In honour of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir’s forthcoming concerts in Washington, and in honour of their recent film, The Song Keepers, I re-publish this 2003 article about the premiere of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, which featured one of their predecessor organizations, the Ntaria Ladies Choir. (Please be advised that this article may contain […]
Have film screenings with live orchestra really been around so long? Jon Burlingame writing in Variety in 2013[1], cites a 1987 live screening of Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the ‘light bulb’ moment when Steven Linder of IMG Artists realized these could be a thing. Thirty years! Is […]
Loretta: That was so awful. Ronny: Awful? Loretta: Beautiful… sad. She died! John Patrick Shanley Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987) In the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Ronny Cammareri (Nicholas Cage) woos Loretta Castorini (Cher) by taking her to La bohème at ‘the Met’. In the Third Act, as the two principals on stage touch hands through […]
I have always suspected that works of art are the result of greater collaboration than the proponents of auteurism would want us to believe. I love Billy Mernit’s phrase in Cut to the Chase about movies benefitting from ‘a spirit of collaboration that once yielded cathedrals’. Now, The Guardian reveals (Oct 23, 2016) that Christopher Marlowe’s name […]
Should it be an opera? (or should a biography be a film?) – transcript of a talk given to the Strehlow conference ‘Where do we go from here’?’ Sep 24, 2014 Should it be an opera? – dramatising the Strehlow story The details of T.G.H. Strehlow’s life provide immense opportunities for dramatically illuminating Aboriginal/European relations […]
Over the years I’ve noted down statements that I consider life changing. I ended my previous blog (Words, words, words, 11 December 2012) with one of my favourites: Thomas Jefferson’s “Not a blade of grass grows uninteresting to me”. Others have been: “The problem’s the problem; the person’s not the problem.” Yesterday we were at […]
…continuing my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Harlem-born concert pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler. Philippa was the daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and white Texan Josephine Cogdell who thought that if they combined their superior genes they could produce a genius. Philippa was, indeed, […]
I don’t live in Central Australia and haven’t since the 1980s. It’s been an important strand in my life though, given expression partly in the piece, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. And I guess I think of Central Australia every day. I see myself there. When I am there, visiting in person, I can still see […]
Sometimes I despair of the endless recitativo of modern opera, this fallacious idea that the music should underscore the words. These passages remind me of Kenneth Hince’s phrase: ‘acres and acres of interminable mudflat’, which he applied unfairly to Brahms, but which describes contemporary opera better. I think this ‘unending recitative’ (which is not what […]