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A powerful work by brave innovators is a legacy for the departing Opera Australia Artistic Director. 

Monodramas by Francis Poulenc, Kaija Saariaho and Jack Symonds feature in a triple bill on the themes of love, loss and absence. 

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.

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.