How does it feel? Pretty good for New Order after nearly 50 years

MUSIC
New Order
Sydney Opera House forecourt
March 14
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½

How does it feel to play songs you wrote in your 20s when you’re on the far side of 60?

If they are as quality as the synth-pop bangers of New Order and post-punk gems of Joy Division, it can’t be that bad.

And when you look from the stage straight out to the sails of the Opera House and across to the Harbour Bridge, little wonder Bernard Sumner described Friday night as brilliant.

Those of us down the front with the second-best view had it pretty good, too, as Sumner and co launched into a thunderous rendition of Joy Division debut single Transmission. The frenetic and fuzzy Crystal kept up the momentum, and made a strong case to be considered the band’s best song this century.

Bernard Sumner was at his most electrifying on guitar.Credit: Ken Leanfore

The set ticked through a reliable roll call of classics. The bright Age of Consent had the crowd dancing, Bizarre Love Triangle was so deliciously ’80s even the accompanying vision was reminiscent of Pac-Man and Rubik’s cubes.

Being pioneers means New Order songs are both ahead of their time and trapped in the past. But then they surprise with an urgent rendition of State of the Nation flashing warnings about tariffs and conspiracy that suits 2025 almost too well.

There were a couple of misfires: Plastic was not so fantastic and, in this set, Be a Rebel felt pedestrian.

Sumner occasionally resembled rock’n’roll’s answer to Anthony Albanese, most notably when crankiness flashed across his face in the heat. Like the PM, there were times his voice failed to cut through the noise, but his everyman delivery mostly worked. He was at his most electrifying on guitar.

Gillian Gilbert on keys has been to the Pet Shop Boys school of standing still and looking uninterested; Stephen Morris is an energetic force on the drums; and relative newcomers Phil Cunningham (guitar) and Tom Chapman (bass) seemed right at home.

Before the fan-pleasing Joy Division encore, a trio of the biggest hits served as the highlight. True Faith is New Order at their most imperious, Blue Monday’s squall of synths and hooks is undeniable all these decades later, and Temptation proved hard to resist.

There were many pluses, and bonus points for sticking to the hits and not faffing around, even if it fell short of spectacular.

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OPERA
Dido & Aeneas
Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, Circa
Opera House, March 13.
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

This combination of musical and circus artistry creates a twin pull on one’s attention, the two strands sometimes working harmoniously, sometimes in tension and occasionally in internecine subversion.

First, there is the musical seductiveness and clarity of Purcell’s great score, as fresh today as it has been for more than 300 years, conducted with refined musical discernment by Pinchgut Opera’s Erin Helyard.

Anna Dowsley grows in stature with each appearance.Credit: David Kelly

Rising star Anna Dowsley takes both the role of Dido and that of the Sorceress who, in a thoughtful touch, is constructed as the negative double of Dido’s personality (“risen star” might be more accurate for Dowsley, but she continues to grow in stature each time she appears).

Alongside this stylish musical realisation, director Yaron Lifschitz places the astonishing skill and strength of the Circa Ensemble. Although Lifschitz adds grace and expressive gesture to their movement, the essence of Circa’s appeal still lies in their gasp-inducing acrobatic audacity, and the voyeuristic anxiety of watching performers walk and climb on the spines of others, and tumble from towers of acrobats piled three-high, each standing on the heads and shoulders of those below.

Gasps sat well enough with some moments, notably the sailors’ song and chorus, full of rollicking intoxicated swagger. They were out of step, however, with the interpolated instrumental number just before it, where the circus feats were dissonant with Dido’s reflective mood, and the intricate counterpoint of the music.

The Circa Ensemble performs with astonishing skill and strength.Credit: David Kelly

Before the curtain rose, a series of aphorisms and quotations, some from the opera, some thought-provoking, others pretentious, were scrolled on screens against spectral noise and harmonies far removed from Purcell. The production adds a Prologue and additional musical numbers in compatible musical style to accommodate additional circus/dance routines.

The Prologue developed like an abstract work of contemporary dance with Baroque music and was slightly overextended, but this quickly evaporated when Purcell and Nahum Tate’s music drama took the reins in Act I.

Dowsley’s singing was laden with deep expressive colour, beautifully sculpted melodiousness and flashing fierceness as Dido, and she found a more sinister penetrating tone for the Sorceress. Left alone, stripped of regal garb and statuesque poise at the end, she shaped the expressive gradations of When I am laid in earth to a weighty tragic culmination, the climactic G opening out a world of colour and pain.

Jane Ede sang her attendant Belinda with bright, often thrilling tone, crisply pert projection and shining aura. As Aeneas, Nicholas Jones had a freshly attractive youthful voice, not yet as powerful as Dowsley’s (though it is not dramatically inappropriate that, vocally, she eat him alive).

Sian Sharp sang the Second Lady with rounded clarity, and Angela Hogan and Keara Donohoe sang the witches duets with spirit and finely edged balance. Cathy-Di Zhang’s voice as Mercury was glowing and smooth, while Gregory Brown led the sailor’s chorus with roistering swagger.

Although their daily bread is the vibrato-coloured resonance of 19th-century opera, the Opera Australia Chorus adapted themselves to the needs of Baroque transparency with finesse, eliminating forceful projection to create warmth of sound and well-disciplined balance from the galleries during the final chorus. Similarly, the Opera Australia Orchestra emphasised delicate tonal discretion and natural colour. Notwithstanding its inner tensions, most will find something (not necessarily the same thing) to make the experience absorbing and enjoyable.

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MUSIC
PJ Harvey
Opera House forecourt, March 13
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½

The colours told us, even before the notes did.

On her most recent tours, as the rooms got bigger, PJ Harvey progressively narrowed the palette. The boldly patterned and cut outfits of yore turned to Victorian simplicity in white, then workmen’s functional garb, widow’s weeds, and increasingly crimping lights, culminating in her and her band in severe black and leather binds in an almost militaristic presentation.

This time, the colours on the men were more autumnal and forest floor and Harvey was in a white quasi-priestly robe with trees sketched on it. There would be sins and death and sex of questionable provenance, but there was a lot more story to tell than that, beginning with the folkloric creation of 2023’s I Inside The Old Year Dying.

PJ Harvey on stage at the Opera House forecourt.Credit: Daniel Boud

Played in sequence and in full to begin the night, an album that had divided fans even more than the bristling reportage of its predecessor, The Hope Six Demolition, became an enthralling piece of theatre. It was a melange of set-piece staging (PJ sat at a desk or crouched before it), contributed noise (animal squawks and screeches; the scratchy irritant of a reverberation), and the firmer, earthier, beautifully mixed voice she now offers.

And it was carried by a band – drummer Jean-Marc Butty, multi-instrumentalists John Parish, James Johnston and Giovanni Ferrario, and Harvey occasionally on autoharp, harmonica, electric and acoustic guitar – that even when visceral and agitated in A Noiseless Noise played within the songs and lived the invocation in A Child’s Question, “Love me tender, tender love”.

If the show was divided in two – newest album in full; career-wide variety – it was not separated by approach. The theatricality, the exaggerated physicality and moves, remained, as did the plainness of the sonic palette. To Bring You My Love was sinew and bone, taut skin stretched almost to transparency; electric bass sealed Man-Size as a pressing blues cut through by violin; Dress was a properly sinuous experience, from its rhythm to Parish’s trebly soft counter-vocals.

And then, closing the night and closing the circle with the Dorset village voicings of the first half, White Chalk held firm within its ghostliness, forlorn but not forsaken, colours diffused rather than stark.