The puppets are chilling in this opera’s classic ghost story
By Kate Prendergast, Chantal Nguyen, Peter McCullum and Harriet Cunningham
The Turn of the Screw
Hayes Theatre
August 21
Until September 15
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★
Benjamin Britten’s 1953 opera, The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’ novella of the same name, is a classic ghost story.
A governess is hired to care for Miles and Flora, two genteel orphans who live on the country estate of Bly, alone but for Mrs Grosse, the housekeeper. Their guardian makes it clear he is not to be consulted, informed or in any way bothered by the governess. She is in sole charge.
Something wicked this way comes: Margaret Trubiano and Julie Lea Goodwin.Credit:
But as she settles into life at Bly she begins to see apparitions, shadowy figures, who seem to have a disturbing influence over the children. Is she imagining things? And what secrets are the children keeping from her?
The peeling paintwork is all too believable in Emma Vine’s transformation of the Hayes into an abandoned theatre, and the ghost light introduces Kanen Breen, the spooky Peter Quint, in an eerie glow.
Addy Robertson, Kanen Breen and musical director Francis Greep. Credit: Richard Farland
The entire production is played out in a half light, or less, with scene transitions taking place almost in darkness, but for the loom of a grand piano and keyboard in the corner of the stage, from which music director Francis Greep and Lillian Hearne conjure up a reduced version of Britten’s score.
It’s tantalising and, sometimes, frustrating, but this work is, at its heart, about the unspoken and the unseen. In that respect, Craig Baldwin’s production is ideal - understated but enough to fire the imagination.
Musically, it is less successful: individual voices are excellent but the blend is uneven, obscuring the fine lines of Britten’s spare score. Julie Lea Goodwin is exceptional as the Governess, and Kanen Breen makes a spine-tingling Peter Quint, but the abundant white locks of Miss Jessel (Catherine Bouchier) risk tipping the gothic horror into parody. The children, two puppets voiced and moved by Sandy Leung and Addy Robertson, are chilling, with Robertson a standout as the unreadable Miles.
Opera Australia has just announced major new productions of two musicals, Hadestown and Guys and Dolls, for its 2025 season. Meanwhile, the Hayes Theatre, Sydney’s home of music theatre, is mounting its first opera.
Where does opera belong? Under the vaulted shells of Sydney Opera House, or in a black box somewhere in Kings Cross? Craig Baldwin’s flawed but fascinating production makes a strong case for the latter.
THEATRE
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: AN ADAPTATION IN WORDS AND MUSIC
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, August 15
Until September 1
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
What a strikingly bold and peculiar endeavour – to program something as quaint as a reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at the Opera House.
This is an unabashedly earnest yet often delightful homage to the revolutionary Regency-era novelist. It is also an argument for the power of unadorned language and music to hold an audience captive.
Jane Austen’s 19th-century romance is uniquely revived by Nadine Garner’s energetic reading. Credit: Robert Catto
That our tech-enfeebled attention remains rapt is thanks to the talent assembled by director Tyran Parke. Reading an expertly abridged version of Austen’s socially cutting romance is respected actor Nadine Garner.
With plummy elocution, swanning about the stage with dramatised aplomb and eyes given to pop with her characters’ indignations, Garner allows the lively wit and wry warmth of Austen’s story to flow through her. Each phrase seems to land just as it ought, such that we chuckle almost in unison. It is only lightly spell-breaking when you see the pages of the leather-bound book from which she reads are flared with Fluoro highlighter.
Notably, Garner is not in the horrible brussels sprouts-coloured empire gown of the promotional posters. She is instead liberated, gender-flexed and debonair in a long grey cape, high boots and trousers. Salute, costuming’s Mikailah Looker!
Garner’s reading is accompanied by celebrated pianist Melvyn Tan, who is also the player behind the main theme of the BBC’s popular Pride and Prejudice series, and Madeleine Easton, whose top plumed feather-in-cap is her solo performances at our present monarch’s coronation.
