A night with the Melbourne opera
A raised stage, orchestra pit and tiered seating bank were built into the Royal Exhibition Building, which has been a part of Melbourne's culture for 140 years.
Costumes, designed by Karine Larché, are hung up backstage.
Audiences experience a 4.5-hour production of Wagner's epic comedy, with multiple intervals across the afternoon and evening and themed catering.
Internationally acclaimed Wagner mastreo, Anthony Negus, mid performance.
A member of the chorus getting ready backstage.
Melbourne Opera describes Die Meistersinger as 'central to understanding Wagner's ideas on the role of music in society'.
The performance space was specifically designed to showcase the intricate paint and plasterwork of the recently restored Royal Exhibition Building.
James Egglestone, performing as the young knight Walther von Stolzing, alongside Lee Abrahmsen as Eva Pogner.
Lee Abrahmsen, as Eva, looks on from the wings.
Conductor Anthony Negus takes in the room during a quiet moment before the show.
Negus conducting the orchestra, with past collaborator Suzanne Chaundy as director.
The orchestra warms up and tunes before the performance. Melbourne Opera has regularly presented works by Richard Wagner including Ring Cycle in Bendigo (2023), Rheingold (2021) and Die Valkyrie (2022).
The opera is set in 16th-century Nuremberg and revolves around a guild of amateur poets and musicians called the Mastersingers.
James Egglestone brings Von Stolzing to life. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is unique among Wagner's work as the only comedy in his mature operas.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is the only mature Wagner opera based on an entirely original story, and in which no supernatural or magical powers or events feature. The set for the Melbourne spectacle was designed by Andrew Bailey.
The chorus waiting backstage for the final performance.
The chorus entering the stage for the final performance. Four performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg take place at the Royal Exhibition Building between 16 and 22 February.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Pelléas et Mélisande, Longborough Festival, review: Opera at its most intoxicating
In the wake of their recent small-scale stagings of Wagner's Ring cycle, under the outstanding musical direction of Wagner supremo Anthony Negus, it makes sense for him to tackle Debussy. After all, the French composer's 1902 operatic adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's play was profoundly influenced by his experience of Wagner's music-drama. Now, in doing so successfully, Longborough have demonstrated a way to move forward. Heavy with symbolism, the story of Debussy's intoxicating opera is essentially a simple love triangle in which the developing, overwhelming love of Pelléas and Mélisande threatens her enigmatic marriage to Pelléas's half-brother Golaud and leads, in the end, to the murder of Pelléas and the death of Mélisande. But around this swirls a host of allusive episodes linked by Debussy's unique through-composed score, a continuous narrative of suppressed passion and lurking danger with no conventional operatic arias or ensembles. Picking up on the frequent references in the text to light and dark, Jenny Ogilvie's staging (designer Max Johns, lighting Peter Small) is dominated by lights with an alarming life of their own: a moving neon strip for the pool by which Golaud and Mélisande first meet, swinging spotlights across the stage, dazzling crossbeams for moonlight, an illuminated swing on which Mélisande becomes entangled with Pelléas. However, this becomes overdone towards the end, as the equipment has to be dragged on and off stage by silent servants, while the concept of Mélisande's baby portrayed as a light should be rethought. But all this frames a perfectly intelligible telling of the story, against a threatening moving back wall of concealed steps and hiding places, where the young Yniold (the excellent Nia Coleman), Golaud's child by his first marriage, can constantly lurk unobserved, and then be used by his jealous father to spy on the lovers. As Golaud, lost at the beginning of the opera, despairing at the end, Brett Polegato captures perfectly the intensity of Debussy's writing but also its restraint. There is strong support from Julian Close's sonorous Arkel and Pauls Putnins's disturbing Doctor. The central couple are not perfectly matched: Karim Sulayman's Pelléas is well sculpted, the words crystal clear, but there is just not enough voice to sustain the role. But Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper as Mélisande is an outstanding discovery here, with a voice fuller and richer than we may be used to in this role, but wonderfully rounded, full of anxiety, and heart-rending at her death, prostrate in a glass box (recalling the sleeping Tilda Swinton at the Serpentine all those years ago). Mélisande's hair is not long, there is no tall tower from which to drape it: our imaginations have to work overtime to conjure up these scenes, but Negus realises Debussy's storytelling precisely, especially in the vivid interludes. At first I feared he would be too overtly dramatic, and it is true that there is an element of translucence and stasis missing here. But the orchestral playing is very fine, and bodes well for Longborough's future expansion of the repertory.
