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Oscar & Lucinda – Elliott Gyger’s Opera Journey

ELLIOTT GYGER’S
OPERA JOURNEY

A composer’s lifelong path to
Oscar and Lucinda
By Annarosa Berman

To music lovers it might seem that composer Elliott Gyger arrived on the opera scene fully formed in 2015, when Sydney Chamber Opera premiered his Fly Away Peter. But speaking to Gyger on the first day of rehearsals for his second opera, Oscar and Lucinda, one realises that this composer’s journey began on the day he was born   

The son of opera critic David Gyger and music academic Alison Gyger, listening to and attending opera was like eating breakfast to Elliott. He was four and a half when he wrote his first piece of music, a song of which his parents wrote down the words, and not much older when he attended his first opera performance, an open dress rehearsal of the first two acts of Aida, at the Sydney Opera House. Gyger remembers being entranced by the spectacle, but frightened by the noise. “During the triumphal scene I hid under a chair!” he laughs.   

At six he attended his first full-length opera, The Magic Flute. “I was delighted,” he remembers. Nothing about it seemed strange; moreover, when studying languages later at school, he found that Italian, French and German came very naturally to him. “I’d heard them sung around the house for years.”

Gyger wrote his first formal piece of music at nine. He blames his flute teacher, Belinda Webster, now director of the Tall Poppies classical music recording label, for the event. “In class one week she told us that for homework we had to write a solo piece for flute. Next week we came back and I was the only one who’d actually done it. So I can credit Belinda Webster with the start of my composition career.”

His first hands-on opera experience came when he was in the children’s chorus for three Australian Opera productions: Boris GodunovLa Bohème and Tosca. He remembers it as an introduction to the making of opera: the rehearsal process, the difference between a piano score and a full score, the vocal ranges, the mechanics of getting around a stage.

He also remembers the Act I church scene in Tosca, and the coronation scene in Boris Godunov, as pivotal in triggering his decision to become a composer. “Both scenes have amazing orchestral representations of bells, with the harmony powerfully invoking both sonority and emotion. It was almost overwhelming to be on stage with that music playing around you. I wondered if I could write music that would make people feel the same way.”

The path to true love is seldom without obstacles though, and in his late teens Gyger experienced “a bit of a reaction” against the high melodrama of the operatic canon. He loved the Australian Opera’s Britten and Janáček productions though. Two key pieces from this time were Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, a kind of operatic theme and variations, and Berg’s Wozzeck, built from tiny pieces constructed with precision and power. These works taught Gyger that an orderly musical structure enables a composer to take risks with extremes of emotion and contrast, a lesson that would stand him in good stead when years later he wrote his own operas.

While still in his teens he did begin to write an opera, only to realise, half a scene in, that he didn’t know what he was doing. “I was trying to run before I could walk.” He would not try again for many years. Having graduated from Sydney University, where he studied composition with Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe, he headed for Harvard, where he completed his PhD in Composition under the guidance of Bernard Rands, who’d taught Anne Boyd, and Argentinian composer Mario Davidovsky.

He spent four more years teaching at Harvard before returning to Australia. “The US is so vast, it’s very easy for composers to forget that there’s a world outside it,” he says. “The advantage of being smaller and further away from the big cultural magnets of Europe, is that we can be more open to cultural influences from elsewhere. Asia for example.”

Having focused on choral and instrumental writing in his early career, a turning point for Gyger was From the Hungry Waiting Country, premiered by Halcyon in 2006, in which he combined vocal and instrumental music for the first time. When SCO was established in 2010, founding member Louis Garrick approached him with a view to doing a project with the company. Fly Away Peter grew from that.

Fly Away Peter, performed at Carriagework, 2015

Chatting for this article on the first day of rehearsals for Oscar and Lucinda, Gyger says it does not surprise him that Brett Dean had found another Peter Carey novel, Bliss, suitable for his 2011 opera debut. “Both Oscar and Lucinda and Bliss turn the realistic into the surreal and the transcendent. That’s opera. You walk into a room and people are singing – realism is not an option.” Opera also excels at depicting characters with rich internal states of mind. “Oscar and Lucinda has dramatic confrontations, arguments, a love story, but those things are only interesting when the composer puts us inside the minds of the protagonists.”

In Fly Away Peter the principal image was that of birds in flight, and consequently the music was horizontal. “It was all about long lines and arches through space.” Oscar and Lucinda the novel, by contrast, consists of many tiny chapters. “Peter Carey’s aim seems to have been to tell a story in shards.” Thus, Gyger has created a vertical musical landscape, with the kaleidoscope as its guiding image. “The two central ideas of the novel are glass and chance. The kaleidoscope captures both: if you turn it, the pieces of glass inside fall randomly into an arrangement. You think you’re seeing a pattern, but in fact it’s just randomness multiplied to create the illusion of a pattern. If you turn the kaleidoscope again, the same elements re-assemble themselves into a completely new pattern.” Similarly, the music in Oscar and Lucinda is like the constant resetting of a kaleidoscope. “It’s as if the listener is being told to have a look at the view through the kaleidoscope, then told that the kaleidoscope has been turned and the image has fallen in a new place.”

Although by the time he wrote Fly Away Peter he was very confident of his musical skills, Gyger learned many lessons from his first opera. The most important one was to trust his collaborators. “I wasn’t sure that my music and Pierce Wilcox’s words had created believable characters. But the singers took our material and turned it into characters in front of our very eyes.” He also learned to have faith in the production team. “Whatever I imagined Fly Away Peter to look like on stage, it was far less interesting than what my collaborators had created.” He remembers spending an afternoon with the lighting designer. “Magic was happening right there on stage.”​

The two central ideas of the novel [Oscar and Lucinda] are glass and chance. The kaleidoscope captures both: if you turn it, the pieces of glass inside fall randomly into an arrangement.

