This Carmen is trashy, kitschy and quite brilliant
By Peter McCallum, John Shand and Bernard Zuel
MUSIC
Carmen
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, July 10
Reviewed by Peter McCallum
★★★★
The opening scene is set in a park where a stone cross is protected by a security fence, itself defaced by hundreds of tourist padlocks.
Director Anne-Louise Sarks has resisted the cliches of Spanishness and superficial sultry seduction that often plague productions of Carmen, replacing them with messy contemporary reality where beauty is an almost-hidden presence littered with trash, kitsch and ungainly design.
Danielle de Niese as Carmen (on table), Jane Ede as Frasquita and Helen Sherman as Mercedes.Credit: Keith Saunders
The obscured cross recurs in each of Marg Horwell’s four sets as a visual leitmotif for a forgotten truth. In the second act, gaudy religious art adorns the walls of Lillas Pastia’s dubious tavern, while the third is a lookout with car park lighting and a neon cross visible on glittering distant hills.
The costumes are youthful, attention-grabbing and full of life, especially in the bullring of the final act where strange and wonderful characters in bright fancy dress leap to the fore, while the final tragedy unfolds in a claustrophobic dressing room.
Sarks’ finely detailed direction subtly shifts the story from a romantic crime-of-passion to an all-too-familiar tale of coercive control, while a truly stellar performance from Danielle de Niese as Carmen holds the stage with a glance, a gesture, and beautifully shaped melodic lines.
De Niese moves insouciantly and impetuously, always with expressive litheness. Her upper register entwines the ear with silken mellifluousness, and the low register delivers darkly grained notes of implacable fatefulness.
Abraham Breton started as a bashful Don Jose in Act 1, and small but growing gestures of menacing violence insinuated themselves as the action progressed. Vocally, he was strongest in his impassioned declaration La fleur que tu m’avais jetée in Act 2 and made the transition from pleading to violence in Act 4 with persuasive modulations of forcefulness. In Act 1 his pitch was unsettled and his duet with Jennifer Black as Micaela didn’t gel.
Black’s Micaela was characterised as plain homeliness rather than saintly purity, and her final dismissive gesture to Don Jose’s possessiveness was one of many moments that kept the drama plausible and engaging. But there was purity aplenty in Black’s pitch and her Act 3 aria was well-shaped and quietly telling.
The Opera Australia dancers provide colour and movement.Credit: Keith Saunders
Andrii Kymach’s Escamillo exuded the undaunted confidence of a person who stares down wild bulls for a living. His singing in the Toreador Song was well-moulded rather than stentorian. Jane Ede and Helen Sherman sang with lively colour as Frasquita and Mercedes, and Luke Gabbedy and Kanen Breen were lanky wiry smugglers, violent only when they needed to be.
Andrew Moran’s Morales was as cheerful as Richard Anderson’s Zuniga was morose and Ruth Strutt as Lillas Pastia was ruthlessly efficient in calling time. In keeping with the production’s avoidance of the obvious, conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya never rushed the tempi or injected empty noise and energy, but rather allowed Bizet’s distinctive melodies to blossom with exactness and comeliness, harnessing the musical instincts of the Opera Australia orchestra.
The Opera Australia Chorus began with laconic murmurs in Act 1, blazing out in splendid colour when moved to the front of the stage in later acts, while the Children’s Chorus sang with true tone and cheeky impertinence. Shannon Burns’ choreography had the informal knockabout daring one worries about in teenagers.
MUSIC
Sjaella
Opera House Utzon Room, July 13
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
German female vocal sextet Sjaella modelled their program around representations of nature but what audience members are most likely to remember is the ethereal, almost tactile resonance of their gently glowing sound as it settles into the bones of one’s head.
With polished musicality and discreet, sometimes arch, humour this became the vehicle for a program drawn from 400 years of music. The restriction to soprano, mezzo soprano and alto voice types, which gives their sound such pearly luminance, also means most of the pieces they sing are arrangements.
Sjaella projected a gently glowing sound.Credit:
They entered individually from different directions behind the audience for A Bird’s Prelude from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, some singing quietly, some whistling wispy bird calls, to come together on the stage with vocal textures that resembled the rustling of daybreak. The bird theme informed the next piece, an arrangement by Susanne Blache of Le Rossignol by Clement Janequin, a French Renaissance pioneer in programmatic musical representation.
Dolce cantavi is a contemporary piece by American Caroline Shaw using a text by the Renaissance poet, T. Francesca Turina Bufalini Contessa di Stupinigi. At the start it could have been mistaken for one of the more chromatically daring sixteenth century madrigalists such as Gesualdo, before subtly establishing its own language of sliding harmonious intervals and dream-like expression.
