POETRY IN EMOTION
A new show celebrates female opera singers and their importance while challenging the prevalent themes of violence against women on stage
When you are putting on a show called The Sopranos you should expect some confusion. So Opera Queensland’s main stage debut for 2022 is about Tony Soprano and his mafia cronies? Well, no, but there may be some parallels according to writer Sarah Holland-batt, the acclaimed poet and Brisbane academic who wrote the piece for Opera Queensland, working closely with dramaturge Jane Sheldon and artistic director Patrick Nolan. It comes to the Concert Hall at QPAC from Tuesday March 29 and will later tour as part of the Festival of Outback Opera.
“The title of the show started as a bit of a joke,” Holland-batt says. “And opera can be a bloody business so I guess there really are those parallels. It’s a sort of riff, a joking allusion but it also opens up those questions of gratuitous violence and questions about opera as an art form.”
Holland-batt is a professor of creative writing at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane but she will be spending most of 2022 in Sydney after being awarded the University of Sydney’s $100,000 Judy Harris Writer in Residence fellowship at the Charles Perkins Centre. She is the first poet to be awarded the year-long fellowship. She will use it to complete her fourth book of poetry and a book of personal essays, exploring subjects including deep brain treatment, the unknown side of Parkinson’s disease, ageing and mortality.
She has become something of a critic and commentator on aged care in Australia after her late father’s suffering in the system.
It was her dad who inspired her love of classical music and it was while living in America some years ago on a Fulbright Scholarship that she got interested in opera.
“I didn’t have a lot of money at the time but I bought myself a season ticket to the opera in New
York,” Holland-batt recalls. “It was affordable if you didn’t mind sitting up in the rafters at the Saturday matinee.
“I saw some fabulous shows and some of the best operas. It was a form I had always been interested in.”
But also one that often features women in extremis.
“Women have been repeatedly raped and murdered in operas and that raises questions,” Holland-batt says.
“The driving question for me is what would the women of opera say to each other if they were brought together.”
So she has done that for The Sopranos, which explores the idea that opera can be both a vehicle to celebrate the virtuosity of women artists at the same time as questioning and challenging representations of women.
“The Sopranos will be staged in two thematic parts,” she explains. “The first act addresses the challenges and crises women have faced in opera, the second examines their strength and tenacity in responding to those challenges. While we explore the tension between female characters who suffer tragic or violent fates and those who rebel against their social constraints, what is consistent throughout is the tremendous power and virtuosity of the human voice.
“Our hope is that audiences will leave with a renewed appreciation for the enormous contributions women make in opera and perhaps with new perspectives on those female characters that are so familiar to us.”
Traversing the art form from its beginnings in Florence to the present day, The Sopranos is conceived and brought to life by a powerhouse team of creatives with Holland-batt and Sheldon leading the way. Laura Hansford co-directs with Nolan, with Jessica Gethin conducting the Queensland Symphony Orchestra for the production. Marg Horwell designed the sets and Christine Felmingham is in charge of lighting design.
As for the frocks, well that’s down to Karen Cochet and Bianca Bulley.
Of course being a show about sopranos it features a parade of our best – Sarah Crane, Tania Ferris, Eleanor Greenwood, Lisa-harper Brown, Leanne Kenneally, Eva Kong, Katie Stenzel, Hayley Sugars and Sofia Troncoso. And yes there will be some token males including Shaun Brown, Jose Carbo, Simon Lobelson and Timothy Newton.
Sarah Crane will be doing a duet with Brown, who happens to be her husband.
Crane is a lecturer in the School of Music at UQ and she and Brown will be singing the final duet from Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsy, which will close out the show.
Crane says she was “surprised and impressed” when first presented with Holland-batt’s idea.
“It’s going to pack a lot into two hours,” Crane says. “There are certainly some strong feisty characters in opera and it will be wonderful to look at such an array of operas and look at how the role of sopranos has evolved over time. The outcome will be intense and with the drama of the characters and the lush orchestration it will be impressive.”
Being a soprano requires incredible discipline as well as training and Crane describes the voice as “fragile and precious”.
“The vocal demands require us to be careful maintaining that voice,” she says. “We do treasure what we have.”
Fellow soprano and rising star, Sofia Troncoso, says opera has “always shone a light on the darker recesses of the human experience in both dramas and comedies”.
“At the centre of many of these stories are women,” Troncoso says. “As our society continues to interrogate gender and its complicated history, it is important that we don't shy away from the ugly truths that reveal themselves or else we run the risk of repeating history.
“The women I play in The Sopranos are flesh and blood individuals, complete with flaws, staring
WOMEN HAVE BEEN REPEATEDLY RAPED AND MURDERED IN OPERAS AND THAT RAISES QUESTIONS
Poet and academic Sarah Holland-batt
adversity in its face and moving forward with courage and faith.”
The Sopranos will feature classic arias from Puccini’s Tosca, Donizetti’s dramatic Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Nabucco, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and many more including some more contemporary works by Australian composers.
Holland-batt says there will be a kind of Greek chorus to “help the audience”. She says she admires sopranos and their virtuosity and the “incredible feats” they perform on stage, even when they are meeting violent or tragic ends.
Co-director Laura Hansford says Holland-batt has written “a phenomenally beautiful and poetic script that takes the audience on a journey through space and time”.
“We capture these moments and people are drawn into the narrative by the Greek chorus and we understand that there is a person under this character and costume,” Hansford says.
“For me as a director the through line is disengaging from sympathy and finding empathy. It’s a concert where you can let go of the idea of what a concert should be. It’s not just a stand and sing concert.”
Opera Queensland’s Patrick Nolan says he initially wanted to do a history of opera.
“In the end I realised that would just take too long,” he says. “Then we started to think about how women have been represented in opera and that’s a subject that has arisen numerous times in the past few decades. It seemed like a good opportunity to explore that and to engage in that in a robust and entertaining way. The time has come to ask is it okay to continually put women on stage who are being raped and murdered.
“Out of that conversation we thought – let’s make a show.”
But as Hansford suggests it’s not an opera gala in the traditional sense and Nolan agrees. “‘If we trotted the sopranos out and they just sang their songs it would be a lovely concert,” he says.
“But we wanted it to be more than that. We are still doing a kind of history but by choosing this subject we bring it in at two hours rather than the 22 hours it would have taken to do the entire history of opera.
“It’s not a lecture. It’s a celebration of the art form and a conversation that happens around the art. It’s the art that creates a space for this conversation and you may feel challenged but all the great moments in art have challenged people.”
The Sopranos, Concert Hall, QPAC, Tuesday March 29, to April 2. oq.com.au