The best gigs to see in Sydney this winter

Incredibly, it’s been almost a decade since Opera Australia last handed over the Joan Sutherland Theatre, its main performance venue, to a new opera. So after endless revivals of Madama Butterfly, La Bohème and Carmen, composer Elena Kats-Chernin and librettist Justin Fleming’s opera about the life of artist Brett Whiteley is a welcome addition to the company’s programming. It’s well past time our national opera company invested in some more Australian-made music. On that count, at least, Whiteley is a wise investment. Kats-Chernin has created an eclectic musical landscape that goes some way to conjuring up a sense of Whiteley’s artistry, his tumultuous life and fiery relationship with his brilliant wife Wendy. It’s lush and inventively orchestrated, with memorable motifs and a use of harmony that’s reminiscent of Bernstein or Gershwin at their most daring. It hits the sweet spot between sophistication and accessibility, and you don’t have to understand a whole lot about music to appreciate its riches. The score has its own narrative shape, which is key to the opera’s success as neither the libretto nor direction measure up to its strengths. Whiteley feels strangely tentative and rarely has the courage to take bold stylistic or storytelling choices, let alone questioning notions of artistic geniuses and their muses. Given the breadth of inspiration available in Whiteley’s story, the opera feels strangely uninspired and is more an exercise in painting by numbers than creatin

At first it seems an incongruous pairing: Donizetti’s elegant historical tragedy about the downfall of Anne Boleyn at the hands of King Henry VIII, and a tech-heavy digital production using 12 high-definition LED panels as sets. This is Opera Australia’s big gamble on the future of opera, and their third production using the technology. Surprisingly, it’s quite a seamless melding of mediums, bringing a piece from almost two centuries ago into our digital age. Director Davide Livermore, whose bombastic production of Aida was utterly thrilling, this time matches the elegance of the music in a bold, visually striking but mostly sensitive production. We say mostly sensitive because it gets off to an inauspicious start: as the overture begins, the curtain opens on a misty video of London’s ‘Gherkin’ building. A young woman dressed in a Tudor-inspired punk outfit struts to the front of the stage, taking a selfie in front of the landmark. We then see the tower being deconstructed, followed by the London Tower Bridge and a series of symbols of British wealth and power. The idea is interesting as it takes us back to the time of Boleyn, but leaning into the “millennial bimbo” stereotype is in bad taste and completely unnecessary in an artform that’s already so dominated by men. Once we’re past that significant misstep and into the world of Henry’s court, this production is a delight right to its final moments, as Henry (Teddy Tahu Rhodes) plots to remove his wife Anna (Ermonela Jaho

You couldn’t accuse choreographer and director Graeme Murphy of having a shortage of ideas for his new production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. It’s Opera Australia’s first new mainstage version since Moffatt Oxenbould created the company’s definitive, traditional staging in 1997. It’s a lot to live up to, and Murphy clearly understood his task: bring something new to one of the most popular operas in the canon. The production begins with the eponymous figure descending from the heavens suspended by red shibari (Japanese bondage) ropes, arranged to resemble giant wings. We’re in some sort of high-end sex club, with grabby businessmen crawling over one another to reach women suspended in air. It’s a striking and somewhat unsettling image, but it’s only deployed fairly briefly before we’re in the house that American naval officer Pinkerton (Andeka Gorrotxategi) has rented in Nagasaki to live with Cio-Cio-San (Karah Son), the 15-year-old girl he plans to marry – just until he finds a “proper” American wife. Murphy uses the 12 high-definition LED screens to create a digitalised house, where everything slides back and forth using a handheld device – a little like Google Home – complete with a digital servant to bring glasses of whisky.  It seems, at this point, that Murphy’s vision might be of a Butterfly where sexual objectification sits up against the dehumanising effect of technology – the way that technology allows us to objectify people who aren’t part of our own, immedia

Peter Carey’s colonial love story picked up both the Miles Franklin Award and the Booker Prize before being made into an acclaimed film that launched the career of a young Cate Blanchett. Now it’s been turned into an opera thanks to composer Elliott Gyger and librettist Pierce Wilcox, who created the excellent Fly Away Peter for Sydney Chamber Opera back in 2015. The story follows the meeting between obsessive gamblers Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier, who make a bet that Lucinda cannot build a cathedral of pure glass and have it delivered to the outback in time for Good Friday. Jessica Aszodi and Brenton Spiteri play the title roles in this production directed by Opera Queensland artistic director Patrick Nolan.