Category: Reviews, News and Commentary

John Daly-Peoples

Stabat Mater

Gioachino Rossini and Victoria Kelly

Michael Fowler Centre, October 2

Auckland Town Hall, October 3

John Daly-Peoples

Opera giant Gioachino Rossini’s breathtaking Stabat Mater will be performed for the first time in nearly 40 years by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Wellington and Auckland—alongside a world premiere. Of a new 21^st-century Stabat Mater by New Zealand composer and musician Victoria Kelly.

Rossini’s dramatic hour-long choral work was inspired by the 13^th-century ‘Stabat Mater’ liturgy, written by a priest, described Mary’s suffering at the crucifixion of her son, Jesus.

Kelly’s Stabat Mater, commissioned by the NZSO, is a response to Rossini’s interpretation and a contemporary appraisal of Mary, motherhood and women.

To create this unforgettable operatic experience, Rossini’s Stabat Mater features three extraordinary New Zealand singers: soprano Madison Nonoa, mezzo-soprano anna Pierard and tenor Filipe Manu. Talented Australian bass-baritone Jeremy Kleeman has replaced Teddy Tahu-Rhodes, who had to withdraw.

The singers are joined by the internationally lauded Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, which also perform during Kelly’s new work.

For both concerts, the NZSO will be led by renowned Italian conductor Valentina Peleggi, making her New Zealand debut. Peleggi, who won acclaim for elevating the profile of the Richmond Symphony in the US since becoming its Music Director 2020, conducts many leading orchestras, including the Royal Philharmonic. She is highly regarded for her direction of bel canto opera. Concerto.com declared: “Peleggi has Rossini in her blood.”

Peleggi’s 2024 debut at Seattle Opera with Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was enormously successful, as was her Paris debut this year for Rossini’s Semiramide at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where she was praised for “navigating Rossini’s characteristic crescendos with both power and accuracy.”

Her family history has special link to opera. Very early in the last century, her great-grandmother, then a teenager, worked up the courage to audition for a new opera called “La Bohème.” Puccini himself had come to Rome to choose the singers for a production in the Italian capital, and she was offered one of the lead roles, Musetta.

“But she was also engaged at the time to someone in the navy whose superior would not allow him to marry a singer, because that was not considered a respectable profession,” Peleggi explains. “So she got married and never sang again.”

However, her daughter — Peleggi’s grandmother — inherited her love of opera and passed it across the generations, encouraging Peleggi to sign up for a children’s choir that led to a life-changing experience at the age of 13.

“I was singing Carmina Burana… When the huge orchestra in front of me and the adult chorus behind me started, the wave of sound hit me physically,” she has said.

“For the first time, I felt part of something bigger than myself. That is how my passion for music really started — and how I decided to become a conductor.”

Kelly, who has collaborated with NZ Trio, Neil Finn, Don McGlashan, Tami Neilson and others, is delighted that her work will be performed by the NZSO and Voices New Zealand.

“There is nothing quite like the sheer emotional force of an orchestra and choir performing together… not only because of the music, or the astonishing scale of the sound, but also because this vast ensemble reveals—in the most powerful and life-affirming way—the possibilities of creative collaboration.”

The Wellington concert will be livestreamed for free on the streaming service NZSO+.

MARY THE BIRTH OF FRANKENSTEIN

By Jess Sayer

Auckland Theatre Company

Director – Oliver Driver

Set – John Verryt

Costume – Sarah Voon

Sound – Leon Radojkvic

Lighting – Jo Kilgour

Choreography – Ross McCormick

With Emily Adams, Timmie Cameron, Tom Clarke, Arlo Green, Dominic Ona-Ariki and Mary Graham 

ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland

Until 7 September

Reviewer Malcolm Calder

If you were expecting a history lesson, or a literary feast, at Mary the Birth of Frankenstein forget it.  With only loosely based smatterings of actuality, the mind of playwright Jess Sayerand has really gone to work concocting a remarkable horror story that is pure gothic.

Imagine if you will, five friends sitting around one evening housebound because of a fairly vicious storm outside.  They know each other well and each has a distinct personality.  They are a highly intelligent, articulate and radically argumentative group.  Their idle chat turns to intellectual sparring and rivalry abounds.  There are references to literature and science and to their driving needs to make a mark on the world – individually and collectively.  Alcohol and social drugs are in abundance and, as the evening passes passions grow, each becomes increasingly assertive about their own viewpoint– at best regarding those of others as only partially so.   I fondly recall not dissimilar late-night parties in my own student days a couple of centuries later.  Many of us do.

In this outstanding work however, Jess Sayer turns the wick up a bit.  She casts the well-credentialled, slightly older and highly opinionated literary scion Lord Byron as the prime catalyst.  The most articulate of his protagonists gradually becomes Mary Godwin, the lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Around Byron, and particularly around the rather distasteful and insensitive Shelley there is initially jocular chatter.  But this gives way to friction.  Soon minor differences of opinion appear as each addresses Byron’s challenge to tell a ghost story.  Differences grow and violent disagreements flare.  Mary becomes more and more vehement about women – their place and role in society, and their contribution to literature.  Thus Sayers reveals a dramatic work that is really about anger. Mary’s anger.

And it takes the form of the repulsive figure she concocts that will forever take its place in the annals of literary.

Using a collective and collaborative approach, Director Oliver Driver has knitted together a cast that is strong, dynamic and impassioned.  The laconically supercilious Byron (Tom Clarke) creates a strong and rightly pivotal presence sparring well with the self-admiring Shelley (Dominic Ona-Ariki).  Both establish things well with their counterpoints – the yes-man Polidor (Arlo Green) and Claire (Timmie Cameron), Mary’s sightly dizzy sister and lover of Byron.

However, it is Mary (Olivia Tennet) who becomes the ultimate pivot, growing in stature just as her viewpoints do. Initially fighting for her right to have any voice at all about the role and place of women, her character matures, and her anger becomes overt until she concocts something totally and horrifically outrageous – in the form of Frankenstein.

It is almost as if Mary has said – OK, you bunch of blowhards.  Try THIS on for size!

And, very very importantly, Emily Adams (initially an arthritic a more-than-humble home help Marta), evolves into the slithering sinuosity of a something that can only be described as a ‘thing’ – a kind of conscience or fading last gasp on reality.  Her movement alone remains memorable with her dance training clearly evident.

Despite the occasional accent slip, muddy delivery and balance between the two acts, high ATC production standards and a stunning creative team allow director Oliver Driver to indulge and support this strong cast.

Conversely the second act changes course and presentation completely and quickly becomes an insane exploration of the world she has invented for her Frankenstein and his dastardly deeds.  One might say that the proverbial hits the whirly-gig in second act and that the first was merely a scene-setting precursor. 

The result is a madness and a mayhem that unrolls that becomes, in some ways. the highlight of the show.  And I use the word advisedly because a ‘show’ it certainly is, rather than a mere ‘production’.  The creative team have generated an extravaganza that is mind-boggling in its complexity.  So, production team take a bow.

John Verryt’s set is simple yet complex at the same time.  It has depth and variance enabling changes that are both subtle and nuanced and in your face at others.  Similarly, Sarah Voon’s costumes echo those at the end bearing little in common with the play’s opening.   But it is Jo Kilgour’s lighting and Leon Radojkvic’s sound that truly make this production remarkable.  They must have had a lot of fun dreaming things up.

Mary the Birth of Frankenstein is a highly promising work from a highly promising writer.