These days he doesn’t often go to mainstream opera. “But I probably should, because every time I do go I learn something. Marriage of Figaro, for exampleis in some ways an unsurpassable peak of the most amazing perceptiveness in terms of human character. And Rosenkavalier is in many ways an early 20th century version of that. I learn something every time I see these works.” And not only these works. At a recent performance of Pinchgut’s production of Ulysses, a piece he’d never heard, he was struck by how, within decades of opera being invented, Monteverdi was already doing “absolutely extraordinary things with characters on stage.”

Gyger has ideas for several more operas. Turning them into reality would depend on opportunities. “One thing I value at SCO is the creative freedom they’ve given me. They’ve never been alarmed by anything I’ve proposed. I’ll always be looking for that kind of freedom and mutual respect.”

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Oscar & Lucinda

OSCAR AND LUCINDA

Opera in two acts

Music by Elliott Gyger
Libretto by Pierce Wilcox
after the Novel by Peter Carey

World Premiere

A co-production and co-commission of Sydney Chamber Opera,
Opera Queensland and Victorian Opera

Peter Carey’s beloved novel is one of our nation’s artistic triumphs, winner of the Booker and Miles Franklin Awards. Elliott Gyger is the composer who gave World War I phantasmagoric life in Fly Away Peter. In May 2019, he reunites with librettist Pierce Wilcox to transform Carey’s kaleidoscopic tale into a new landmark of Australian opera, directed by internationally acclaimed Patrick Nolan.

She is an orphaned proto-feminist industrialist; he believes he is touched by God. They have nothing in common- except their maddening addiction to gambling. She calls it chance; he calls it providence. Oscar and Lucinda find each other in colonial-era Sydney, and nothing will keep them apart. Until they are torn by a wild dream: to build a cathedral of pure glass, and walk it into the Australian outback.

Oscar and Lucinda is a bonfire of the passions within every human soul. It is impossible, romantic, and visionary.

Like a church made of glass.

Conductor
Jack Symonds

Director
Patrick Nolan

Set & Costume Design
Anna Tregloan

Lighting Design
Damien Cooper

Assistant Director
Constantine Costi

Singers
Jessica Aszodi
Brenton Spiteri
Jeremy Kleeman
Simon Lobelson
Mitchell Riley

Jane Sheldon

Instruments
Peter Clark
Veronique Serret
James Wannan
Henry Justo
Judith Hamman
Paul Zabrowarny
Muhamed Mehmedbasic
Ben Opie
Jasper Ly
Jason Noble
Georgina Oakes
Gergely Malyusz
Neil O’Donnell
Ben Kopp
Emily Granger
Claire Edwardes

SCO thanks the Oscar and Lucinda Production Circle for their support of this ambitious work:

Production Partners ($15,000+)
Martin and Susie Dickson, Kim Williams AM

Principal Artist Partners ($10,000- $14,999)
Anonymous (1), Meredith Brooks, Neil Burns,
Penelope Seidler AO, Christine Williams &
The Macquarie Foundation

Artist Partners ($5,000- $9,999)
John Barrer, John Kaldor AO, Jane Mathews AO,
The Russel Mills Foundation, Prof Di Yerbery AO

Gallery

VENUE

Carriageworks
Bay 20, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

duration

130 minutes
Including one 20 minute interval

Press Reviews

Australian Book Review
Read More
“A triumph for Sydney Chamber Opera… a company that has redefined operatic performance in Sydney and Australia”
TimeOut
Read More
“Sydney Chamber Opera has proven itself to be an essential company in Sydney’s arts landscape in its decade of operation, and Oscar and Lucinda is another feather in its cap.”
The Guardian
Read More
“Musical vignettes that flash and bend like rainbows… setting your heart to new rhythms… a harmonic chase of caramel tones and prayer, and, thankfully, twists of wit and fun”
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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang

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Saariaho’s Musical Path to Simone

SAARIAHO’S MUSICAL PATH TO SIMONE

SCO’s Artistic Director discusses the work of Saariaho
By Jack Symonds

Why did I so strongly want to bring Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone to Sydney Chamber Opera? Simply because the fusion of Saariaho’s unique musical style with the ideas and persona of Simone Weil seemed a perfect match, and one ripe for investigation on the stage by a probing creative team.

Saariaho’s music has been a love of mine since I was a teenager- I must have played albums of her string concertos and orchestral works a hundred times. The universe of sound she invariably unveils in the first five seconds of a piece is musically unique and expressively sui generis: I can’t think of any composer who makes music the way she does.

The glistening webs of tone that open each work seem to stretch from the bottom to the top of one’s aural perception, ushering in an ocean of music that teems with a seemingly impossible abundance of sonic life. Much has been written comparing Saariaho’s music to natural phenomena; waves, lava, the slow unfolding of flowers. The essence of her art is to bend the instrumental and vocal colours available to create a sense of sound reborn from the grit of white noise, embracing the purest fundamentals of music making in striking new ways.

