Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Jack Symonds

This electic performance of Pierrot Lunaire was preceded by a clutch of contemporary Australian works (and a poem), which served to demonstrate that Schoenberg's modernity is still way ahead of the times.

The problematic nature of Britten's Rape of Lucretia is well-known: Sydney Chamber Opera's production attempts to navigate it via gender inversion. 

Mary Finsterer has managed a musical melange that crosses effortlessly and delightfully from the Renaissance to today. If only Tom Wright's book and libretto had been a match, this would have been a work worth taking to the world.

Its achievement lies in the brilliant notion of taking the two parts of Dostoevsky's work – the Aboveground Man's self-loathed life and the Underground Man's reflections upon it 20 years later – and running them concurrently, using two different singers.

It's quite a contradiction when you call a work Passion and then spend 90 minutes resisting all emotions. 

The adaptation of David Malouf's novella Fly Away Peter by Pierce Wilcox and Elliott Gyger is given a compelling world première by Sydney Chamber Opera under the direction of Jack Symonds.

A new opera by Alison Croggon and Michael Smetanin on the Soviet poet Mayakovsky is an intense experience in the production by Sydney Chamber Opera under Jack Symonds.

Sydney Chamber Opera deliver a thrilling double-bill of works by Kurtág and Benjamin under the direction of Jack Symonds, at the Sydney Festival 2014.

Showing unusual restraint for Sydney Chamber Opera, Giya Kancheli's monodrama Exil became a performance with an undeniable power and poignancy in the hands of this young company.

Three days after seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast version of Wagner’s Parsifal, I attended Climbing Toward Midnight, Jack Symonds’ compositional response to this same opera, directed by Netta Yashchin.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s latest venture, a production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ 1979 piece The Lighthouse, played to a packed Carriageworks theatre on Monday. In an era when the continued viability of classical music institutions is debated hotly, the fact that this new company can pull in the crowds for a challenging modernist work is cause for congratulation.