Visceral and thrilling: This plea for peace is as relevant as ever

MUSIC
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
September 13
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★½

Michael Tippett began A Child of Our Time in September 1939. The oratorio had its premiere in 1944. In the interim, Tippett lived through the Blitz and spent three months in prison as a conscientious objector while the world warred. And yet this is a work that speaks with a clarity and cohesion that belies the chaos of its time. Our Time.

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, under the baton of Brett Weymark, made a spectacular case for the work, not only with words and music but also using the physical presence of a massed choir to tremendous dramatic effect. The choristers were not wearing the usual concert blacks, but dressed in everyday city greys, browns and navy blues. Normal people, living their lives.

Furthermore, they didn’t stand and sit with the usual quasi-military precision of a trained choir, instead moving like a crowd, one or two at first and then more, as if the Opera House was a train pulling into Central full of commuters. This could happen to anyone. But then, at artistic director Brett Weymark’s signal, the crowd roared into life, as one. It was visceral and thrilling.

The Symphony Chorus and VOX singers negotiating Tippett’s dense fugues with solid skill, while the Festival Chorus swelled the ranks to shattering effect in the five spirituals. Meanwhile, soloists Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Nicholas Jones, Sian Sharp and – a particular highlight – soprano Deborah Cheetham Fraillon rang out from the mix.

The first half of the concert featured two premieres: Agnus Dei by Australian composer Alice Chance, and A Plastic Theatre by UK composer Joanna Marsh.

In A Plastic Theatre the chorus became another instrument of the orchestra, building a complex, fascinating patina over which soloist Helen Sherman articulated Katie Schaag’s dreamlike, nightmarish words. Chance’s work, by contrast, was the antidote to angst, a deeply affecting setting of the Latin Agnus Dei next to an arrangement of a traditional hymn from Mer Island, which held out hope for a moment of stillness and reflection.

MUSIC
Donald Runnicles conducts Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House, September 13
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin played the famously unassertive solo opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with reflective simplicity, and when conductor Donald Runnicles and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra answered with the second phrase, it was as though the whole musical thought had been uttered in a single breath.

The sense of shared goals and understanding between soloist, conductor and orchestra was one of the things that made this performance so memorable. The other was Hamelin’s own combination of superb technical command and inner-looking focus, as though always moving beyond brilliance to pursue a deeper thought.

The first movement unfolded in a mellow glow until Hamelin’s cadenza (which he wrote himself), which explored darker expressive shades in the piano’s mid to low register. In the second movement the orchestra’s gruffness and Hamelin’s quiet inner song were minutely synchronised with breathless rhythmic unanimity.

The springing gait of the last movement repeatedly moved to a plateau of calm in the rustic second theme, as though wanting to take time to follow up an important idea. This movement had another of Hamelin’s highly original cadenzas. It was one of those performances that found an ideal point of balance between quiet vitality and meditative flow.

Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour, which opened the concert, found a different sort of balance between wild energy and languor. The way the opening section mixed frenetic rushing passages in the cellos and double basses, interrupted with dramatic flashing chords from the wind reminded me, perhaps oddly, of the opening of Wagner’s The Valkyrie, which also portrays a wild nocturnal flight.

Clyne moved on to a doleful minor-key melody, and then brought in textures that conjured up a medieval world. The close settled on a warm chord of strings, woodwind and muted trumpets played from the upper balconies, which was beautifully tuned and balanced by the SSO players, until the timpani abruptly ended the reverie.

In Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5, Op. 47, Runnicles and the SSO moved from brooding sometimes stormy heaviness in the first movement, through delicate textures of magical clarity in the second, to the deep stillness of the Largo, which is its expressive centre. Runnicles repeatedly led the music to a sense of profound stasis, quickened only by the most shaded tones before reviving the pulse with barely-moving stirrings and ending the movement in transcendent calm.

The finale also has its moments of stasis while its clamorous noisy passages created Shostakovich’s notoriously ambivalent excitement – visceral exultation or enforced rejoicing?

MUSIC
Worlds Collide in the Round
Bankstown Arts Centre, 13 September
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★

Richard Petkovic’s Culture X Festival dreams big, and Worlds Collide offers a glimpse of that dream made real. That we get only a glimpse is less a reflection of the band’s limitations and more a function of the ambition their dream.

That ambition goes beyond the obvious - having a loose collective of musicians from seven cultural traditions would be bold enough - and looks not merely to bring diverse sounds together but to forge something distinct that could only have emerged from Western Sydney.

For now it remains a work in progress. Inevitably in the “world music” palette, the interplay between MC Esky’s (Filipino and very Sydney) urban patter and Danny Telas’ Colombian ululations is always interesting and occasionally hints at a new musical language. Similarly, Yaw Derkyi’s exuberant Ghanaian percussion keeps the performance firmly in party mode.

