Performer: Simon Lobelson

Gorgeous music by Mary Finsterer and an evocative setting by Elizabeth Gadsby transport you to the ends of the earth.

Luke Styles' interludes to the Canticles may not set the musical world alight in Awakening Shadow, but they provide the perfect excuse to perform Britten's remarkable works.

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.

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.