Season Overview
Who can resist the power of the human voice? It can excite, persuade and even move you to tears. Add orchestra, costumes, lights, dance,drama, gripping stories, amazing scenery and fabulous performers and you enter a whole new world.
Opera Australia invites you to step into a new world in 2009. A world where lovers meet, animals dance and heroes stand up for freedom.A world of adventures at sea, love among the pyramids and high jinks in Japan. A world where music heightens the drama with emotions that words alone cannot express.
In 2009 we celebrate the power of the voice through the sounds, sights and sensations of opera. There are thirteen different productions, ranging from the seventeenth-century elegance of Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas to Benjamin Britten’s gripping Peter Grimes, via Mozart, Puccini, Verdi and many more. Five of the productions are new and all of them are brought to the stage brilliantly by Opera Australia’s ensemble of singers, dancers, actors, costumiers, wigmakers, designers, painters, technicians, directors and orchestral musicians.
Now is the time to plan some memorable nights at the Opera.
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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 artistic leadership of Opera Australia comprises Chief Executive Adrian Collette, Music Director Richard Hickox and Executive Producer Stuart Maunder. 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
Executive Producer:
Stuart Maunder
Telephone:
+61 2 9699 1099
Fax:
+61 2 9699 3184
Email:enquiries@opera-australia.org.au
www.opera-australia.org.au