Reviews

Carmen, the world’s most popular opera, was a good choice for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s final 2017 Gala. Performed as a concert, it was a bells-and-whistles grand affair with a Children’s Chorus, the Opera Q Chorus, guest dancers from the Queensland Ballet, students from Lisa Gasteen National Opera School, and three acclaimed international artists making their Australian debuts in principal roles - indeed, a surfeit of riches.

A bloke in a work shirt, outside in his garden, belts out a song into the ‘microphone’ of his garden hose.  Inside, a tired woman comes home from work and lapses into a detailed-but-romantic private sexual fantasy… until her prickly, depressed daughter walks in.  They’re all expecting the son for the weekend…  Like old times.  He’s moved out (escaped?), but he will turn out to live in his own world too. 

Here’s a play about the drowning of a capital city via Global Warming hurricanes, the mass shooting of workers and the end of civilisation as we know it. It runs for 75 minutes and has but three characters, one of which is in custody (‘arrested and detained pending further investigation’) for most of the action. This is a first play from excellent director Phillip James Rouse so let’s forgive him his Orwellian excesses. It’s pretty good.

The great Giuseppe Verdi once said, “The artist must yield himself to his own inspiration, and if he has true talent, no one knows and feels better than he what suits him.”

Verdi obviously knew what suited him and so does Opera SA with their latest offering Verdi Spectacular.

Conductor Stephen Mould has constructed a night of some of Verdi’s most famous overtures, solos, duets, trios, quartets and chorus numbers, all backed by the illustrious Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.