The band pays due respect to this country’s first victims of cultural collision but Aboriginal music is contributed only through a guest appearance by Raph Hatz on yidaki. Previous iterations of this ensemble have featured middle eastern strings and the group would be stronger for incorporating these voices into the core ensemble.

Lyrically, it is the high minded stuff you would expect - anti-war exhortations on Bombs, a celebration of cultural identity on Freedom and a joyful meditation on the soul in Ayah. That last piece is the standout of the night - rising above stylistic collage into something transcendent, calling the audience at once inward - towards our shared essence - and outward into our one human family.

Not that the lyrics matter much - the real message was in the audience: young and old, black, white and everything in between, cool and uncool ... all united by the music. It may be earnest and a little homespun, but a world too often cynical and slick, we could use more collisions like this.

DANCE
Dracula
State Theatre until September 12
Newcastle Civic Theatre September 17 to 21
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★

The audience was in full Gothic dress-up at Sydney’s opening night of Dracula by BIG Live. Spurning the traditional ballet company structure in favour of a fully privately funded show-based business model (more akin to musical theatre), BIG is currently the new kid on the dance company block.

You have to admire its entrepreneurial spirit. Though BIG blurs the line between ballet as a classical artform and ballet recast as popular entertainment for business, its performances are mostly sold out. Clearly, it has reached audiences typical classical dance companies have not.

The choreography (Joel Burke, who is also co-founder, artistic director and dances the role of Jonathan) condenses Bram Stoker’s novel into a two-act ballet. It tells a sufficient if unchallenging ballet-as-popular-entertainment story, rather than being maturely expressive or artistically sophisticated. Act 1 is tighter than a tonally patchy Act 2, though the four ghost women are a consistent highlight.

Eric Luchen’s sets are satisfyingly gothic, and Toby Alexander’s score plays like a pub quiz round of “name that famous classical music piece”.

While the musical familiarity is meant to help audiences feel at home and quickly identify what mood the story intends to inspire, it underestimates audience ability to resonate with lesser-known music, to the story’s detriment: some pieces are so cliched or famous in their own right that their meaning overrides.

The first glimpse of Dracula’s castle features the opening of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ - musical shorthand for horror films - prompting audience snickers. As Dracula (Ervin Zagidullin) embarks on a killing spree to Tchaikovsky’s ubiquitous 1812 Overture, my guest asked with genuine puzzlement if the music meant Act 2 had turned into a slapstick comedy.

The dancers are mostly young, their freshness somewhat compensating for inexperience. But for seasoned ballet-goers, even those preferring traditional ballet companies, the main reason to consider Dracula is Zagidullin, a Vaganova-trained former Mariinsky Ballet artist with the powerful masculine technique and fearless leaps unique to the Russian school of male ballet.

One of BIG’s strengths is that it regularly features guest eastern European stars such as Maria Khoreva, Iana Salenko, and Daniil Simkin. Renowned eastern European companies such as the Bolshoi and Mariinsky scarcely toured Australia even before the Russia-Ukraine war, so BIG provides valuable opportunities to experience this iconic style, which – especially with male dancers such as Zagidullin – is unlike anything else in the dance world.

MUSIC
LeAnn Rimes
ICC Sydney Theatre, September 13
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★
She had her first record deal at 11, her first No.1 (from wistful country debut album Blue) at 14. Back touring Australia for the first time in two decades, LeAnn Rimes jokes to a devoted audience that it was a good thing she didn’t take folks’ advice to do songs more appropriate for her age back then: “it would be really weird singing them now”.

Rimes’ seemingly innate maturity – in her sense of self, and in the superlative control she has of that powerhouse soprano – is what grounds the Texas-raised megastar’s show. Barefoot on stage, rose gold and luminous in a ruffled silk pantsuit, the lithe 43-year-old carries us with a laid-back, easy grace through her decades of international multi-platinum fame, refusing to let any one hit, genre, or cult movie define her.

Because, despite the intermittent yelling of “Coyote Ugly!” from a few too-eager punters, that film (Rimes tells us, perched casually on a chair) was her introduction to “sex songs” and one to which she was pretty unprepared.

Her most recent albums – including Chant: The Human & the Holy (2021) and God’s Work (whose “resurrected” version was released in 2023) – are far from pop bangers, falling into what the industry calls “contemporary Christian”. They’re not immediate crowd-pleasers but Rimes turns out to be at her best when delivering soaringly optimistic, spirit-moving songs like Something Better’s Coming.

She doesn’t pander with her biggest hits either, dialling a lot of them back to a groove she sways along to, arms raised and completely unfazed.

That first No.1 hit, the one she released at 14 – One Way Ticket – is slowed right down, its final verses segueing into what Rimes reveals is its inspiration, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. In slow, reverent belters like You Light Up My Life, particularly in those impossibly held, impossibly pure high notes, listening to Rimes feels like being pierced with a shaft of beatific morning light.