A little bit of history for those wanting to know where Simone came from: in the 1990s Saariaho really began to integrate her early explorations of electronics in Paris with her instrumental writing. It’s like the whole orchestra heaves with an electronic force trying to break out of what it means to play ‘correctly’. She refined this into works of considerable drama, density and savage beauty- listen especially to the orchestral diptych Du cristal …à la fumée. That piece does what it promises: gradually turns a very hard, crystal-like musical object into the aural equivalent of smoke by a kind of musical alchemy where everything melts and becomes effervescent. This process is here perfected, and never left her musical arsenal; La Passion de Simone seems to be built on this principle of writing. What I love about this earlier style is that even though it’s sometimes almost impossibly dense, her clarity of composition and orchestration means that it’s like one hears almost limitless depths of ideas and textures in some kind of vast, uncharted world.

Gradually, the density begins to clear. A piece like Graal Théâtre is every bit as complex in its thought patterns as Du cristal, but the lines are cleaner and the whole sound world more iridescent; the colours are chosen with delicacy rather than the immense textural strength of before. This is a violin concerto, and the violin’s long, singing lines perhaps prepared the way for her long-awaited détente with the solo voice.

Kaija Saariaho Graal Theatre Violin concerto

It was the original singer of Simone, soprano Dawn Upshaw, who initially seems to have inspired Saariaho to begin to write more – and differently – for the voice. The soprano and electronics piece Lonh, and soprano, female choir and orchestra work Château de l’âme seem to be gateways to the operas, and to Saariaho’s more recent music in general. The singing lines she was making room for are now, very naturally, vocal melodies. She also seemed to happen upon a distinctive vocal style almost immediately. Sung melodies act like extraordinary, lyrical ornaments on the orchestral or instrumental texture creating long, hypnotic lines of arresting beauty. They seem sensually arching, always with clear high points and expressive directness. Her background in electronics and composition using the natural overtone series (‘Spectralism’) means that the vertical harmonies which produce these horizontal lines are extremely resonant and have a real connection to each other – even though they are complex. The way Saariaho spaces notes on top of each other is carefully done so that we can hear every single pitch precisely, making the music feel inevitable and somehow ‘right’.

Her big hit was the opera L’amour de loin from 2000– a dreamy, medieval troubadour work which is perhaps the absolute epitome of her style, recently staged by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera. The old troubadour-inspired songs and chants which form the backdrop to this opera really seem to have gotten under her skin and even emerge, transformed in subsequent pieces. The next opera was perhaps a surprise in its directness and brutality: Adriana Mater is about a woman raped in war, becoming pregnant, and the story of her bringing up a son who becomes a violent, complex man. All the implicit, lava-violence of the early ‘90s music comes bursting out in that piece which still manages to contain a final scene painting the most moving portrait of maternal love and forgiveness I think I’ve ever heard in opera. Simone was next and, I think, successfully marries the brutality of Adriana with the voluptuousness and languor of L’amour de loin.

L'Amour de Loin: "Si tu t'appelles Amour", staged by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera

All the best qualities of Saariaho’s music are on display in this extraordinary piece from 2006. The enveloping mystery of the opening immediately conjures the paradoxical, strange figure of Simone Weil with a pool of sound that seems as if it has existed forever, waiting for this story to be told. 

The solo soprano takes on Simone as an idea: she sings to her, about her, through her, around her and speaks as her, allowing Saariaho to use instruments, voices and text to paint a more complex and fully-realised Simone than any single performer could ever portray. The additional use of choral voices adds immeasurably – they are embedded in the tapestry of the orchestra, and I see them giving words and definite meaning to the instruments to articulate this imagined, musical Simone.

The vocal melodies and words are then spun in time over a constantly shifting instrumental backdrop of resonance. It’s this sense that everything is always melting, transforming and alive that is essential to capture in every aspect of realising her work.

..."The universe of sound she invariably unveils in the first five seconds of a piece is musically unique and expressively sui generis: I can’t think of any composer who makes music the way she does."

There is also an ever-present feeling of timelessness, and a deliberate confusion of the unfolding of musical time versus clock time. In a great Saariaho performance you should feel like you have no idea how long you’ve been there – five minutes could stretch into eternity, or the whole thing could feel like an upbeat to a single, new second. I will never forget the feeling of seeing the world premiere of Lumière et pesanteur in 2009. It’s actually a short orchestral piece, a transcription of the 8th ‘Station’ of Simone. I hadn’t heard Simone at all then, but the sense that this six or so minutes was complete, perfected, suspended time in an exquisite unfolding world- like the most delicate plant opening in timelapse- has never left me. Since then, I knew I had to find a way to bring a major piece of Saariaho’s to Sydney, and Simone is, unbelievably, the first of her larger works to ever be performed in Australia.

Director Peter Sellars has said of Saariaho’s work that “in the 21st century…we have a responsibility to do more than sit around and tell sad stories. Here we see there will be a future. And that future has been guaranteed all over the world by women, women who in impossible situations nourish and cultivate human dignity.” Simone Weil: figure of impossible, paradoxical grace, Kaija Saariaho: composer of some of today’s greatest and most distinctive music, and the Australian dream team of director Imara Savage and designer Elizabeth Gadsby are just the people to show us this future.

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A Passion for Transcendence

A PASSION FOR TRANSCENDENCE

Creatives find their concept for La Passion de Simone
by Annarosa Berman

The idea for the form of La Passion de Simone, a work for solo soprano, chorus and ensemble based on the life of the philosopher Simone Weil, came from the passion play tradition according to composer Kaija Saariaho. Yet when the director for Sydney Chamber Opera’s new production for Sydney Festival, Imara Savage, and designer, Elizabeth Gadsby, began to explore Saariaho’s score and Amin Maalouf’s libretto, they were initially confused.

Says Savage: “The different sections are labelled as Stations, so as a theatre maker you think, okay, this is a passion play – there are discreet episodes that lead to the main character’s death. Except that the music does not necessarily reflect such episodic stations- it is much more subtly structured and complex.” Maalouf’s libretto did not fit the passion play mould in any obvious way either – as Savage puts it: “How do you stage somebody’s thoughts changing?”

