What a year! The title of the first Friday offering immediately demanded the response, “What a great idea!” Amid what seemed to be an unusually large number of performances of Handel’s Messiah, along with the usual Christmas-themed concerts, came a series of hugely varied one-hour vocal offerings from Victorian Opera.
Featuring 2024 Opera Prize winners Michaela Cadwgan and Douglas Kelly, What a year! was a celebration of their year in residence with Victorian Opera. Highlights from several operas included Michaela’s aria from Carmen – an almost inevitable choice for Michaela Cadwgan – sung with appealing full resonance and beauty of tone. Douglas Kelly excelled as the lovelorn Nemorino in the duet from L’elisir d’amore. Becoming increasingly tipsy due to taking successive swigs of “elixir”, his performance was a wonder of vocal and physical agility as he staggered and danced around. Ably supported by Victorian Opera Repetiteur, Tom Griffiths, other arias and duets displayed vocal and theatrical assurance.
The following afternoon they participated as soloists in Victorian Opera’s VOYCE Showcase Concert at Melba Hall in a program that included repertoire as diverse as excerpts from works by Mozart and Hayden to Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was indeed a splendid showcase for Victorian Opera’s Youth Chorus Ensemble with plenty of well-disciplined movement to accompany some impressive singing.
Friday number 2, Judy sings her songs of Stage and Screen, gave us an opportunity to hear Liane Keegan as most operagoers have never before heard her. Greatly admired for the quality of her gorgeous dramatic contralto voice – steady, smooth and with an addictively alluring timbre – she inhabited a completely different genre as to the manner born. Whether standing or sitting, she held the audience rapt, her command of style and vocal technique quite astonishing. Stefan Cassomenos was equally spellbinding as her fellow artist and the arranger of all the songs for piano – a painstaking process he described while giving Keegan some vocal respite. What was perhaps most surprising was finding out that he has an attractive singing voice when he joined in for one of the numbers. Among the many Garland favourites, The Trolley Song was presented with such verve that it was almost tempting to join in too. As the only possible encore, Somewhere Over the Rainbow concluded a fabulous hour of singing and occasional anecdote. This was a presentation that deserves to be heard by audiences far and wide and in a more atmospheric setting with better sight lines than Horti Hall was able to provide on the evening.
In some respects the midpoint Friday performance offered the most significant performance. A collaboration between composer Linda Kouvaras and soprano Antoinette Halloran, who wrote a series of poems during the pandemic lockdown, She, Who Should Have Been A Queen largely explores the journey of iconic characters in the operatic canon. The perspectives offered were often startling, sometimes humorous and all portrayed with dramatic flair. Those who have seen her many performances in principal roles with Victorian Opera, most recently as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, know that Halloran is a gifted actress. In his introduction to the song cycle, pianist Coady Green and Kouvaras described how two songs had been added to the original five and this performance was partly a test to see whether the sequence was suitable for their addition to the recording of works by Kouvaras. Green invited us to clap between songs and Kouvaras warned us to “Brace yourselves, Antoinette is a force to be reckoned with – as is Coady Green”.
A door slammed and then Halloran came stomping down the centre aisle for Lady Macbeth on Her Soapbox at Last. An ominous piano rumble introduced her spine-chilling declamation of fiery intent then a “pissed off” Scottish Queen got it all off her chest in true feminist style. Turning away from the audience Halloran transformed herself into different characters, aided by simply rearranging her shawl. In The Nurse’s Curse, Juliet’s nurse “regrets her complicity and imagines a better course of action”. An unexpected pondering from a male point of view is found in Pinkerton’s Lament where Kouvaras uses the only discernible musical quotation from the opera source – Butterfly’s main aria. There are shades of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical style as Buttercup from HMS Pinafore also ponders “the obscene STOMP of time”, but Verdi is absent from Just Gilda as Rigoletto’s heroine laments her fate, and Puccini can only be discerned in Musetta’s Schmaltz, in a waltz rhythm. Finally, in a departure from the operatic characters, we heard a maligned black snake made its sibilant case in The Snake’s Perspective.
Although a copy of the text was provided, it was hard to take your eyes away from Halloran’s compelling presence. Sometimes poignant, always entertaining, these songs were performed with technical and artistic sophistication by singer and pianist.
Accompanied by pianists Coady Green and Kevin Tamanini, tenor Boyd Owen and bass-baritone Adrian Tamburini performed seven scenes from Gregory Spear’s opera Fellow Travelers for Friday number 4. Based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, the opera deals with the secret love affair between Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin in Washington DC during the 1950s when McCarthy’s relentless persecution of communists and homosexuals was at its height. The chosen scenes were the duets between the two lovers, with Tamburini as the older predatory Fuller, and Owen as the naïve fledgling reporter Laughlin. The audience was provided with a concise description of all 16 scenes outlining the context for the interactions between the two men, which gave an idea of what a performance of the whole work would involve. While some of the love scenes might have been a little too graphic for some members of the audience, Tamburini’s strong, almost overbearing presence and a voice that was at once seductive and compelling lent credibility to his portrayal of a flawed individual torn by social constraints. He was an effective foil to Owen’s depiction of a young, idealistic man struggling to maintain his integrity. Owen’s tenor voice had a suitably youthful ring for the part, and his acting conveyed the pathos of Laughlin’s predicament. The music appeared fairly barren and unduly repetitive at times in this arrangement, but had arresting moments. These intense scenes suggested that a full version of the opera would be worth producing.
A rarely performed work by a major composer was a highly satisfying way to conclude this terrific series of Friday in November performances. In addition to being a superb accompanist for the evening, Alex Raineri introduced Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared (1919) as something between a song cycle and an opera. It is a setting of 22 poems (some very short) about Jan, a young village farmer, who becomes infatuated with a gypsy girl called Zefka and elopes with her. Firing Janáček’s imagination, the poems reflected his own erotic obsessions and inspired a work of dramatic power and musical complexity. The 35-minute piece draws on speech melodies and combines elements of European impressionism and Moravian folk music.
Sung in Czech with English surtitles, the stage was bare except for a sole music stand that was only used for Jan’s songs of contemplation. Interactions between Jan and Zefka were sung without a score as part of the operatic element. Brenton Spiteri gave a passionate performance as Jan, his vibrant tenor voice encompassing the musical and dramatic demands of the role with ease. It was an outstanding performance ideally suited his special talents. Katherine McIndoe was an enticing Zefka, her rich soprano (almost mezzo-soprano in quality) part of her playful charm.
The work also calls for a small chorus of three female voices, supplied by six members of VOYCES in this case. In addition, they sang two songs to begin the evening and bookended the Janáček with two songs referring to midnight – the first by Mahler and the final one by Britten. The fine contribution of this sextet seemed to bring the November experience full circle.
Photo supplied.
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Heather Leviston reviewed “5 Fridays in November”, presented by Victorian Opera at Horti Hall on November 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29, 2025
