You’re conducting the world premiere ofBiographicawith Sydney Chamber Opera. What can audiences expect from the production?
This is a very unique opera – a fusion of so many different theatrical and musical ideas into a really fascinating whole. The lead character of Gerolamo Cardano is actually a spoken part, played by the amazing Mitchell Butel, who interacts with five singers and 11 instrumentalists. The musical apparatus therefore becomes a dazzlingly rich psychological portrait of a complex figure from the Renaissance, and brings him into an eternal present. The production itself is a sleek modern gloss on Renaissance ideas and visual motifs, always aware of its presence in the striking industrial space of Carriageworks.
How does the Renaissance-inspired music fit with the opera’s thematic concerns?
The composer Mary Finsterer has invented an ingenious method of creating music that filters the radiant yet ascetic beauty of Renaissance music through processes belonging very much to modernity. Cardano was a visionary thinker and an extreme human being; Mary’s score fully reflects his historical roots and the sounds of the Renaissance while extending his thought over the intervening centuries.
Is it important to show contemporary audiences that opera isn’t all about music from hundreds of years ago?
Yes! That has been Sydney Chamber Opera’s mission from the start. If opera gives up on extending its repertoire into the present, it will become a moribund museum form – albeit a very beautiful one. The creation of stories told through the alchemical meeting of music, text and stagecraft is one of the most exciting art forms ever invented. To confine it to a single historical period because of perceived audience timidity is a cultural tragedy. It therefore falls to companies such as ours to present new work in the best possible light, giving the most virtuosic, sincere, dramatic performances we can.
Does conducting a work that’s never been performed before offer you an opportunity or a challenge?
Both, in huge amounts – but the opportunities and challenges are genuinely exciting. Every interpretative question I have and decision I have to make in this 300-odd-page score has never been thought of by anyone before. You feel like you’re taking your machete and exploring an untouched environment where everything is at first strange, and then you learn how it all works.
Apart from conducting Biographica, you’re also a composer and the artistic director of Sydney Chamber Opera. What do you have in store for 2017?
I’m particularly excited about SCO’s first co-production with Victorian Opera on the very first chamber opera of consequence – The Rape Of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten, directed by the extraordinary recently appointed artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, Kip Williams. I’ve no doubt this will be an amazing show!
[Jack Symonds photo by Anja Emzen]
Biographica,as part of Sydney Festival 2017, playsSaturday January 7 – Friday January 13 at Carriageworks.
