Intérprete: Chad Kelly

An updated staging of this 17th-century opera, with great singing and acting, is more successful than its somewhat distracting updated orchestration. 

Director Constantine Costi updates the action  of Mozart's Singspiel to a secluded cross between a cult headquarters and a nightclub. 

Iestyn Davies joins the Australian Chamber Orchestra for music by Bach and Pärt in a programme featuring distracting modern dance. 

Winner of OperaUpClose’s Flourish competition for new writing, The Blank Canvas is a heartbreakingly tragic tale of an abstract artist coming to terms with widowhood, success and some worrying hallucinations. 

Turning great novels into opera isn't a new idea - consider Prokofiev's War and Peace or Massenet's Werther - but it can be a tricky business: opera thrives on pace and high drama, while the greatest novels have time and space for reflection and character development.