Daily Mail
20-06-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Karaoke star who stunned stag do revellers with stunning version of Nessun Dorma says he's 'ecstatic and flabbergasted' after video went viral
A Karaoke star who stunned stag do revellers with his astonishing version of Nessun Dorma has said he is 'flabbergasted' after a video of the rendition went viral. Welshman Timothy Richards was recorded belting his heart out in Tallinn, Estonia where he gave the 'once in a lifetime' performance to a room full of Brits. Footage filmed in the Satumaa Karaoke Bar shows dozens of men brought to their feet by the powerful performance as they sing along to the iconic piece of Italian opera. But the most soul-stirring moment of all comes at the aria's climax where the partygoers raise their arms high in the air with whoops and cheers as Mr Richards perfectly hits the famous concluding note. Following the spectacular showing of May 11 this year, a video was finally uploaded last night - though it was only a matter of hours before it surpassed one million views and amassed thousands of likes. Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Richards, who currently lives in Germany but had been performing in Richard Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin the night before in Estonia, said he had arrived at the karaoke bar in a group of six - having never previously been to one in his life. The singer said: 'I was in town at the same time as these guys - I didn't even know who they were. 'We had a few drinks and soon I was up. I enjoyed it. They [the revellers] all knew it that's why sang together. 'I just went with it. I left the building straight away and then sort of forgot about it - until today. 'I only heard about the video from children who use TikTok. I was ecstatic and flabbergasted to see the response and I am still pinching myself.' Mr Richards, who studied at the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester, made his professional operatic debut in 1998 as Alfredo in La Traviata for Welsh National Opera. The Tallinn stag do groom, Sam Stride, who Mr Richards is now in contact with, also recounted the memorable event which he described as the last night of his stag do. Mr Stride also told MailOnline he was now looking into the process of 're-uniting for the big day' with Mr Richards. He described the experience as a 'just a complete right time, right place'. 'It's not something you expect to see. I've seen Fulham get promoted and a lot of other big things. But this was better than all of that together. Mr Stride recalled the bar was 'pretty packed with British people'. He said people from the smoking area came 'flooding in' as the song was performed and the moment was 'pretty magical'. Following circulation of the video on X, a number of people commented to sing the praises of Mr Richards. Someone said: 'Cancel the wedding, it does not get better than this.' Another person added: 'Absolutely unreal.'
Telegraph
16-06-2025
- Telegraph
Stop using the word ‘genius' – here's why they don't exist
'Genius' has become a widely devalued concept: it can describe a goal by Mo Salah, Sally Rooney's latest novel, or the geek who fixes your computer. One reason for this, as Helen Lewis suggests in her breezy and entertaining new book The Genius Myth, is that the idea of genius has always been hazy. It holds that an exceptional few possess, for some reason, faculties or talents from which the many are ineluctably excluded, and that no amount of perspiration, method or reasoning can produce the eureka! moment, the sudden flash of inspiration or intuition that opens closed doors. Lewis is sceptical. There is no such thing as genius, she argues, in the sense of an individual discovering or creating something unprecedented. Even the most apparently original artists and scientists are building out of what is already there, drawing on either tradition or collaboration. 'To make Leonardo,' she writes, 'you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.' The same could be said for Steve Jobs needing Silicon Valley in 1997. And yet there lingers the glamorous notion, fundamental to Romanticism, that genius is a divine gift granted to an elite exempt from normal standards of behaviour. Licensed by his operatic achievements, Wagner's anti-Semitism has to be excused; Picasso's serial maltreatment of the women he loved is framed as inspiration for some of his most powerful paintings. Related to this is Thomas Carlyle's belief that history is made and changed not by impersonal social forces or revolutionary masses but egregious mould-breakers such as Cromwell or Napoleon. Lewis finds such hero worship aggravating: she complains that 'people who succeed wildly in one domain stop thinking of themselves as any combination of talented, hard-working and lucky, and instead come to imagine that they are a superior sort of human.' After this comes the book's strongest section, exploring the development of the (now largely debunked) idea of IQ and its implication of inherent genius in those who score highly – as well as its uncomfortable relationship to racism and eugenics. Lewis exposes the fraudulence of some celebrated spokesmen in this field, including the psychologists Cyril Burt and H J Eysenck, as well as recording the rather poignant tale of Marilyn Vos Savant, whose chart-busting IQ of 228 was honoured in The Guinness Book of Records but who ended up as an advice columnist in a popular magazine. Some comedy pops up here too, notably in the account of Robert K Graham's short-lived scheme for Nobel laureates to provide a bank of sperm that could impregnate comparably brilliant women to produce a new breed of genius. And it's amusing to find among Havelock Ellis's many potty notions the assertion in his study of 'the British genius' that East Anglians have 'no aptitude for abstract thinking'. The latter half of Lewis's book is a series of disconnected essays, and it's less successful. A chapter on Thomas Edison usefully points to the moment when the Byronic idea of genius gives way to 'the workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation'. There's proper acknowledgement of the backroom boys on whom the front-page astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking rely for their ground-breaking discoveries, and due tribute is paid to the support systems that women such as Tolstoy's wife Sophia and Pollock's wife Lee Krasner provided for their husbands' grand achievements – at the cost of their own aspirations and talents. But too much space is wasted on the question of the Beatles, and futile speculations as to what might have happened if John had never met Paul. Quite what the avant-garde theatre maker Chris Goode (posthumously exposed as a paedophile) did to merit inclusion is anyone's guess. More predictably, 'disruptor' Elon Musk appears to be dispatched as 'one of the clearest examples of how the mythology of genius – the sense of being a special sort of person - can warp someone's outlook'. What is most disappointing, however, is that Lewis doesn't engage in any depth with a category of genius that doesn't depend on tradition or collaboration, and which remains something of a neurological mystery. This consists very largely of men, often on the autistic spectrum, who excel in fields such as chess, mathematics and music and whose brains appear to be wired differently to those of the rest of us, especially in terms of their ability to make staggeringly complex computations in nanoseconds and draw on total recall of anything they've read. Films such as Rain Man, based on the real-life figure of Kim Peek, have romanticised this phenomenon, and it would have been worth analysing, inasmuch as it relates to Lewis's questioning of the extent to which genius is the result of mental torture or eccentricity. It would also have been interesting to speculate on a new species of purportedly superhuman genius: AI. Now that computers are on the brink of becoming creative thinkers as well as information processors, might the intellectual potential of homo sapiens have run its course? Or will A1 turn out to be merely the latest instalment in the 'genius myth'?
