By Peter McCallum
The Marriage of Figaro
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, July 31
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★
Driven by a minute focus on the follies of human motivation that unsettle the rigid force fields of class, gender and power, David McVicar’s 2015 production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro has become a jewel in Opera Australia’s repertoire.
It is helped in no small way by Jenny Tiramani’s design, which incrementally places each act in a closet, a bedroom, a grand hall and the great outdoors, and clothes the characters in the warm drabness of unbleached fabric.
At the start and end of each act, female servants run to draw a large fraying curtain, like an aging window drape that doesn’t really conceal anything, while the army of prying servants primarily occupy themselves with eavesdropping through the nearest keyhole. It somehow becomes heartwarming that things always go wrong and to see the lies piled upon lies in the great act two finale collapse into joyous chaos.
Siobhan Stagg established the character of Susanna with the simple beauty and attractiveness of her voice. Credit: Keith Saunders
Yet this on its own would not sustain this revival were it not for an equally bejewelled cast in which each character is defined and refined by distinctive vocal fabric. Each number enveloped the listener anew in the bright freshness of Mozart’s seemingly endless melodic inspiration.
With the single word “Cinque” (“Five” – he is measuring a bed) baritone Michael Sumuel established a robust, rich vocal presence that immediately caught the ear. His Non piu andrai at the end of act one had well-edged articulation and buoyant rhythmic vigour, and he animated the stage throughout with naturally responsive musical and dramatic energy, as though always on the brink of some new lame idea.
As Susanna, Siobhan Stagg was the musical opposite, establishing the character with the simple beauty and attractiveness of her voice. It had ample power when needed but was at its most touching in moments like her act four aria, Deh vieni, sung in front of the curtain, where she revealed hidden soft lights against the orchestra’s transparently coloured wind solos.
Each character is defined and refined by distinctive vocal fabric.Credit: Keith Saunders
Against such honest straightforward tones, it fell to Kiandra Howarth to find a new sound for the Countess’s woe. In her act two aria, Porgi amor, she insinuated a loftier shade, swelling to blushing colour yet always with an immaculately smooth surface, and developed these shades with further depth and nuance in Dove sono in act three.
Gordon Bintner was an imperious, coercive and thoroughly unpleasant Count singing Vedro, mentr’io sospiro in act three with sinister control and aloof precision that was both comic in its impotence and menacing in intent. As an androgenous Cherubino, Emily Edmonds sang Non so piu in act one with pantingly precise rhythmic articulation.
Voi, che sapete in act two had rounded warmth in sound, suggesting a hint of adult passion behind the well-behaved primness of the phrases. As Barbarina, who is required to sing the opera’s most plaintive music over a lost pin, Celeste Lazarenko’s was shaped and well-rounded. It was gratifying to hear the vocal maturity that Richard Anderson brought to Dr Bartolo’s act one aria La vendetta in which he mixed command of line with almost spiteful precision.
Dominica Matthews brought well-characterised roughness to the role of Marcellina and Virgilio Marino sang Don Basilio with oleaginous obsequiousness. The Opera Australia Chorus animated the finales with thrilling edge, the women singing the cameo choruses with balanced poise.
Conductor Matteo Dal Maso led a nervously energised overture and nicely ironic marches from the Opera Australia Orchestra. With some judicious cuts and good pacing from Dal Maso, act four avoided the sagging momentum that plagues some Figaros and the standing ovation at the end suggested no-one was even thinking about the last train.
THEATRE
WERKAHOLICS
Belvoir St Theatre, August 1
Until August 17
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★
This much is true: the chaotic good of the first half of Vivian Nguyen’s new play werkaholics can be very good. It’s when we meet and kind of begin to adore our leads – two super dramatic young Asian-Australian besties, each doing their (worst) best to #manifest their ideal lives in this, this, dream-crushing economy.
Early on we get to eat up the totally extra comedic performances of Georgia Yenna Oom as Lillian, an extremely pretty (and she knows it) Instagram influencer; and of Shirong Wu as the hilariously moody Jillian, a queer chronically out-of-work actor and grumpy unpaid underling to her self-obsessed, ruthlessly aspirational friend. Wu’s second small role as a fretfully intrusive mum – with clear homage to Fountain Lakes’ Kath – is also a pure treat in a permed wig.
Georgia Yenna Oom (Lillian) and Shirong Wu (Jillian). Credit:
In many of these early scenes, the audience has great fun. A giddy anticipation ramps up.
