Directors Note:

My Dear;
I am writing to you this time about a wholly different matter. Knowing of your piety, but also knowing that, for many reasons, you do not attend religious services during these holy days, I think of you often and , as I pray for you, I would like you to join even indirectly in this spiritual union, by act if not by personal presence.

Something very simple is involved through our Father Nikolai. On the day of Christ’s Resurrection, I am arranging for a distribution of alms among the poor, among all those who waste away in destitution. I will participate personally, and I am seeking people who might respond to my appeal. If you would like to give something yourself, and take up a small collection among those around you, you would be performing an act of charity. But do it right away (if possible), so that I have the money on Sunday to give to Father Nikolai.

I embrace you and send you all my best wishes on this holiday eve.

Igor Stravinsky sent this extraordinary and surprising letter to Sergei Diaghilev a few weeks before the Paris premiere of Oedipus Rex. The letter itself is testimony to the state of mind that Stravinsky was in as he worked on the piece, a sense of public and personal crisis, and the atonement and purification process that must be engaged in individually and collectively if society is to survive.

While Stravinsky carried on an open affair with his mistress in Paris, his own wife was dying of tuberculosis in the south of France. Perhaps this accounts for some of the extraordinary anguish that gushes forth in the opening chorus of his Oedipus, and the vividness of the musical evocation of the stages of disease, deterioration, debilitation, and decay. And then denial.

The dazzling and seductive melismatic flourishes in Oedipus’ vocal lines show a brilliant mind at work, quick-witted, chameleon-like, able to transform itself to suit the occasion, and prone to repeat the word “clarissime”. Not just famous, but the most famous. All his life Stravinsky surrounded himself with a tireless and well-oiled publicity machine to ensure that he was the most famous living composer. Countless ghost-written books and articles assure us of his supremacy, and the difference between his music and the music of the “other” composer (Schoenberg) was the difference between good and evil.

His autobiographies claim that his music is “pure” – consummate form devoid of personal content, but simply to be admired for its astounding intelligence and beauty of craftsmanship. But of course his sterile, hollow, arrogant, stylish, dazzling, and seductive autobiographical writings consistently ignore or conceal the most important events in his life as a human being – as if, like Oedipus, it is enough to be king, universally praised (except by your jealous enemies) for your brilliance in solving riddles, but what got you to this point, your actual origins, and what actually sustains you, and what tragedies have occurred along the way must be suppressed. As if success is all that matters in life.

Fittingly, the Paris premiere of Oedipus was a failure. The history of drama is the history of failure – Oedipus, Hamlet, Phaedre, Masha, Winnie – these are not success stories. Sophocles’ point is that the understanding of and active compassion for failure are the measure of human greatness, that man is only exalted by humility, and that we only find ourselves once we are lost.

Of course Stravinsky told people that he chose the subject of Oedipus because the audience would already know the story, but you don’t tackle the most central myth in the history of Western civilisation by accident, without noticing. And of course there are no surprises. Plato would say that we have all knowledge before birth, and upon entering this world we forget everything. Thus our passage on the earth is a process of remembering things which, deeply, we knew already. The word that Aristotle uses is recognition – to “cognise” something again.

Theatre, as a religious ritual, was invented by the Greeks to help deepen and intensify this process as a collective experience, not as a private therapy, but as an act of social healing. But Aristotle makes it clear that in dramatic form, reversal must precede recognition – first this world of illusions must be turned upside down. We have to understand in a Buddhist sense, in a Christian sense, in a Muslim sense, that kings are finally beggars, that probably only beggars can achieve the beauty, power, and poise of genuine kingship. That when we imagine that we see we are really blind, and that when we learn how to look with our heart we can finally begin to see.

Stravinsky needed to create a religious ritual of return in a modern social context that had lost all ability to share a sacred experience, that had exhausted and de-natured its store of religious vocabulary through an exploitive, excessive, and hypocritical theatricality. Needless to say, he could hardly confess his motives and ambitions in public in the brittle social whirl of Paris in the mid-1920s. So, to throw people off the scent, he hired Jean Cocteau, a perversely brilliant artistic avatar who specialised at the time in reducing Greek tragedies to snappy psychological fashion statements. (In fact, we have returned to Sophocles for the narrative interludes in these performances.)

On the positive side. Cocteau was famous, and Stravinsky liked being seen and photographed with famous people. But, finally, they had little in common artistically. Stravinsky’s first step was to neutralise Cocteau – making him rewrite the libretto three times and putting it into Latin. Latin offered a liturgical feeling, but it also provided a convenient linguistic mask for an exiled Russian who was travelling culturally incognito, denying his own birth and origin, and hoping to be crowned king in the next city he came to.

And yet, his first act of artistic preparation to begin writing choral music again was to set the Lord’s Prayer in old Church Slavonic (1926). The famous shifting accents in the word setting (Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus) were grandly, imperiously dismissed by Stravinsky as necessary according to his “musical dictates”. The words are abstract forms which can be chopped up, rearranged, repeated, and shifted at will. But might another reason for this bold aesthetic license be that our cosmopolitan composer was actually thinking in Russian as he wrote?

