If the ancient layers of ice that make up Antarctica could sing, what stories would they tell you? Composer Mary Finsterer and librettist Tom Wright’s new opera, Antarctica, shows you – using the icy plains as “a library of hidden mysteries,” and a place where ideologies, people and nature collide. Fresh from its world premiere at last year’s Holland Festival, the opera makes its Australian debut as one of the highlights of 2023’s Sydney Festival.
It is clear from first glance that this isn’t your traditional opera, and it’s best enjoyed as a ceaselessly layered soundscape; a series of dreams, thoughts, experiences and ideas forged in sound, rather than a narrative with a singular trajectory.
Finsterer’s music is at once cinematic, deliciously dissonant and evocative of the epic scale of endlessness in Antarctica...
The design by Elizabeth Gadsby (set and costume) and Alexander Berlage (light) combines browns, navies and greens reminiscent of old world explorers with stark, electronic blacks, reds and bright LED white. Singers take their places in a large glass window filled with billowing fog, and set like a square block of ice near the bottom of a towering screen that is later strewn with raw text from data relating to Antarctica; including coordinates, species, landmarks, and star constellations (AV design by Mike Daly). Above, in the top left corner, a little girl who has somehow survived to tell the story watches from her own solitary window (played by Hayden Holmes).
In front of the huge set sits the Asko|Shönberg orchestra, led by Jack Symonds. It features a celesta (or bell piano), a huge glockenspiel and a set of tubular bells that ring out alongside live operatic singing, electro-acoustic sound and recorded, echoing speaking voices. Voices are attributed to human characters, but also the ship that carries them and the creature that threatens them.
Finsterer, Wright and director Imara Savage have worked together to create a cohesive vision of Antarctica as a mysterious and dangerous place for the four explorers to discover. Finsterer’s music is at once cinematic, deliciously dissonant and evocative of the epic scale of endlessness in Antarctica, employing the voices of the singers and the expert instrumentalists to awe-inspiring effect. The opera uses a range of musical techniques, developed from Finsterer’s varied musical practice and in tandem with scientists from the University of Tasmania, including matching musical contours to those of a graph predicting decompositions of tidal currents somewhere on the Antarctic coast.
Wright’s libretto combines English and Latin phrases that blur the lines between language and music in a beautifully poetic way. Savage places detailed vignettes inside the central block of ice that are sometimes static, but never distracting from the grandeur of the sound accompanying them. It’s something of a neo-Romantic work, blending art, language, science, and music to show us how small we really are in the terrifying largeness of our world.
Antarctica begs you to lean into its precisely orchestrated, excitingly layered complexity. Go with open ears, armed with a program and a bit of research (start with Shönberg, Philip Glass and John Cage), and leave with an astonishing new vision of what contemporary Australian opera can achieve.
Antarctica is being performed at Carriageworks, Eveleigh, as part of Sydney Festival until January 8, 2023. Find out more and get tickets here.
