Mozart’s ‘Abduction’ gets a wildly modern makeover
By Barney Zwartz, Tony Way, Marcus Teague and Andrew Fuhrmann
OPERA
Abduction ★★★★
Victorian Opera, Palais Theatre, until August 16
Victorian Opera took a massive, though calculated risk with Abduction at the Palais on Tuesday and, judging by the ecstatic reaction from an unusually young audience, it paid off handsomely.
Cleo Lee-McGowan as Konstanze.Credit: Jeff Busby
Once you accept that it is a long way from Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and take it simply on its own terms, it is easy to see why. This bold and imaginative staging is moved several centuries forward from a Turkish harem to 2025 Melbourne in a cult temple/sex club.
The text is entirely rewritten for modern sensibilities by director Constantine Costi, and its wit and self-parody clearly struck a chord with the audience. The music is heavily cut, with other bits of Mozart blended in, including, oddly, a kyrie eleison (“Lord have mercy” from the Catholic mass), but few in the audience would know or care.
Victorian Opera took a calculated risk with their new production, Abduction.Credit: Jeff Busby
As with any “relocation”, sometimes it leads to a strange split. For example, in Costi’s revision, the two heroines are not abducted but enter the club out of curiosity, and Konstanze has just been told she can leave any time when she sings that she is determined to resist torture and torment of every kind.
Mozart wrote the roles for specific singers, which means two are fiendishly difficult: Konstanze’s coruscating coloratura and Osmin’s sustained ultra-low bass. The five well-cast young soloists – Cleo Lee-McGowan (Konstanze), Luke Stoker (Osmin), Kyle Stegall (Belmonte), Katherine Allen (Blonde) and Douglas Kelly (Pedrillo) – did show occasional signs of strain but were generally excellent. Lee-McGowan, in particular, was ravishing at times.
Orchestra Victoria was, as always, highly accomplished, and sensitively led by Chad Kelly, whose swift pace and sense of momentum papered over a couple of production cracks. Sets and costumes by Nathan Burmeister and Matilda Woodroofe were lavish, lurid and effective. But the production belongs to Costi, who largely realises his vision of making Mozart’s themes contemporary with an ideal introduction to opera.
Reviewed by Barney Zwartz
MUSIC
Takács Quartet with Angie Milliken ★★★★★
Musica Viva, Melbourne Recital Centre, August 14
In a very welcome return to Melbourne, the Takács Quartet reaffirmed itself as probably the best string quartet on the planet.
Takács Quartet perform at Melbourne Recital Centre, August 14. 2025. Credit: Cameron Jamieson
Haydn’s Quartet in G minor, Op. 74, No. 3 was a splendid curtain-raiser, showcasing the group’s burnished, multifaceted tone. Like looking into a gemstone, there were flashes of brilliance but beguiling depths of colour. After revelling in the quick-witted interplay of parts in the first movement, there came a superbly controlled second-movement choral. So ebullient was the finale that the audience burst into applause before the end.
Brisbane-born, Berlin-based composer Cathy Milliken’s Sonnet of an Emigrant after Bertolt Brecht for narrator and string quartet was commissioned for Musica Viva’s 80th anniversary season. In marrying Brecht’s poetry of displacement with fragmented reminiscences of the Viennese modernism with which many musical refugees would have been familiar, Millikin has created an evocative meditation on loss and new beginnings. The empathetic narration by the composer’s sister Angie Milliken alternated between English and German, underlining a loss of belonging.
At the heart of the program was Beethoven’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3. The vastly different timbres of the first two chords signalled that this would be an engrossing account. Indeed, it riveted listeners for some 30 minutes.
After the initial brilliance of C major, it was hard not to swoon to the ensuing Andante, beautifully underpinned by András Fejér’s cello. A vividly contrasted Menuetto led directly into the fugato finale, taken at breakneck speed and overflowing with energy and excitement.
A generous encore, the second movement of Ravel’s String Quartet, captivated not only with its exquisite elegance but with the most luscious pizzicato anyone could hope to hear this side of the pearly gates.
Such heavenly music making really does put the Takács Quartet in a class of its own.
Reviewed by Tony Way
MUSIC
Elevator Music ★★★★
Omega Ensemble, Melbourne Recital Centre, August 16
Despite the tenuous link between elevators and this Omega Ensemble program, most of the music seemed to be chosen to lift listeners’ spirits.
Elevator Music is the title of a jazz-infused work by Adelaide-based composer Graeme Koehne, which (confusingly) was not performed. Koehne, however, provided a new work for orchestra and two clarinets to showcase the talents of English virtuoso Michael Collins and Omega’s artistic director David Rowden.
Dances on the Edge of Time (a title derived from poetry by Rabindranath Tagore) consists of three movements (a rigaudon, a chaconne and a gigue), each tagged with a phrase from the popular aphorism attributed to baseballer Leroy “Satchel” Paige: “Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt and dance like nobody’s watching.”
Collins and Rowden, along with the rest of the ensemble, willingly followed Paige’s advice. Surmounting a buoyant rhythmic accompaniment, the ascending solo lines of the rigaudon radiated a carefree approach. Classic gestures in the chaconne spoke of loss then love, while the concluding gigue hinted at the rustic style of Australian musical larrikin Percy Grainger.
Koehne’s concerto was preceded by the instantly recognisable Allegro from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, whose jollity stood in stark contrast to Stride by American composer Anna Clyne.