Sjaella then returned to The Fairy Queen for delicately nuanced readings of Purcell’s choruses which depict the four seasons, radiating pastoral pleasantness for Here’s the summer, sprightly gay and receding into mournful beauty for See my many coloured fields. Crystallized by German-born Armenian composer Meredi (full name Meredi Arakelian) began with unpitched vocalisations evoking ice cracking and water dripping, before filling out to longer tones to conjure images of rebirth and growing seeds.
Hypophysis by R. Felicitas Erben with musical input from Shara Nova was an amusing, quasi theatrical piece on women’s monthly cycles with the serious purpose of exploring, with humour and wonder, a universal experience for women about which art is almost universally silent.
In Cockatoo Circus by Australian Alice Chance, Sjaella added cockatoo screeches to their extensive musical vocabulary, although, thankfully for the health of their vocal chords, they spared themselves the deafening raspiness of the sulphur-crested inhabitants of the Botanical Gardens, visible behind them through the Utzon Room windows.
In the final set of folk-song arrangements, Sjaella shared other treasures of their travels, singing in Gaelic, Breton, Finnish and, as an afterthought by way of encore, their native German.
MUSIC
Ravel & Falla
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, July 11
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Jaime Martin led a program of sophistication, sultriness and garish excess with the SSO, drawing on music displaying the unmistakable hallmarks of his native Spain even in those parts conceived and written in Paris.
The program was framed by masterworks by Ravel, and, in the Concert Hall’s gloriously translucent acoustic, both exhibited to perfection that composer’s genius for creating orchestral combinations no one seemed to have previously thought of.
Eva Gevorgyan performs with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.Credit: Craig Abercrombie
Alborado del gracioso, Ravel’s arrangement of the fourth of his set of piano pieces Mirroirs, began with the strings playing salty dissonances in hushed pizzicato while the melody was delicately enunciated on woodwind. Suddenly, an exaggerated trombone motif blares out like someone in riding boots stomping into a ballet class.
Bolero, which came at the end of the program, made a similar transition more gradually, starting with the driest of drum taps from percussionist Rebecca Lagos, who was repositioned from the back to a spot just in front of the conductor to create immediacy and avoid any hint of imprecision caused by sound delay.
The melody’s teasing journey from the quietly limpid flute solo, through raunchy saxophones, burnished brass and fleshy bitonal combinations towards a sudden boost into E major at the close is well known, but remains endlessly fascinating when played this well. Ravel, who was born 150 years ago, was of Basque heritage but his musical sensibilities were distinctly French.
Manuel de Falla, by contrast, was among the first of those 20th-century composers who used the music of their own country to create an original, and in his case highly colourful language. In the first movement of Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Martin and the orchestra nurtured smouldering dark textures, which solo pianist Eva Gevorgyan illuminated with bright energy and bristling strumming patterns.
The second movement began quietly and fleetly like the sound of people far away having a wonderful time. In the third movement Gevorgyan cut through the orchestra with radiant brittleness and glowing intensity in a melody imitating impassioned improvised song.
After interval, Martin and the orchestra played the two suites from de Falla’s ballet, The Three-Cornered Hat with large, pantomime-like gestures. It was a performance in which high precision, apt accent and sweeping gesture combined to create an exhilarating sense of freedom, bejewelled with excellent solo work, notably in bassoonist Todd Gibson-Cornish’s deadpan characterisation.
MUSIC
Lisa Simone
State Theatre, July 10
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
What a blessing and curse it is to be the progeny of legend. The primary place in music history of the likes of Tina Sinatra, Jason Bonham, Mercer Ellington and Julian Lennon has almost inevitably become being their famous parents’ offspring. Lisa Simone has faced the same blessing and curse.
Being Nina’s daughter helps her sell tickets, but also invites comparison with someone who’s probably never been matched for the sheer intensity of her singing (even if Nina primarily thought of herself as a pianist who wrote songs).
Lisa has found her own way of dealing with this. For a start, she did some growing up first, spending a decade in the US Air Force before becoming serious about singing, whereupon she concentrated on musical theatre, an area Nina never remotely approached.
Lisa Simone dedicated the first half of her show to her mother’s music.
So when she did move in on her mother’s patch – blending jazz with soul and so much more (which Nina called “black classical”) – she had firm ground beneath her feet. She knew she couldn’t burn with her mother’s ferocity, but she had a large, attractive and true voice, and she could sing less confrontationally and be less aloof with her audiences.
She could also perform her own songs as well as her mother’s, and thereby establish the concept of a Simone legacy.
The first half of this generous show was dedicated to her mother’s music in all its breadth of endeavour. Along with Nina’s own songs, there were those she made her own: as diverse as Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, I Put a Spell on You, Mr Bojangles and I Shall Be Released. The standout was Lisa’s reimagining of Nina’s angriest composition, Mississippi Goddam, her first and perhaps most caustic foray into civil rights protest songs. While Lisa’s softened delivery rode on a more sensual groove, the lyrics (about race-motivated murder) didn’t lose their savage bite.
