Source : the age
After several years plagued by management volatility and financial strife, Opera Australia is pitching its 2027 season as one of stability and renewed ambition with a varied slate of productions for Sydney and Melbourne. The new season ranges from a new David McVicar production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser to a family-friendly, steampunk Magic Flute, two major Australian operas and the return of Gilbert and Sullivan to the Sydney Opera House.
This will be the first season for newly appointed director of opera Amy Lane, who is presently serving out her time as artistic director of the Copenhagen Opera Festival. She will join OA full time after delivering her final event in Denmark this month and said she was excited for the company’s future.
“It does feel strangely like, after a slightly bumpy period, that the ground is kind of fertile for us to go, ‘OK, what are we planting and what are we going to see in our five-year round?’” she said.
Lane joins Alex Budd (CEO) and music director Andrea Battistoni in a revamped leadership team, wiping the slate clean from the revolving-door era of Jo Davies and Fiona Allan.
The big-ticket item for 2027 will be staged not in the Sydney Opera House but at Melbourne’s State Theatre, which will come as a relief to the city’s opera fans, who have suffered slim pickings for the past three years while the venue has been closed for renovations.
Tannhäuser is a monumental work requiring an orchestra too big for the pit at the Opera House’s Joan Sutherland theatre – not to mention the massive off-stage brass ensemble scored by Wagner. OA will be hoping fans from Sydney and beyond will make the trip to Melbourne to see Scottish director McVicar’s vision for Tannhäuser.
“His take on it is so extraordinary,” said Lane. “Only David’s mind could work in this brilliant way to find a pathway through this piece to make it enticing, not just for those who love Wagner, but for those who want to be in the theatre.”
She described initial meetings with McVicar, where he outlined his vision for Tannhäuser as “exhilarating”.
In Sydney, OA is pitching the Australian premiere of Scottish Opera’s well-reviewed Magic Flute as a show for all ages in its continuing bid to capture young opera fans.
“We’re trying to program family operas and build on that,” said planning and program director Ruth Thomas. “We had Hansel and Gretel earlier this year and last year we had Cendrillon [Cinderella] so we want to try and keep that [going].”
Sydney’s season opens with the local premiere of perhaps the world’s best-loved opera, Puccini’s La Boheme, which has its world premiere in Melbourne in November. Sydney audiences also get a return of Simon Phillips’ production of Donizetti’s frothy comic opera The Elixir of Love, complete with ocker-ised surtitles.
Also coming to Sydney is an intriguing double-bill of one-act French works. Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges will feature much-loved Australian mezzo soprano Margaret Plummer. La Voix humaine, by Francis Poulenc, is a one-woman opera in which the woman makes a final phone call with her faithless lover.
“You hear her side of the conversation as we as an audience have to imagine what she is hearing,” said Lane. “It is painfully intimate and so vulnerable.”
Sydney’s winter season features a return of McVicar’s lush production of Faust plus Stuart Maunder’s knockabout Pirates of Penzance and a Sydney premiere of Verdi’s A Masked Ball.
Melbourne also gets that city’s premiere of Ann Yee’s Turandot, the Magic Flute and Leah Purcell’s stunning The Drover’s Wife. And in a left-field programming decision, Melbourne fans will get a one-off performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Opera Australia Chorus and Orchestra Victoria.
“What we’ve been working with is variety and pushing our elbows out just a little bit more to go, where else can we go?” Lane said.
“What else can we look at? What haven’t we had here for a while? What do we consider to be our classics? How are we re-imagining classics if we’re doing that? And what might people buy a ticket for that they haven’t heard?”
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