Music is the food of love for opera chief
Jumping from his own nuptials to the Marriage of Figaro, opera chief Lyndon Terracini is on a roll.
Wentworth Courier
Don't miss out on the headlines from Wentworth Courier. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Scots College reveals $10m plan to solve parking woes
- Property bonanza: 435 properties for sale in eastern suburbs
Lyndon Terracini is on a roll. For the artistic director of Opera Australia, the country’s biggest and most significantly funded performing arts organisation, October has been a memorable month.
For some time he had a big red circle around the date October 4 on his desk calendar. And with good reason, for on that date he married his partner, the striking soprano Noëmi Nadelmann.
Born in Zurich, she enjoys a distinguished artistic lineage. She is related to the famous Polish sculptor Elie Nadelmann, whose work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and her parents both had careers in the performing arts. Her mother, Rachel, was an actress and her father, Leo, a pianist and composer.
Nadelmann too has had an international career, with leading roles at La Fenice in Venice, the Komische Oper Berlin, The Met in New York, the Paris Opera and Vienna Staatsoper and other important European houses.
When younger, the couple had a relationship which they resumed five years ago when Nadelmann moved to Australia and which was formalised in Switzerland this month.
Their wedding was a romantic affair in the picture postcard pretty alpine village of Weisstannen, in the mountains near Zurich, by the border of Liechtenstein. Any champagne left over came in handy the next day when Terracini celebrated his 70th birthday.
Neither the nuptials nor the birthday marked the end of the celebratory month of October. More than happy with his performance, the Board of Opera Australia has extended the groom’s contract for three years.
So much for personal pleasures. Back at Bennelong Point, things were also going along swimmingly. The Nadelmann Terracini marriage was followed by The Marriage of Figaro, a revival of David McVicar’s joyous staging of Mozart’s masterpiece and, as if that wasn’t enough fun for one month, last week saw a delicious bit of Rossinian fluff in the form of Damiano Michieletto’s production of a great operatic rarity, Il Viaggio a Reims.
Terracini’s tenure at Opera Australia (once unkindly dubbed the Reign of Terra) has seen its ups and downs. Welcome to the world of opera which, despite scandals, tantrums, swingeing cuts to budgets, changing tastes, radical reshaping of population and egregious artistic decisions, continues to flourish. It is both loved and hated but it has persisted and found its way into every generation and every class since it emerged as a bona fide discrete musical genre in 17th-century Italy.
Dr Samuel Johnson was among the haters. In 1755 he described opera as “an exotic and irrational entertainment”.
He would have few arguments on that score. Some critics disparage it as a “heritage art form”. Nationalists see it as Eurocentric. Other critics see it as for toffs only. Or “elitist”, despite the fact that sport which is, in fact, elite is never saddled with that pejorative.
To Terracini and opera’s loyal disciples, it’s the most sublime of art forms, combining theatre, poetry and music, essential to the cultural and spiritual wellbeing of a society, but he acknowledges its challenges.
Over lunch at Cafe Sydney, where he is greeted the way Pavarotti was when he bowled up for a post-performance supper at Biffi Scala (the restaurant adjacent to the legendary opera house in Milan), we discuss some of those challenges.
“Musical education doesn’t exist any more,” he laments, “and the demographic of audiences has changed dramatically. Many people have never even heard of opera let alone been to one.”
It’s a truism that one audience excludes another, but the putative patrons who might be uncomfortable sitting among the dressed-up crowd at the Opera House seem perfectly at home in the bleachers for Opera on the Harbour or at one of the popular musicals which now form part of the company’s activities. Stand by for Fiddler on the Roof, which he recently saw in New York.
What impresses one about Terracini is his clear view of his beloved opera and its future.
“We’re doing very well, but internationally the opera form is in trouble. In the States big companies such as Chicago and San Francisco are experiencing difficulties. In Italy it’s a complete catastrophe. It’s not a good time for opera.”
So why is it a good time for the lyric art in Australia?
Terracini thinks it’s because of a pragmatic approach to repertoire which, in his view, should comprise a judicious mix of unashamedly popular works with a couple of more radical, sometimes contemporary, pieces and landmark Broadway musicals such as recent record-breaking revivals of My Fair Lady and West Side Story.
