Happy New Year!

At the conclusion of every year, our natural instinct is to reflect on the events of the past year while we begin to focus on the next. We remember the happy occasions as well as the sad ones as we reflect on our successes and, sometimes, on our failures.

This past year at Opera Australia we were fortunate to have had some wonderful successes. The one I think of above all, is the extraordinary achievement of Brett Dean and Amanda Holden's Bliss.

Experiencing a great success at its world première in Sydney, Bliss then had an outstanding season in Melbourne, followed by an extraordinary success at the Edinburgh Festival. It was truly a very exciting and emotional experience to sit in the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh and observe the tremendous response from the audience, and then in the following days to read the brilliant reviews in all the major papers. I felt proud for Brett Dean and Amanda Holden, but I felt particularly happy for the cast of wonderful Australian artists who really were great ambassadors for Australia, both on and off the stage. This was a major international success that all of us at Opera Australia remember as a terrific highlight of 2010.

We also remember at this time the sadness of losing one of our greatest friends, Dame Joan Sutherland. Dame Joan was not only the greatest opera singer that Australia has ever produced, she was an extraordinarily generous and open human being who will be missed by all who knew her. She was an inspiration to all who worked with her and she will live forever in our memories.

In 2010 we announced that in 2013 Opera Australia will present Richard Wagner's mighty Ring Cycle for the very first time. It will be presented at the State Theatre in Melbourne and there is tremendous interest in this event, both here and internationally.

We announced another major event, Opera on Sydney Harbour, which will begin as an annual event in 2012. This too has generated enormous interest and we are very excited about this massive stage being the focus of attention in March and April of 2012.

Finally, this past year we began filming operas from the Sydney Opera House and presenting them in cinemas within Australia and internationally.

All of these wonderfully exciting projects present opportunities for Opera Australia which will have far-reaching artistic and financial benefits.

In conclusion, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for supporting Opera Australia in 2010. I hope you enjoyed the performances which you attended and I look forward to your company in 2011.

I wish you all a very happy holiday season and a wonderful 2011.

Playing Figaro...or how I learned to love skipping

It’s hard to believe that The Marriage of Figaro has finally ended. I’ve been together with this cast, on and off, for six months, in Sydney and Melbourne, and it has been a wonderful experience. In particular, Peter Coleman-Wright (who plays the Count) and Kanen Breen (Basilio) have kept me laughing, usually at totally the wrong moment. Individually they are very funny. Put them together and they are almost impossible. In the most wonderful way. They are great artists but they can make you crack up and still keep a straight face themselves.


Playing Figaro has been a big change for me. When I last did the opera (in Washington DC) I was the Count. I can't look at it from where I'm standing but people say it seems to suit me doing Figaro. Perhaps it depends on the production. I was really nervous doing Figaro because I thought it was a comic role, which is not necessarily me. But the great thing about working with Neil Armfield was that he showed me Figaro isn’t a comic role. Figaro is real. The Count is the fall-guy and Basilio is, in this production, the show-stealer.


Neil Armfield is amazing to work with, even though he pushes me out of my comfort zone. For instance, I think it’s fair to say I’m not much of a skipper. I don’t skip. No. When Neil Armfield asked me to skip as part of the stage business in The Marriage of Figaro I fought it. But he insisted, and he was right.


It’s an example of how much you have to put your trust in people on the stage. You become very self-conscious in the rehearsal period because everyone's watching you. You throw yourself in and feel like it's terrible, it's not working. But if you don't throw yourself in you look even more ridiculous because you look half-hearted. Eventually you have to throw away all your inhibitions and trust your colleagues, trust the director and the choreographer and the conductor. They trust you to perform it well, and you have to trust them that what they see is right. Because so often what you perceive is not how it's perceived out front.


At one point in Figaro Neil had me sucking on a lollipop. No kidding! I had this lolly that I have to suck - all part of my routine -- and I fought against it, black and blue, and said it wasn't really me. But I lost. It's in there, and it works, so there you go.


You have to trust.

Welcome to the Opera Australia blog

BY LYNDON TERRACINI, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR


It's interesting to observe how for centuries the consumption of art has been directed by the changing nature of society and culture....or has it been the reverse! 

Whatever the order, what is clear is that in today's technological and digital age, the way art is consumed by a voracious public has seen a change of spectacular velocity.

The fact that I'm writing a blog on Opera Australia's web site would have been the stuff of science fiction not so long ago. A blog was unknown, a website was unknown, the Internet and text messaging were unheard of. Images and sound bites are now distributed across the globe instantaneously and we can watch a performance on YouTube from Catania or The Met at any time.

We can also make instant comparisons and judgments about the merits or otherwise of artists and share them with colleagues worldwide in a heart beat.

While these marvelous inventions and innovations are fabulous to behold, they also put far more pressure on today's singers than at any time in our history. We now expect to see singers who not only sound magnificent but who also look as fabulous as movie stars and who are completely believable in their roles. Seeing artists performing on a Big Screen magnifies all of the deficiencies that might be camouflaged in an opera theatre which means that singers not only need to exercise their voices and maintain them in peak condition but they also need to exercise their bodies so that they are in peak physical condition as well. Naturally this places more demands on what constitutes a complete artist in the twenty first century. We may disagree with it but that voracious audience that I mentioned earlier has a very high global expectation.

Consequently opera companies, theatre companies and obviously dance companies all need to be thinking of their possible worldwide digital audiences when making casting decisions. To survive in a highly competitive environment we all must be aware of what contemporary audiences expect and even demand.

The art forms change with or without us and unless we also keep pace with those changes, we will be left wondering why our analogue black and white television that our parents bought in 1971 no longer works.