Category: Dominica Matthews

Three years in the making (not very long, really) Opera Australia (OA) commissioned a new work with Music by Australian Composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, with a Libretto by Australian Playwright, Justin Fleming, focusing on the life of an iconic Australian painter, Brett Whitely. Whitely, in life, was a controversial figure. He is, still, a controversial figure. His art however, has grown more and more powerful as time as moved on. Born in 1932, he died young at the age of 53. The death as a result of a drug overdose. Whitely had become in 1985 an incurable addict. The Opera Australia…

  Opera Australia present FAUST, an Opera in five acts by Charles-Francois Gounod. Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre, after Michel Carre’s FAUST ET MARGUERITE (1850) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST, Part 1. In the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. I have not, of late, attended Opera Australia (OA). The choice of work presented, by that company, seems to be repetitive with not enough variety of repertoire, or interesting singers, to attract me, considering the cost outlay. The last live opera I attended was in New York, where I attended a performance of Shostakovitch’s THE…