Last week, I equated country music and purgatory. We'll, things are looking up.
Yesterday we booked for an event that is fast becoming a cultural highlight of the year: Opera in the Paddock. Imagine some of Australia's best opera singers and an orchestra assembled in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere! Imagine, too, them singing a selection of some of the best known arias and passages in the opera repertoire.
This unlikely scenario unfolds on the Ides of March on a cattle property about 160 km from Armidale which is the ancestral seat of one of the principal singers in the Australian Opera Company. The little nearby town, Delungra, has a population of 320, so it's not quite in the same league as Bayreuth.
It takes place at dusk and I can imagine that it will be quite magical listening to opera in the dark under the stars. The main band of Milky Way - best seen from the southern hemisphere - will be overhead. Facilities are not up to even Bayreuth's creaky standards and the audience has to take along its own seating. I'm not sure about the acoustics either given that the concert hall is, well, open to the skies and the floor consists of grass. I wonder also what the back-up is in the case of rain!
The program includes works by Handel, duets from Bellini's I Puritiani and Norma, O Star of Eve from Wagner's Tannhauser, Puccini's Che Gelida Manina (La Boheme), Verdi's Ah Forse lui (La Traviata), and selections from Gershwin's Porgy & Bess.
AS
1 comment:
We also have these outdoor events in England. Longleat, Lord Bath's grand estate in Wiltshire, regularly hosts such an event and so does Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. Amazingly it hardly ever rains on these events.
Richard.
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