Victorian Opera serves up banquet for 2016 season

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This was published 8 years ago

Victorian Opera serves up banquet for 2016 season

By Barney Zwartz

If music be the food of love, as Shakespeare wrote, then Victorian Opera is serving up a feast with its 2016 season, featuring a banquet with Steve Vizard and Paul Grabowski, and an on-stage dinner with Robyn Archer and Merlyn Quaife​, as well as a smorgasbord of stars including Jessica Pratt and Emma Matthews.

The season, announced on Thursday, opens with Voyage to the Moon, by celebrated Australian playwright Michael Gow and composer Calvin Bowman, based on the 16th century poem Orlando Furioso. This is well-trodden ground, artistic director Richard Mills says – Handel and Monteverdi are among the great baroque composers to have got there first, and their music forms part of the pastiche.

Jessica Pratt in <i>Lucia di Lammermoor</i> at Teatro La Fenice in Venice.

Jessica Pratt in Lucia di Lammermoor at Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Credit: Michelle Crosera

In a coup for the company, Matthews sings Selena, guardian of the moon, with leading mezzo Sally-Anne Russell and a rising VO star in baritone Jeremy Kleeman.

Next is a new musical by another pair of famous Australians, reuniting Vizard and Grabowski (the latter was musical director for the former's early 1990s late-night talk show). Banquet of Secrets is a bitter-sweet tale of four friends enjoying an annual dinner in which a deep secret is revealed.

Emil Wolk is directing at the Palais theatre, having recently worked at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Emil Wolk is directing at the Palais theatre, having recently worked at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.Credit: Sara Krulwich

Featuring another strong cast in Antoinette Halloran, Dimity Shepherd, Kanen Breen and David Rogers-Smith, "there are some surprising turns and a rich humanity," Mills says.

Italy-based Australian soprano Pratt returns after her triumphs for VO in La Traviata and I Puritani to sing the title role in one of the greatest bel canto operas, Donizetti​'s Lucia di Lammermoor, at Her Majesty's.

Opposite Pratt, only the third Australian to sing Lucia at La Scala in Milan (after Dames Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland), is another pair of rising VO stars in tenors Carlos Barcenas​ as Edgardo and Michael Petruccelli​ as Arturo. The production, a collaboration with West Australian Opera, also boasts established Opera Australia singers Jose Carbo​ and Jud Arthur.

Another innovative idea is a double bill titled Laughter and Tears, at the Palais theatre in August. Part two, the tears, is the short verismo masterpiece I Pagliacci​, with Rosario La Spina​, Emma Pearson and James Clayton, directed by Emil Wolk​, fresh from directing the work at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

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The laughter – Mills' "new from old" in a combination he has drawn together – is a recreation of the Commedia dell'Arte​. It takes arias and other music from Italian composers from the 16th to the 18th centuries, especially the madrigal comedies of Banchieri​ and Vecchi​. It presents a play within a play, and employs the arts of Circus Oz because, Mills says, clown acts in modern circuses have their origins in commedia.

VO gets together with video production company Deakin Motion Lab for the second time, after this year's triumphant Flying Dutchman, for the Australian premier of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.

Performed by the company's youth arm, it precedes an on-stage dinner, a separate event curated by chef Gay Bilson​ from the cookbook by Stein's partner, Alice B. Toklas​. Archer and Quaife, as Stein and Toklas, will join the diners, but the menu will not include Toklas' hash cookies, Mills says.

Young VO artists will stage Cendrillon​ – Massenet's version of Cinderella – aimed at family audiences, and the company will take on tour a new work by Mills, Pied Piper. In each regional centre, local people will join the cast playing rats, children and citizens of Hamelin.

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