In other words, was the myth of modernism – pure line, pure form, pure colour, pure structure – that invaded the arts early in the last century in fact the product of a group of exiles who were determined to hide their ethnic identities, and needed a blank canvas on which to recreate themselves with no ties and with no personal responsibilities to the society that created them? In Stravinsky’s case we have by now traced the origins of specific numbers in his most quintessential and path-breaking compositions (to this point), Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and Les noces (The Wedding) to specific sections of published ethnographic materials.

Which brings us quite sharply, at the slightly delayed beginning of our new century, to a much needed revision of that form of widely accepted “ethnic cleansing” which has maintained that Western culture is inherently superior to, say, African culture, or Hindu culture, or Islamic culture. In fact, Stravinsky is using African rhythms, and of course a Bach Siciliano is derived from Sufi sources. In fact, the longer one looks at where we have all come from, it turns out that a lot of information has been suppressed. Stravinsky’s particular genius is to culminate Western music by being a profoundly “non-Western” composer.

Certainly he re-integrated into the modern vernacular the tradition of Western music before it became “westernised” by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the 19th century (periods of seemingly endless colonialist, capitalist expansionism that were not fond of the Oedipus myth with its strict limits on human knowability, ambition, and willpower). In the medieval tradition of chant and polyphony he recovered a concept of faith that was without personal psychology. In Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, with its blocks of sound and rigid rhythmic ordination, we rediscover the “cradle of Western civilization” – ancient Greece, in its power and religious rigour undomesticated by the age of imperialism and attendant bourgeois presumptions.

Freud, at the beginning of the last century, proposed the Oedipus myth as the classic example of personal trauma, and proceeded to diagnose it and suggest paths towards curing it through personal psychoanalytical work. Sophocles and Stravinsky, however, are not interested in personal psychology and whims, vagaries, and the self destructiveness of individual human willpower which inevitably destroys whatever it touches. For them, the crisis is collective – it is not just an individual who suffers, but an entire society that is poisoned. The cure, like the disease, is public, collective: not a private therapy, but a purgative, cathartic ritual that has a libratory force to transform an entire community. This is an understanding that would be typical in an African or Korean village.

Was Oedipus guilty? Is it his fault? Well, to go back only one step, it does seem strange to forget you murdered five people on the way into town one day. Laius [Oedipus’ father and the king of Thebes] and the men in his retinue ordered Oedipus to step off the road so they could pass. He killed all but one of them. In a city like Los Angeles we see something of the pervasive tension in a city and the anger and fear carried around every day by certain individuals that results in someone being shot for cutting in front of someone else on the freeway.

For Americans, a new awareness is dawning of the Karmic debt that must be paid as 400 years of unpaid wages of African-American slaves come due in my generation. And we are all aware that we can buy a cheap T-shirt because someone in Singapore is working in a sweatshop 12 hours a day for sub-standard wages with no benefits in an unsafe firetrap in which the doors have been locked to keep the workers from escaping their brutal work quotas. We have cheap tin foil because Bolivian miners will be shot if they protest their wages. As privileged individuals in privileged societies, we do tend to forget, as we sit down to our nice meal, the people who have had to be killed, tortured, or imprisoned so that we can maintain our “standard of living”.

But was Oedipus guilty from birth? Jesus was once asked, who is guilty, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus replied, no man, but it is so that the works of God might be made manifest in him, and all the world might see it, and believe. And Jesus healed the man of his blindness. Which brings us to Symphony of Psalms and Oedipus at Colonus.

Was Oedipus cursed at birth, or was he blessed? The second half of his life is taken up in Sophocles’ final play, written at the age of 80. Wandering across the earth as a blind beggar led by his two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, cast out in every country that they come to, they finally arrive at the sacred grove of the furies in Athens, where they are at last welcomed and protected by the citizens of Athens. Like the greatest Tibetan masters, Oedipus prepares for death. The oracle has said that his death will come as a benediction to the city and the land in which he dies. He moves off alone, out of sight of his daughters, into the trees. And then a miracle occurs – he dies, without pain, without lamentation, at peace. There are no remains, there is no corpse – he vanishes into heaven, into the earth – no mortal can say. His daughters come to look for him. Antigone in mourning and Ismene in joy. She dances to calm the restless spirits and to guide the passage of his soul after death. Her dance is a prayer.

Stravinsky said that his music is meant to be danced, not sung. He was talking about that which is unspeakable, that which moves and which moves us. And he is asking us to think of singing as dancing, of poetry as dancing, of architecture as dancing, of prayer as dancing – a physical commitment, a commitment of the entire being to contemplation, yes, but then to action. This is the difference between the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (or “total work of art”) and the Stravinskian Gesamtkunstwerk – Stravinsky does not extend your sense of time into an expanding dream world – Stravinsky compresses time to let you know that at this very minute, while you are wide awake, a miracle is occurring, a miracle which calls upon your entire being to act – to change yourself, to change the world, to create.

In Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky makes a long journey towards discovering his own creative identity. Like Oedipus, he is trying on different masks, and making them his own. Appropriately finding value in and recycling materials that his contemporaries in the European avant-garde have rejected and consider to be trash (Verdi, for example) or borrowing voices of his actual progenitors (there is a strong  reminiscence of Mussorgsky’s Pimen in the Tiresias music, for example) until he arrives at the crisis point. With the entrance of the Messenger and Shepherd, the truth comes out and his own mark as a composer finally asserts itself in the rhythms and rigour of their material. It is a major breakthrough.

Three years later, again writing in Latin, Stravinsky finally has the courage to admit in public that he is, like most composers throughout history, primarily a religious composer. He writes a symphony of psalms, putting for the first time the dedication at the top of the score that Bach started every work with: “To the glory of God.” Every note is pure Stravinsky. The piece begins with the children of Israel trudging across the desert, generation upon generation of exiles – with thunder and lightning, God moving before them, a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. In the second movement, the rebirth is heralded by a fugue. The third movement is an ecstatic dance of joy around the grave.

This article is adapted from the director’s note published by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the premiere of this production in 2009.

Symphony of Psalms:
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Exaudi orationem meam (Psalm 38:13–14)
Expectans expectavi Dominum (Psalm 39:2–4)
Alleluja. Laudate Dominum (Psalm 150)
(The three movements are played without pause.)

Although intended as a concert work, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms is closer to the Church’s usual understanding of how to treat the liturgy in music than many works composed for liturgical use. Celebrating the 50th anniversary in 1930 of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its conductor Serge Koussevitsky commissioned symphonies from Prokofiev, Roussel and Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s own account of his decision to compose a choral psalm symphony stresses the mundane: his publisher had suggested he write something popular. But the dedication of the Symphony is ‘To the Glory of God’, and Stravinsky had for some time been thinking of setting the Psalms to music, partly because of his eagerness ‘to counter the many composers who had abused these magisterial verses as pegs for their own lyricosentimental feelings’. An aesthetic standpoint and religious conviction went hand-in-hand, then, as Stravinsky approached this work. He said that he began to set the Psalms in Slavonic, later switching from the Russian text to the Latin of the Vulgate. This symbolises the religious milieu in which he found himself. By the mid-1920s Stravinsky had returned to the active practice of the Russian Orthodox faith in which he had been brought up. It had never ceased to influence his music, particularly the ritualistic aspects of works like The Rite of Spring and Les Noces (The Wedding). Now it came to the forefront. The eventual choice of Latin gave Stravinsky’s setting a universal resonance, and the purified, objectifying approach to setting liturgical words reflects the influence of the intellectual circles in which he was then moving – the rediscovery and revivification of the disciplines of medieval scholastic thought by thinkers such as Jacques Maritain. Stravinsky summed up these connections in an interview given in 1930:

The more one separates oneself from the canons of the Christian Church, the further one distances oneself from the truth. These canons are as true as they are for the life of an individual…The overflowing of the framework in art testifies to a lack of internal discipline, which weakens the work.

In a letter to André Schaeffner in August, Stravinsky described this work as ‘…not a symphony in which I have included the Psalms to be sung. On the contrary, it is the singing of the Psalms I am symphonising’. The fast section of the final movement was conceived and composed first (Stravinsky then composed the first and second movements, and finally the ‘Alleluia’ which begins the last). His first idea was the rhythmic figure to which the words ‘Laudate Dominum’ are set in the final movement. Some have suggested that this rhythm was associated by Stravinsky with the traditional singing of the Russian Kyrie ‘Gospodi Pomiluy’ (Lord have mercy), a prayer to the infant Christ with orb and sceptre. On his copy of the program annotation for the first performance (which was given in Brussels, before the Boston premiere) Stravinsky crossed out this suggestion. The trumpet and harp motif which is heard in conjunction with the words ‘Laudate Dominum’ certainly supplied the idea of the beginning of the whole work.

The first movement, Stravinsky said, was composed ‘in a state of religious and musical ebullience’. The listener is struck immediately by the clarity and bell-like resonance of an orchestra without upper strings: brass, winds, and percussion, two pianos and harp, cellos and double basses. Here are the instruments referred to in Psalm 150 (the text of the third movement), but without the organ, because Stravinsky disliked ‘its legato sostenuto and its mess of octaves as well as the fact that the monster never breathes’. The choir’s chanting of the entreaty of the 39th Psalm is austerely homophonic. Stravinsky expressed a preference for boys’ voices in the soprano and alto parts.

The second movement, setting the ‘Waiting for the Lord’ Psalm, is described by Stravinsky as ‘an upside down pyramid of fugues’. The first fugue is purely instrumental, and uses only solo instruments: five each of flutes and oboes. The second stage is the vocal fugue, which expands into the bass register. The third stage unites the two fugues, with a climax at ‘He hath put a new song into my mouth’. This is the movement of the Symphony of Psalms which most obviously reflects Stravinsky’s tendency, in his so-called Neo-classical period, towards restraint, austerity, and Neoclassical preoccupations. Poulenc saluted the composer of this music as ‘Jean-Sébastien Stravinsky’.