Savage and Gadsby, who in the early, conceptual stages of a production think of themselves as co-directing, approached SCO artistic director and conductor of the production Jack Symonds for help. “Can you tell us what the music is doing, and why? ” they asked. Symonds responded with an essay explaining, among other things, how Saariaho’s score can be thought of as operating like sonic waves that sometimes build to what could be perceived as a climax, yet are never resolved.

“Elizabeth and I both connected with Weil’s view that you gain knowledge through endurance and suffering,” Savage says. “If you walk into suffering rather than pulling away from it, you transcend it to a place of spirituality, where death is not the end. When we started thinking about Weil’s life in these terms, it became easier, because the music strongly reflects it.”

In keeping with this insight, Gadsby began to grasp the drama of the music when she realised that it was constantly moving from one thing to the next, like particles in space. “It’s not dramatic in the sense that it builds up and then settles – it never settles. It goes towards something and then shifts and moves somewhere else. Therein lies the drama.”

La Passion de Simone, Image by Mike Daly

What sustains the narrative is Weil being in a constant state of endurance, with the assurance that if she endures long enough, there will be some kind of knowledge gained. Savage says: “La Passion de Simone is a meditation on suffering. It asks you to contemplate what it means to step into suffering, like Weil did. She gave away all her worldly possessions and rationed her food in accordance with what people could eat in wartime France, for example. She suffered so that she could empathise with others who suffered.”

Gadsby likens this “constant state of endurance” to the experience of picking up a stone and examining it from multiple angles. “You look at it from every possible perspective and then you go, well what does this object taste like? And what does it feel like to try and be a stone? That’s what Simone did: she emulated other people’s experiences in order to have compassion for them. She went to war, went to work in a factory, starved herself.”

Once director and designer grasped how the music sustained the drama, the next question was, how does one represent, on stage, a constant state of flux?

Gadsby says: “The idea of watching something dissolve, then reform in front of your eyes, came up. Imara said, how do you stage that? So we started thinking of gestures that would create a sense of watching matter decompose and reform, and we settled on white rice as a material that could fall in a constant stream, or be in a constant state of flux.”

As [Amara] Savage puts it: “How do you stage somebody’s thoughts changing?”

But singing an opera while a pile of rice is falling on you would be challenging, plus the women didn’t think Symonds would be thrilled with the sound of rice constantly falling on stage during the performance. There was also the structure of the libretto to contend with: the soprano, sung by Jane Sheldon, embodies Weil, while simultaneously observing her as narrator. Savage and Gadsby found a solution that was both practical and artistically satisfying when they asked video artist Mike Daley to create a video installation of Sheldon standing underneath four tonnes of rice piling up around her. Thus, the Sheldon in the video talks, and observes Weil, while Sheldon on stage sings, and embodies Weil.

If the image of Weil slowly being subsumed by rice is a relatively static one, that is the intention. Savage says: “As designer/director, your task is to keep the audience stimulated by creating and changing images. But in Passion, the music is going around the cosmos, and the libretto, besides being full of philosophical contradictions, goes from God to politics to lived experiences to Weil as a child to Weil on her death bed. The libretto and the score need something to anchor it, or you’d be doing the same thing three times over.”

Gadsby adds: “The music gives the emotional content and the libretto acts as intellectual foil to that. What we are trying to do is to create a space where the audience can sit with all the information and emotional content that they’re given. The central image, although it is constantly moving towards something else, stays the same.”

“You look at it from every possible perspective and then you go, well what does this object taste like? And what does it feel like to try and be a stone? That’s what Simone did: she emulated other people’s experiences in order to have compassion for them. She went to war, went to work in a factory, starved herself.”

Direction and design ideas grew organically from the two women discussing the work. “That’s generally how Elizabeth works,” says Savage, to which Gadsby adds: “The best design happens when the designer and director’s brains merge, so you don’t know whose idea was what. Imara bombards me with ideas: sometimes I’d open my inbox and find twenty emails from her, and a hundred images and written thoughts. She pours all this information on me, and I then piece together the most important ideas and we discuss them.”

Many people would struggle to make head or tail of the “indiscriminate” research that she shares with Gadsby in the conceptual phase, Savage says, but Gadsby always manages to create a synthesis. “I said, ‘Rice? No, maybe not.’ And Elizabeth said, ‘Rice? Yes!’” They discussed the symbolism of rice: how it stands for consumption and nurturing, but in some Buddhist traditions where you’d eat one small bowl of rice a day, also for asceticism. And when mandalas are built from rice, for meditative qualities. “It resonated with so many ideas in the work,” Gadsby says.

In the end, La Passion de Simone’s creative team found their answers by focusing not on its links to the passion play, but on Simone Weil’s fractured and contradictory identity. “She’s an activist but also a philosopher, she was Jewish but became Christian and was interested in Eastern religions,” Savage says. “She’s a multi-faceted woman who cannot be pinpointed into a particular thing. In fact, it would have been a disservice to have tried to describe her in fifteen stations.”

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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang

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Past Productions

La Passion De Simone

LA PASSION DE SIMONE

Australian premiere

Presented by Sydney Festival in association with The Song Company

Music by Kaija Saariaho
Text by Amin Maalouf

Passion and philosophy collide in a glimmering ascent to enlightenment.

