of exciting and at times challenging music and stunning imagery.

Sydney Chamber Opera's performance of Awakening Darkness features stunning video backdrops. Picture: Zan Wimberley

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English composer Benjamin Britten wrote his five Canticles – songs that deal with love, death, war, sacrifice and religion – at various stages of his long career and they were never meant to be sung one after the other as in a song cycle.

Sydney Chamber Opera, for its latest production Awakening Shadow, has fused the songs with new music written by Australian composer Luke Styles and set it against a stunning video backdrop featuring multiple digital images of ballet dancer Luca Armstrong shot using photogrammetry.

The result is a riveting 90 minutes of exciting and at times challenging contrasting music superbly performed by four singers and four musicians under music director and pianist Jack Symonds, tightly directed by Imara Savage. Appropriately the show is partly in darkness, pierced periodically by a semicircle of spotlights facing the audience.

Star of the show is Australian-Maltese tenor Brenton Spiteri whose handling of Britten’s first canticle almost rivalled that of the go-to recording by British singer Ian Bostridge. This song, using words by 17th century English religious poet Francis Quarles, is a diatribe on earthly love – the composer’s own impassioned tribute to his partner the English tenor Peter Pears.

Images of dancer Luca Armstrong shot using photogrammetry featured in the show.

Equally dramatic was the second canticle describing Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac to show his obedience to God, and artist Mike Daly’s video added impact, with its chopped up and juxtaposed images of the nude dancer reminiscent of shattered marble statuary. Mezzo soprano Emily Edmonds joined Spiteri for a moving duet.

Carla Blackwood’s horn was called on for the third canticle, a setting of Edith Sitwell’s poem Still Falls the Rain, written in 1940 during the dark days of the London Blitz – “blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails/Upon the Cross”.

Jane Sheldon’s stratospheric childlike soprano was ideal for Styles’s Nova Stella, based on correspondence between the astronomer Johannes Kepler and astrologer Helisaeus Roeslin, and baritone Simon Lobelson joined Spiteri and Edmonds for the wonderful Canticle IV setting of TS Eliot’s poem about the hilarious complaints of the Three Wise Men recounting their journey through the snow.

Elizabeth Gadsby’s costumes – diaphanous shawls, sparkly dark makeup and yards of gaudy hanging materials, lent a Bladerunner feel to some of the production while a headless pig’s carcass for the ritual sacrifice enabled some comic business when various props, including a baby Jesus, were pulled out of its entrails.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Sydney Chamber Opera: Awakening Shadow

• WHERE Carriageworks, Eversleigh

• WHEN Saturday, September 30

• SEASON Until October 7