Tabla de contenidos para May 2025 en Limelight

Dylan Henderson Dylan Henderson enjoys a multifaceted career as a researcher, pianist, writer and arts administrator. He recently completed his performance-based PhD on Fryderyk Chopin at the University of Adelaide, graduating in 2023 with a Dean’s Commendation and the University Doctoral Research Medal. Yvonne Frindle A lapsed flautist, who likes to dance in three-quarter time, Yvonne Frindle is a musician, scholar, programmer, concertgoer and avid dancer, all of which informs her work as a harmonious wordsmith. Specialising in editing concert program books, she has been published by the major Australian concert presenters, visiting orchestras and ballet companies. Jo Litson Jo Litson has been Editor of Limelight since January 2018, having joined the publication as Clive Paget’s Deputy Editor in 2016. Prior to that, she worked as a freelance arts journalist…

No ballet has so captivated the imaginations of both artists and audiences as Swan Lake. Countless creatives have tackled the spellbinding story of the bewitched swan and the sweeping romance of Tchaikovsky’s score. For contemporary choreographers especially, it proves irresistible fodder. From Matthew Bourne to Dada Masilo, Graeme Murphy to Michael Keegan-Dolan – there seems to be an endless well of possibilities lying deep within the magic of the Lake. For French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj – a major name in contemporary dance for more than four decades – his thoughts on the ballet are unequivocal. “It’s an Everest, one of the greatest creations ever.” The dancer-turned-maverick choreographer first encountered Swan Lake as a bright-eyed 14-year-old student. Chaperoned to the theatre by his ballet master, he recalls being enamoured with the…

Harvard University Press, HB, 336pp, $85, ISBN 9780674268517 Historian and academic Lucy Caplan offers a groundbreaking examination of African American contributions to opera during the early 20th century in her book Dreaming in Ensemble. Throughout, her meticulous research illuminates the stories of Black composers, performers, critics and educators who cultivated a vibrant operatic tradition despite systematic exclusion from mainstream institutions. At the heart of Caplan’s narrative is what she terms a “Black operatic counterculture”, wherein African-American artists harnessed opera’s grandeur to express the complexities of Black existence. Her scholarship spotlights pioneering composers like Harry Lawrence Freeman and Shirley Graham Du Bois, whose works boldly interpreted Black diasporic history while challenging prevailing narratives and asserting a distinct cultural identity. The book also explores how performers such as Caterina Jarboro and Florence…

In Good Company If you visit Johann Strauss II’s grave in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, you’ll find him surrounded by some great names from the classical canon, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and Schoenberg. But he was also admired by his ‘serious’ music peers. Brahms wished he could have written The Blue Danube waltz – a charming compliment made to Strauss’s stepdaughter – but he also sent a friend to Vienna’s Volksgarten to watch Strauss conduct his waltzes, declaring him a master of the orchestra. Cosima Wagner reported that Richard listened to Strauss’s waltzes for relaxation. Strauss for his part was one of Wagner’s early champions – when the Vienna Court Opera rejected Tristan und Isolde on account of its difficulty, Strauss immediately programmed the Prelude and Liebestod at the…

Seated by the glass sliding door looking onto the greenery and gravel of her Hobart home, actor Pamela Rabe is feeling a little “thick-headed” with a cold. Tissue tucked in one hand, she is not surprised she has fallen sick while finally allowing the harsh, erratic matriarch Violet Weston to “disappear” from her daily life. Rabe has just flown back from the Perth Festival, where she was, in fact, energised by the cruelty of a family angrily spilling secrets about each other in US playwright Tracy Letts’ renowned 2007 play August: Osage Country. The production premiered at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre late last year, with Rabe winning the 2024 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Performance in a Leading Role in a Mainstage Performance for her searing portrayal of Violet. She…

Penguin, PB, 336pp, $36.99, ISBN 9781761348341 Illiterate, booted from school at 14, his childhood and adolescence in a dodgy part of Melbourne were pretty hopeless, in his opinion. He was sure he would end up dead or in life’s gutter before too long. Yet, he writes, “While I had lied and cheated and stolen from an early age, malfeasance never sat well in my heart.” Vincent Fantauzzo’s memoir is written (with the assistance of Craig Henderson) as he paints – with deceptive simplicity, vividly conveying every person and situation he describes. And the situations in his life -he’s just 48 – are what Mark Twain might have had in mind when he said, “truth is stranger than fiction”. Early on, Fantauzzo describes bit players such as Giuseppe Colombo – a…

