The State Opera Company's production of Jake Heggie's Moby Dick was truly amazing. (There are only two more performances if you can then do go and see it)
I always know when we go inside the Festival Theatre how fortunate we are to have such a facility.
But, in this electronic age it is also the effects and the staging that is the 'hero'.
The picture above is of the whaling boats and is essentially an electronically projected image. It allows all sort of things to be done on stage which could otherwise never happen. And someone actually asked me today if I felt seasick. And ion the great climactic scene at the end I swear I did.
The music is not melodic, but is powerful and rich. The ASO were truly excellent.
The (all but one) male chorus were excellent...and drawn essentially from local talent it makes you proud. Their sound was phenomenally coherent and deeply moving .
For once, too, the story made sense which is more than you can say for most of the film versions of the novella. I suppose it seemed to me that it's about heaven and hell here on earth (or at sea in this case), about how we are driven and how we drive others. Rivetting stuff.
I think everyone who has seen it has been affected (two people in front of us left at half time). I found myself wondering about how all this fits in with the great tragedies that the world faces at this time. The famines, the wars, the imminent climate collapse....and of course whales are ever close to us as a sign of man's inability to grapple with creation
Yet some how art interprets life so profoundly that we all know that we need it to stay alive.
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