Her band – an acoustic and electric guitarist and a drummer – know well to give a gentle backing to such an instrument. They get their dues near the end, with some idiosyncratic solos during Can’t Fight the Moonlight (that Coyote Ugly song, on which our guy can sure slap on those hand drums). Reuben De Melo comes on stage briefly to meet his former The Voice Australia coach and reprise their Coldplay duet of Fix You that sealed his season win last year.

It’s not an evening of huge spectacle or dynamic physical performance but, with its spoken and sung messages of hope, Rimes’ voice seeks to summon a better dawn.

MUSIC
Maid Made Boss (La serva padrona)
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall, September 13
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

In 1733, the 22-year-old Pergolesi wrote some crisp, stylishly brilliant music for a short, extraordinarily silly libretto and changed the course of music history. In setting out to create no more than a filler (or intermezzo) between the acts of a serious, long forgotten work, Pergolesi established, with melodious, well-finished music and rapidly changing tone, the musical and dramatic language for comic opera that Mozart was to perfect in The Marriage of Figaro and which continues in various forms to this day.

Pinchgut Opera’s production of the resulting work, La serva padrona (translated here as Maid Made Boss), captures the style to a tee, with singing of sparkling lightness from Celeste Lazarenko and Morgan Pearse (the only two singing roles), and crisply energised instrumental playing from the Orchestra of the Antipodes under conductor Erin Helyard.

In the role of Serpina, Lazarenko’s lines were imbued with sunny, well-phrased warmth and an even finish across her range, the upper register bright and ringing, the lower firm and neatly polished. Morgan Pearse was previously known to Sydney audiences for his work in contemporary pieces with Sydney Chamber Opera a decade ago, and it was a delight to hear him in the type of 18th-century part that has been the basis for his international career since.

Singing with polished articulation and tonal firmness in all registers, he performed with suave agility and a fine-grained mahogany sound, tossing off difficult passages with lightly worn virtuosity and precision. Gareth Davies took the mute role of Vespone, whose very silence is the whole joke until he is prodded to growl, with dour humour.

Between the two scenes, the orchestra performs a three-movement, concerto-style interlude, and violinist and leader Matthew Greco led this with refined neatness and immaculate style. Playing from behind the stage, the orchestra, under Helyard’s direction, projected with clarity, light colour and airy grace.

Lochie Odger’s design was a simple platform with blue sky and white clouds populated with costumes of deeper hue. The dramatic dialogue of the piece is as much with the audience as between the characters, and director Eugene Lynch met with charm the challenge of sustaining a work that celebrates its own superficiality and whose one goal is not to be taken seriously. Pergolesi himself had little time to celebrate. He died a few years later aged 26, leaving on the evolution of music, a delicate but indelible mark.

MUSIC
Cut Copy
Night At The Barracks, September 12
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★

Maybe Cut Copy knew their audience and the location well – maybe a little too well.

On a night Sydney forgot it’s supposed to rain all the time, the four-piece electro-pop seemed perfectly positioned. Coming on stage at 7.30 sharp and scheduled to be off by the 9pm curfew, before them was an audience bulking around the 35-45-year-old/parents-night-off demographic, in good mood with a light buzz on, knowing they’d be home in plenty of time for a good night’s sleep before Saturday-morning activities.

Meeting the moment, from 2008’s Nobody Lost, Nobody Found to the brand-new Solid, from 2004’s Zap Zap to this year’s Still See Love, Cut Copy offered a really pleasant, mid-level workout dance set: easy to move to, throw shapes to, without fearing sharp elbows or hectic sweat.

While hardly thrilling, it was nice, even a little Wa Wa Nee, as the hour mark approached. And maybe it would have been enough, a little festival atmosphere and a little loosening of the hamstrings to remember when back at work on Monday. But when Time Stands Still found Ben Browning’s bass more prominent, it was as if somebody had given permission to loosen up, or someone remembered there could be more.

The new Gravity added fusion keyboards before the best breakdown, and build-up, of the night so far as it segued into Out There On The Ice, a duo deserving of the strobing lights. Then Meet Me In A House Of Love, with its New Order synth stabs and solid footed underpinnings, moved into a pumping Hearts On Fire, and lordy, we had a dance party. Where had this been all night?

This made even crueller the shock of the power cutting out before the end of Hearts On Fire, the screens still showing mouth and hand movement but all sound absent. They were back after five minutes, and Need You Now and Lights And Music did a pretty good job re-establishing the energy, but in doing so, they served a clearer message: this body-active part of the show should have started a good 15 or even 30 minutes earlier in the set.

Playing it safe might have seemed sensible, like the audience, but sometimes you need to play to the senses not just the sensibility.