Season Preview: Your guide to the arts in 2022Sydney-based Baroque opera company Pinchgut can always be relied upon for something original and its 2022 program, announced today, is no exception. Sydney and Melbourne concerts of music by Monteverdi and Vivaldi rub shoulders with a pair of operas by Cesti and Charpentier – both of them important Australian premieres – and the company has signed up plenty of first-rate singers to carry them off.

Catherine Carby as Médée. All photographs courtesy of Pinchgut Opera

The major work, to be staged at Sydney’s City Recital Hall from 1 to 7 December 2022, will be Médée, the greatest opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and one of the period’s finest lyric tragedies. Originally planned for 2020, the pandemic has delayed the production until now, but this will be the first time that this masterpiece of the French Baroque will have been seen in Australia. Composed to a French libretto by the great Thomas Corneille, Médée premiered at Paris’s Théâtre du Palais-Royal late in 1693 and ran for three months. The only opera Charpentier wrote for the...