Season Overview
Opera Australia 2011 Season
Get your copy of our amazing 3D brochure and see the opera's literally come to life! To request a copy or view the brochure online click here
Opera. Seize the Night.
A night at the opera is the ultimate performing arts experience, a combination of music, art, theatre, dance and dazzling talent. It is a night of glamour and spectacle, big emotions and beautiful music. It is the perfect excuse to dress up and come to life with the people you love.
What’s more, it is an invitation to spend your evening at one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Outside, the arching sails against a starry night sky and inside, the stars, the stories and the glorious music.
This winter Opera Australia presents silver roses, golden girls, pirates and jokers, crazy days and endless nights and an old-fashioned mystery for you. With seven productions to choose from there’s bound to be something you’ll love.
Anthony Warlow and Sigrid Thornton set hearts alight in Sondhemin’s A Little Night Music, while Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West takes a romantic tale to the new world in a spectacular new production.
The Marriage of Figaro is Mozart at his brilliant best, complete with an all-star cast including Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Peter Coleman-Wright
Verdi’s Rigoletto is everything grand opera should be – fast-moving, glitzy and desperately moving, and there is a mystery to be solved when Emma Matthews hits the high notes in La sonnambula.
Some delightfully silly problems need to be unravelled by The Pirates of Penzance and finally, experience the sweet pain of love and longing when Cheryl Barker stars in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.
Company Overview
Opera Australia is Australia's national opera company. Resident at the Sydney Opera House, Sydney and The Arts Centre, Melbourne, it performs in capital cities and regional centres, inspiring people across the country with live opera. As Australia's busiest performing arts organisation, Opera Australia gives upwards of 600 performances a year, including subscription seasons in Sydney and Melbourne and extensive regional touring and schools performances by Oz Opera, its touring arm.
The company casts its productions from an ensemble of Australian artists, with regular appearances by international guest artists. Opera Australia also manages the Sydney-based Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra (AOBO), which plays for all Opera Australia and Australian Ballet performances in Sydney. When in Melbourne, Opera Australia performs with the independently managed Orchestra Victoria.
Opera Australia’s permanent staff of around 300 people, consists of 80 singers and music staff (including a full-time chorus of 48), 70 musicians, and a further 150 people in the areas of scenic construction and painting, lighting, design, direction, wardrobe, wig-making, management, marketing and administration.
Beyond performing, Opera Australia is a national resource for opera as an artform in Australia. It maintains a repertoire of over 80 productions (including sets, props and costumes) and produces new productions every year, manufactured on site at the Opera Centre in Sydney. These productions are seen in Opera Australia's subscription seasons and also hired to Australia's state opera companies and, increasingly, other opera companies worldwide.
Opera Australia also works closely with national broadcaster, the ABC, giving live and recorded national broadcasts on radio and TV as well as producing numerous recordings to build one of the world's largest collection of operas on DVD from a single company.
Chief Executive: Adrian Collette AM
Assistant Music Director: Tony Legge
Artistic Director: Lyndon Terracini (effective October 2009)
Telephone: +61 2 9699 1099
Fax: +61 2 9699 3184
Email:enquiries@opera-australia.org.au
www.opera-australia.org.au