The ‘Alleluia’ beginning the final movement is the ‘new song’ of the previous Psalm. The Allegro section, the first music composed, was inspired by a vision of Elijah’s chariot climbing the heavens, the triplets for horn and piano suggesting the horse and chariot. The choral singing of the hymn, however, begins with quiet gravity, because ‘God must not be praised in fast, forte music, no matter how often the text specifies loud’. The majestic swinging effect of the ending is a kind of apotheosis, typical of the ending of several Stravinsky works of this period, notably the ballet Apollo. In his splitting of the words of the final hymn into their constituent syllables, Stravinsky was consciously reverting to the methods of the polyphonic music of Renaissance and medieval times. This method recalls the words of St Augustine: ‘being overcome with joy…words fail to express their emotions, so, leaving the syllables they drop into vowel sounds.’

The Symphony as a whole, and particularly the last movement, achieves an exaltation and power making it one of the most impressive of all Stravinsky’s works.

Conductor
Joana Carneiro

Noted for her vibrant performances and stylistic diversity, Joana Carneiro has attracted considerable attention as one of the most outstanding young conductors working today. Last year she was named music director of the Berkeley Symphony, succeeding Kent Nagano, and she is also official guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra.

In the 2009–10 season performance highlights have included her inaugural season with the Berkeley Symphony, debut concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Seattle Symphony, a performance in Quito, Ecuador with Renée Fleming as soloist, and the opening of the Venice Biennale in the Gran Teatro de la Fenice. She has also made debut appearances with the Sao Paolo State Symphony, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

In North America she has also worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (where she was Assistant Conductor), New World Symphony, Grant Park Music Festival and the Manhattan School of Music. And in Europe she has conducted the Norkopping Symphony, Prague Philharmonia and Orchestre de Bretagne, among others. Her Asian appearances have included the Macau Chamber Orchestra and Beijing Orchestra at the International Musica Festival of Macau (China).

Increasingly in demand as an opera conductor, Joana Carneiro will conduct John Adams’ A Flowering Tree – with which she made her Chicago Opera Theater debut – at La Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2010 and for her Cincinnati Opera debut in 2011.

Joana Carmeiro’s potential was recognised when she was a finalist of the 2002 Maazel-Vilar Conductor’s Competition. That same year she won the Young Musicians Foundation National
Conductor Search, which led to a three-year term as Music Director of the Los Angeles Debut Orchestra. In 2003–04 she worked with Kurt Masur, Christoph von Dohnányi and the London
Philharmonic Orchestra, as one of three conductors chosen for London’s Allianz Cultural Foundation International Conductors Academy. And from 2005 to 2008 she was an American Symphony Orchestra League Conducting Fellow and assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she worked closely with Esa-Pekka Salonen.

A native of Lisbon, Joana Carneiro began her musical studies as a violist before receiving her conducting degree from the Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra in Lisbon, where she studied with Jean-Marc Burfin. She received her Masters degree in orchestral conducting from Northwestern University, studying with Victor Yampolsky and Mallory Thompson, and pursued doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, where she studied with Kenneth Kiesler.

In 2004 she was decorated by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Jorge Sampaio, with the Commendation of the Order of the Infante Dom Henrique.

Director
Peter Sellars

Renowned theatre, opera, and festival director Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts. A visionary artist, he is known for groundbreaking interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Peter Sellars strikes a universal chord with audiences, engaging contemporary social and political issues.

Peter Sellars has staged operas at Lincoln Center, the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Netherlands Opera, the Opéra National de Paris, the Salzburg Festival, and the San Francisco Opera, among others.

Following his iconic staging of Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in the 1980s, he established a reputation for bringing 20th-century and contemporary operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, and György Ligeti. Inspired by the compositions of Kaija Saariaho, Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, he has guided the creation of productions of their work that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera. He has been a driving force in the creation of many new works with long-time collaborator John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic and, most recently, A Flowering Tree at Lincoln Center in August 2009.

Other Sellars projects have included a Chicano version of Stravinsky’s Story of a Soldier; an Antonin Artaud radio play coupled with the poetry of the late June Jordan, For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye, staged as a press conference on the war in Afghanistan; and a production of the Euripides play The Children of Herakles, focusing on contemporary immigration and refugee issues and experience.

Peter Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals; the 2002 Adelaide Festival and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theatre in Italy. He was artistic director of New Crowned Hope, a month-long festival for which he invited international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fields of music, theatre, dance, film, the visual arts, and architecture for the city of Vienna’s 2006 Mozart Year, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. In January 2009, he was co-curator with Meskerem Assegued on an exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art: Elias Simé: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart.

Peter Sellars is a professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and a resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize, the Sundance Institute Risk-Takers Award, the Gish Prize, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chorus Director
Brett Weymark

Brett Weymark studied singing at the University of Sydney and conducting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Mats Nilsson, John Hopkins, Henryk Pisarek and Patrick Thomas. During the 1990s he performed with Opera Australia, The Song Company and Musica Viva, amongst others, as well as lecturing in the Theatre Department of the University of Western Sydney.

