Reviews

It’s a sunny spring Saturday afternoon in Sydney! The harbour is sparkling, the city bustling. Crowds chat and stroll or snap photographs on the forecourt of the Opera House.

Inside The House, in the Concert Hall, over 400 singers fill the balconies behind and above 74 musicians on the stage. And an audience of over 2,000 wait expectantly for conductor Brett Weymark to enter and introduce yet another exceptional performance by the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and Parramatta’s River City Voices.

Composing something pithy, beautiful and appropriate for the Sun King couldn’t have been easy.  Marc-Antoine Charpentier hit gold with these two short operas created for the private soirees which Louis XIV held in his apartments at Versailles from 1682. 

In some magical programming, Pinchgut Opera artfully stages them with five singers backed by Erin Helyard on harpsichord and the Orchestra of the Antipodes.

SLUTNIK™ 2 is (obviously) the sequel to SLUTNIK™ 1 and fans of SLUTNIK™ 1 – of whom there are many, judging by the gleeful opening night audience for SLUTNIK™ 2 – will know the backstory.

For beginners, in SLUTNIK™ 1, one hundred years ago a legendary crew of lesbian space cannibals [plus robot MOTHERBOARD] left Earth to escape the patriarchy. 

Humans don't like the liminal. We recoil from the “not quite” human of the stray hair or abandoned toenail, but the liminal space created in this new work by Stephanie Francis is a lacuna in which to consider human existence when it is not quite one thing or the other.