BIOGRAPHICA
“Winner of the 2018 APRA|AMCOS Art Music Award for Vocal Work”
2017 Sydney Festival, Carriageworks Bay 20
Presented by Sydney Chamber Opera with Ensemble Offspring
Music & Concept: Mary Finsterer
Libretto: Tom Wright
Conductor: Jack Symonds
Director: Janice Muller
BIOGRAPHICA TRAILER
BIOGRAPHICA ARIAS
In Anno Domini
Aria from Scene II: The Birth of Gerolamo Cardano
Soloist: Jane Sheldon, soprano
Qui Primo Aspect Noli
Aria from Scene IX: The Crime
Soloist: Anna Fraser, mezzo soprano
Your Dusk is Near
Aria from Scene V: The Demise of Chiara
Soloist: Jessica O'Donoghue, soprano
BIOGRAPHICA
~ complete work ~
This archival video of the Sydney Festival 2017 performance is on an unlisted YouTube channel.
The scene–by–scene story is included in the drop-down menu of the YouTube link. The drop-down menu also contains timecode for direct navigation to the different scenes.
Click here to download a PDF about the Opera.
SYNOPSIS
Biographica is a new opera by award winning Australian composer Mary Finsterer with libretto by celebrated writer, Tom Wright. Informed by the principles of Renaissance music, and conceived for one actor, five singers and eleven musicians, Biographica is inspired by the extraordinary life and demise of Gerolamo Cardano.
Gerolamo Cardano was a prolific inventor, a flawed father, a solitary, aggressive and peculiar soul with a magnificent and eccentric Renaissance mind; a human who listened to guardian angels, swore by science, and dreamt of defeating time. He wrote the first texts on the mathematics of gambling and cheating, was a world-renowned surgeon, invented algebra, and was the pioneer of sign language.
The opera takes the form of a sequence of portraits, much like Counter-Maniera painting; rich, florid, bold, Greenaway meets Caravaggio. The portraits are sung episodes, combining principle characters singing in English and choruses singing in Latin, focusing on moments of transformation, elation and tragedy within Cardano’s life: the events surrounding his birth (his mother’s attempt to abort him), the rise and fall of his three children (his eldest son’s crimes and beheading, his daughter’s prostitution and syphilis) and the moments of original thought and invention that garnered him with temporary fame and celebrity (saving the life of the archbishop and the day he correctly predicted the date and time of his own death).
These portraits are presented not in a linear fashion, but in a manner that expresses a mind reflecting upon the events of one’s life that haunt and propel one forward.
Between each portrait are Beckett-like monologues to be spoken by Cardano. Addressed directly to the audience (accompanied by music), they are the lessons and aphorisms written by Cardano where he aims to share wisdom and secure his place in history. His writings range from the insightful to the outright bizarre, capturing a moment in history where the world was taking a terrifying leap forward in thought and complexity. His writings reveal to us a soul deeply human and magnificent in imagination.
The libretto and the interlocking musical events in the opera capture the experience of a febrile moment in time; a time in our history when the world of fact and the world of the soul were intermeshed, when science meant leaps of faith, and leaps of faith held great terrors for the soul.
CREDITS
Music & Concept: Mary Finsterer
Libretto: Tom Wright
Conductor: Jack Symonds
Director: Janice Muller
PRODUCTION
Set & Costume Design: Charles Davis
Lighting Design: Matt Cox AV
Design: James Brown
Creative Consultant: Matthew Lutton
Audio recording: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Video recording: Hospital Hill
CAST
Gerolamo Cardano: Mitchell Butel
Cardano's Mother: Jane Sheldon
Chiara: Jessica O'Donoghue
Caterina: Anna Fraser
Aldo/ Cassanate: Andrew Goodwin
Giambattista/ Archbishop: Simon Lobelson
Ensemble Offspring: Claire Edwardes, Artistic Director
REVIEWS
The Australian
‘Inventive, engaging, stimulating and moving, Biographica is an outstanding new opera.
It deserves regular performances as well as a permanent place in the repertory.’
MURRAY BLACK January 9, 2017
The Australian
'Biographica’s complex yet crystalline textures, evocative instrumental colours, intricate rhythms and Renaissance-inspired vocal writing resulted in an absorbing, appealing sound-world…’
MURRAY BLACK January 9, 2017
Sydney Morning Herald ★★★★
'Finsterer's ear for original, dramatically appropriate instrumental and vocal combinations and the way musical processes intersect with mathematical ones, are a collision of the sensual and the rational.'
PETER MCCALLUM January 8, 2017
Sydney Morning Herald ★★★★
'Finsterer's score recreates the Renaissance sound world with modern musical codes, using imaginative instrumentation, scattered modernist textures, and instrumental figuration to animate, transform and sometimes subvert the glistening vocal sonorities
PETER MCCALLUM January 8, 2017
Limelight Magazine ★★★★
Finsterer’s score thrums with energy throughout, making this a worthy addition to the Australian operatic canon.’
ANGUS MCPHERSON January 8, 2017
TimeOut ★★★★
‘Finsterer draws deep from the medieval minstrel origins of Renaissance music, but links up with intervening periods and contemporary art music styles, delivering highly appealing yet substantive fabrics for every scene. It succeeds paradoxically by being both palatable and unsettling, like the tale it carries. A triumphant level of achievement...'
JASON CATLETT January 10, 2017
TimeOut ★★★★
'... an exemplary achievement for the Sydney Festival: new, fresh high art that will be enjoyed by a wider audience than any accountant would have predicted.’
JASON CATLETT January 10, 2017
Bachtrack ★★★★
Mary Finsterer has managed a musical melange that crosses effortlessly and delightfully from the Renaissance to today which makes Biographica the most musically successful of the young Sydney Chamber Opera's commissions.’
JEREMY ECCLES January 9, 2017
Partial Durations / Real time
'...a major new work by one of our finest living composers.'
ALISTAIR NOBLE January 12, 2017
Partial Durations / Real time
'Biographica is full of lovely colours, both dramatic and subtle. The result is captivating, intelligent, and theatrically powerful.'
ALISTAIR NOBLE January 12, 2017
Partial Durations / Real time
'Biographica is a beautiful, haunting and thought-provoking work from an important composer of our time.’
ALISTAIR NOBLE January 12, 2017
Harry Fiddler
'...thank goodness for opera, thank goodness for composer Mary Finsterer and thank goodness for the many hands which came together to make this palimpsest of sights, sounds, words and music.'
HARRIET CUNNINGHAM January 8, 2017
Financial Times
‘[With] meticulous craftsmanship in her toolkit, Mary Finsterer’s opera is a vote of confidence in the mainstream appeal of new music.’
SHIRLEY APTHORP January 10, 2017