Yet what begins under Nicole Pingon’s direction as a vigorously silly examination of cancel culture, the grind, intersectional feminism and authenticity in our “fake it till you make it” late capitalist digital era soon loses itself in a muddle of hyperbolic cynicism. If my review were over text message, I’d send a flurry of heart-eyes emojis and then a GIF of the Always Sunny Charlie Conspiracy meme.
Plot, tone and character maniacally veer in a new direction, and all that care we had invested in our relatable pair gets sucker-punched. Pop culture reference-stacked Gen Z humour cedes to jarring dystopian despair, where betrayal is the inevitable order of the day.
It’s a bit of a dismaying progression to the denouement, and our leads seem to feel it too – their previously hyper-animated performances becoming hapless and schlumpy. The sound design also becomes odd and squelchy; the lighting frantic.
I suspect the character of Sage might have something to do with all of this. Sage aka the debt collector aka the mysterious “Unmoi”, a shadowy internet figure who purges the feed in a vindictive and fanatical mission towards total transparency, and is more monstrous in her sneering (white) righteousness than the desperation-driven frauds she exposes. Ruby Duncan’s portrayal – as a kind of red pill vigilante – routinely clashes with the bubblegum absurdity of Lillian and Jillian, and her billowing evil eventually swallows them up. This is no more evident than in the final scenes, which spring a nihilistic surprise climax.
In front of two huge 16:9 screens showing a cursed agglomeration of browser windows (put together by an inspired Harrison Hall for Ruby Jenkins’ set), Sage will also step outside the story at intervals and pose as a kind of Internet prophet and all-powerful adjudicator. In dark glasses, she spits sermons on false idols from a dimly lit stage. Direct to audience, we’re made to understand she’s the one controlling the narrative.
There’s a truly worthy modern fable glimmering in this work. If the production had been more subtle in its efforts to disturb, werkaholics might have won over a lot of young, jaded, broke-ass hearts.
MUSIC
Javier Perianes performs Saint-Saens
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Opera House, July 30
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
During the early 20th century it became the habit of some English writers to dismiss “mere virtuosity” as a symbol of shallowness, vanity and the European (particularly French) moral decline. Yet Camille Saint-Saens, in writing about his Piano Concerto No. 5 stated that he wanted to defend virtuosity for its picturesque capabilities.
In his performance of that concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and German conductor Kevin John Edusei, Spanish pianist Javier Perianes became the perfect advocate for a type of virtuosity that boosts the music’s spirit rather than the performer’s ego. He scattered the first movement with graceful starbursts of brilliance, executed with sophisticated elegance and never a hint of harshness or stridency, while always retaining deep affinity for the music’s tone.
In the exotic second movement, recalling Saint-Saens’ trip through Egypt and Africa as far as Vietnam, Perianes played with the ringing clarity of improvised song against swirling turbulence from the orchestra, moving to a warmer quieter melody that the composer said was a Nubian love song he heard on the Nile.
In the finale, as though enjoying a moment of provocative vulgarity, Saint-Saens imitates the paddle steamer’s churning wheels, and Perianes and the orchestra rode the music’s surging torrent with glittering, perilous excitement.
It would be hard to find a more complete musical opposite to this than the work played in the second half, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 in A major, Opus 141, his last, written four years before his death. Philosopher Theodor Adorno noted that the maturity of late artistic works “is not like the ripeness of fruit” but, rather, they are wrinkled and fissured. Although he was speaking of Beethoven his words have resonance for this austere yet totally absorbing work.
Edusei unfolded its structure with exacting concentration which bound the audience’s attention. A ping from the glockenspiel at the start unleashes a bright flute melody (Emma Sholl) and the first movement is largely engaged in playful rhythmic games. At one point the music introduces a well-known quotation from Rossini’s William Tell overture as though it had come to mind through the musical equivalent of word association.
The SSO and Edusei had played Rossini’s actual overture with animated vivacity at the start of the concert. Although listeners don’t exactly need reminding of how it goes, this gesture saved Rossini from the indignity of appearing only as a cliché in Shostakovich’s sardonic eye.
After premonitory brass chords in the second movement, cellist Catherine Hewgill led the mood to soul-searching expressiveness. This movement eventually rises above its desultory stride to a determined climactic moment, the centre point of the entire work. The third movement relapses to bizarre sarcasm and the fourth moulds the brass sound that opened the second movement into another, less capricious quotation, Wagner’s “fate” motif from Die Walkure. The music fragments and grows increasingly spare, returning at the close to the symphony’s opening ideas. Even the rhythmic chirpiness is recalled as though the troubled composer had come to look on both pleasure and pain with detachment, if not indifference.