In 2003, Brett Weymark was appointed Musical Director of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, whom he has conducted in performances including Bach’s St Matthew and St John Passions, Christmas Oratorio, the Requiems of Mozart, Verdi, Durufl é and Fauré, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Handel’s Messiah and world premiere performances of works by Elena Kats-Chernin, Andrew Schultz, Nicholas Vines, to name a few. He has also prepared the choir for concerts with such noted international conductors as Charles Mackerras, Charles Dutoit and Simon Rattle in repertoire ranging from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor to Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

Recent highlights with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs have included Amadeus, a journey into the life of the great composer through music and film; the Dawn Chorus, performed before thousands on the beaches of Sydney as part of the 2009 Sydney Festival.

Brett Weymark has also conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras, the Sydney Youth Orchestra, the Queensland Youth Orchestra in performances on Thursday Island for the 2009 Queensland Music Festival, and the 2008 Intervarsity Choral Festival.

This year, Brett Weymark directs Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in the world premieres of music by Peter Sculthorpe and Moya Henderson, tours with the choir to London to appear in the BBC Proms, and conducts the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and the contemporary Indigenous ensemble Black Arm Band.

Sydney Symphony

Founded in 1932 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Sydney Symphony has evolved into one of the world’s finest orchestras as Sydney has become one of the world’s great cities.

Resident at the iconic Sydney Opera House, where it gives more than 100 performances each year, the Sydney Symphony also performs in venues throughout Sydney and regional New South Wales. International tours to Europe, Asia and the USA have earned the orchestra world-wide recognition for artistic excellence, and in 2009 it made its first tour to mainland Asia.

The Sydney Symphony’s first Chief Conductor was Sir Eugene Goossens, appointed in 1947; he was followed by Nicolai Malko, Dean Dixon, Moshe Atzmon, Willem van Otterloo, Louis Frémaux, Sir Charles Mackerras, Zdenek Mácal, Stuart Challender, Edo de Waart and, most recently, Gianluigi Gelmetti. The orchestra’s history also boasts collaborations with legendary figures such as George Szell, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer and Igor Stravinsky.

The Sydney Symphony’s award-winning education program is central to its commitment to the future of live symphonic music, developing audiences and engaging the participation of young people. The Sydney Symphony promotes the work of Australian composers through performances, recordings and its commissioning program. Recent premieres have included major works by Ross Edwards, Liza Lim, Lee Bracegirdle and Georges Lentz, and the orchestra’s recording of works by Brett Dean was released on both the BIS and Sydney Symphony Live labels.

Other releases on the Sydney Symphony Live label, established in 2006, include performances with Alexander Lazarev, Gianluigi Gelmetti, Sir Charles Mackerras and Vladimir Ashkenazy. The Sydney Symphony has also released recordings with Ashkenazy of Rachmaninoff and Elgar orchestral works on the Octavia label, and numerous recordings on the ABC Classics label.

This is the second year of Ashkenazy’s tenure as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

Formed in 1920, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs is Australia’s largest choral organisation and occupies a unique position in the performing arts world. With four main choirs – the 40-voice Chamber Singers, the 100-voice Symphony Chorus, the youth-focused 50-voice Vox and the 300-voice Festival Chorus – Sydney Philharmonia presents its own annual concert series in the Sydney Opera House and City Recital Hall Angel Place, as well as acting as chorus for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Sydney Philharmonia has worked with conductors such as Eugene Ormandy, Otto Klemperer, Sir David Willcocks, Sir Charles Mackerras, Edo de Waart, Charles Dutoit, Christopher Hogwood, Mark Elder, John Nelson, Richard Hickox and Bruno Weil. Previous Musical Directors have included Mats Nilsson, Antony Walker, John Grundy and Peter Seymour.

In August 2002, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs toured to the UK to perform Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle as part of the BBC London Proms series at Royal Albert Hall. They were the first Australian choir to sing at the Proms.

Other highlights include: Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 in a worldwide satellite TV broadcast as part of the Opening Ceremony of the Nagano Winter Olympics (1998); two concerts with Barbra Streisand during her Timeless tour and recording a CD of this tour; Mahler’s Eighth Symphony for the opening concert of the Olympic Arts Festival in August 2000; and performing in the Opening Ceremony of the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney.

In 2007, highlights included a performance of Britten’s War Requiem at the UWA Perth International Arts Festival, the premiere performances of the Festival Chorus and a tour to Hobart to work with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Choir.

In 2008, in addition to a highly successful subscription series, Sydney Philharmonia performed with the Sydney Symphony under conductors Gianluigi Gelmetti, Charles Dutoit and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

In 2009 the year began with performances for Sydney Festival on four beaches, entitled Dawn Chorus. May saw the success of Amadeus, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the film that made Mozart a household name. It was among the most popular concerts and in 2010 Sydney Philharmonia returns with another inventive marriage of music and movies: Songs for Shakespeare.

