Modern Spice Flavours Weak Blend
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 20, 2007
OPERA
DON JOHN OF AUSTRIASydney SymphonyCity Recital Hall, October 19IF ONE searches for themes of emerging nationhood in the first opera written and produced in Australia, Isaac Nathan's Don John of Austria (1847), they turn out to be neither of the black armband type, nor white, but rather the usual quotidian grey.Nathan was - let's be frank - an untalented composer who arrived in a colony of unformed musical taste to escape debts. Like others, he lied and made exaggerated claims and a fashionable set applauded. Don John has several themes we would rather forget: anti-Catholicism and unswerving subservience to king and country. The only theme one might build a musical heritage on was the pro-Jewish one.Nathan and his Jewish librettist depict Don John's beloved Agnes as a virtuous but secret Jewess amid the perils of the Inquisition. When she confesses her status he, being a well-schooled hero, says it doesn't matter a damn.One hundred years later Sydney also said it didn't matter to the thousands of Jewish migrants fleeing fascism. In return, they gave us a rich musical culture that we still haven't quite worked out how to mix with what we already had. Nathan's score, arranged by Charles Mackerras, is full of weak to medium ideas that he doesn't know how to develop. However, the Sydney Symphony has done him proud with a performance that is amply justified on historical and heritage grounds. The work is a hotchpotch of 19th-century styles: ballad opera with spoken text, bel canto melodies and folk song, fioritura and French opera-ballet.Steve Davislim is heroic as Don John, Cheryl Barker vocally regal as Agnes. Grant Doyle is passionate and peevish as Philip II and Paul Whelan towers vocally and physically as Don Quexada. The conductor, Alex Briger (a distant relative of Nathan's), honours his ancestor in a way Nathan couldn't have imagined.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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