One brilliant performer sets this Aussie classic alight

MUSICAL THEATRE
MY BRILLIANT CAREER
Roslyn Packer Theatre, March 25
Until April 26
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

How many novels spawn a film, play, musical and forthcoming TV series? The fascination with Miles Franklin’s 1901 story continues because protagonist Sybylla’s debunking of patriarchal ideas of marriage as fulfillment for a woman, and instead following a nascent dream of being a writer, so radical in its day, still echoes loudly.

Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film remains a hard act to follow, proven by Kendall Feaver’s disappointing 2020 play. This 2024 Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation, with book by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant, music by Matthew Frank, lyrics by Bryant, and directed by Ann-Louise Sarks, Sydney Theatre Company now presents with the same key participants.

Just as the book was a beacon in Australian literature, so this is something of a groundbreaking musical. Its innovation is an ingenious blend of the vernacular of then and now in the dialogue and lyrics, mirrored in Marg Horwell’s sets and costumes.

Frank’s music, meanwhile, mainly leans into Sybylla’s rebelliousness via a punk-folk idiom played by the cast, augmented by musical director Victoria Falconer’s violin and keyboards and Jarrad Payne’s exceptional drumming. The remaining eight performers act, sing, dance and often play more than one instrument.

However exceptionally those boxes were ticked, there’d be no show without the right Sybylla, and Kala Gare is certainly that. The creators have initially made Sybylla angrier than Franklin’s, which slows our warming to her, so it’s not until she’s escaped her impoverished family to stay with her more genteel grandmother and aunt that she really wins us over with a ravishing song called In the Wrong Key. Sarks’ staging of the song becomes ever more compelling, until Gare’s atop the upright piano, singing her heart out of her desire for a higher plane of living; of writing and music.

While Gare delights in the teenaged Sybylla’s whirlwind of mischief, sarcasm, wit, emotional confusion, morbid depression and vivacity, Raj Labade unleashes his capacity for smouldering and swaggering as Harry, Sybylla’s love interest.

It works, but is somewhat undermined by the songs he sings. That the hyper-intelligent Sybylla would fall for Harry must be completely convincing, or her decision to pursue her career is robbed of all its dramatic tension.

Among the rest, Melanie Bird stands out in three roles, including Blanche, the Melbourne beauty who’s chasing Harry, and a hilarious Liza, the most pliable of the unruly M’Swat children, whom Sybylla is sentenced to teach.

The production’s early tendency to be overly shouty and frenetic eases towards the end of Act One, and then stays in a more emotionally sophisticated and complex place, buttressed by moments of gorgeous design and direction. Perhaps, structurally, it would have worked slightly better if, disobeying Franklin, the creators introduced Harry sooner. That’s where the story really starts of a young woman defying convention and daring to believe in carving out her own life. Chances are, you’ll be cheering Gare by the end.

MUSIC
The Devil’s Violin
Australian Chamber Orchestra
City Recital Hall, March 21
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

ACO guest director, violinist Ilya Gringolts, began the program with a seventeenth-century descriptive piece, Johann Paul von Westhoff’s Imitazione delle Campane. Notionally this is an imitation of bells but in the context of this program, it served to introduce the Baroque virtuosity, that formed the backbone of the concert, and also established, in the listener’s ear, the sonorous depth, particularly in the lower register, of his 1743 violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu.

In fact the range of noble ancient instruments on the stage, played by ACO members, was striking: a 1759 Guadagnini violin (Liisa Pallandi), a newly-acquired 1610 Maggini viola (Stefanie Farrands), a 1728 Stradivari violin (Satu Vanska), a 1610 Amati cello (Timo-Veikko Valve) and a venerable Da Salo double bass from about 1585 (Maxime Bibeau).

Yet no-one could accuse either Gringolts or the ACO of dusty antiquarianism. These are instruments prized for their potential to create distinctive and new sounds. Westhoff’s piece explores spare quivering tremolos across the strings with cello and lute.

Gringolts then launched, without a break, into the first movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D minor, RV 237 emphasising rough storminess, with pitch precision disregarded in places. The second movement introduced a new shade of sweetness and fire into the concert’s tonal journey.

The remainder of the program juxtaposed Baroque works with twentieth and twenty-first century sounds that created a new context and perspective. Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 (1987) began with a single cello note with rapid crescendo, which set off hushed echoes on other instruments, the whole piece becoming an absorbing essay in strident and wispy textures alternating anxious tension and repose.

The first half concluded with Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G minor, The Devil’s Trill, (so named after an alleged fanciful dream in which the composer allegedly heard the devil play the violin). Gringolts wrestled with the piece with Faustian tempest and mercurial fancy as though dragging out its soul.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Aria, Opus 9, subjected a classic melodic texture to sliding harmonies in a veiled sound, like a past moment of tender sentiment recalled in a dream. In Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins in C major, RV 507, Gringolts and Vanska exchanged rapid virtuosity deftly, bringing out Dionysian and Apollonian musical personalities in an agonistic display of fiery brilliance.