Simone Weil bestrode the 20th century as a figure of impossible grace. Acclaimed Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho tells her story through music in this deeply spiritual work, never before seen in Australia.
Saariaho’s score is luminous and coruscating, blending a single incredible soloist with the voices of The Song Company and nineteen virtuoso instrumentalists.

Star soprano Jane Sheldon (The Howling Girls, An Index of Metals) leads the audience through Weil’s extraordinary life, from her rejection of labour during World War II to her exile into self-imposed starvation in protest of the Holocaust’s atrocity. Director Imara Savage and designer Elizabeth Gadsby, the creative team behind the acclaimed Fly Away Peter, return to SCO for this shimmering meditation on defiance in the face of inhumanity.

Conductor
Jack Symonds

Director
Imara Savage

Set & Costume Design
Elizabeth Gadsby

Lighting Design
Alexander Berlage

Assistant Director
Clemence Williams

Video Artist
Mike Daly

Soloist
Jane Sheldon

Vocal Ensemble
The Song Company

Instruments
Alex Norton
Veronique Serret
James Wannan
Mee Na Lojewski
Kirsty McCahon
Lamorna Nightingale
Jane Bishop
Jasper Ly
Jason Noble
Noriko Shimada
Gergely Malyusz
Neil O’Donnell
Callum G’Froerer
Matthew Harrison
Genevieve Lang
Susan Powell
Joshua Hill
Bree van Reyk
Kaylie Melville

La Passion de Simone is published by Chester Music, by kind permission of The Music Sales Group

Watch the trailer

Gallery

VENUE

Carriageworks
Bay 20, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

duration

70 minutes

Press Reviews

The Sydney Morning Herald
Read More
“glowing pristine beauty and transcendent iridescence”
TimeOut
Read More
“Bold, uncompromising and musically spectacular… thrilling, mesmerising…extraordinarily rich and rewarding; sensual, strident and stinging.”
Realtime
Read More
“Once again I’m deeply grateful to Sydney Chamber Opera for staging a work I knew of but never expected to see and which has provoked thinking about opera and form, politics and faith”
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Keep in touch

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General Information

We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang

Categories
Past Productions

Resonant Bodies Festival

RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL

Australian Exclusive
View the program here

Illuminating the shape-shifting power of the human voice, Resonant Bodies is an international festival of new vocal music founded in New York in 2013 and described as “indispensable” and “essential” by the New York Times.

In this exclusive Australian iteration, six extraordinary singers will showcase their work over two days throughout Carriageworks. Resonant Bodies‘ singers extend to an international constellation of performers whose innovative practices represent the vanguard of the vocal arts.

For Sydney 2018, Swedish-Ethiopian composer-improviser Sofia Jernberg, Indonesian experimental vocalist Rully Shabara and luminous New York soprano Ariadne Greif join SCO favourite Mitchell Riley , new music royalty Deborah Kayser and local rising star Sonya Holowell for a unique demonstration of the breadth and range of the contemporary voice.

Voice
Rully Shabara
Sofia Jernberg
Deborah Kayser
Sonya Holowell
Mitchell Riley
Ariadne Greif

Alto Saxophone
Jim Denley

Drums
Ramberto Agozalie
Daniel Cesar

Movement
Raghav Handa
Melinda Tyquin

Piano
Jack Symonds
Jonathan Holowell

Installation
Elia Bosshard

Double Bass
Nick Tsiavos

Sound Design
Ben Carey

Visual Director
Alexander Berlage

Gallery

VENUE

Carriageworks
Bay 20, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

duration

Each artist performs a 45-minute set

Press reviews

The Sydney Morning Herald
Read More
“…a thoughtful and hugely impressive co-creation… an outstanding tour-de-force of nuanced vocal flexibility, dissembling characterisation and physical theatre.”

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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang

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Vocal Mobbing & Prelanguage

VOCAL MOBBING, PRELANGUAGE &
SECRET CODES

An interview with Damien Ricketson, composer of The Howling Girls
By Pierce Wilcox

The first thing Damien Ricketson does is shatter my notion of the composer as a driven scribbler cooped up in their ivory tower.  ‘It hasn’t been one of those situations where I sit in my bedroom, concoct a score, then it gets handed to a director,’ the composer of The Howling Girls tells me. He sees the entire project as a co-creation between him and director Adena Jacobs, where the typical division of labour is blurred; she was on board from the beginning, and he’s still in the room playing a creative role as the project moves into staging rehearsals.

They were in sync from the beginning, he explains, with a shared interest building a opera that took on the human voice itself. He tells me they were interested in ‘what it means to have a voice: both literally as in the singing voice, and politically as in agency.’ Their early ideas shared this common thread, covering everything from Ophelia’s moment of drowning in Hamlet being exploded out into an ‘aquatic howl against her situation’ to the Slavic myth of Rusalka, familiar in pop culture from The Little Mermaid, ‘again about a girl having to sacrifice her voice in order to fulfil her desires.’

The work crystallised when both Damien and Adena read Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which includes the infamous story of five girls presenting at hospitals in post-9/11 New York City unable to speak for no medical reason. ‘We’d both been reading this book through the Trump election campaign,’ Damien tells me. ‘It seemed a very terrifying end point for this book.’

Written in 2007, Faludi’s book seems to foreshadow the direction an anxious America and the West would take through to the present. ‘She [Faludi] tracks how female commentary just… shrinks in the years in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and how the mythology of this John Wayne type, cowboy-cum-fireman, your Strong-Jawed Man, is put back to the fore as the protector and the saviour.’ For Adena and Damien, it gave shape to their ideas and yoked them to a feminist political undercurrent. ‘It’s associated with this whole notion of having a voice, losing your voice, and trying to regain your voice.’