Let’s circle back, though, because this reading is actually Act Two. More daringly, more endearingly, less impressively, is the first: a “musical introduction” featuring Easton and Tan. With much audience enjoining, Easton leads us through a 40-minute presentation on Austen, her musical contemporaries, and the class-obsessed society in which she lived.
This informal tutorial is linked up with sublime performances of Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn (and a classical Taylor Swift). It’s a guileless, educative and enthusiastic presentation – I felt I should have heels together, scribbling notes.
Presented by Spiritworks & Theatre Tours International, this is a warmly enjoyable, nobly intentioned invitation for audiences to gather in a stage-crafted drawing room and listen. With the bonus of world-class musicians, Austen fans will relish this adaptation of her best-loved classic in the manner it was first told.
Trio Gaspard
Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
August 17
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Trio Gaspard’s program in the Utzon Room explored the moods and styles of music from Austro-Hungary, from Haydn’s music from the 1770s to an affectionate tribute by Swiss/Dutch composer Helena Winkelman.
This is repertoire of special significance for Sydney since Austro-Hungarian refugees around World War II provided a crucial enrichment to our musical culture, notably through the founding of Musica Viva by Viennese-trained violist and inventor Richard Goldner in 1945.
Jonian Ilias Kadesha and cellist Vashti Hunter.Credit: Jay Patel
Trio Gaspard’s playing was by turns elegant, sardonic, expressive and wild, and never less than engaging. In the distinctively plucked instrumentation of the theme of Haydn’s Piano Trio in E, they created graceful charm in well poised phrases, and in the last movement established a wistful lilt of Arcadian serenity.
By contrast, Winkelman’s Threesome in a high-den was a tartly witty engagement with some lesser known details of Haydn’s life – his quarrelsome dinners with his brother, his waning powers with age, and the quantity of wine in his salary package.
The musical language was a sideways take on aspects of Haydn’s musical style pushed along with salty modernist jabs. The first movement had neo-classical phrase structures with nightmare-like dissonances while the second displayed drawn-out lassitude with fleeting references to his Emperor Hymn, which Haydn liked to play in old-age.
The finale, built on an insistent pecking motive, was bacchanalian and, at times, irascible. The second bracket started with Haydn’s two-movement Trio in A major. In the first movement Trio Gaspard created a rhapsodic expressive world through stylishly decorated lines, followed by a pertly spirited second movement.
Sandor Veress’s Tre Quadri described three paintings in musical terms. In the first movement, a landscape by Claude Lorraine is represented in a quizzical motif exchanged between cello and violin at the start, which is subsequently explored with earnest intricacy. The second movement is lonely and elegiac while the third, describing a portrait of a peasant, is full of furious energy and deadpan grimness, its headlong rhythms continually at threat of being derailed by missed notes and irregular phrases.
The virtuosity of this finale was set free in the final bracket, first by Brahms’s Hungarian Dances in F minor and F major (15 and 10 respectively) and by Franz Liszt’s own arrangement for Piano Trio of his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9 Carnival in Pest. All three (pianist Nicholas Rimmer, violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha and Cellist Vashti Hunter) rose to the extravagant bravura demands of Liszt’s writing with panache and insouciant swagger.
Dance
INDance 2024 Week One
Sydney Dance Company Neilson Studio
August 15 to 17
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★
Independent creators can push an art form’s boundaries, and sometimes it’s part of the fun when their experiments cook up something a little unexpected. Sydney Dance Company’s annual INDance program creates a space for these artists in its Neilson Studio: an intimate venue tucked at the back of the SDC wharf.
The friendly locale tempers the potential excesses of the experimental edge and makes the experience affordable, allowing audiences to engage with a relaxed, open mind. It’s the dance venue equivalent of going to a cosy dinner party at a friend’s house rather than attending a fancy restaurant.
In Make Your Life Count, Sarah Aiken spends the first half dialoguing with a giant on-screen projection of herself.Credit:
INDance 2024 Week One features two works by Melbourne choreographers: Sarah Aiken’s visual projection-heavy Make Your Life Count and Harrison Ritchie-Jones’s wrestling-inspired Cuddle.
