‘Ridiculous situation’: Former boss unloads on Opera Australia
Opera Australia is under the management of an acting CEO as deficits from its operations are mounting and its board and executive are the subject of an external review. As Lyndon Terracini ventures out on his own, he reveals where the company should go next.
When Lyndon Terracini called time on his 13-year reign at Opera Australia in October 2022, it seems no one insisted that the former artistic director be made to sign a non-compete clause.
“I don’t think anyone leaves an opera company to start up another opera company,” he says with a wry laugh.
Nevertheless, that’s what he’s done – albeit on a much smaller scale than the national opera company, and away from the Sydney Opera House and other capital city theatres.
Across the Easter weekend, Terracini is launching the inaugural Handa Opera at Millthorpe, a three-day festival of concerts, talks, food and wine in the historic titular township, which is just over three hours west of Sydney in the Central West of NSW, where he and his wife, singer Noemi Nadelmann, have made their country home.
If the name Handa has a familiar ring, it’s because Terracini has once again called upon the generosity of Dr Haruhisa Handa – the reclusive Japanese billionaire and religious figure who has bankrolled Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour since Terracini launched the annual season of outdoor performances in 2012.
Terracini is frankly dismissive about the latest show that opened there last month, saying: “I didn’t create Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour to do Guys and Dolls … that was absolutely not the idea.” But those nights of music and romance on a floating stage that Terracini initiated remain one of his great achievements.
So, how much has Handa tipped into Terracini’s latest venture in Millthorpe?
“It’s certainly not what he puts into Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour,” he says. “But without (his support), I couldn’t do the festival.”
The Millthorpe event will rely entirely on money from ticket sales and contributions from stalwart supporters of Terracini’s – Philip Bacon, David Mortimer and John Frost – as well as from Handa. Unlike at Opera Australia, where state and federal subsidies now exceed $30m a year, Terracini says he has not sought government funding.
Total turnover for Handa Opera at Millthorpe is expected to be just above $200,000 – a mere fraction of Opera Australia’s $148m in 2022, Terracini’s last year with the company.
He has not exactly been in the wilderness since then, and nor was he ready to retire. He has been looking for a new project, and had considered possible openings in Europe.
Still, at 75, he is embarking on a new venture when many are well into the autumn years of retirement.
Handa Opera at Millthorpe came about after he and Nadelmann bought an acreage at Guyong, not far from Millthorpe between Bathurst and Orange.
“We’d been looking for a place outside of Sydney, where we might live when I finished at Opera Australia, and somewhere we felt comfortable,” Terracini says.
He and Nadelmann, a glamorous Swiss soprano, married in 2019, after reigniting a relationship they’d started decades earlier.
“We looked at a few places that didn’t work out,” Terracini continues. “And, of course, when you start looking online, it seems that every real estate agent in Australia has your address.
“A photograph of this place came up – I showed it to Noemi and we came and had a look. We loved it, loved the climate, loved the house. It was built in 1861.”
The property has some cattle and chickens, and Terracini is building a loft for his homing pigeons, again taking up a hobby he enjoyed when he was a kid in Sydney.
“We were welcomed with open arms,” Terracini says of his new community.
“It can be a peculiar situation when strangers come into a small community, the way people react. Here it has been terrific. We have some wonderful friends. And the aesthetic of the village – it’s as though the world passed Millthorpe by in the 1920s. It’s like a village you find in Europe, but it’s got a real Australian feel to it.”
Conceptually, the opera festival brings together Terracini’s belief that an artist be part of and make work in his own community, and also his memory of a formative experience in Italy when he was a young singer.
He was a twenty-something baritone when he sang in an opera by Hans Werner Henze, El Cimarron, at the 1976 Adelaide Festival. He evidently made an impression on the German composer, who then invited him to a summer music festival in Montepulciano, Italy, the Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte (International Art Workshop).
Terracini describes it as an exercise in arts and community-making. He appeared as Sancho Panza in the opera Paisiello’s Don Chisciotte della Mancia (Don Quixote), and the production involved the whole town, where local women made the costumes, children painted the posters, and the piazza was adorned with windmills.
It was a similar model that Terracini, after he returned to Australia, initiated with Northern Rivers Performing Arts in Lismore, NSW, and is now bringing to the state’s Central West.