Paul Stanhope’s new work Giving Ground used the same harmonic foundation as Geminiani’s La Follia, which it preceded, and began with a quivering ricochet recalling Gubaidulina’s opening. It explored the harmonic “ground” with imaginative originality, sensual expressiveness, and increasingly exaggerated, swaggering gestures before collapsing in a heap onto its opening note.

Geminiani’s work was a tour-de-force of energised and breathtaking instrumental mastery from Gringolts, Vanska, Valve and the entire team. The devil must have felt quite put out.

MUSIC
An Organ Recital with Anna Lapwood
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, March 22
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★½

Anna Lapwood doesn’t walk on stage. She runs. Likewise, she doesn’t stand up to take a bow. She vaults over the organ bench and then jumps up and down, like an excited kid. She is an excited kid. But she is simultaneously a virtuoso musician who conducts, composes, broadcasts and plays multiple instruments including piano, harp, voice and, last but definitely not least, the organ.

In her organ recital, part of a two-week residency with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Lapwood transforms the organ from dour sonic backdrop to vibrant centre-stage storyteller. Repertoire helps. Lapwood is a fierce and unapologetic film music nerd, and plays her own arrangements of the music of Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore and John Williams, including her own The Lord of the Rings Organ Symphony.

It’s a spectacular show, amped up with dramatic lighting, but the music itself does so much of the work. Olivia Belli’s Limina Luminis, for example, written for Lapwood, evokes a rocket launch from the astronaut’s point of view, from nervous anticipation to earth-shaking noise to the magic moment where they reach orbit.

It’s captivating and brilliantly performed. Likewise, when Arwen’s song from Lord of the Rings cuts through the colour and movement, a lone voice (sung by Lapwood) against a wall of sound, you retune your ear to the intricacies of the scoring.

Occasionally, the music risks being outshone by the Anna Lapwood show. Her breathless introduction to the concept of leitmotif, by way of an LOTR recap, has the audience alternately rapt and giggling, while her invitation to join in with the chorus of Hoist the Colours from The Pirates of the Caribbean Suite unleashes a hearty, massed choir which almost drowns out the organ. It’s impressive and moving, but it’s also fun. And isn’t that what live music is about? About a shared experience of wonder and joy, and a good laugh with new friends.

Anna Lapwood appears with Sydney Symphony on March 25, 26, 27 and 28, and in recital on March 28.

OPERA
Eugene Onegin
Opera Australia
Sydney Opera House, March 17
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has the principal singers, Lauren Fagan as Tatyana and Andrei Bondarenko as Onegin, view the story through their younger selves portrayed by dancers Keeley Tennyson and Brayden Harry, as though reading old letters that kindle memories to life.

This makes the characterisation a shared responsibility in the crucial scenes, Fagan projecting serene clarity of musical line against the dancer’s coltish energy, and Bondarenko creating a vocal persona of rough-grained weariness against his doppelgänger’s darting insouciance.

Mia Stensgaard’s set, like the setting of so much 19th-century Russian literature, starts as a drab and alienating country estate, mutating to a drab and alienating ballroom, the perfect setting for self-loathing and disgust, while Katrina Lindsay’s costumes pick out the bright colours of youth against prevailing black.

The chorus singers needle Tatyana while singing bright peasant songs as though her paranoia has turned cheerfulness into an instrument of oppression. A sense of stylised detachment pervades the tone creating something of an analogue for the verse-novel format of Pushkin’s original poem on which the opera was based.

Fagan sang the extended letter-writing episode of Scene 2 with well-shaped clarity, the expressive range reserved at first and opening out in the final affirmative andante. She reserved her strongest moments of dramatic power for the final scene.

Similarly, Bondarenko sang the earlier scenes with laconic, unshaven ennui reserving any hint of impassioned feeling and ferocity for the latter part. As the ill-fated Lensky, Nicholas Jones, who strutted and fretted his first hour upon the stage and then lay on it for the second, sang the earlier scenes with attractive lightness, almost too light at times, and found a settled lyrical sound for his Scene 5 aria where Tatyana’s tune is transformed into minor-key pathos.

Sian Sharp’s Olga was effervescent, bright and true-toned. In the first quartet of these four singers, the balance was uneven, but the later ensembles found their tonal weight securely. As Gremin, Tatyana’s respectable husband after Onegin’s rejection, David Parkin sang with splendidly rich depth.

Angela Hogan gave the servant Filipyevna an affectionately worn dependability and Helen Sherman animated Larina with gentle warmth.

The Opera Australia Chorus were balanced and rounded, even when the placing at the back of the stage compromised projection. Tchaikovsky, a master of orchestral sonority, places a good part of the emotional and expressive burden on the orchestra, leaving the singers with well-crafted melodies and dialogues in Russian speech rhythms.