Damien goes out of his way to assure me that they’re not telling the story of these girls, or any story as you’d conventionally define it. ‘There’s no narrative, there’s no libretto, there’s no orchestra! A lot of the foundations of what you might call opera are not there.’

It’s easy to imagine this as difficult, cerebral art – the terror of every marketing department – but Damien is going for the opposite. ‘It’s an attempt to create a music that almost bypasses the brain and acts directly on the body. In terms of an audience experience, it’s… direct, visceral, primal.’ Not everyone has the cultural references to process the depths of some avant-garde performance, but everyone knows what it’s like to scream.

‘There’s a choking cadenza!’ He almost laughs at this sentence, previously unuttered in human history. He wants the audience to feel like they’re part of Jane Sheldon, the brave soprano who has trained in specific breathing techniques to handle the demands of this piece. ‘I turned to many non verbal vocalisations that you typically associate with high emotional arousal: howling, but also sobbing, moaning, crying…. Laughter’s one as well. That doesn’t make much of an appearance,’ he admits.

None of these are language, but they all communicate in the most expressive manner, which is something humans might have done long before the invention of words. Damien tells me about ‘vocal mobbing’, a theorised mode of pre-language. ‘People used to sing in this great, throbbing, almost cicada-like chanting as a means of creating a sonic shell around themselves,’ which might have warded off potential threats.

Communication without language is a paradox he’s excited to live inside, in a work full of paradoxes. ‘I’ve been working in this contradictory space of using a lot of involuntary sounds, but in a highly controlled, composed kind of way…. On one hand it’s very abstract, without narrative, but there is also a very literal directness about it.’

I ask him about another paradox: a composer who leaves gaps in their work. He’s always been interested in creating incomplete or open works, on the principle that it’s provocative to the imagination, both of his collaborators and his audiences.

‘The ruins of the ancient city, or a secret code… it’s exactly the missing knowledge that excites the brain to try to fill it in, to imagine it or discover it or unlock it.’ It’s sometimes a literal theme in his work, which has in the past evoked ancient or forgotten musical conditions.

It’s also a theme he explores formally, creating scores that are open to fluidity in their interpretation. He’s excited by the way this ‘elicits a necessary creative engagement from a performer, not just a technical engagement. Trying to facilitate someone else’s imagination. I love this situation where you bounce off one another, and the composer is not the isolated lone genius in their bedroom.’

On set for The Howling Girls,Carriageworks.

‘There’s no narrative, there’s no libretto, there’s no orchestra! A lot of the foundations of what you might call opera are not there.’

The Howling Girls is the latest in a series of multi-modal pieces that emphasise the creativity of their performers and co-collaborators. Fractured Again featured a glass artist and a video artist, while The Secret Noise was a fully staged work with actors and dancers. Damien sees his first opera as an extension of these explorations, while his work as co-artistic director of Ensemble Offspring, the lauded new music ensemble, has encouraged him to treat every performer as a potential multi-instrumentalist. ‘That’s the [percussionist]’s realm… always looking at objects around them and innately curious to ask what sounds they can produce.’

It’s a curiosity he shares, and he’s written far outside the norm, creating scores for arcane, old or exotic instruments, and even experimented with building his own. The score for The Howling Girls features a set of instruments that do more than produce sound. In a playful way, they respond to the themes of the work, and offer new opportunities to stage its ideas.

There’s a theremin, played by Jack Symonds, who also serves as musical director. ‘It’s a wonderful contradiction of being a gestural, physical instrument, without ever being touched. There are associations, with [Jack] being a conductor, with the notion of sign language and attempts to communicate. The piece ends with – rather than him controlling a specific melody – an attempt at sign language.

It features an instrument with the sound of raw fear: the Aztec death whistle. Damien’s journey towards this horror started with an article about psychological responses to sound. ‘People have used sound as a tool to create fear in others. You know the German dive bombers in the Second World War? That siren-like sound when they come at you-’ he makes the neeeewwww sound familiar from old war movies- ‘it’s not natural. They put baffles on the end of their wings that, as they accelerate, catch the wind and make this terrifying sound. It was… psychological warfare. I never knew.’

In the same article was a tantalising reference to an Aztec death whistle that took him down a Google rabbit hole. ‘Thank you, Internet! A few clicks later there’s a video, and it sounds like a B-grade splatter film scream. That’s great. I’ll get a few of those.’

Even a bass drum, which to the uninitiated has one function, takes on playful new roles in this score. ‘On one level it’s an amplified surface on which things can happen, whether they be scrapes or rice dropping… to more literal kinds of things, it gets whacked when Jane has her choking cadenza. You can literally view it as someone whacking you on the back, trying to dislodge what’s in your throat. The image I had was a defibrillator – the violence that comes with resuscitation.’

These seem like surprising innovations, but for Damien the real departure was going electronic. ‘It’s not my main shtick as a composer… but it was a conscious and logical response to these themes. If it’s about being inside Jane’s body, that immediately suggests a heavily amplified aesthetic, really feeling like we’re in her throat. I want a music that works directly on the body, and one of the most obvious examples of that are those sub-frequencies where you feel it, rather than hear it.’

He’s been assisted in this electronic direction by sound designer Bob Scott. ‘I give him sounds, mock-ups, and he’s been lifting it to another level. He’s almost like an orchestrator.’

It’s a fitting closing moment of modesty and generosity for a composer who places so much emphasis on the creativity of others.