In June, performance opportunities for the wider community continue with ChorusOz, an extraordinary annual weekend of music for one thousand singers and aspiring singers at the iconic Opera House. This had been so successful in Sydney that a regional ChorusOz took place in Wagga Wagga in July 2009.

In 2010 Sydney Philharmonia Choirs celebrate 90 years of music making and in addition to the Sydney subscription series will tour to the UK and perform at the opening concert of the 2010 BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Cast Biographies:

Rodrick Dixon
Oedipus

Tenor Rodrick Dixon’s dramatic stage presence and stunning vocal qualities have established him as one of the rising stars in opera, oratorio, recital, musical theatre and television.

Last year he made his Los Angeles Philharmonic mainstage debut as Oedipus in the Peter Sellars production of Oedipus Rex, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. He has performed extensively
with American orchestras, including appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Center, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Millennium Park. His concert repertoire includes The Bells by Rachmaninoff, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Dvorák’s Stabat Mater.

He made his Los Angeles Opera debut in 2007, singing Walther in Tannhäuser, and in 2008 he gave an acclaimed performance in Zemlinsky’s one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) for LA Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Other opera credits include Michigan Opera Theater and Todi Music Festival’s La Fille du régiment (Tonio), the title role in The Tales of Hoffmann for Portland Opera, the world premiere of Vanqui (Prince) for Columbus Opera, and Sportin’ Life for the Virginia Opera production of Porgy and Bess. He has also performed numerous roles with the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.

From 2001 to 2004 he made many orchestral appearances as a member of Tenors Cook Dixon & Young. He has also performed extensively on American public television and in musical theatre, including the original Broadway cast of Ragtime, and Show Boat at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. He has also appeared in pops concerts for the Grant Park Music Festival, in the Too Hot to Handel Christmas concerts in Detroit and Chicago, and in concerts with the Chicagoland Pops Orchestra and the Cincinnati Pops with Eric Kunzel.

Rodrick Dixon’s recordings include PBS Great Performances Cook, Dixon & Young Volume One (2005), Follow That Star Christmas CD (2003), Liam Lawton’s Sacred Land (2006), Rodrick Dixon Live in Concert (2008) Chicago Olympic Anthem/duet I Will Stand with soprano Alfreda Burke for the 2016 Games (2008), Triptych: A CD of Negro Spirituals (2009) and Of Vision and Truth: A Song Cycle (2009, recorded for the Center for Black Music Research).

Yvonne Kenny
Jocasta

Yvonne Kenny is one of the most distinguished sopranos of her generation. She has performed in most of the world’s leading opera houses and concert halls, having built an enviable reputation as a dazzling interpreter of works by Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Britten and more recently for her performances of the Richard Strauss heroines, most notably as the Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), the Countess (Capriccio) and Christine (Intermezzo).

She appears regularly on the concert platform including performances in the Edinburgh, Salzburg and Aix-en-Provence Festivals and at Carnegie Hall, and is a regular guest at the BBC Promenade concerts. She was the first artist to give an official performance at the newly reopened Royal Opera House (a recital in Floral Hall). Her Australian performances include national tours for Musica Viva, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Brandenberg Orchestra, as well as regular guest appearances with the Australian symphony orchestras in a broad range of repertoire. Recent opera performances have included Capriccio (Dresden State Opera), the Marschallin (Vienna State Opera), the BBC Proms, The Merry Widow, the Marschallin, La Voix Humaine, and Blanche (A Streetcar Named Desire) for Opera Australia.

Her discography includes over 65 releases on international labels as well as the best-selling discs Simple Gifts, Something Wonderful, Handel Arias, Make Believe, The Salley Gardens, Clair de lune, The Divine Yvonne Kenny and Vienna City of My Dreams, all for ABC Classics.

Yvonne Kenny was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1989 and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Sydney in 1999. She is Professor of Voice at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Ryan McKinny
Creon, Messenger, Tiresias

American bass-baritone Ryan McKinny is a graduate of the Juilliard School and an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera Studio. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2004 (Messiah) and in 2007 represented the United States in the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, where he was a finalist in the Rosenblatt Recital Song Prize. He was also a Grand Finalist in the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

In the 2009–10 season he has sung the Herald in Lohengrin and two new roles with Los Angeles Opera: Leone in Handel’s Tamerlano with Plácido Domingo, and Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia. In April he will make his European operatic debut singing Escamillo in Carmen for Deutsche Oper Berlin and Hercules in Peter Konwitschny’s new production of Alceste for Oper Leipzig.

Last year Ryan McKinny also sang the roles of Creon, Tiresias and the Messenger in the premiere of Peter Sellars’ production of Oedipus Rex for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In February he will perform the same roles in his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

He appears regularly with Houston Grand Opera, recently singing Don Pedro in Béatrice et Bénédict, Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Flint in Billy Budd. He has also appeared for Wolf Trap Opera; LA Opera; the Spoleto (Italy) and Ravinia festivals, singing Der Tod in Ullmann’s Kaiser von Atlantis; and in concert for the Aspen Music Festival. In future seasons he will perform at the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Semperoper Dresden, Hamburg State Opera and English National Opera.

