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Antarctica

Mary Finsterer’s new opera
Sydney Chamber Opera
by
ABR Arts 10 January 2023

Antarctica

Mary Finsterer’s new opera
Sydney Chamber Opera
by
ABR Arts 10 January 2023
Antarctica (Sydney Festival)
Antarctica (Sydney Festival)

Picture the scene …

A space. Empty. A fall of white ash which covers all surfaces, enveloping in a fine whiteness. A party of futuristic explorers trudge through the frozen steppes. They are in the colours of artificial, twenty-first century Antarctic wear – bright red, yellows oranges. they come across a figure, buried in the whiteness, near to death, frozen. It is a girl, dressed in nineteenth-century clothes – sepias, browns, deep greens. They warm her, wrap her in insulative blankets. She begins to stammer out her story, a fantastic tale …

This is the premise of Mary Finsterer’s new opera, Antarctica, with a libretto by Tom Wright, which is playing as part of the 2023 Sydney Festival. Finsterer, one of Australia’s most versatile and successful composers, works in a wide range of genres, including film. Her first opera, Biographica, which was premièred by Sydney Chamber Opera as part of the Sydney Festival in 2017, garnered critical acclaim. It is a work inspired by the extraordinary life of Gerolamo Cardano, a prolific and controversial inventor during the Renaissance.

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