In the earlier scenes, the Opera Australia Orchestra seemed slightly separated from warmth and momentum at times, but conductor Anna Skryleva achieved points of colour and emphasis in the later scenes. One is left with the memory of haunting melody and the conviction that the stiff patriarchy of 19th-century Russian society, so oppressively restrictive for women, didn’t work for men either.

MUSIC
Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony
Sydney Opera House, March 20
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Maria Duenas played Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor with spirit and musicality, following the curves and eddies of each phrase as though guided by a personal inner vision. In the opening chords, conductor Alexander Soddy laid the foundations for a mysterious aura for Duenas’ opening cadenza, the thoughts initially drawn, out before she hammered out the main theme as though hewing oak.

In the slow movement, both orchestra and soloist established a dreamy, sweet sound, Duenas conjuring, from the upper register of her 1734 Nicolo Gagliano violin, a tone of silvery expressiveness. The finale was energised and sinewy, yet retained throughout the same polished finish, well-shaped phrases and imagination that make her playing communicative and vivid.

Soddy led the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as a responsive partner to this performance, picking up on details of phrasing and providing well-calibrated moments of emphasis.

In Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony (No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78), Soddy demonstrated the same care for detail, feeling for long formal spans and cogent understanding of structure. In the first movement, the three-bar phrases created sculpted arcs that grew in expressive weight as the orchestration thickened.

The organ (Anna Lapwood) made a quiet, veiled entry at the start of the second movement, while the strings announced the peaceful chant-like melody with serene clarity. In the second theme the lowest organ notes extended the orchestral tonal palette subtly, with hushed cavernous echoes. The SSO strings created a fine web of sound for the decorated return of the main idea, closing in profound repose.

The second part of the symphony seemed initially to embark on the same journey as the first, and began with a vigorous, scherzo-like transformation of first movement themes. But following Lapwood’s blazing clarion call at the start of the finale it ends in a totally different place, Soddy maintaining in the exhilarating, yet adeptly orchestrated chorale, a judicious balance of control and excess.

After hearing the nuanced refinement that the SSO and Soddy achieved with Saint-Saens’ instrumental innovations, my only regret was to miss the rare performance of Messiaen’s Les Offrandes Oubliees that accompanied the other iterations of this program and which showed the further heights that French orchestral imagination scaled in the ensuing century.

THEATRE
The Four Quartets
Old Fitz Theatre, March 17
Until March 20
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★

It’s late. Late in the day, late in life, and late on stage. As the audience files into the performance space at the Old Fitz, the sense of anticipation has a faint tinge of frustration. What’s taking so long? But, as this staged recitation of T. S. Eliot’s final meditations presented by independent theatre company The Wounded Surgeon demonstrates, sometimes you just have to wait.

Inspired by Ralph Fiennes’ 2021 solo performance, director Patrick Klavins and his four brave cast members take Eliot’s pungent and elliptical verse off the page and onto the stage. The achievement here is to make the words the real heroes.

Scholars have had a field day finding the tantalising references and clues unselfconsciously littered through the four poems. But this is not a stream of extravagant mind wanderings there for the literary code-breakers: the repetitions, the seemingly accidental rhymes, the gently insistent images which build across the four works call out for a voice, and for an audience sitting, listening in real time, rather than scanning the page for meaning.

All four performers bring a clarity and space to their performances, always seeking (and sometimes finding) the underlying rhythm behind the gnarly verse. In Burnt Norton Sandie Eldridge takes us for a walk in the garden – one that gradually crystallises into a memory palace revealing fragile shards of childhood voices around every corner.

Eldridge inhabits the words with a childlike wonder, letting them do their work without theatricality, but for a charming piece of shadow play (with help from lighting designer Topaz Marlay-Cole). Charles Mayer takes a more urgent, enquiring approach as he grapples with earthy, rugged imagery of East Coker.

Eldridge sets up the space for listening, but Mayer demands we hear, not through volume and bluster, but with some nicely done switches of perspective, from embodied character to curious onlooker. Kaivu Suvarna conjures up the world of water in The Dry Salvages with lightness of touch which sets us free from the claggy, brown river and the overwhelming ocean. Finally, Grace Stamnas burns with cool insight in Little Gidding.

Eldridge and Mayer both have scripts in hand, although Mayer rarely looks at his and, in an impressive feat, Suvarna and Stamnas are both off-book. Whether this is by chance or design, it feels like a dramatic progression from the page-bound text to speech to epiphany.

Eliot wrote The Four Quartets in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. East Coker and The Dry Salvages were written in London, against the backdrop of incessant and terrifying night-time air raids.

But there are no gestures towards history required: instead, phrases jump out as being frighteningly prescient. In a twittering world, and Distracted from distraction by distraction you could do worse than to spend an hour in the theatre as the wounded surgeon plies the steel.

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