As Canberra Symphony Orchestra’s 2025 Composer in Connection, I will compose three new works across the year. The first was a chamber piece called Cameo about the myth of Ariadne, which was performed in March at the National Museum of Australia’s Pompeii exhibition. The second is an orchestral work, which has its world premiere this month, and the third is a percussion trio for October. The CSO’s 2025 season is based around the theme of stories. That throughline resonates deeply in my three works, and I’m really committed to it. It was one of the big attractions for me coming on board, because I often work with themes from Ancient Greek and Roman mythology and literature in my music. At the moment, I’m still using a working title for my…

I came here as a Ten Pound Pom when I was five and grew up in Adelaide. My mother and grandmother always bought me tickets for the youth concerts by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and my cousin was one of the first classical guitarists at the Con [in Adelaide]. Her name was Joan Smyth. She was a student of Segovia’s, so I studied classical guitar with her for four or five years, and then I couldn’t resist the temptation to join a rock ‘n’ roll band, much to her displeasure. When I was studying at Flinders University, I had a bit of an epiphany. At the opening of the Festival Theatre [on 2 June, 1973], they presented Act Two, Scene 1 of [Beethoven’s opera] Fidelio. I had a non-singing bit…

Mention The Birds and Alfred Hitchcock’s chilling 1963 movie is probably the first thing that comes to mind. The suspenseful thriller in which the inhabitants of a coastal town are attacked by huge flocks of marauding birds is now considered one of the greatest horror films of all time. Hitchcock’s movie was loosely based on a short story by British writer Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1952. And it was the short story, not the film, that Louise Fox turned to when she was commissioned to write a new stage adaptation for Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre. It was Matthew Lutton, Malthouse’s former Artistic Director and co-CEO, who came up with the idea. Recently appointed as the new Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, he will return to Melbourne to direct…

Dedicated to “my family, the living and the dead,” German director and screenwriter Matthias Glasner’s black comic Dying (Sterben) manages to feel intensely personal yet symphonic in scale. Three hours long and broken into five chapters plus an epilogue, the film is centered on Tom Lunies (played by Lars Eidinger), a Berlin-based orchestra conductor caught in the jaws of the Gen X crunch. Still in thrall to an ex-partner – to the point where he’s present at the birth of her child to her current partner, a man he dislikes intensely – Tom is also monitoring the decline of his elderly parents back in his hometown, while preparing for the premiere of a new work by his frequently suicidal best friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdeck). And just to add to his…

RADIO *All times local Russian Grandeur This program of powerful music includes Rimsky-Korsakov’s Suite from The Golden Cockerel and Prokofiev’s complete score to film director Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. 3 May, 2.30pm, 2MBS Fine Music Sydney, 2mbsfinemusicsydney.com Sunday Night Concert Tune in for Beethoven’s fun-filled Name Day Overture (a hidden gem which should be played more often), Richard Strauss’s music for Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Martha Argerich playing Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 and Mozart’s Symphony No. 33 performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. 4 May, 8pm, 5MBS, 5mbs.com Rising from the Rubble Shostakovich visited Dresden and saw firsthand the devastation caused by the WWII bombing raids. The heart-wrenching String Quartet No. 8 is his response to the city’s near-total destruction. 8 May, 10am, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au Bubbles and Beer There seems…

When I was a baby, my dad [Jan Bilk] and his bandmate [Tomas Nawka] took me to their concerts. They were called Servi Pacis [later just Servi] and they played electronic music in churches in the GDR, which was very rare and adventurous for the time, because they got all their instruments from the West. Surrounded by synthesisers and sequencers, it was only natural for me to start playing the piano when I was five. I took up the violin a year later. In 1995, they bought a Big Briar 91A Theremin, which looked a bit like the very old RCA Theremins that were built in the 1920s. It was a new model from Robert Moog, so they brought it home, tried it out and figured, “This isn’t easy to…