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Bypassing the Rational

BYPASSING THE RATIONAL

An interview with Adena Jacobs, director of The Howling Girls
By Pierce Wilcox

When I speak to Adena Jacobs it’s almost the end of the first week of rehearsal for The Howling Girls, and while other directors might be intimidated by the challenging first days of staging a new opera, for her it comes as a relief. The lead artists have spent so long with this project existing only in their minds. Adena and composer Damien Ricketson have worked conceptually on the project for around three years, and soprano Jane Sheldon has spent months hard at work mastering the incredible technical challenges of the score. Now, Adena says, it’s about experiencing the work in person, in their bodies, and finally ‘getting out of our heads’.

This moment has been a long time coming. SCO’s Artistic Director, Jack Symonds, played creative Cupid back in the summer of 2015 and paired Adena with Damien Ricketson with the faith that together they’d make something strange and brilliant. ‘Our initial meetings were like dating. Artistic dating!’ Adena laughs. They’d never seen each other’s work, and decided to meet up every day for a week, going to concerts, art galleries, and theatre performances, getting to know each other’s processes and what excited them as artists.

The arranged marriage stuck, and Adena speaks with enthusiasm about Damien’s approach. ‘He was from the very beginning excited to have a creative collaborator, a director, as part of the conception of the piece. I think that’s quite rare.’ They developed a collaborative style that encouraged improvisation, testing and experiment, or in one case, ‘making a bizarre instrument in your living room and showing it on Skype!’.

She didn’t know Damien’s music before starting the project, but rapidly gained an appreciation for his style. ‘His music is very open, and gives you space as the listener and as the observer in the end to experience… a series of states. It puts you through something, through an experience- and I think that’s really beautiful. It puts me in a different mode. The process of working with him is interpretive as well as generative, and he’s still willing to shift and respond and change.’ Damien has been in the room for this week of rehearsals, testimony to their ongoing creative partnership. ‘He’s in the mess of it, all the time, which is cool!’

Wizard of Oz, performed at Belvoir 2015

Like all great partnerships, they wanted the same things. ‘We wanted to do something distilled and singular, a ritual experience,’ Adena explains, in which a soprano either sang themselves hoarse or staged some kind of a ritual – of death or ecstasy.

Having a third partner in the marriage helped: they knew they were making a work for the virtuosic Jane Sheldon. Knowing that Jane was doing the piece, they came together through an idea Adena describes as ‘an extreme durational event, as performed by an extraordinary soprano.’

Adena has spent most of her career in devised theatre, creating abstract and strongly visual responses to canonical texts, everything from the Bacchae of Euripides to The Wizard of Oz. Her normal process, she tells me, starts with being attracted to a particular image inside a myth or a story, but this time was different.

Like all great partnerships, they wanted the same things. ‘We wanted to do something distilled and singular, a ritual experience,’ Adena explains, in which a soprano either sang themselves hoarse or staged some kind of a ritual – of death or ecstasy.

The Bacchae. Photo by Pia Johnson

‘I had done a series of works like that back to back, and felt a bit exhausted, and wanted to do something from a new place.’ Instead, she began with the formal principles that united her and Damien. ‘We didn’t want the work to be narrative driven… we wanted it to be pure, and distilled, and experiential.’

Knowing that, they pulled apart the ideas they’d had for Jane, and realised it all came back to the voice. The concept of de-voicing brought them to the story of the Rusalka, the Slavic water sprite who must lose her voice to become mortal and find love. You might know this as Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

Adena then remembered a story she’d read about five girls who found themselves unable to speak following the 9/11 attacks, and fed that into the work. What transpired is in no way a literal telling of their story, but might echo their experience of horror, psychic anxiety, and a possible grasp for release.

It’s an idea common to much of Adena’s work, which has been preoccupied with the place of the voice and the difficulty of language. ‘Why somebody would be silent in the face of something is a mystery,’ she says, asking the question of these girls and their fellow silent witnesses through history. ‘It could be borne from a refusal or a choice, as much as a retreat, or an escape, or a sense of paralysis. Or a symptom of something that can’t be named.’

When I complain that, as a librettist, Adena’s textless opera has put me out of a job, she assures me that it’s not out of disdain for language. ‘I enjoy literature more than theatre,’ she confides. The problem, for her, is that ‘in traditional theatre our brain goes into a particular place when we hear words being spoken,’ while she wants to ‘communicate in forms that bypass the rational.’

Skipping the brain to hit you straight in the body, her work operates much like these girls and women, who are so often rendered voiceless, or when they do speak, are not listened to or believed. ‘Because the verbal becomes difficult, politically or psychologically, it’s like their body is communicating in some other way.’

Those bodies speak in ways that can’t always be controlled, which Adena knows well, having worked with young female performers multiple times. Her collaboration with teenage girls in The Bacchae was polarising and telling, with some audience members and critics focusing on the reality of these bodies far more than the ideas they were communicating. It’s an experience Adena has considered with rigorous clarity. ‘The politics of performance immediately sets up a dynamic where there’s a paying audience and figures on stage who are both the subjects and the objects. While they control many elements of the performance, they can’t control what the audience is seeing or thinking in their minds. That dynamic is inbuilt into many young women’s experiences of walking down the street, where you can perform a certain identity but you can’t control the gaze of others.’

Book of Exodus, Photo by Pia Johnson

Even the title plays into that political question, and she assures me it won’t be what people expect. ‘It enters into the iconography of young girls and horror, but also subverts it in quite fundamental ways… It’s not a punk band, it’s not a riot, it’s not pussy riot, it’s not cheerleaders.’

