Jason Catlett

Opera Australia's third annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour is a world-beating triumph, surely one of the most spectacular outdoor operas ever staged anywhere. But it's not just pomp and glitz: although Catlan director Alex Ollé and his company La Fura dels Baus have a global reputation for large scale shows, he still presents a highly intelligent and original take on Puccini's now clichéd tale of a poor Japanese teenage bride used and abandoned by the scoundrel Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton.   Many of the legendary outdoor performances of the operatic canon have been in the real locations specified in their fictional librettos: Turandot in the Forbidden City, Verdi's Aida in Egypt or even the Pavarotti movie ofTosca shot in Rome. The contrarian Ollé here discards the libretto's very Italian orientalism, and gives Puccini a maximal dose of his own verismo by keeping it real and making it contemporary. He transposes Butterfly from her home town of Nagasaki around the time Puccini set librettist Luigi Illica's adaptation (1904) to the here and now of Sydney with our prevailing domestic dreams: a harbourside outdoor wedding, shoddily built flats with water views bought off the plan, cranes bearing the phone numbers for enquiries, a familiar taxi.   The only soloist who looks Japanese is the prima donna Hiromi Omura, who really is. Ollé's Madama Pinkerton is not a generic ex-geisha, but a caste member of the yakuza with their trademark tattoos: the wings of a butterfly

Many works of art tell a story, as well as being stories in themselves. The Parthenon Marbles told the early history of ancient Greece, and the marbles’ own difficult history continues today, drawing ever more attention. When presented with a masterpiece, we crave narrative from it; if it tells of no events by itself, we ask about it: what made the Mona Lisa smile? Many artists try to interest you in their stories. Anri Sala deliberately keeps narrative out of his artworks, yet many of his methods and materials are historical. Invited to create a new work in Sydney by Kaldor Public Art Projects, he studied the city’s history and decided to place his installation, titled The Last Resort, in the Federation-style octagonal timber bandstand constructed in 1912 on Observatory Hill. “The work still carries my interest in political and social history, but it is embedded in the structure of the work,” he says. “Nothing is there to produce narrative.” The obvious external structure of The Last Resort consists of 38 snare drums suspended neatly from the rotunda’s ceiling. The paired loudspeakers concealed artfully inside each drum could tell many a tale, but they speak only in sound-shards, rattling and reminiscing phrases of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major, as rearranged by Sala’s sound designer Olivier Goinard (a long-term collaborator) and performed by the Munich Chamber Orchestra.   Anri Sala: The Last Resort at Observatory Hill, Sydney Photograph: Pedro Greig     Mozart di