National Opera’s La Clemenza is a compact, semi-staged production, directed by Peter Coleman-Wright and performed in Canberra’s leading orchestral venue, Llewellyn Hall. Its six soloists are joined by a mixed chorus of sixteen voices (chorus master, Tobias Cole), and a classical-era ensemble of about thirty-five musicians, most drawn from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Saturday evening’s première was a rousing affair, both musically and dramatically, only diminished by the provision of action summaries as surtitles rather than the full, translated libretto. This lack of text mattered most in understanding the rapidly delivered content of the recitatives and the interaction of the key characters, particularly the opera’s leading couple, in their frequent altercations.

Among the evening’s soloists, it was Helena Dix (Vitellia) who unequivocally stole the night. She was strong across the extreme two-and-a-half octave range that Mozart demands. Shrill and demanding at the top, powerful and menacing in her depths, Dix enhanced her depiction of Vitellia’s vengeful character with marvellously supple movements of body and hand to fulfil one of Coleman-Wright’s precepts of ‘the performer, not singing, but being’. Dressed in bright red, with exquisite cloak, Dix truly lived the role. Indeed, the opera begins with her plans of conspiracy, and ends with her confession to leading it, yet both acts, in different ways, are a provocation to the naturally forgiving emperor. In failing to sign death warrants for the conspirators, he intends that no oxygen be given to the movement that has just nearly killed him. ‘No, they shall not have this triumph’, in his absolving actions. Dix’s Vitellia is deliciously provocative throughout, as the libretto demands. ‘I don’t fear his [Tito’s] punishment; I fear his clemency,’ she utters at the close of Act I.

As the ever-nervous Sesto, Vitellia’s (male) lover but also emperor’s confidant, mezzo-soprano Catherine Carby meticulously portrays the coils of his evolving insecurities. Sesto is but putty in Vitellia’s histrionic clutches, whether he is trying to fulfil her changing demands that he assassinate, or not assassinate, the emperor. Carby’s tight vibrato and bulls-eye intonation ably promote a constant vocal tension, as her character tries (and fails) to reconcile what love, friendship, and duty require. Depressed most of the time, Sesto never oversteps the emotional bounds that beloved Vitellia ever exceeds. At least, not until well into Act II, when in the aria ‘Remember our first love’, he confronts the serious possibility of his own death, by imperial warrant. This draws a wider, less inhibited expression of emotion, thereby showing the fuller range of Carby’s capacities.

The opera’s secondary couple, Sesto’s (male) friend Annio (Eleanor Greenwood) and lover Servilia (Mikayla Tate), also Sesto’s sister, are essentially foil roles of diligence and loyalty, and this production did not much exceed that brief. Servilia’s gentle, almost pastoral girl-to-girl advice in Act II to the prickly Vitellia that weeping was not enough to save Sesto was deftly delivered by the youthful Tate. The imperial minder, Publio, in his brief interventions, likewise stood for everything stalwart. Bass-baritone Andrew Collis deliciously represented that Canberra type of bureaucrat who never fails to make explicit what he knows, and what he knows he does not know.

Bradley Daley as Tito in La Clemenza di Tito (photograph by Peter Hislop)

Amid the fevered comings and goings of these characters stands the eponymous Tito (Bradley Daley). Daley’s is the hardest role to convey, for Tito eschews retribution (signing death warrants), wants to trust his friend Sesto (who is ‘the standard by which I measure my own heart’), and genuinely supports his people (who have just experienced the eruption of Mount Vesuvius). Those people (the chorus) are appalled at the storming of the Capitol. Daley plays, as required, a modest, reasonable, clement ruler. Being a tenor, Daley’s Tito is frequently overwhelmed in Act I by the otherwise all-female (and higher) voices, which cut through the orchestral texture more easily; and he appeared sometimes less secure in his intonation. Having survived the conspiracy, however, the part is higher, more urgent, occasionally even demanding, in Act II. Daley neatly culminated his role, rising above the hubbub of the final scene, to maintain his message of clemency: ‘I know everything, absolve everyone and forget all.’ He deserved a more generous ovation from the audience, which seemed to evaluate Tito rather than the artist Daley.

Equally responsible with the soloists for National Opera’s opening-night success was Australian-Chinese conductor Dane Lam, also the keyboardist in recitatives. Lam kept a riveting hold on tempos and the instrumental-vocal balance, ever reflecting the fluctuations of the work’s flickering dramatic barometer. His strict control of rhythmic detail and phrasing inspired the strings to deliver a lucid late-Classical corporate tone, and to cushion important woodwind roles, such as the two original basset horn obbligato accompaniments, well rendered by clarinettists Alan Vivian and Sam Kelson-Gray.

What, you might ask, is National Opera? For La Clemenza was its corporate début. As Coleman-Wright asserted in interview with me last week: ‘There are not many opportunities for so many great Australian talents to perform in Australia. They need to “cut their chops” here.’ True to his word, all of Saturday’s cast, who have truly roamed far and wide in the operatic world, ‘still call Australia home’, more so than ever in these years of Covid-19.

To its director, the company title also indicates that it is ‘for all Canberrans, and indeed all Australians’. Coleman-Wright’s plan intensifies the heroic struggle by Canberra Opera and various local predecessors, stretching right back to when Nellie Melba sang at the opening of Parliament in 1927. Although well endowed with visual art venues of national purpose, notably its art and portrait galleries, Canberra still lacks any such national focus in the performing arts of music, dance, or drama.

In his winning plan for Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin – unlike most of his competitors – included an opera house in his design; in fact, facing his planned National Theatre, at the lake end of what is now Anzac Parade. What a different Canberra it might have been! As Coleman-Wright commented last week: ‘I thought it was time that such an important city really had its own company.’ Perhaps National Opera, with three further productions this year, is a further step towards realising Burley Griffin’s dream for a cultural, as well as political, capital of Australia.

La Clemenza di Tito, presented by National Opera, continues at Llewellyn Hall on April 13, 15, and 17. Performance attended: 10 April 2021.