“An exciting place to be”: Carmen becomes first opera performed on Cockatoo Island
Operas as we know them conjure up images of concert halls with soaring ceilings, tiered, cushiony seats, and singers projecting their voices for the whole audience to hear.
To take opera beyond the theatre and into the great outdoors comes with plenty of challenges, many of which conductor Tahu Matheson has become all too familiar with while conducting the orchestra for Carmen on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island.
“It’s quite tricky,” he tells OverSixty. “In particular, it’s the distance. The orchestra is a long, long way away from the grand outdoor stage.”
With the orchestra located in one of the island’s historic buildings and the opera’s main stage on the water’s edge, Matheson and the cast rely on monitors to see each other and stay in time.
“I can see the stage but only really from a distance,” he explains. “So really, I just listen, basically, and try and follow the singers as much as possible.
“And they've got a big monitor, and when they can they take note of the monitor.”
Naturally, the elements present another challenge to be overcome with the help of microphones, and the help of sound designer Tony David Cray, who Matheson describes as a “sound genius”.
“He never stops working. When we’re all having a break, we hear moments of stuff that we’ve just done, and then he's just working on the sound and seeing if we can make this clearer and more beautiful, and more articulated,” Matheson says.
But the most interesting part of this production for Matheson has been how it has changed from the original under the guidance of director Liesel Badorrek.
“Carmen, probably one of the strongest women in opera, is being sort of interpreted just slightly differently, from a woman’s point of view,” he says.
“There’s always a little bit of Carmen where, yes, she’s an incredibly strong character, but it’s definitely been written by a man, so a man’s idea of a strong woman.
“And so Liesel just interprets that in a slightly different way… a strong woman from a woman’s perspective. I think it’s timely and it’s also slightly more interesting than we’ve had in the past.”
Opera Australia’s version of Carmen draws attention to themes of violence against women at a time when sexual violence and coercive control have been in the spotlight.
It also modernises the appearance of Carmen through costuming and set design, opening up questions of whether future productions could follow suit in a bid to appeal to modern audiences.
But, Matheson says this can be tricky when dealing with an artform like opera.
“I think there are some things about opera, just the artform itself, that are so thrilling and exciting that I don’t think you're going to experience them in any other artform,” he says.
“It’s very difficult because it’s a hybrid of three or four different artforms, each of which, in itself, is capable of reducing the audience members to tears, whether it’s just the spoken word alone, or just music in a concert, or just a singer with a piano.
“And then you bring all these things together and then you add a dramatic plot to it - it has the ability to be something so thrilling and so amazing.
“But it also has this fragility because it depends on all four or five disparate parts working together. And so it can fail, and sometimes it does.
“And I think it’s worth remembering as a member of the public that it has the possibility to be the most stunning experience that you’ve ever had in your life.
“At the same time, we do need to modernise, think forward a little bit and [think]: How do we engage with people as well as wanting them to engage in the artform itself?’
“I don’t think it’s as simple as going, ‘We’ll add more people in jeans and t-shirts so that people empathise with characters’, but somehow a mixture of both, I think it’s what we need.”
Carmen on Cockatoo Island is showing Tuesday through Sunday nights from November 25 until December 18, with tickets available here.
Images: Prudence Upton / Opera Australia