This five-star, pared-back Messiah is a sparkling gem: Don’t miss it

MUSIC
Messiah (Original Dublin version, 1742)
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall, November 27
Until December 3
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

Since its small-scale premier in Dublin in 1742, Handel’s Messiah has grown into a cultural icon that seems, at times, almost on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its accumulated sclerotic traditions.

Using just three singers per part (close to what Handel used at the first performance) and a matching orchestra of strings, organ and harpsichord, with two trumpets and timpani added for moments of splendour, Pinchgut Opera restored Handel’s sometimes over-loved textures to something resembling their original weight and hue.

Beguiling: Alto Ashlyn Tymms. Credit: Anna Kucera

It was like seeing a familiar picture by Gainsborough or Reynolds with its centuries of grime and well-meaning touch-ups removed to reveal a breathtaking original of richly coloured lightness.

Yet, graced with a glorious group of fresh young voices, this performance was more than simply historically informed. Conductor Erin Helyard approached the expressive purpose of the music not with stylistic caricatures – the musical equivalent of dressing up in powdered wigs and hooped dresses – but with deep musical seriousness.

Gentle unforced warmth: Alto Hannah Fraser. Credit: Anna Kucera

Thus, the slow part of the overture was not spiky and pompous, like a French court entrance, but was imbued with warm dragging gestures of compassion. One of the delights of the performance was to watch the singers’ different musical personalities emerge from the ensemble, which was positioned in an imposing line across the stage before a curved background with disc-shaped opening.

Tenor Jacob Lawrence began Comfort ye with unpretentious humility and navigated the passage-work in Ev’ry valley with neat agility and a nicely grained voice. When the full chorus joined for a buoyantly vigorous reading And the glory of the Lord, the great joy, here and later, was to hear all four parts equally balanced, and their details articulated with light yet virtuosic professionalism.

With just three voices per part, the nuances of Handel’s writing are revealed. Credit: Anna Kucera

Bass Edward Grint shook the heavens and the dry land with rounded sound, almost like a British constable offering dignified admonishment. Statuesque in a hallo of light (courtesy lighting designer Damien Cooper), alto Hannah Fraser sang Behold a virgin shall conceive with gentle unforced warmth, and bass Andrew O’Connor sang the ominously creeping lines of The people that walked in darkness with a voice like polished rosewood.

In the Pastoral symphony and the many instrumental introductions the Orchestra of the Antipodes combined transparent simplicity with spontaneous mercurial ornamentation from leader Matthew Greco.

Soprano Miriam Allan’s Rejoice greatly was a tour-de-force of light brilliance and her disarming simplicity in I know that my redeemer liveth created one of the most touching and effective performances of this aria I have heard.

Alto Ashlyn Tymms had a bony warmth to the tone creating a vivid edge in lower notes and giving the lines persuasive and beguiling shape. With a pure open sound, soprano Myriam Arbouz brought painful, almost waling expressiveness to Thy rebuke hath broken his heart. Tenor Louis Hurley sang with polished strength and bass Freddy Shaw sang Why do the nation so furiously rage with firm resolution.

Erin Helyard conducting from the harpsichord. Credit: Anna Kucera

Grint paired with trumpeter Leanne Sullivan’s sublimely smooth flowing lines for The trumpet shall sound and Olivia Payne and Sebastian Maclaine matched interjection precisely across the stage in O death, where is thy sting? The moment when all these superb voices come together to weave the serene polyphony of the final Amen is something you wouldn’t want to miss.

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THEATRE
King Lear
Belvoir St Theatre, November 20
Until January 4
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

At the end, director Eamon Flack has the dead sitting watching the few poor sods still alive. It’s a telling moment, given this greatest of tragedies – greatest of plays – is seldom well served upon the stage. The challenges are too vast for all the spokes of the huge wheel to be consistently strong, and so it is again.

Yet, there’s much to admire in Flack’s production, from the opening moments, when Colin Friels’ Lear draws a chalk circle on the blank stage, instantly pulling us into his pagan world. Just as the setting is nowhere and therefore everywhere, the music, composed by Steve Francis and Arjunan Puveendran, and performed by the latter on mridangam (hand-drum) and occasional vocals, with Jess Green’s electric guitar, creates mythical timelessness, which could have been better echoed in James Stibilj’s costumes.

Flack’s production uses part of the title of the first Quarto edition: The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters. That title actually continues, With the Unfortunate Life of Edgar, Son and Heir to the Earl of Gloucester, and his Sullen and Assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam.