“We have to acknowledge the realities of the 21st century. You can’t have a successful opera company unless you do the core repertoire. La Traviata, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Aida, Tosca, La Bohème. You need good productions of ALL these, you need to do them often and you need to populate them with really good singers.”
Dame Nellie Melba knew this. She sang her first Mimi in La Bohème in Los Angeles in 1900 and she kept the role in her repertoire for 30 years.
For Terracini, the notion of durable repertoire was a lesson well learned at New York’s Metropolitan Opera where a flamboyant staging by the late Franco Zeffirelli has been revived almost annually since 1971. Any attempt to replace it is met with audience outrage.
“We’ve been doing our version since 2012. We do 24 performances and it always sells out,” says Terracini. “A good production is like a Rolls-Royce. It can be taken out for a run on a regular basis.”
However, he does admit the odd miscalculation. “We had to do a new Aida. The other one was terrible.”
People who run opera companies seem to fall into two categories. They are almost always either administrators or retired singers. Terracini fits into both.
“My parents and grandparents were full-blown Salvation Army officers so I grew up with music. I first sang solo in public when I was four. It was at a Sunday school concert at the Citadel in Hayberry St, Crows Nest.
“My whole life has been about music. Grandmother wrote her own mini operas including one about David and Goliath, which I used to perform with my brother.”
Seriously stage struck, he worked as an unpaid extra with the opera company in its earlier incarnations, watching some of our finest singers, “especially that wonderful tenor Donald Smith”.
By the time the company moved into the Opera House, Terracini was one of its leading lyric baritones, an assured Figaro and a memorable Strephon in Iolanthe. He came to the attention of the renowned German composer Hans Werner Henze and became a preferred interpreter of his works, giving international premieres of several.
Returning to Australia he continued his international singing career but also turned to artistic direction, heading up NORPA, the Lismore-based Northern Rivers Performing Arts organisation. I recall a first meeting with him over lunch at Rae’s on Wategos Beach at Byron Bay.
“NORPA was good fun,” he tells me, “and really fantastic training. I had to learn how to go out and raise money, put a program together that wouldn’t cost a fortune. I learned that if you bombed, no one was going to help you.”
The rise through the regional ranks to the big smoke seemed inexorable.
“I spent the next 10 years running the Brisbane Festival and Queensland Music Festival.
“I love Brisbane. They have fantastic events there now; the Bolshoi and La Scala. They are attracting audiences from all over,” he says.
It may be why he elected to stage Opera Australia’s new production of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle there in 2020. In his words, “the Ring Cycle is ‘the Everest’ of opera.”
A year out from the opening of the Cycle on November 10, 2020, advance bookings are “exceptional” and a sell-out season is expected, numbers swelled by interstate and international visitors.
Where there’s a Ring, at Manaus on the Amazon or Warsaw, there’s a guaranteed audience of Wagner tragics in the ranks of which this writer is numbered.
“I love working with Queenslanders,” Terracini says. But he is less enthusiastic about Melbourne audiences, whom he sometimes finds “pompous” and believes they should be braver in their approach to major events. “Their parochialism is disappointing,” he says.
A long-term subscriber and quondam critic now acknowledges Terracini’s success: “Lyndon has done the hugely important job of keeping the opera company afloat during tough times. And now he’s putting on some very fine works with top casts.” With the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, sopranos Ermonela Jaho and Eva-Maria Westbroek, Ukrainian lyric baritone Andrei Bondarenko and the sensational French dramatic baritone Ludovic Tézier among the international marquee names in those top casts, he has a point. But local singers have not been overlooked.
Over lunch Terracini waxes rhapsodic about a young high tenor called Shanul Shama.
Born in India, this young man was educated in Wagga Wagga, sang with a heavy metal band before moving to opera and was one of the revelations of the recent revival of that Rossini rarity in Sydney. Word got out about his voice and he was flown to Russia to reprise the role at the Bolshoi.
From the banks of the Murrumbidgee to the banks of the Moscow River.
Now that’s another great opera success story.
LUNCH AT CAFE SYDNEY
ENTREE
Dozen oysters
MAINS
Grange 350g scotch fillet served with mushrooms, bacon, onion rings and creamed potato
King George whiting served with vongole, creamed corn, farro and parsley oil
Seasonal vegetables
DESSERT
Sheep milk pannacotta with berry sorbet, strawberry, meringue and white chocolate