If time travellers were a thing, someone should pay Mozart a visit, pump his hand and praise him for placing the humble viola as well as the showier, stage-stealing violin in the limelight in his Sinfonia Concertante K394.
Boy, Lost, Katherine Lyall-Watson’s stage play inspired by Kristina Olsson’s award-winning memoir, with brilliant direction by Caroline Dunphy, turns a harrowing real-life tragedy and its themes of domestic violence and emotional abuse into raw, unflinching, deeply moving theatre.
Taking its starting point from a theatre production staged just after the second world war by Chinese workers at Bulimba dockyards, this play traces the story of a group of six men who had to flee China after the Japanese invasion in the 1930s.
A collaboration of epic proportions. So the program describes the process of creating this beautiful, powerful recreation of the central love story of Homer’s Iliad; a process of blending and interweaving the innovative creative powers of two amazing theatre companies. It is not an exaggeration.
I have seldom been so impressed by the unanimity of purpose of director and conductor in an operatic production as I was in the care these two people gave to the music and the action.
Before this concert began, Patrick Nolan, the artistic director of Opera Queensland, told us that we were in for a treat. But it was much more than that.