Drawing material from Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, Clyne’s often busy and astringent soundscape created episodes of tension and release.
Originally written for swing jazz legend Benny Goodman, Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, with its masterly writing for both orchestra and soloist, was brilliantly executed by Collins. Effortlessly negotiating its melodious languor and its infectious rhythmic energy, Collins happily and vividly brought the music alive in time and space.
Arranged for two clarinets, the final movement from Elena Kats-Chernin’s Ornamental Air proved the perfect encore, taking the mood, as it were, to the top floor.
Reviewed by Tony Way
MUSIC
Press Club ★★★★
Corner Hotel, August 8
“You should see the piece of skin hanging off my shin,” says Press Club singer Natalie Foster of the blood trickling down her leg, just four songs in. “It scared me. I’ve only seen that once before when I was 18 and fell off a construction site drinking tequila.”
Press Club perform at the Corner Hotel on Friday, August 8.Credit: Martin Philbey
This banter could be a manifesto for her jangly, garage-punk quartet. Misadventures and big emotions, testing limits and returning home to report on them: they’re key themes throughout the Brunswick group’s catalogue. Since their debut in 2017, the staunchly DIY Press Club have been on a tear – stomping across world stages and releasing four LPs in quick succession.
Tonight they’re launching their latest, the sugary punk sheen of To All the Ones I Love. It also makes for an emotional homecoming, laced with a slight hint of exhaustion, to close the band’s 10-week, 30-date European and Australian tour.
Following a walk-on to the moody I Am Everything, Press Club throw everything at it. “We’re from Melbourne,” says Foster before a blistering Cancelled. “Feels f---ing good to be playing our hometown.”
The gig served as both an album launch and an emotional homecoming for the band.Credit: Martin Philbey
The celebratory Headwreck ignites the first singalong, and from there it’s over to Foster to pull focus – be it via bloody injuries or her incredible voice, which retains its husky, impeccably roaring croon even when she’s mid-headbang, pulling a handstand mid-verse of Coward Street, or lost deep in the crowd.
Around her the band sizzles on Greg Rietwyk’s relentlessly melodic guitar lines, Iain MacRae’s excellent burbling bass and the breakneck drumming of Timmy Hansen, filling in for founding member Frank Lees, who’s on parental leave.
Dynamics of a punk show can be tricky – if every song allegedly inspires catharsis, after a while the stakes don’t seem as high. Press Club mitigate this with clever stylistic detours. Mid-show highlight Untitled Wildlife features Stu Patterson from support band Placement lend wailing saxophone to an indie-rock build that culminates in real anthemic alchemy. Suburbia, from the band’s debut, Late Teens, remains the perfect set closer, Foster yelling, “I can’t relate to letting all your dreams go”, while instructing the crowd to launch themselves one last time.
Back for an encore, Foster takes the dying minute of joyous, Smiths-y closer Wilt to jump into the crowd and make her way over to help out at the merchandise desk. As we file out, she’s there keeping the dream alive.
Reviewed by Marcus Teague
DANCE
Phantasm ★★★
Chunky Move Studios, until August 16
The title of Melanie Lane’s new show suggests a singular, self-contained vision. In the event, however, it unfolds as a plurality of figments and counterfeits drawn from the archives of popular culture with only the loosest thematic connection.
The setting is impressive. Working with designers Eugyeene Teh and Bosco Shaw, Lane constructs a wonderfully gothic space enclosed by solid walls of darkness, filled with haze and crossed with scrims.
Phantasm takes place in a wonderfully gothic space.Credit: Gregory Lorenzutti
A lone dancer drops into this lowermost dungeon of the mind. She bites the head off a rat, blood running over her chin, then jerks and twitches, hands vibrating like a plucked string.
It’s a strong opening, with the promise of something visceral, bloody and unexpected: a feminine nexus of death, desire and horror, darkly animate. Yet little of this intensity carries through the rest of the work.
Phantasm, the title of Melanie Lane’s new show, suggests a singular, self-contained vision.Credit: Gregory Lorenzutti
We move through predictable variations: exotic dancers, demonic cheerleaders, gothic heroines, romantic ballerinas, witches on broomsticks. Some, like the witches suspended above the stage, are more interesting than others.
They are all, however, fairly generic images. They’re types or figures, mythic only in the rather desolate sense that they are overexposed: tropes of femininity endlessly adapted and exploited by mass culture.
We rely on the movement to give these figures new relevance, and to provide the thread that might bind them into a collective phantasm. This doesn’t happen. Instead, the dance often settles into familiarity.
Costumes are exiguous and change often: witches’ rags give way to tinselled cheer skirts, then tutus. Only mushroom-coloured bodystockings remain constant, giving, at a squint, the illusion of nudity.
In the final scene, the bodystocking is also stripped away. The setting shifts to a primeval forest where the women exchange gestures of care. The implication seems to be that this is the real myth behind the others: a return to some essentialised, pastoral femininity.
I’m not convinced. This image of the natural woman seems just as constructed and just as overexposed as the others. Does Lane really intend this as a return to the body in its purest form? Surely this is just another costume to be sloughed?
In the end, this haphazard tour through popular images of the supernatural feminine is less persuasive than other of Lane’s shorter works, where historical detail and a clear sense of time ground the mythic in the specific.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
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