Peter Tregear

Peter Tregear reviews 'British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1950' edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton

April 2020, no. 420 • 03 September 2019

When the German social commentator Oscar A.H. Schmitz described England as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ [The Country without Music], the insult stuck. Its veracity arose not because the English lacked a vibrant musical culture, or a lively intellectual class prepared to engage with what they were hearing. Rather, it was because Schmitz believed the English simply did not consider music to be an art f ... (read more)

West Side Story (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 10 April 2019

Some sixty-two years after its Broadway première, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s musical and geographical updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet continues to pack a powerful dramatic punch. While not without its weaknesses, such as the reliance on now-dated street slang and ethnic stereotypes, West Side Story remains a masterful fusion of musical and dramatic elements set to a sco ... (read more)

Karl V (Bayerische Staatsoper)

ABR Arts • 15 February 2019

The corpulent form of Henry VIII understandably dominates our own historical imagining of the turbulent first half of the sixteenth century. From the perspective of continental Europe, however, other rulers loom just as large; from there even the English Reformation seems to have another monarch at its epicentre. That monarch, Charles V (1500–58), was the inheritor of both the Habsburg and Span ... (read more)

Peter Tregear reviews 'National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered' by Michael Halliwell

December 2018, no. 407 • 01 November 2018

Just as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for being long ago overshadowed by those iconic sails, and by the internal compromises that mired its construction. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, for i ... (read more)

Evita (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 19 September 2018

I confess that I do not share the knee-jerk negative view of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that many of my colleagues profess. His best works, especially those conceived with librettist Tim Rice, stake a legitimate claim on our attention, if only for their consummate skill in identifying and exploring subject matter for music theatre that captures, and holds, the popular imagination. Their three e ... (read more)

Strange Times for Artistic Practice

ABR Arts • 03 August 2018

We live in strange days. Matters once unlikely to raise a flicker of public criticism can now quickly became raging bushfires of self-righteous anger. Such is the accelerant power of social media. Our public discourse is, however, rarely the better for it. Subtlety and nuance are all too frequently sacrificed on the altar of a supposed moral clarity that, among other things,sits uneasily against t ... (read more)

Opera, the art of the possible

ABR Arts • 28 August 2014

Hanrahans are scarcely a new phenomenon in the so-called ‘heritage arts’. Classical music in general, and opera in particular, have been publicly declared to be dead or dying for hundreds of years. But when no less an institution than the Metropolitan Opera starts talking openly about a new ‘global crisis confronting the operatic form’, it might be time for us to take a little more notice. ... (read more)