Simon Rattle, The Ring Cycle and the devil’s Russian hijinks
The arts should excite dormant senses, tickle the grey matter and make us feel alive. These stage productions did just that.
An attempt to sum up and rank by merit and equally weighted criteria the year’s full slate of performing arts across the nation and all artforms would be an attempt doomed to failure. So we won’t be doing that.
But allow this writer to nominate a handful of performances that stood out for their intensity, artistic magnificence and inventiveness. We should demand nothing less of the arts than that they should excite dormant senses, tickle the grey matter, make us feel alive. After all, we don’t go to the theatre to be bored. The following shows from the past year were outstanding because they reaffirmed one’s faith in live performance — an experience that can only be had in the theatre or concert hall.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
London Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House
Conductor Simon Rattle brought the London Symphony Orchestra to Australia for a final fling before he stepped down as music director from the British orchestra and prepared to take up the baton in Munich. His three-city tour took in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and Sydney had the benefit of three concert programs at the Opera House. The two Sydney concerts I heard were a revelation, the first opening with Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s musical welcome to country, Tarimi Nulay, and the rhythmic propulsion of John Adams’s Harmonielehre. T
he main course was Debussy’s great symphonic tone-painting La Mer, in Rattle’s hands rendered with deep surges of orchestral sound and flecks of instrumental highlights. The third concert program was built around Bruckner’s mighty Symphony No 7, Wagnerian in its range and tragic grandeur. No detail was overlooked by the LSO players, and it was thrilling to hear this great orchestra in the new clarity of the refurbished Concert Hall.
THEATRE
The Master and Margarita
Belvoir
Of the year’s theatre offerings in Sydney, The Master and Margarita stood out as a wild theatrical adventure, attended by a thrilling sense of danger. The adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire of life in Stalin’s Moscow was written and directed by Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack, who streamlined and made sense of a book teeming with characters and storylines. The brilliant cast of 10 was led by Paula Arundell as Woland, aka Satan, standing in for You Know Who. It was quite something when the full cast came on stage, naked, for the dance at Woland’s Ball. And I’ve never seen the fourth wall broken with such delicious aplomb as when Margarita (Anna Samson) made her flight as a witch over Moscow. Most exciting of all was that The Master and Margarita banished dullness and returned the audience to a place of pure theatrical play. A close tie for the year’s top theatre is Dutch director Ivo van Hove’s utterly absorbing, four-hour adaptation of A Little Life, the epic by Hanya Yanagihara that follows the lives of four male friends. Presented by the Adelaide Festival, and performed entirely in Dutch, it was a fully realised piece of theatre, utterly harrowing but also tender in its humanity.
OPERA
The Tales of Hoffmann
Opera Australia
The Brisbane Ring Cycle that concluded on Thursday was without question the major undertaking by the national opera company this year, postponed twice because of the pandemic. The world’s first fully digital Ring Cycle was epic, dazzling in its video images, and wonderfully sung by the Australian and international cast. This writer’s top opera performance for 2023, though, was Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by Damiano Michieletto for OA in a co-production with the Royal Opera. It had one of the best musical tricks a coloratura soprano can have up her sleeve: Jessica Pratt singing the four principal soprano roles in each of the four tales, following in the footsteps of Joan Sutherland, no less. She nailed the vocal delivery and brought the characters to life on stage. The exceptional cast also featured Peruvian tenor Ivan Ayon Rivas as Hoffmann, and Croatian bass-baritone Marko Mimica as the villains. Magic tricks, dancers and acrobats enlivened the stage picture, and Guillaume Tourniaire conducting the Opera Australia Orchestra conjured a suave and detailed reading of Offenbach’s score.
DANCE
Salamander
Brisbane Festival
Part dance, part art installation, Salamander was a collaboration between British choreographer Maxine Doyle and designer Es Devlin, with music by Rachael Dease. It was staged in a warehouse on the Brisbane River, with an audience of just 200 people a time, giving the performance the atmosphere of an immersive, multi-sensory installation. In the first part, a Perspex maze surrounded by water suggested an aqueous, sci-fi world from which there is no escape. The emergence of the dancers from the Australasian Dance Collective — their bodies pulsing like amphibians from the deep — was thrillingly realised, creating the sense of an oppressive, waterlogged world.
In part two the audience was seated around a circular stage on which was mounted a long red table that rotated from the centre. At first the table was a place for celebration, but as the rotations increased to a dangerous speed it became clear more was at stake. When water started to fall on the stage as rain, it became clear that time is running out for humanity. Salamander was a compelling metaphor for the climate crisis, and an unforgettable theatrical experience.