Victorian Opera Season 2017

Victorian Opera has launched a season of fables, fairy tales and legends for 2017 - a season of rarely-heard gems, wonders of the 20th century and operatic masterpieces - from a fantastical history of the courtesan and concubine with Meow Meow, a charming puppet opera, to star sopranos Jessica Pratt and Greta Bradman together in a Bellini concert.

“Victorian Opera’s 2017 Season is a meditation on the notion of how we view reality and the way we can reflect on the real through story, particularly magical stories that are removed from the normal world. Each of the productions we’re staging is not about everyday life at all. It’s about something that is above and beyond everyday experience, in which the normal forces that shape our daily life are no longer valid. This gives us freedom both to look at ourselves and our relationships in a way that is not possible in ordinary time. Each production has a very specific musical language that creates this magical world or other kingdom,” says Artistic Director Richard Mills

International chanteuse and cabaret star Meow Meow opens the 2017 season in a new work for Victorian Opera exploring the fantastical history of the concubine and the courtesan in ’Tis Pity: An Operatic Fantasia on Selling the Skin and the Teeth for four performances only at Melbourne Recital Centre from 4-8 February 2017. Following 2015’s sell-out production of Seven Deadly Sins, Meow Meow is reunited with director Cameron Menzies. The creative duo will work together with Victorian Opera’s Artistic Director Richard Mills, who will compose and conduct the production. Mills, Meow and Menzies are currently writing the new work.

The transformative power of love takes centre stage as Victorian Opera reawakens a charming puppet retelling of The Sleeping Beauty in a new production at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse from 11-18 March 2017. Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s 1922 opera will be directed by Nancy Black, returning to Victorian Opera following Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Four Saints in Three Acts. A cast of opera singers will lend voice to puppets designed by leading Creature and Puppet Designer Joe Blanck (Walking with Dinosaurs, King Kong).

Glittering star soprano Jessica Pratt continues her close association with Victorian Opera and appears as Amina in a concert staging of Bellini’s bel canto opera La Sonnambula at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on 5 May 2017. Greta Bradman makes her debut with Victorian Opera as the meddling inn-keeper Lisa, and in his first Australian performance, grand Italian basso cantante Paolo Pecchioli joins the cast as the ‘other man’, Count Rodolfo.

Melbourne audiences will hear the forest come alive in Leoš Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen in a new production at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse from 22 June – 1 July. Director Stuart Maunder AM is reunited with Tony Award-winning designer Roger Kirk following their production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2015. Cunning Little Vixen will also mark the company debut of Sydney Chamber Opera’s Artistic Director Jack Symonds, who will conduct Jonathon Dove’s chamber orchestration of the work.

Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre will present the Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs’ cult musical fable The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets at Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse from 15 September – 8 October.

Kanen Breen (Sweeney Todd, Banquet of Secrets), Paul Capsis (The Threepenny Opera) and Meow Meow (Seven Deadly Sins) star. Malthouse Theatre’s Artistic Director Matthew Lutton takes the helm as director with musical direction from Victorian Opera’s Head of Music Phoebe Briggs.

For children, there’s the Australian premiere production of Ernst Toch’s 1927 operatic rendition of Han Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Princess and the Pea at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse with three performances of this Family Opera on Saturday 25 March 2017.

Eighty years after Aaron Copland’s youth opera premiered in New York, The Second Hurricane makes its Victorian Opera debut as the company’s Youth Opera in October 2017. Part of the company’s Education Program, it will be performed by a cast of singers aged 15-25 together with students from Victorian Opera’s Youth Chorus Ensemble (VOYCE).

Victorian Opera gives insight into the process of developing a new Australian opera with live-streamed event Three Tales, together with ensemble Plexus and composers Stefan Cassomenos, Dermot Tutty, Katie Noonan and Zac Hurren on October 27.

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is revisited in a new work from Gordon Kerry and John Kinsella, commissioned specifically for Wodonga.

In partnership with The Australia Council for the Arts and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Victorian Opera also heads to Hobart as part of an ongoing commitment to staging opera in Tasmania. Following its season at Arts Centre Melbourne, Respighi’s The Sleeping Beauty will be the first production to travel south.

victorianopera.com.au / 1300 822 849