When she returned after the interval, her hair was out, her clothes were looser, the grooves were sweatier, and she described herself as “more playful”. In fact, she was simply more at ease, with the emphasis now on her own finely crafted material, which allowed her band of expert Sydney musicians, led by pianist Bill Risby, to stretch out a little more – one of the oddities of the first half being how brief the pieces were.
Legacy, which she wrote when her mother died in 2003, was haunting, and the first song whe wrote, The Child in Me, about her younger self’s need for a mother who was seldom there, was as telling as anything she did, capped by a fine solo from Risby.
She returned to material by or associated with her mother, including an especially energised Feeling Good, by which time you could feel she had won over an audience somewhat inclined to sit on its hands and wait to be fully convinced. We were.
Lisa Simone: Hamer Hall, Melbourne, July 13
MUSIC
John Cale
City Recital Hall, July 10
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
Cuddly Uncle Jack? Well, nearly.
A friend who’s seen John Cale quite a few times talks about how some shows could be buoyant, and some chilly, alienating and almost aggressively seeking to disturb – which to be fair is kinda what we want from this 83-year-old with a fine mop of white hair, a soul patch and no interest in cardigans.
While not exactly avuncular – the triggered drum loop, repetitive piano and almost Germanic sternness of Out Your Window, paired late-show with the tense Company Commander’s slow build to nagging near dissonance, had a windchill factor comparable to the night outside – this version of Cale, from his cheery wave as he entered, to the fan service of I’m Waiting for the Man in the encore more than 90 minutes later, was definitely at the “next-door neighbour happy to set another place for you” level of friendliness.
Set before a full-length screen whose vivid imagery veered between precise and distorted all night, there was something quite alluring in Setting Fires, a song for a possible western, evoking long skies and occidental meeting oriental over cards, pigs and gold, while Chums Of Dumpty, a rolling, almost danceable, slightly East Asian yet very New York piece of pop gave the band of drummer Alex Thomas, bassist Joey Maramba and guitarist Dustin Boyer room to be playful.
And there was a noticeable lift in the audience when Cale offered up Mr Wilson, an abrasive but not without sweetness, or humour, alterna-rock song that reminded us and the titular Brian W. that “Wales is not like Californ-i-a/In any way”.
While the set list’s representation from across his career had some notable gaps (none of the “pop bangers” from 1919, another gig-goer grumbled), no one was going to complain about the deconstructed slab of Elvis put back together in a psychedelic haze that was Heartbreak Hotel, the art rock stripped to the bones of Shark Shark, and Captain Hook’s mid-century modernist take on the sea shanty, enhanced by the inclusion of local support in loop-wielding violinist Xani Kolac, who was given about 10 minutes’ notice of the call-up but sparred brilliantly with Boyer.
So, maybe not cuddly, but huggable.
MUSIC
Sydney Chamber Choir
50th Anniversary Gala
City Recital Hall, July 5
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Celebrating a 50th birthday with a requiem is certainly tempting fate. However, it was worth the risk for the Sydney Chamber Choir to select Paul Stanhope’s Requiem (2021), one of the finest of the many commissioned pieces from its first half-century, to be the major work in its anniversary gala.
By splicing choral settings of six poems by female writers with settings of the Latin liturgical text, Stanhope has created a rich musical meditation on loss and hope that resonates with monuments of the Western tradition while honouring the expressions of Australian Indigenous culture as expressed in the words of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
Sydney Chamber Choir conductor Sam Allchurch. Credit: Robert Catto
The Introit grows from humble, chantlike passages to a luminously ecstatic moment in a manner that recalls the shape of Fauré’s Requiem yet within a totally different musical utterance.
The next movement, a setting of Noonuccal’s Tree Grave, mixed soprano Brooke Window’s bright, pure sound with dragging Mahlerian lines from the small ensemble of harp, percussion and wind instruments.
The Kyrie breaks away from this mood with sharply defined rhythm before florid passages welcoming rain by Neela Nath Das. The setting of Noonuccal’s Song joined leanly expressive singing from tenor Richard Butler with delicately transparent expressions of pain from harp and woodwind before a brief but quickly suppressed outburst near the close.
In contrast to the traditional reverential breadth usually given to the Sanctus, Stanhope conjures holiness with irregular rhythms and angular liveliness reminiscent of Stravinsky. The Agnus Dei, the emotional centre of the work, incorporates a setting of Mary Elizabeth Frye’s poem Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep by the soloists, underpinned by solemn intonations of both Latin and English words from the choir.
