Peter Rose

Nicole Car, Étienne Dupuis and Jayson Gillham (Melbourne Recital Centre)

ABR Arts • 12 August 2019

Melburnians haven’t heard Nicole Car since 2014, when she was a luminous Tatiana in Kasper Holten’s production of Eugene Onegin. Much has happened to the Melbourne-born  lyric soprano since then, primarily in Sydney at first with several big Mozart and Verdi roles (Pamina, Fiordiligi, Violetta, Luisa Miller), but now, increasingly, overseas. At thirty-three, Car has already sung major rol ... (read more)

Peter Grimes (Sydney Symphony Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 30 July 2019

Difficult it is to imagine the full impact Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes had on the opening-night audience at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 7 June 1945, just a few weeks after the conclusion of World War II. Little wonder that the audience, possibly expecting something cheerier from the prodigal wunderkind, sat there in silence for minutes after that subtlest of endings. Joan Cross, direct ... (read more)

Anna Bolena (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 08 July 2019

Opera Australia – in its present expansionary phase – has hitched its wagon to a digital star in the form of a series of seven-metre-high LED screens. The future moves about on a busy automation system, thus creating a series of new dramatic spaces. Interviewed in the July 2019 issue of Opera magazine, Lyndon Terracini – now in his tenth year as artistic director – extolled the new technol ... (read more)

Get Adam and Eve out of Paradise

Book Talk • 06 June 2019

Few people escape from publishing. Most people, once they get a foot in the door, stay put. Mary-Kay Wilmers has been working in the industry for more than fifty years. She began at Faber & Faber when the company was still dominated by ‘GLP’ (the ‘Greatest Living Poet’ himself, T.S. Eliot, much mentioned in Toby Faber’s epistolary history of Faber). Wilmers, co-founder of the London ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'My Life As Me: A memoir' by Barry Humphries

December 2002-January 2003, no. 247 • 01 December 2002

When Barry Humphries published his first volume of autobiography, many readers were left wanting ‘More, please’ – avid as gladdie-waving victims during one of his shows; voracious as the greedy polymath himself. After all, he had opened that comic triumph with a credible confession: ‘I always wanted more. I never had enough milk or money or socks or sex or holidays or first editions or sol ... (read more)

Rigoletto and Così Fan Tutte (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts • 16 May 2019

Dr Johnson famously defined opera as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’, and so it proved on the opening night of Opera Australia’s autumn season – at least until the curtain went up. Lights down, photography admonition underway, conductor due any moment, we became aware of a strange incident in the gloom, as a solitary figure – elderly, well-dressed, seated behind the conductor, c ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'On David Malouf: Writers on Writers' by Nam Le

May 2019, no. 411 • 30 April 2019

For more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words, it may not be what the ravenous world had in mind, but it is seriously interesting – interestin ... (read more)

Peter Rose reviews 'A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis: A Literary Life' by Jacqueline Kent

August 2001, no. 233 • 01 August 2001

In September 2018, NewSouth published a new edition of A Certain Style. On a chilly evening in 1980, a stylish woman in her early seventies, wheezing slightly from a lifetime’s cigarettes, climbed a staircase just beneath the Harbour Bridge, entered a room full of book editors – young women mostly, university-educated, making their way in a newly feminised industry – and proceeded, in her c ... (read more)

Die Walküre, Act One (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 27 August 2018

Notwithstanding the riches that follow in the final two acts (Wotan’s Farewell, the Ride of the Valkyries, the Todesverkündigung), Act One of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre offers perhaps the greatest hour of music in German opera. It is ideal for discrete, unstaged performances, and as we know from last week’s sensational WASO Tristan und Isolde in Perth, the pleasures of concert performanc ... (read more)

Tristan und Isolde (West Australian Symphony Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 20 August 2018

Nietzsche was in no doubt: Wagner owed his success to his innate sensuality. The philosopher – most influential of the Wagnerites – began to have reservations about his hero in the mid-1870s, around the time of the first Bayreuth Festival (1876), though he never changed his mind about Wagner’s pre-eminence (‘Other musicians don’t count compared to Wagner’). It was Wagner’s decadence ... (read more)