Colin Friels, Peter Carroll and Brandon McClelland. Credit: Brett Boardman

Edgar’s importance in the play comes both from his vying for the second-biggest role (with the Fool and Gloucester), and because he succeeds Lear as king. This elevated him in the eyes of Shakespeare’s contemporary audience, just as they would have quickly latched on to the scale of Lear’s imperiousness in a way that’s harder for us today.

Tom Conroy has transcendent moments when Edgar has reduced himself to Mad Tom, hinting at how high this production might have soared. Friels, too, can be every inch a Lear, brushing against the role’s greatness, then bouncing off, only to collide once more. He rushed lines that should be allowed to linger (opening night nerves?), yet could rise to a magnificence that brought both character and verse to their full glory. Deeper into the season he might stay up there.

Peter Carroll’s Fool does now. What inspired casting! I’ve never seen the Fool performed by Lear’s elder, and Carroll, with his innate playfulness, can now pertly admonish Lear not only from the privilege of position, but of age.

The gender-swapped Gloucester is played by Alison Whyte, whose bell-like voice commands the language. Raj Labade understands the complexities of Edmund, even if they aren’t consistently manifest: that jumble of charisma, evil and, crucially, the magnetism that drives Lear’s older daughters, Goneril (Charlotte Friels) and Regan (Jana Zvedeniuk) to distraction and destruction. Ahunim Abebe is a suitably soft and loving Cordelia, and Brandon McClelland a typically convincing Kent.

The problem is that we’re never brought to tears by the saddest play ever penned. Carroll takes us closest, but Whyte, Conroy and, above all, Friels should plunge us into the waiting abyss. The ingredients are mostly in place.

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MUSIC
Rufus Du Sol
Qudos Bank Arena, November 20
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★½

“I want to make sure everyone’s standing up,” says Tyrone Lindqvist five minutes in. The vocalist is eyeing, as meaningfully as a guy can in dark glasses, the thousands seated in the stadium’s high rises.

Too right. For any able-bodied person to sit during a Rufus Du Sol performance is an insult to dance music.

It was a special homecoming for the world-renowned trio, returning to the city in which they formed 15 years ago, with their legendary tune Innerbloom getting a jubilant rinse as the closer, 10 years to the day since its release. Even then, most of the crowd had kept to their feet, aglow with that uplifting nostalgia that is the hallmark of RDS’ lush, layered sound.

Australia’s biggest electronic music export, somehow still chill and on the rise, deliver live shows that adapt and flex their studio excellence, conjuring a world in which sinews meet synths, carbon interfaces with machine, sequencing pushes form.

They’ve crafted a sublime journey for this tour, putting up top fan favourites like On My Knees while drawing most from last year’s Inhale/Exhale, an album that proves their evolution is holding true. Cresting waves of wistful bliss towards a natural high, these are songs that feel forged in the golden hours of day that can be danced to all night. The thrillingly dark Pressure is an anomaly, sonically akin to a biting kiss on the neck.

Holding centre with guitar and keyboard, Lindqvist’s voice is that of a dream lover leaned in close, singing sweet sincere words like “daylight just seems so much brighter with you” and “I just wanna treat you better”. Jon George bounces his keys towards a gently insistent hedonism. James Hunt on drums gives everything a beat-chaser or ASMR-craver needs to get their fix.

In scene fashion they’re Matrix-coded for an enduring millennium: black threads, speed dealer sunnies, chains, impressively toned arms. The stage itself is in atmospheric shadows, with industrial scaffolding bleeding colour as a backdrop, and fingers of light caressing the dancers below.

It’s not all simpatico. Whether the disconnect is between human/machine or human/human, there’s occasional muddiness with the production, diffusing the power of the drops. The stadium – predominantly young – doesn’t mind too much, though.

After their AU/NZ run, the boys are off to South America and Europe to spread the Rufus Du Sol euphoria to a world in dire need of some healing hope.

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THEATRE
Romeo and Juliet
Opera House Playhouse, November 20
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★

After months on the road, racking up an impressive death count night after night, Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet arrives in Sydney for its final performances.

The story remains the same: Two houses alike in dignity, star-crossed lovers, parents’ strife, two hours’ traffic of our stage. The real coup de theatre is to make us believe that just this once the story might turn out differently. That Romeo and Rosalind might get back together, or Juliet might fall desperately in love with Paris, or that Mercutio will just walk on by when Tybalt taunts him.

And for a miraculous moment in Peter Evans’ stripped-back production the play does still feel full of possibility. Juliet is a 12-year-old girl with her life ahead of her; Romeo is a dozy, dreamy teenager; Mercutio is Benvolio’s razor-sharp sparring partner, clearly destined for glory. But no.