As a concert artist his performances include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the National Symphony Orchestra and Zuniga in Carmen for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. His concert repertoire includes the Mozart, Brahms and Fauré requiems, Vaughan Williams’ Dona nobis pacem, as well as Henrik Strindberg’s I Thought Someone Came By, for which he sang the premiere in New York’s Alice Tully Hall in 2004. He was featured in the 2009 documentary DVD The Audition, about aspiring tenors, baritones and sopranos vying to appear on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Daniel Montenegro
Shepherd

Daniel Montenegro, a native of Southern California, has performed on stages ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Hollywood Kodak Theater. He performs regularly with Los Angeles Opera, and his appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic include the premiere of Peter Sellars’ production of Oedipus Rex in 2009.

He made his stage debut with LA Opera singing Gastone in La traviata alongside tenor Rolando Villazon and soprano Renée Fleming. Other roles with the company have included Maxamino Mendez in the premiere of Lee Holdridge’s opera Concierto para Mendez, Liberto in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Anibal in Moreno Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda, opposite Placido Domingo. Last season he appeared in Puccini’s Il tabarro and as El Dancairo in Carmen, and covered the role of Prunier in La rondine. He has sung the Steuermann in Wagner’s Der fl iegende Holländer with Portland Opera and Arizona Opera.

He is equally at home on the concert stage. As a featured member of the American Tenors he has appeared nationwide on US public television in a dedicated special and has given concert performances throughout the United States and parts of Europe.

Daniel Montenegro is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Minnesota Opera’s Resident Artist Program.

Paula Arundell
Antigone

Paula Arundell is one of Australia’s premier theatre actors. Paula’s theatre credits include: The Threepenny Opera (Belvoir Street Theatre); The Torrens (STCSA); The Servant of Two Masters, Hippolytus, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing (Bell Shakespeare Company); Life is a Dream, The Three Sisters, The White Devil, Attempts on her Life, Love for Love, Julius Caesar (Sydney Theatre Company); Company, Measure for Measure (Melbourne Theatre Company).

Paula has also performed in productions for Ensemble Theatre, The Directory Workshop/STC, Griffin Theatre Company, the Australian Museum and Threshold/Mardi Gras.

Paula’s film credits include the 2007 feature film Disgrace opposite John Malkovich, as well as roles in the films Bad Eggs, Sample People and Diana & Me.

Paula has guest-starred on television in Farscape, All Saints, Murder Call, Children’s Hospital, Water Rats, The Alice, Out of the Blue, Home and Away and was a series regular in the critically-acclaimed Love My Way.

Paula won the 2001 Sydney Morning Herald Award for Best Actress (Antony and Cleopatra), the 1999 Glugg Award for Best Up and Coming Actor and the 1999 Green Room Award for Female Actor in a Featured Role.

Paula starred as the musical muse in Stephen Sewell’s and Jim Sharman’s Sydney Festival hit, 3 Furies, and is the haunting vocal on the title song of Neil Armfield’s feature film Candy. In 2006 Paula performed in Neil Armfield’s production of Peribanez for Company B, participating in the workshop of a production of Venus and Adonis for the Bell Shakespeare Company and starred in the Ensemble Theatre’s production of Are You There.

In 2007 Paula performed in Snugglepot and Cuddlepie for Company B and Sydney Festival, Paul for Company B and starred in Loves Lies Bleeding for STC.

In 2007–08 Paula starred in Black Bird, Cate Blanchett’s directing debut for the STC, with sell-out tours to New Zealand and Germany. Later in 2008 she starred in Scorched directed by Neil Armfield for Company B.

In 2009 Paula starred in Gethsemane directed by Neil Armfield for Company B.

Elma Kris
Ismene

Born in 1972, Elma was raised on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. She is a descendant of people from the Wagadagam, (Kai Dangal Buai), Sipingur, Gebbara, and of those from the Eastern, Western and Central Islands, including the Songoro people from Mabaduan, near the coast of the Pahoturi River in Mugie Daudaiop Deudai (PNG). Elma is also a descendant of the Aboriginal Torres Strait Kaurareg of the north. Elma’s language is Kulkagau Ya and Kala Lagaw Ya. Her tribal totem is Wagadam, Kigus, Kadal, Snake, Dangal, Waru, Warup, Umai, Serra, Walisirsir, Pibi, and Umailag.

Elma completed a Visual Arts course in Cairns and taught Visual Arts on Thursday Island TAFE Campus for a year in 1993. The following year she moved to Sydney to further her studies in traditional Torres Strait dance at NAISDA College. During her time as a student Elma choreographed and performed in two pieces for college productions: Bupau Ipikazil (Bushwomen) in 1996 and Bupau Mabigal (Bush People) in 1997.

