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Sydney Morning Herald

Nicole Car's Rusalka glows with moonlit grace and tragic depth

OPERA Rusalka. Opera Australia Sydney Opera House. July 19 Reviewed PETER McCALLUM ★★★★½ Making a welcome and triumphant return to Sydney, Nicole Car sang the title role of Rusalka with all the warmth, strength and depth of humanity that notionally eludes the operatic character she portrays. I say 'notionally' because Rusalka is an allegory for a person who, in failing to understand human fickleness, superficiality and venality, ends by performing the most deeply human act of compassion, sacrifice and love. Car is at her magnificent best when opening out climactically at the peak of phrases with thrilling sound and immaculate melodic arc, but the sound is evenly controlled and shaded across the full range. She unfolded the lines of the opera's most well-known aria, Song to the Moon, with gentle reserve, allowing the melody's natural grace to place a stamp of beauty on this mysterious tale at its outset. It is a performance that fulfils in every respect the exciting promise Car revealed in her earliest roles with Opera Australia (including as Michaela in Carmen, one of the first roles in which she attracted listeners' ears). Tenor Gerard Schneider sang her Prince with attractive light sound and Disneyesque good looks, true in pitch and tone and unforced in expression. As the Water King, Warwick Fyfe maintains a fierce, fretful and doom-laden tone, his chief narrative function being to warn that this isn't going to end well. His appearance in this role accentuated the resonance of Dvorak's opening scene with that of Wagner's Rheingold, in which Fyfe sang a ferocious Alberich in 2023. As though to clinch the connection, director Sarah Giles has chosen to locate this scene not beside the lake, as the stage directions say, but in it. Charles Davis's set, David Bergman's projections and Paul Jackson's lighting create this illusion deftly, conjuring a sense of strangeness and, later, of alienation from the brightly lit vacuousness of the human world. Poetically, the water is the cool subconscious, linked with the unsullied but austere purity of moonlight, which, though corrupted by human contact, remains an ideal of chaste beauty that the Prince aspires to but can attain only in death. By contrast, the human scenes in the castle are filled with paper-cutout people. In this world, Natalie Aroyan has a glowering edge to her tone as Rusalka's flouncing rival, the Duchess. Just as Dvorak leavens the gloom with folk-like music (anticipating the stylistic collisions that his compatriot Janacek was later to exploit), Giles mixes the opera's sorrowful aspect with comedy.