Merridy Eastman and Madeline Li.Credit: Brett Boardman

The first half bristles with energy. With the actors on a mostly bare stage, dressed in shades of black (set and costume design by Anna Tregloan), the colour and movement is all in the performances and, with few exceptions, it’s dazzling.

Brittany Santariga (Mercutio) and James Thomasson (Benvolio) are a gripping double act who bounce off walls and rostra like kids on red cordial. As for Tybalt, you can almost smell the testosterone radiating from Tom Matthews’ malevolent glares. There’s a febrile brilliance to these youngsters, burning hot, bright and fast.

The older generation is no less sparky. Khisraw Jones-Shukoor’s Friar plays the flawed philosopher with understated gravity, while Merridy Eastman, as Juliet’s nurse, upstages the glamorous Capulets with delicious giggles and well-timed gags. Simone Sault’s choreography animates the Capulet’s party and Tom Royce-Hampton’s fight direction furnishes a gripping action sequence, all high-speed leaps and spins, set to the acid rasp of metal on metal.

The second half feels harder, not least because a taint of unavoidable tragedy hangs over it. Ryan Hodson is an agile, breathless Romeo, snatching excitement out of the air even as he rants and rails against his fate. Juliet’s downfall, by contrast, has something profoundly exhausting about it. Madeleine Li’s Juliet is a child playing at big feelings: her love-making with Romeo is affectingly grandiose and petulant by turn. Meanwhile, her inner world takes her to darker places.

Which brings us back to a question with creepy contemporary relevance. At what age does a girl become a woman? Even in Shakespearean times, not 12, surely.

The beauty of this production is its honesty and its unstinting commitment to the raw material, Shakespeare’s words. I heard lines spark that had never before caught my ear, and relished words spoken with the grace of poetry and the kick of prose. Any disappointment in seeing the story play out as predicted was leavened by the feeling that there was, and always will be, more to discover in these words.

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Lenny Kravitz is at his best when he lets rip with his guitar. Credit: Mia Ross

MUSIC
Lenny Kravitz
Qudos Bank Arena, November 18
Reviewed by GEORGE PALATHINGAL
★★★

They just don’t make rock stars like Lenny Kravitz. Any more? I’m not sure they ever did.

Here’s a perfectly preserved New Yorker – at 61, he genuinely looks half that – all charismatic but likeable swagger. He still sings with grit and soul, plays a bunch of instruments with effortless panache and gets some of this night’s biggest cheers when he’s merely pausing between songs. (He’s usually just thinking of something to say but still looks like a living, breathing Vogue cover.)

Here, however, lies the problem. For someone so long established as a global rock god, it’s eventually apparent that Kravitz’s best work, in a set largely comprising material from this side of 2000, came from the decade or so before that year. Those cheers of aesthetic admiration are loudest because on this tour, well, he looks better than he sounds.

The saddest case in point is his 2001 generic power ballad Stillness of Heart, in which our hero encourages a crowd sing-along without realising we don’t know this one. He’s wonderfully gracious about it, lovingly feeding us the lyrics line by line, but the moment falls awkwardly flat.

Kravitz fares best when he turns up the guitars and rocks hard: the opening trio of postmillennial tunes is pretty great, though it’s the song that follows, 1991’s Always on the Run, that takes the show to the next level, especially when the brass-boosted coda kicks in.

At 61, Kravitz is wearing remarkably well. Credit: Mia Ross

Similarly, while the closing trio of big-riffing jams also comes from the ’90s, it builds almost exponentially from his American Woman cover, through Fly Away, into a blistering, ballistic Are You Gonna Go My Way.

In between, we get a varied but – there’s that word again – generic series of songs: Low, with its clipped but aimless funk; the lite disco of The Chamber; the not so much forgettable as forgotten piano ballad I’ll Be Waiting. It’s not until the powerhouse soul of a golden oldie that arrives well past the halfway mark, It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, that we eventually hear a song as gorgeous as Kravitz is.

At least, given his apparent access to the fountain of youth, he has plenty of years left to come back with a stronger set.

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MUSIC
Simone Young Conducts Siegfried
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, November 13
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

After splintering a sword, killing a dragon and scaling a fire-covered mountain, not to mention waging a stentorian battle against 100 instrumentalists for 5½ hours, Simon O’Neill, as Siegfried, rose quietly to a top E, the orchestra now silent, to tell us that Siegfried had finally learnt the meaning of fear.

You would not have guessed it from his pure pitch and tone, which was as radiant as in the great forging song he had sung in Act 1, where he had adorned the necessary lustiness that the rugged, folk-like lines demand with smooth strength and musical shape.

