Latest news with #Rusalka
The Age
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
When should you eat your main meal each day? A dietitian weighs in
This story is part of the August 3 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. Nicole Car is an opera singer. The 39-year-old shares her day on a plate. 10.30am Today is a show day, so I keep my routine simple. After admin, I make myself some oats with a handful of blueberries, some natural whole-milk yoghurt and a spoonful of peanut butter. 3.30pm I tend to eat the same meal before a show as I had for dinner the night before. Lunch today is homemade bolognese with wholemeal pasta and a little parmesan cheese. It's a very late lunch, giving me enough energy to perform without being too full. 5pm I make the 45-minute walk to the theatre – I'm in San Francisco, playing Mimi in La Boheme – while listening to my next project, Rusalka, for Opera Australia. 10.30pm I always bring an apple with me to the show in case I get hungry during the performance. Tonight, I eat it as I am leaving the theatre. 11pm A late-night snack of avocado, salad and hummus. And then it's time for rest. Dr Joanna McMillan says Top marks for… Your wholefood staples – oats at breakfast and wholemeal pasta – which are easy on the gut yet deliver fibre and sustained energy. Having your main meal at lunchtime is smart and your apple delivers a quick carb and antioxidant boost. Your walk is ideal for vitamin D production.
Sydney Morning Herald
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
When should you eat your main meal each day? A dietitian weighs in
This story is part of the August 3 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. Nicole Car is an opera singer. The 39-year-old shares her day on a plate. 10.30am Today is a show day, so I keep my routine simple. After admin, I make myself some oats with a handful of blueberries, some natural whole-milk yoghurt and a spoonful of peanut butter. 3.30pm I tend to eat the same meal before a show as I had for dinner the night before. Lunch today is homemade bolognese with wholemeal pasta and a little parmesan cheese. It's a very late lunch, giving me enough energy to perform without being too full. 5pm I make the 45-minute walk to the theatre – I'm in San Francisco, playing Mimi in La Boheme – while listening to my next project, Rusalka, for Opera Australia. 10.30pm I always bring an apple with me to the show in case I get hungry during the performance. Tonight, I eat it as I am leaving the theatre. 11pm A late-night snack of avocado, salad and hummus. And then it's time for rest. Dr Joanna McMillan says Top marks for… Your wholefood staples – oats at breakfast and wholemeal pasta – which are easy on the gut yet deliver fibre and sustained energy. Having your main meal at lunchtime is smart and your apple delivers a quick carb and antioxidant boost. Your walk is ideal for vitamin D production.
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
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘It's a story you already love': Can fairytales lure young people to the opera?
In the early '90s, nearly every girl in Sarah Giles' grade one classroom was singing Part of Your World – the yearning soprano ballad from Disney's recent princess film The Little Mermaid. Giles can't remember whether she saw the film in cinemas or at home on VHS, but warmly recalls loving the Caribbean musical numbers and thinking Ariel's crustacean sidekick Sebastian was hilarious. But the ending? In her words, it was 'horseshit'. 'There's a version of The Little Mermaid where the lesson you take away is change yourself, give up anything you can for the man you love, and make sure that above all else, he is happy before you. That's a shit lesson,' she tells me emphatically over the phone. This month, Giles will bring her production of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka to the Sydney Opera House. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's original and far grittier mermaid fairytale, Rusalka follows the eponymous water nymph who falls in love with a prince and longs to live on the surface. Under Giles' direction – which stars renowned Australian soprano Nicole Car as the titular lead – Rusalka is no lovesick maiden but a fierce and courageous explorer who wishes to change her destiny. 'She doesn't like the world that she's in,' Giles says of Rusalka. 'She sees this prince as an opportunity for freedom, as an opportunity to try a different world, but that isn't her place either. It's essentially like what we've done is turned the fairytale into a tale about relentlessly pursuing and searching for where you feel you belong, and not really giving up, and trying to find yourself and be true to yourself. 'So I felt like that felt quite relevant to my kind of contemporary experience as a woman.'
The Age
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘It's a story you already love': Can fairytales lure young people to the opera?
In the early '90s, nearly every girl in Sarah Giles' grade one classroom was singing Part of Your World – the yearning soprano ballad from Disney's recent princess film The Little Mermaid. Giles can't remember whether she saw the film in cinemas or at home on VHS, but warmly recalls loving the Caribbean musical numbers and thinking Ariel's crustacean sidekick Sebastian was hilarious. But the ending? In her words, it was 'horseshit'. 'There's a version of The Little Mermaid where the lesson you take away is change yourself, give up anything you can for the man you love, and make sure that above all else, he is happy before you. That's a shit lesson,' she tells me emphatically over the phone. This month, Giles will bring her production of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka to the Sydney Opera House. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's original and far grittier mermaid fairytale, Rusalka follows the eponymous water nymph who falls in love with a prince and longs to live on the surface. Under Giles' direction – which stars renowned Australian soprano Nicole Car as the titular lead – Rusalka is no lovesick maiden but a fierce and courageous explorer who wishes to change her destiny. 'She doesn't like the world that she's in,' Giles says of Rusalka. 'She sees this prince as an opportunity for freedom, as an opportunity to try a different world, but that isn't her place either. It's essentially like what we've done is turned the fairytale into a tale about relentlessly pursuing and searching for where you feel you belong, and not really giving up, and trying to find yourself and be true to yourself. 'So I felt like that felt quite relevant to my kind of contemporary experience as a woman.'
