Peter Rose

'Come, Memory', a new poem by Peter Rose

April 2020, no. 420 • 19 March 2020

‘Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.’ Donald Justice, ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’   I think of you now for the first timein about five times as many yearsas you actually lived, so uncomplainingly,they always said, as they do of the dead.Your name shadows meas we shadowed your small coffin,toggle-straight in our uniforms –why, I have no idea, for my ... (read more)

Coronavirus and Australian Book Review

April 2020, no. 420 • 17 March 2020

After a summer of bushfires across the nation and phenomenal loss and destruction, Australia – like the rest of world – now faces a health crisis of fearsome scope. As we go to press (earlier than planned because of present uncertainties), the scale of the threat, unprecedented in our times, is becoming stark. Australian Book Review is mindful of the enormous challenges posed by the coronavir ... (read more)

La Bohème (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 07 January 2020

Gale Edwards’s production of La Bohème is back for an extended summer season – sixteen performances no less. This production has been filling theatres since its creation in 2011. It may not run for as long as Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 extravaganza, still an annual fixture at the Metropolitan Opera, but it probably has another good decade to go. Revived here by Liesel Badorrek, it works consi ... (read more)

Turandot (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 26 November 2019

Reviewing the recent production of Madama Butterfly in Adelaide, I dwelt on Giacomo Puccini’s ceaseless search for new subjects between operas and how he considered everything from a Zola novel to the historical Marie Antoinette before settling on the story of Cio-Cio San. The path to Turandot, his final, unfinished opera, was similarly curious. Puccini, the world’s most famous composer, ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978–1987' by Helen Garner

December 2019, no. 417 • 22 November 2019

‘Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.’ Franz Kafka, 7 January 1911   Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in ... (read more)

Madama Butterfly (State Opera South Australia)

ABR Arts • 18 November 2019

With certain artists – the luminaries, the abiders – it’s tempting to assign a kind of inevitability to their oeuvres. The musicals of Cole Porter, the satires of Jane Austen, the exiguous poems of T.S. Eliot have a kind of perfection that make them seem nonchalant. But here we run the risk of overlooking the sheer chanciness of most artistic careers – not to mention the false starts and t ... (read more)

Nina Stemme Returns (Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 06 November 2019

Three years ago, almost to the day, the great Swedish soprano Nina Stemme made her Australian début – in Hobart, a little unexpectedly. Joining her was Stuart Skelton, with whom she had just performed in Mariusz Treliński’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera – a sombre, martial, digital creation that divided critics and audiences alike (‘overdetermined darkness an ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'Ransom' by David Malouf

May 2009, no. 311 • 01 May 2009

In David Malouf’s second and perhaps most celebrated novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), of which this new novella is so reminiscent, the Roman poet Ovid is exiled to a primitive village named Tomis. Ovid, ‘called Naso because of the nose’, has been banished due to his unspoken affronts. In Tomis, Ovid, doomed and apart, senses that he must acquire in simplicity a new kind of wisdom: Must it ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'The Henson Case' by David Marr

November 2008, no. 306 • 01 November 2008

Panic, David Marr has stated since the publication of this book, is what he writes about: why people panic, what they panic about, and how they express it. Clearly, with his investigative skills and his access to different worlds, Marr was the ideal person to examine the so-called Henson affair. The story itself is by now depressingly familiar, but few if any saw it coming. Bill Henson, a Melbour ... (read more)

Andrea Chénier (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 19 August 2019

A few weeks after that memorable Peter Grimes from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney and Melbourne audiences were treated to another concert version of an opera, this time a very different and much less cerebral work: Umberto Giordano’s sole enduring success, Andrea Chénier (if we discount the tilting Fedora, occasionally mounted for a famous soprano à la Callas or Freni). Giordano’s fo ... (read more)