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.
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.