What it is remains a secret, but her design team guarantees it will be stunning and surprising. She has nothing but praise for Eugyeene Teh on set & costume design, and Jenny Hector on lighting, with whom she recently collaborated on The Book of Exodus Part II. ‘What’s good about both of them is that they think in terms of form, and they’re both very intuitive. They’ve felt like a natural extension of the team. I feel like the design is using Carriageworks Bay 20 to its maximum capacity, which is exciting for a piece that ranges between the very intimate and the cosmic.’

Those shifts in scale are essential for a work that moves between the specific and the general. The performers are all women, but Adena and Damien didn’t set out to make an explicitly feminist opera, unlike many of Adena’s other works. ‘It feels like these female performers are channeling a more universal kind of energy. We’re coming together to channel a particular kind of anxiety, or terror, that feels most interesting through the bodies and voices of women.’

She returns to the 9/11 girls, who ‘absorbed everybody’s psychic horror of the event.’ If we imagine the girls in a doctor’s surgery, we encounter a specific, female experience of ‘not being believed or listened to in an institutional context.’ But what they are unable to express is something larger and shared by everyone.

‘It’s not about the experience of being howling girls, or being a woman,’ Adena insists. Rather than an opera about hysteria, she’s interested in our representations of hysteria, and the way we project it onto women and young women above all else. ‘It’s trying to understand why we need female vocalists to express this range of emotions and ideas.’

I end by asking her if she wants her audiences to leave terrified. ‘The work has to be dark to warrant its release at the end. I wouldn’t say there’s catharsis, but it does feel like there’s a sense of potential, or future-looking, which is quite beautiful. There’s an odd sense of salvation.’

You heard it here first: if you want to be saved, come to The Howling Girls.

Image: Polly Borland, MOUTH 2017, Archival pigment print, edition of 6, image courtesy Murray White Room, Melbourne

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Past Productions

The Howling Girls

The Howling Girls

World premiere

by Damien Ricketson and Adena Jacobs

In the weeks following Sept 11, five young women present separately to hospitals in New York with identical symptoms. They are unable to swallow, and believe that some debris or body part from the destruction has lodged in their throats. The surgeon who examines them finds no obstruction.

The Howling Girls is a new chamber opera dissecting the medium and metaphor of the voice, its loss and attempted reconstitution. A solo voice constricted, wheezing, stammering, in decay, a teenage chorus of howling girls, an absent mass, an unearthly theremin, a spectacle of fragmented bodies and voices. A sublime aural and perceptual encounter.

Composer
Damien Ricketson

Musical Director
Jack Symonds

Director
Adena Jacobs

Set & Costume Design
Eugyeene Teh

Lighting Design
Jenny Hector

Sound Design
Bob Scott

Soloist
Jane Sheldon

The House that Dan Built
Grace Campbell
Kittu Hoyne
Kiri Jenssen
Emily Pincock,
Jayden Selvakumaraswamy
Sylvie Woodhouse

The Howling Girls is supported by Creative Partnerships Australia through Plus1 

stream now

Gallery

VENUE

Carriageworks
Bay 20, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

duration

60 minutes

Press Reviews

TimeOut
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“This is the pinnacle of their [Sydney Chamber Opera’s] daring provocations and an essential work for anybody wanting to experience the cutting edge of the operatic art form.”
Audrey Journal
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"...The Howling Girls coils around the listener like some impossibly ancient Siren song.”
The Sydney Morning Herald
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“… a remarkable tour-de-force”
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General Information

We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang

Categories
Past Productions

The Rape of Lucretia

The Rape of Lucretia

Opera in two acts, op. 47 by Benjamin Britten
Libretto by Ronald Duncan

A co-production of Sydney Chamber Opera and Victorian Opera

This is where chamber opera begins: with an unforgivable crime and a hollow prayer.

For composer Benjamin Britten, the Roman tale of Lucretia’s tragic violation at the hands of the tyrant Tarquinius became the vessel for an operatic revolution. In place of grandeur and bombast, his work was taut and intimate, with only eight singers and a chamber ensemble to score their every thought and action.

Britten’s Lucretia seethes with psychological insight and desperate yearning for divinity. It is a ritual circle carved out for the noblest acts of humanity. And the most depraved.

SCO brings this pioneering work to a Sydney stage for the first time this century. Helpmann Award-winning Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company Kip Williams returns to SCO after his ravishing production of An Index of Metals to direct rising star Anna Dowsley (Le Nozze di Figaro for Opera Australia; SCO’s Ich habe genug) in the career-defining title role.

Conductor
Jack Symonds

Director
Kip Williams

Associate Director
& Costume Design

Elizabeth Gadsby

Set Design
David Fleischer

Lighting Design
Damien Cooper

Singers
Anna Dowsley
Celeste Lazarenko
Jane Sheldon
Jessica O’Donoghue
Andrew Goodwin
Nathan Lay
Jeremy Kleeman
Simon Lobelson

Instruments
Miki Tsunoda
Nicholas Waters
James Wannan
Mee Na Lojewski
Steven Adler
Jane Bishop
Ben Opie
Jason Noble
Anthony Grimm
Michael Wray
Rowan Phemister
Joshua Hill

These performances of The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten are given by permission of Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, exclusive agents for Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd of London

Gallery

VENUE

Carriageworks
Bay 20, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

duration

110 minutes, including one 20 minute interval

Press Reviews

TimeOut
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“Musically, and in terms of its visual design, the production is unequivocally strong. All eight soloists are well cast and sing very, very well.”
Sydney Morning Herald
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“… a cogently fresh look at a rich though problematic piece.”
Bachtrack
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“… there was excellence throughout the entire eight-person cast.”
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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

© 2020 Sydney Chamber Opera | Site designed & built by Anderson Chang