Come for the opera and stay for the circus – or vice versa

Dowsley’s singing was laden with deep expressive colour, beautifully sculpted melodiousness and flashing fierceness as Dido, and she found a more sinister penetrating tone for the Sorceress. Left alone, stripped of regal garb and statuesque poise at the end, she shaped the expressive gradations of When I am laid in earth to a weighty tragic culmination, the climactic G opening out a world of colour and pain.

Loading

Jane Ede sang her attendant Belinda with bright, often thrilling tone, crisply pert projection and shining aura. As Aeneas, Nicholas Jones had a freshly attractive youthful voice, not yet as powerful as Dowsley’s (though it is not dramatically inappropriate that, vocally, she eat him alive).

Sian Sharp sang the Second Lady with rounded clarity, and Angela Hogan and Keara Donohoe sang the witches duets with spirit and finely edged balance. Cathy-Di Zhang’s voice as Mercury was glowing and smooth, while Gregory Brown led the sailor’s chorus with roistering swagger.

Although their daily bread is the vibrato-coloured resonance of 19th-century opera, the Opera Australia Chorus adapted themselves to the needs of Baroque transparency with finesse, eliminating forceful projection to create warmth of sound and well-disciplined balance from the galleries during the final chorus. Similarly, the Opera Australia Orchestra emphasised delicate tonal discretion and natural colour. Notwithstanding its inner tensions, most will find something (not necessarily the same thing) to make the experience absorbing and enjoyable.

MUSIC
PJ Harvey
Opera House forecourt, March 13
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★½

The colours told us, even before the notes did.

On her most recent tours, as the rooms got bigger, PJ Harvey progressively narrowed the palette. The boldly patterned and cut outfits of yore turned to Victorian simplicity in white, then workmen’s functional garb, widow’s weeds, and increasingly crimping lights, culminating in her and her band in severe black and leather binds in an almost militaristic presentation.

This time, the colours on the men were more autumnal and forest floor and Harvey was in a white quasi-priestly robe with trees sketched on it. There would be sins and death and sex of questionable provenance, but there was a lot more story to tell than that, beginning with the folkloric creation of 2023’s I Inside The Old Year Dying.

Played in sequence and in full to begin the night, an album that had divided fans even more than the bristling reportage of its predecessor, The Hope Six Demolition, became an enthralling piece of theatre. It was a melange of set-piece staging (PJ sat at a desk or crouched before it), contributed noise (animal squawks and screeches; the scratchy irritant of a reverberation), and the firmer, earthier, beautifully mixed voice she now offers.

And it was carried by a band – drummer Jean-Marc Butty, multi-instrumentalists John Parish, James Johnston and Giovanni Ferrario, and Harvey occasionally on autoharp, harmonica, electric and acoustic guitar – that even when visceral and agitated in A Noiseless Noise played within the songs and lived the invocation in A Child’s Question, “Love me tender, tender love”.

If the show was divided in two – newest album in full; career-wide variety – it was not separated by approach. The theatricality, the exaggerated physicality and moves, remained, as did the plainness of the sonic palette. To Bring You My Love was sinew and bone, taut skin stretched almost to transparency; electric bass sealed Man-Size as a pressing blues cut through by violin; Dress was a properly sinuous experience, from its rhythm to Parish’s trebly soft counter-vocals.

And then, closing the night and closing the circle with the Dorset village voicings of the first half, White Chalk held firm within its ghostliness, forlorn but not forsaken, colours diffused rather than stark.