Latest news with #OperaAustralia
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Sydney is not a shallow city': Major change for Sydney Writers' Festival
The Sydney Writers' Festival will deliver year-round storytelling at a new dedicated literature hub to be established at Australia's oldest library amid warnings that without paid speaking gigs professional writing will become an unviable occupation within 20 years. Almost 30 years after launching at the State Library of NSW in 1997, the festival is to become a resident company of the Macquarie Street institution in the same way that Opera Australia performs mostly in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. Arts Minister John Graham has awarded $1.5 million to the writers' festival for the first year for events at the library – outside its one-week annual May festival at Carriageworks – starting from September. The investment precedes the upcoming launch of the state's writing and literature strategy – the first time an Australian government has put together a comprehensive plan to support writing and literature, Graham said. 'I see Sydney as a city of ideas. I don't accept that Sydney is a shallow city,' he said. 'We've got some of the best writers, some of the most engaged readers and writers and, with the library and the festival working together, it will strengthen both institutions.' Festival-led talks and events at the library will rise from the current trial of six to 10 a year to between 75 and 80 events annually, confirming the library as the festival's second home. It's all part of the evolution of the writers' festival into a literary institution that conducts year-round events programs for local and international thinkers and a platform for new and diverse voices in the manner of Melbourne's Wheeler Centre. 'That's huge growth for Sydney Writers' Festival, and presents increased opportunities and access both for the literature sector and for NSW,' the festival's chief executive Brooke Webb said. 'There are shrinking paid opportunities for writers right now and, if we don't address this now, in 20 years' time writing just won't be a viable choice for people.' In Australia, writers are among the poorest paid creatives, earning on average $18,500 a year, yet reading and writing remain vital to personal wellbeing, and economic and social prosperity.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Sydney is not a shallow city': Major change for Sydney Writers' Festival
The Sydney Writers' Festival will deliver year-round storytelling at a new dedicated literature hub to be established at Australia's oldest library amid warnings that without paid speaking gigs professional writing will become an unviable occupation within 20 years. Almost 30 years after launching at the State Library of NSW in 1997, the festival is to become a resident company of the Macquarie Street institution in the same way that Opera Australia or the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performs mostly in the Sydney Opera House. Arts Minister John Graham has awarded $1.5 million to the writers' festival for the first year for events at the library – outside its one-week annual May festival at Carriageworks – starting from September. The investment precedes the upcoming launch of the state's writing and literature strategy – the first time an Australian government has put together a comprehensive plan to support writing and literature, Graham said. 'I see Sydney as a city of ideas. I don't accept that Sydney is a shallow city,' he said. 'We've got some of the best writers, some of the most engaged readers and writers and, with the library and the festival working together, it will strengthen both institutions.' Festival-led talks and events at the library will rise from the current trial of six to 10 a year to between 75 and 80 events annually, confirming the library as the festival's second home. It's all part of the evolution of the writers' festival into a literary institution that conducts year-round events programs for local and international thinkers and a platform for new and diverse voices in the manner of Melbourne's Wheeler Centre. 'That's huge growth for Sydney Writers' Festival, and presents increased opportunities and access both for the literature sector and for NSW,' the festival's chief executive Brooke Webb said. 'There are shrinking paid opportunities for writers right now and, if we don't address this now, in 20 years' time writing just won't be a viable choice for people.' In Australia, writers are among the poorest paid creatives, earning on average $18,500 a year, yet reading and writing remain vital to personal wellbeing, and economic and social prosperity.
Sydney Morning Herald
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
Sydney Morning Herald
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Phantom of the Opera returns to Sydney Harbour amid Opera Australia woes
Following this year's disastrous financial results, Opera Australia will restage its hit 2022 production of Phantom of the Opera for next summer's Opera on the Harbour season. The season will kick off the beloved Andrew Lloyd Webber musical's 40th anniversary year in March and promises a lucrative box office – the 2022 Handa Opera on the Harbour season sold 61,580 tickets, despite being dogged by wild rain and unpredictable weather, narrowly missing the record 65,000 tickets sold to West Side Story in 2019. It comes at a crucial time for the national opera company, which posted a $10 million operating deficit this year, following disappointing returns for its 2024 production of Sunset Boulevard. Opera Australia chair Rod Sims said that when the results were released in May, the company was committed to 'better programming', trimming procurement costs and 'taking a stronger look at musicals'. 'We'll need to be sure of their financial success, and if we can't be, we just won't do them [musicals]. We won't be taking the sort of risks we took with Sunset Boulevard, so that won't happen again,' he said. However, the return of the Simon Phillips-directed production of Phantom of the Opera is a surefire winner – at the time of its premiere season, Herald critic Lenny Ann Low gave it four stars. 'Watching this fantastical, old-school stage spectacle outdoors, with a backdrop of twinkling planes, bats soaring overhead and the reflections in the harbour of glowing skyscrapers, is simply glorious,' she wrote. 'Director Simon Phillips and conductor Guy Simpson have charged Andrew Lloyd Webber's best-known work with a thrilling force that merges grandeur, nuance and old-fashioned fun.' She said: 'Georgina Hopson shines as Christine Daaé' while Joshua Robson as the Phantom brought 'lusty fury and sinewy heartbreak to the role'.
The Age
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Phantom of the Opera returns to Sydney Harbour amid Opera Australia woes
Following this year's disastrous financial results, Opera Australia will restage its hit 2022 production of Phantom of the Opera for next summer's Opera on the Harbour season. The season will kick off the beloved Andrew Lloyd Webber musical's 40th anniversary year in March and promises a lucrative box office – the 2022 Handa Opera on the Harbour season sold 61,580 tickets, despite being dogged by wild rain and unpredictable weather, narrowly missing the record 65,000 tickets sold to West Side Story in 2019. It comes at a crucial time for the national opera company, which posted a $10 million operating deficit this year, following disappointing returns for its 2024 production of Sunset Boulevard. Opera Australia chair Rod Sims said that when the results were released in May, the company was committed to 'better programming', trimming procurement costs and 'taking a stronger look at musicals'. 'We'll need to be sure of their financial success, and if we can't be, we just won't do them [musicals]. We won't be taking the sort of risks we took with Sunset Boulevard, so that won't happen again,' he said. However, the return of the Simon Phillips-directed production of Phantom of the Opera is a surefire winner – at the time of its premiere season, Herald critic Lenny Ann Low gave it four stars. 'Watching this fantastical, old-school stage spectacle outdoors, with a backdrop of twinkling planes, bats soaring overhead and the reflections in the harbour of glowing skyscrapers, is simply glorious,' she wrote. 'Director Simon Phillips and conductor Guy Simpson have charged Andrew Lloyd Webber's best-known work with a thrilling force that merges grandeur, nuance and old-fashioned fun.' She said: 'Georgina Hopson shines as Christine Daaé' while Joshua Robson as the Phantom brought 'lusty fury and sinewy heartbreak to the role'.