Noonuccal’s Dawn Wail for the Dead was preceded by a horn solo in burnished half-light from Euan Harvey. The last two movements return to the chantlike ideas of the opening, and the closing passages mix rekindled hope with lively birdlike snatches from the woodwind for Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers.
Stanhope’s use of vernacular poetry to humanise the Latin text recalls Britten’s War Requiem, but the expressive voice remains distinctively his own.
The first half comprised five short world premieres, beginning with the serenely drifting lines of Nardi Simpson’s Dharriwaa, Narran Lakes Dreaming, mixing English and Yuwaalaraay language to tell the creation story of Narran Lakes.
Anne Cawrse’s The Greatest of These used delicate dissonance to colour the adjectives at the end of familiar New Testament lines, while Stanhope’s We Might be Fifty evoked homely comfort. Song by Luke Byrne had a lively rhythmic underlay to gently imitative lines.
The last of the new commissions, Meteora by Meta Cohen, was the most expressively varied, simultaneously creating a sense of distance and intensity. Sydney Chamber Choir is to be congratulated on this milestone, although, from the composers and audience members it has nurtured for the past 50 years, it can expect no peace.
MUSIC
Eva Gevorgyan in recital
City Recital Hall. July 7
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★½
Eva Gevorgyan began the first phrase of Beethoven’s expressively lyrical Piano Sonata No. 27 in E minor, Opus 90 with a show of eager attack then pulled the tempo back as though the second phrase was making a suppliant plea in response.
The gesture was indicative of a free approach to tempo that would inform much of her playing in which each utterance was treated as its own special flower but where the desire to connect them all into a cogent whole was not always in evidence.
This sonata, written at the start of the composer’s last decade of creative life, is one of several works of the years 1814-16 that usher in the strong dualities that are often associated with his late style: timelessness and terseness, integration and dissociation, serene song and dense counterpoint (though counterpoint is not a strong feature of this work).
It is as though Beethoven put the heroic aspirations of his earlier music aside to focus more intently on a deeper truth. Serene song is certainly the dominant force in the second and last movement; in expressive eagerness, Gevorgyan was inclined to let the pace run impetuously.
Gevorgyan took a similar approach to the autumnal mellowness of the first of Brahms’ late piano pieces – Opus 119. This is a highly ruminative yet tightly unified work, and unity here was somewhat sacrificed to dreaminess.
Gevorgyan concluded the first half with Ravel’s La Valse (1920) in which the composer’s love of the energy and coyness of Viennese waltzes takes on nightmarish qualities as though the innocent enjoyment of that world was gone forever after the trauma of World War I.
Gevorgyan played it with vertiginous urgency, highlighting sudden accents and sweeping glissandos as though trying to goad the fading waltz back to its former brilliance.
For the second half, Gevorgyan chose Schumann’s set of 21 short cameos, Carnaval Opus 9 highlighting the many changes of character and mood.
The work is like a series of miniature portraits, each looked at with a smile or thoughtful pause before being put aside in favour of the next. In this regard, Schumann’s volatile imagination could be said to find unlikely common ground with the sideswiping short attention span of today’s social media.
Although I didn’t always find the musical thoughts were developed and followed through, Gevorgyan has highly developed and impressive control over what she does at the piano.
MUSIC
STAYC
Hordern Pavilion, July 3
Reviewed by CINDY YIN
★★★★
K-pop girl group STAYC are unapologetic about staying true to the roots of their sweet, sentimental bubblegum pop: why change a winning formula?
This is the first time the South Korean sextet – Sumin, Sieun, Isa, Seeun, Yoon and J – have performed in Sydney since their debut five years ago. Some nerves are evident early, but they loosen up and gain confidence as the night goes on.
Six sweet teens: STAYC
In a set peppered with fiery releases, some of the loudest screams come for upbeat fan favourites Stereotype and Run2U. For their 2023 hit Bubble, the six each bring out handheld bubble-making guns.
The girls’ singing is exceptional. The crisp vocals barely waver despite the energy-sapping choreography, with charismatic performances in particular from 21-year-old Yoon and Sieun, 23.
While they have gained prominence at home and abroad for their tooth-achingly sweet sound, exemplified in songs such as ASAP, Poppy and Teddy Bear, STAYC also shine in more melancholic coming-of-age songs that depict perfectly the bittersweet, nostalgic emotions of girlhood.
The emotional pop song Beautiful Monster commands total silence from the crowd, making it the night’s standout performance.
As the girls pause between sentences for the translator to express their worries about not being able to attract large audiences in Sydney – we’re a long way from their home city of Seoul – the near sold-out venue and enthusiastic response give the lie to their fears.
By the time the lights dim after encore Stay with Me, the girls’ infectious energy hangs in the air almost tangibly.
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