Warwick Fyfe’s voice as Alberich seems to grow in elemental wildness and stature.Credit: Daniel Boud

This was a performance of astonishing stamina and commanding maturity that tempered power with lyricism, but, as the remaining half hour with Miina-Liisa Varela as Brunnhilde was to show, that was not all.

Varela’s awakening lines over the hauntingly still, simple chords Wagner writes after so much crazed chromaticism, glowed with resplendent warmth, and she retained that lustre in each moment of the duet that followed. With intertwining phrases of fiery exultance, she and O’Neill brought this superb performance of the third instalment of Simone Young and the SSO’s concert presentation over four years of Wagner’s Ring cycle to an overpowering close.

The quality of the singers Young has assembled has been an outstanding feature of the cycle to date, and Siegfried continued this with a cast that blended experience and freshness. Gerhard Siegel as Mime subtly burnished the edge of his voice towards malevolence, comedy, anger or oleaginous obsequiousness as needed, creating a mercurial gem out of the character’s sometimes tiresome peevishness.

Conductor Simone Young’s experience with Wagner was clear right from the opening prelude. Credit: Daniel Boud

As the world-wearied Wanderer (Wotan), Wolfgang Koch conjured a rounded nobility of tone in Act 1, inscrutable control in his standoff with the dwarf Alberich in Act 2 and a fiercely impassioned edge in his two great valedictory scenes in Act 3.

Warwick Fyfe’s voice as Alberich seems to grow in elemental wildness and stature each time he appears in the role, and, with assistance of wonderfully dark, polished textures from the SSO brass, he and Koch created a formidable confrontation.

Wotan’s scene with Erda embraces resignation rather than confrontation, and Noa Beinart sang this role with statuesque reserve and a shrouded tone of unvoiced mystery. If there really is an earth-goddess, one would want her to sing like that.

As the slumbering dragon, Fafner, Teddy Tahu Rhodes created cavernous echoes from the back of the stage and, after being slain, disarming directness from the front. Samantha Clarke sang the part of the Woodbird, the voice of nature that directs the naive Siegfried, with richly coloured silken sound, a refreshing change from the bell-like quality often used for this part.

The other great glory of Young’s Ring presentations is to hear the orchestral part on full stage lavished with all the expertise, polish and care of the SSO under concertmaster Andrew Haveron. Horn player David Evans delivered Siegfried’s dragon-wakening call from the high organ loft with a coloured velvety finish, and throughout the wind and brass created many-shaded timbral complexity with moments blazing brilliance and fleeting brightness.

Violas and lower strings brought even-toned depth to the important role Wagner gives these instruments in the opera’s darker textures, and the violins were both brilliantly energised in climaxes and admirably disciplined in quieter passages.

The percussion players contributed piercing anvil sounds offstage and ominous and thunderous timpani.

Young’s experience with this work was clear right from the opening prelude as she calibrated the pace to draw out tension and expressive moments, all the while maintaining magisterial continuity and flow. These Ring performances have been among the finest I have heard in the Opera House throughout its history.

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MUSIC
Addison Rae
Enmore Theatre, November 17
Reviewed by NADIA RUSSELL
★★★★

Judging by the reception for the first of her two Sydney shows, it’s clear Addison Rae is well on the way from TikTok star to pop princess.

It’s a tough transition and she’s far from the first social media star to try to make it in the mainstream – many have stumbled – but this viral TikTok dancer and former Hype House member with millions of followers has talent and charm to burn.

It hasn’t been a smooth transition. She tried acting, reality TV, make-up and clothing lines, and her initial music releases didn’t resonate. But last year’s hit single Diet Pepsi broke through and she followed it up with the album Addison earlier this year. Now, she has been nominated for a Grammy (best new artist) and her first headlining tour has produced mesmerising choreography and plenty of viral moments.

Addison Rae is well on the way to making it in the mainstream. Credit: Gabrielle Clement

If the silhouette of Rae coming out for the opener Fame Is a Gun with her headset mic doesn’t immediately evoke Britney Spears, then that is cemented by the second track I Got It Bad, which actually includes elements of Spears’ ...Baby One More Time. Scantily clad in black lingerie and donning a newscap over her pigtails, for a moment Rae seemed to perfectly channel Spears but without taking away from her own artistry and performance.

Rae may have made her mark as a singer but here she shows her range as a dancer; her vocals take a back seat during the more energetic numbers especially.

At the start of Summer Forever her voice falters in the higher register, and Headphones On is weak at times. But there are also strong vocal moments.

When Rae closes the show with Diet Pepsi, the stage is all hers. Wearing a white tutu with a long train, she knows how to own the stage without all the polish – and it would have been nice to see more of that. However, one thing is for sure: Rae knows how to get eyes on her and keep them there, whether that be on a screen or on stage.