Elma has appeared in the films Oscar and Lucinda, Reef Dreaming, Farscape and also in the ABC radio broadcast Not Your Mob Next Door by Helen Anu. In 1997 Elma joined Bangarra Dance Theatre under NAISDA’s ADAPT Program and performed in Fish. After graduating from NAISDA Elma joined the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre Company for her first international touring experience: to Germany, Israel and England with Warup Kodomir. She later performed in Albert David’s piece Bipotim for Dance Clan.

Elma founded her own dance group named Bibir (Strength) and choreographed Malu, presented as part of Artyfact at the Sydney Opera House. Her work Bupau Ipikazil appeared as part of Fusion at the Sydney ANA Hotel. In 1999 Elma toured the UK with Bangarra’s production The Dreaming and was part of Bangarra’s DanceClan 2.

Elma danced in the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Arts Festival and at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, and choreographed the Torres Strait element of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. More recently, Elma danced in Gail Mabo’s work in progress, Koiki, Bangarra’s Bush in the UK, Walkabout, Unaipon, Boomerang and Gathering.

In 2007, for her choreographic debut for Bangarra Dance Theatre, Elma created Emeret Lu, a Torres Strait Island-inspired work, part of Bangarra’s True Stories double bill. Emeret Lu won much acclaim around the country, which culminated in a oneoff special performance in Mer Island. Emeret Lu was named Best New Work by critic Hilary Crampton at the 2007 Critics’ Survey.

In recognition of her outstanding achievements as a dancer, Elma was awarded Dancer of the Year for 2007 at the Deadly Awards ceremony presented at the Sydney Opera House. In 2008 Elma Kris was the lead in Mathinna, Stephen Page’s work for Bangarra Dance Theatre. In 2009 Elma’s work Emeret Lu was taken to Germany, Austria and Hungary on a hugely successful International tour of True Stories. Later in 2009 Elma helped Bangarra celebrate its 20th Anniversary with Fire - A Retrospective.

Creative Team Biographies:

Elias Simé
Sculptor

Elias Simé was born and raised in Cherqos, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As a child, he made toys with found objects for himself and his friends in his neighbourhood. When he was a teenager, he started repairing or reconstructing the furniture in his family house and carved out designs on the wooden front door of the living room. Recognising his talent, his father encouraged him to study art. In 1990 he graduated from Addis Ababa University School of Fine Art and Design in graphic art. Soon after he graduated, he completely abandoned graphic art and began making collages. One of Simé’s favourite things to do is collecting anything he finds interesting to apply in his art. Most of his works are made from collections of old items gathered from around the city, particularly in Chid Tera or Menyalesh Tera in Merkato. Merkato is the largest open market in Africa. In Chid Tera, everything that one can imagine and beyond is available. Nothing is trash. His collection includes rusted metal, buttons, keys, yarns, dolls, bottle caps, horns, scraps of clothes, and anything that he can incorporate in his art. For Simé, the material he chooses and his composition go hand in hand. One of Simé’s unique characteristics is his relationship with his neighbours, particularly with the children and the elders. Currently, he is in the midst of finishing a house that he designed and constructed with his hands. The house is made from mud, straw, stones, wood, and mosaic. Since 2001, he has been travelling with Meskerem Assegued, an anthropologist and curator, through many rural villages of Ethiopia to research ancient rituals that are still in practice. Since then, most of his art has been influenced as a result of these findings, including the thrones he constructs. His work has been shown in several galleries in Addis Ababa, particularly in Zoma Contemporary Art Center, and internationally in the 2004 Dak’Art Bienalle in Dakar, Senegal; Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, Austria; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California

Dunya Ramicova
Costume Designer

Dunya Ramicova has designed costumes for over 150 productions of theatre, opera, dance, film and television in the United States and Europe. Her work has appeared at such prestigious venues as Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, as well as Salzburger Festspiele, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Guthrie Theater, Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, Mark Taper Forum, and many others. She is the long-time collaborator of director Peter Sellars. Their work together includes the world premieres of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Dr Atomic by John Adams. Their most recent collaborations include Oedipus Rex and The Symphony of Psalms, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Dunya Ramicova has taught costume design for the past 30 years at Yale School of Drama, Harvard University and University of California, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. She is the founding faculty of the new University of California campus in Merced.

James F. Ingalls
Lighting Designer

James’ recent work includes Phedre (American Conservatory Theatre/ San Francisco), The Tales of Hoffmann (Metropolitan Opera), Brief Encounters (Paul Taylor Dance Company), Bitter Suite (Jorma Elo/ Hubbard Street Dance Company/Chicago), Giselle (Norwegian Ballet) and Othello (Peter Sellars/Vienna, Bochum, New York).

Diane J. Malecki
Associate Producer

Diane J. Malecki served for several years as Artistic Administrator of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where she first worked with director Peter Sellars. She was subsequently invited by him to become Executive Director of the American National Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, where Peter Sellars had been named Artistic Director. In 1987, she was appointed Producing Director of the newly formed BAM Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since 1990 she has been working as an independent producer, working primarily with Peter Sellars on the development, production, and touring of his theatre, opera, and festival work.