“You know, the whole fantasy of me retiring was never going to happen,” he says. “I’ve always believed that an artist lives in a community – and I still think of myself as a singer. Any artist who lives in a community, I think, should contribute to that community.”
Millthorpe, population 1300, is a charming heritage town with bluestone buildings, stone cottages, and handsome public buildings with deep, shady verandas. The town had a population of 1347 in the 2021 census, and Terracini wouldn’t mind if all had part to play in Handa Opera at Millthorpe.
Schoolchildren have designed posters for the festival, and local people are invited to sit in on rehearsals for free. Each of the four concerts seats 200, and about half of the tickets across the weekend, Terracini says, have been sold to residents from the region.
“The hall has a great wooden floor and a pressed-metal ceiling – so the acoustic is fantastic,” he says. “Millthorpe has three wonderful cellar doors within 50m of the hall, it’s got a hatted restaurant, a wonderful boutique. The pub is terrific – if I go there for a drink, it’s having a great conversation with the people who go there.
“It’s that combination that is really attractive, and you can walk everywhere. As we know, whether it’s the Adelaide Festival or any festival, it really works when you can walk to all the places you need to go.”
The festival program is something of a family affair. Nadelmann is singing a concert of songs by George Gershwin and Cole Porter, and Paul Terracini, Lyndon’s younger brother, is conducting the Ku-ring-gai Philharmonic Orchestra for the gala concert on the first evening.
“My brother is a well-known composer and conductor – he’s had commissions from the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and he’s conducted operas through Europe,” Terracini says.
“Obviously I could never hire him for Opera Australia, so I’m thrilled that we’re able to work together. With Noemi too, for the same reason, I could never engage her. She has this Gershwin and Cole Porter concert that she does with (pianist) Andre Desponds – she’s fabulous in it, and he’s brilliant. It’s great to be able to work with people who I wasn’t able to work with before.”
Also featured are artists well-known to Opera Australia audiences, including soprano Natalie Aroyan, Italian baritone Giorgio Caoduro in an evening of Rossinian effervescence, and violinist Jun Yi Ma, formerly concertmaster of the Opera Australia Orchestra. Up-and-coming singers are showcased in an afternoon concert billed as Stars of Tomorrow.
The opening gala promises a night of opera’s greatest hits, including Vissi d’Arte from Tosca, the Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Nessun Dorma, and the bromance duet from The Pearl Fishers, among other favourites.
“As I said to people in the pub, ‘You’ll recognise them, you will have heard them as television commercials – but this is how they’re supposed to sound’,” Terracini says.
A small opera festival in a country town may attract some attention in the big smoke but people are taking notice because Terracini is doing it.
During his 13 years at Opera Australia he attracted admirers and detractors seemingly in equal measure. Among the complaints are that he relied too much on Broadway musicals, and too little on Australian opera singers.
Even so, with the hindsight of only a few years, his reign has come to be seen as a golden period for the company – terrific nights at the opera that included two Ring cycles, epic Verdi, a host of exciting international and Australian singers, and new ventures including a made-for-TV opera and, of course, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour.
In the time since he left, Opera Australia has shed both its chief executive, Fiona Allan, and its new artistic director, Jo Davies, a Welsh opera and musicals director who barely seemed to have arrived. The company is under the management of an acting CEO, deficits from operations are mounting, and its board and executive are the subject of an external review.
There’s talk about whether Opera Australia may dispense with the position of artistic director altogether and opt for a different management structure. Terracini says he has no inside information about that, but he isn’t thrilled at the prospect.
“You have to have an artistic director,” he says, flatly.
“Any arts organisation that doesn’t have an artistic director is a ridiculous situation. You can’t have an arts organisation without an artistic head. So the idea of not having an artistic director is just ridiculous.
“Ultimately, with any organisation – not only an arts organisation, whether it’s a business or whatever – then the ultimate responsibility has to fall back on the board,” he says.
“I think the board needs to make some extremely important decisions, very soon. And those decisions will affect the future of Opera Australia as we know it.”
In Millthorpe, Terracini can enjoy the fun of organising opera without the heavy business of running a national opera company.
“I started talking to people about it here and they said it sounds fantastic,” Terracini says.
“I just thought, ‘I’ll go for it’. I’ve been really chuffed by the level of support and enthusiasm.”
Handa Opera at Millthorpe runs from April 18-20.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout