In a Bachtrack world dominated by the cultural riches of Europe and America, it may come as a surprise to find that distant Australia has its own specialist Baroque and Early Classical Opera Company. The quirkily named Pinchgut Opera was founded in 2002 to tackle one work a year, but has succeeded sufficiently to move to two a year in 2014.
Why would youthful Australia – at the “arts (or was it arse) end of the world”, as Prime Minister Paul Keating never quite clarified – patronise Baroque and early Classical opera? The history was not particularly encouraging. Opera Australia had a go at that period every three or four years with successful stagings but an orchestral sound that was swallowed up by the notorious Sydney Opera House pit. But then along came the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra with a showmanship and a close approximation of historically informed performance which revealed considerable demand.
It took a rare compounding of age and youth to bring Pinchgut into being – the name taken from the island in the middle of Sydney Harbour where the worst of the worst convicts in the 1790s were isolated and starved. The age came from Liz and Ken Nielsen, who'd grown weary of traditional operas that seemed to be just “entertainment with sets and costumes” and wanted to create something that prioritised the music. Fortunately, the Nielsens were led to the 23 year old Erin Helyard, a self confessed “opera nerd, babbling on about old operas that I kept discovering. And there are, of course, far more of them than 19th and 20th Century works”.
Now Pinchgut's artistic director, via 8 years in Canada, an academic career and an international reputation for interpreting historical scores, Helyard was reliant at first on founding artistic director Anthony Walker, an Australian who already had international experience of opera production and singers and has gone on to head the Pittsburgh and Washington Concert Operas in the USA. But the emphasis on “operas not in mainstream that deserved to be heard and given musical priority” has never wavered.
Semele started the ball rolling, followed by Purcell's The Fairy Queen and Monteverdi's Orfeo – relatively familiar works to build support. Liz Nielsen recalls that from the beginning, wooing the audience was of equal importance to selecting the musicians. “We wanted to develop the best possible audience: one that understood what we were doing and trusted us to come to unknown works and composers like Charpentier (David and Jonathan) and Salieri (The Chimney Sweep). That required lots of communication; and a group of them became key supporters with generous funding that has saved us from being dependent on government money. We assumed, rightly, that would never be reliable”.
Despite steady box office, it took 7 years to break even – Cavalli's L'Ormindo starting the process of building up enough reserves to go biannual. Sadly, it was also the only opera not recorded because of a hiatus between ABC Records and Pinchgut's own label. “And those recordings are essential”, says Nielsen. “For one thing, they give us an international reputation at a time when we're just about the last company left recording full operas live. And they're essential for the artists, allowing them to show off and increase their chances of an international career. We're also selling Erin's performing scores – his Salieri is unique, for instance; there are no other versions”.
Salieri's The Chimney Sweep was the first biannual opera in 2014. Its balancing act with Gluck's Iphegenie en Tauride – comedy then high drama – was perfectly planned; better, one might argue, than last year's Armida (Haydn) and Theodora (Handel) which may have delighted musically but suffered from confusing plots and productions that were wanting.