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A new Australian work, a major statement by a leading recent international composer and a radical interpretation of a 20th century classic: experience SCO’s aesthetic mission in a single evening.

Poulenc’s classic La voix humaine is a shattering portrait of lost love – as heard through only one side of a dramatic phone call. Celeste Lazarenko (The Rape of Lucretia) will inhabit this woman with her characteristic emotional truth. Kaija Saariaho’s Quatre instants also maps the terrain of intoxicated passion, but from a 21st century female perspective: an ocean of sound unleashed from the rich voice of Emily Edmonds (Owen Wingrave, His Music Burns). 

 

Directed together by Clemence Williams (Breaking Glass), these vivid monodramas of desire will be complemented by Jack Symonds’s The Shape of the Earth starring Mitchell Riley and directed by Alexander Berlage (Future Remains). Described by the SMH as “a hugely impressive co-creation… an outstanding tour-de-force of nuanced vocal flexibility, dissembling characterisation and physical theatre” in its one-off showing in 2018’s Resonant Bodies Festival, this contemporary gloss on Patrick White’s Voss pulls apart the voice to breaking point, before reconstructing an inner landscape of glowing intensity.