Make Your Life Count contemplates modern life’s paradox of individualism and insignificance. It is quite literally absorbed in its own self-reflection. Aiken spends the first half dialoguing with a giant on-screen projection of herself, then the second half coordinating dozens of tiny projections of her own image dancing in outer space.
In Cuddle, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheef play two heist partners in crime.Credit:
It’s tonally unclear what mood the dialogue means to evoke, at times ironic (the giant projection advises Aiken to practise “gratitude” and “hydrate”) and other times attempting to reach the profound. A coda featuring The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony feels unnecessary and cliched in its montage on the cycles of life. But there’s no denying Make Your Life Count is visually striking, with the pink and yellow of Aiken’s costume vividly matching the microscopic close-ups of her skin and eye.
Unsurprisingly, it won an Australian Green Room Award for Best Visual Design. It would be perfect as a shorter dance and art installation piece, especially in a gallery or public arts space, but as an hour-long dance performance, it feels a little bloated.
Cuddle is a quirky, entertaining, and unsettling enigma. Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheef play two heist partners in crime, complete with getaway car, balaclavas, and voice-changing microphones. Their costumes – which they gradually peel off – are stuffed with squeaky toys, creating an amusing symphony of sound effects.
The wrestling-inspired choreography is carefully considered, unsettling with the vulnerability of Tancheef’s toplessness, and simultaneously violent, intimate, and amusing. A live-feed camera projects the dancing onto three screens and the audience sit in the round, so you really do feel like you’re at a wrestling match. For a night of experimental modern dance, that’s quite a fun place to land.
Augustin Hadelich and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall, August 15
By PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Violinist Augustin Hadelich began each half of this carefully curated journey to despair and back with one of the Mystery Sonatas for solo violin by American composer David Lang. Before Sorrow, which started the program, was a prayer-like meditation around a small number of pitches, pausing every few notes and varying the pattern like the changes in bell ringing.
The piece spirals downwards and becomes ever quieter before moving to the very highest register and repeating the process. Hadelich’s remarkable control of tone and inflection made this deceptively simple idea spellbinding.
Hadelich performs Brahms at the Sydney Opera House in 2022.
The “sorrow” that followed was Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata, Opus 134 arranged for violin and string orchestra with percussion by Michail Zinman and Andre Pushkarev. Its outer movements dwell in dark shadows around a central movement of forceful bitterness, driven energy and bludgeoning force in which the warmth and creativity of every musical thought is hammered into banality.
In the hushed utterances of the third movement, a quiet passacaglia on a gradually mutating bass, Hadelich and the string players of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, led by Andrew Haveron, maintained suppressed tension as though contemplating the smouldering ruins of humanity after a titanic battle. At the close, a mistuned march starts up but dissolves into shudders on solo violin.
It was a bold move to end the first half in such depths, but the second half was a journey back to the light. After sorrow, another of Lang’s Mystery Sonatas was built on a series of rising broken chords, each note receiving the same purity of sound. Hadelich built intensity in imperceptibly subtle gradations to reach a peak of pristine brightness.
Having raised us from the depths, Hadelich showed what paradise looks like in the form of three movements from Bach’s Partita In E major for solo violin. The Prelude had magically deft lightness, the Loure sweet purity, while the Gavotte assumed such simple clarity, charm and naturalness of phrase as to become the very perfection of grace.
The last piece, a rarity, was a more light-hearted postcard from Arcadia, a Violin Concerto in A major, Opus 5 No 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George. Son of a plantation owner and a slave, he dazzled pre-Revolutionary Paris with his musical brilliance and counted Marie Antoinette among his fans.
Supported by excellent ensemble playing and careful listing from Haveron and the orchestra, Hadelich maintained the spirit of sparkling elegance while accommodating innovative and dazzling virtuosic writing without skipping a breath.