THE NEW ZEALAND OPERA SOCIETY

Stravinsky’s operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress in the now over 30-years-old David Hockney production, which I was lucky enough to see when it debuted at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in the old house, gave the Melbourne Autumn Season of Opera Australia tremendous caché. The unique sets and costumes have held up magnificently; and if a production can assume the status of a museum piece, this one certainly should be preserved, for it was, and still is, a trend-setter.

The musical setting of Hogarth, to a libretto by W. H. Auden and his lover Chester Kallman (and there’s a story in itself) is deceptively simple but demands singers and players of great experience and virtuosity of a type not required in the normal run of operatic singing. This cast was uneven. The two most important roles, of Rakewell and Nick Shadow, were capably sung by John Heuzenroeder and Joshua Bloom, but I felt that Leanne Kenneally as Anne Truelove was a bit overshadowed, if you will excuse the pun. Richard Hickox proved a less than sympathetic accompanist, for the singers were almost always swamped by the orchestral sound. However, as Baba the Turk, Catherine Carby struck just the right note of dignity-cum-farce, and Kanen Breen made an engaging Sellem in the auction scene.

La Traviata was the great disappointment of the season.  I attended the matinée (April 29) and there found quite a few substandard goings-on, not the least of which was the inadequate characterisation (plus a lot of out-of-tune vocalising) of the two principals, Joanna Cole (Violetta) and Ding Yi (Alfredo). There is really no excuse in this day and time for the casting of anyone as robust as Ms Cole in the role of a dying courtesan. She might have carried it off despite her, let’s say, healthy appearance, if she’d had an ounce of stagecraft, but clearly she was never taught how to act, and the effect was of a rather nervous and plump woman from the provinces lurching through the role of what should be an elegant and sophisticated Parisienne of the murky and highly mannered demimonde. Mr Yi was simply vocally not up to it for a start and one could not get beyond that and the fact that (and absolutely no racism intended) it required a large stretch of the imagination, completely in the absence of any dramatic nonce, to accept this clearly Asian fellow as a young, French, hotheaded aristocrat. Nicolas Braithwaite’s very skilled and idiomatic Verdi conducting was lost on the cast and chorus, who were seldom with him.

That same evening I attended Lakmé in a co-production between Opera Australia and L’Opéra de Montréal, and it was both beautiful to look at and to hear. Mark Thompson’s designs came clearly from countless illustrations including those of the Kama Sutra, and featured voluptuous lotus motifs, elaborate mosaics of sinuous intertwinings, and plenty of suggestive animal couplings, choosing to point up what the opera’s chaste libretto tries to ignore – the obvious sexual attraction of the tenor for the soprano. And what a soprano we heard on this evening – the beautiful Emma Matthews. She made an ideal interpreter of this role, with its famous coloratura arias and the dramatic demand that the protagonist appear and remain an innocent convert to love from a life of contemplation. Her English paramour, ably sung and acted by Jaewoo Kim (again Asian but cleverly losing himself in the role of young English gentleman) was a good vocal match for Ms Matthews. Bruce Martin’s Nilakantha was both forceful and kind, as it should be sung, and he looked quite fit. The two silly English sisters Ellen and Rose were played by Tiffany Speight and Taryn Fiebig respectively. Both seemed to revel in creating the contrast between their own characters and that of the virginal Lakmé and her friend and confidante Mallika (Sally-Anne Russell).

With the master of bel canto, Richard Bonynge, in the pit, one was aware that the pace and tempo of the opera was just right and that the playing of the orchestra never once exceeded the volume of the singers. Orchestral motifs were subtly underlined and the ensemble was nearly always intact. Some of this was doubtless the result of Brian Castles-Onion, who did much of the musical prep and served as assistant conductor. 

Laurence Jenkins