Peter Rose
In 2001 Peter Rose became the Editor of Australian Book Review. Previously he was a publisher at Oxford University Press. He has published several books of poetry, an award-winning family memoir, Rose Boys, and two novels, the most recent being Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate, 2010). His latest poetry collections are Rag (Gazebo Books, 2023) and Attention, Please! (Pitt Street Poetry, February 2025). His extensive criticism appears in a variety of publication, including ABR. Rose writes and performs short absurdist plays with The Highly Strung Players.
A few weeks after that memorable Peter Grimes from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney and Melbourne audiences were treated to another concert version of an opera, this time a very different and much less cerebral work: Umberto Giordano’s sole enduring success, Andrea Chénier (if we discount the tilting Fedora, occasionally mounted for a famous soprano à la Callas or Freni).
Giordano’s fo ... (read more)
Melburnians haven’t heard Nicole Car since 2014, when she was a luminous Tatiana in Kasper Holten’s production of Eugene Onegin. Much has happened to the Melbourne-born lyric soprano since then, primarily in Sydney at first with several big Mozart and Verdi roles (Pamina, Fiordiligi, Violetta, Luisa Miller), but now, increasingly, overseas. At thirty-three, Car has already sung major rol ... (read more)
Difficult it is to imagine the full impact Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes had on the opening-night audience at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 7 June 1945, just a few weeks after the conclusion of World War II. Little wonder that the audience, possibly expecting something cheerier from the prodigal wunderkind, sat there in silence for minutes after that subtlest of endings. Joan Cross, direct ... (read more)
Opera Australia – in its present expansionary phase – has hitched its wagon to a digital star in the form of a series of seven-metre-high LED screens. The future moves about on a busy automation system, thus creating a series of new dramatic spaces. Interviewed in the July 2019 issue of Opera magazine, Lyndon Terracini – now in his tenth year as artistic director – extolled the new technol ... (read more)
Few people escape from publishing. Most people, once they get a foot in the door, stay put. Mary-Kay Wilmers has been working in the industry for more than fifty years. She began at Faber & Faber when the company was still dominated by ‘GLP’ (the ‘Greatest Living Poet’ himself, T.S. Eliot, much mentioned in Toby Faber’s epistolary history of Faber). Wilmers, co-founder of the London ... (read more)
When Barry Humphries published his first volume of autobiography, many readers were left wanting ‘More, please’ – avid as gladdie-waving victims during one of his shows; voracious as the greedy polymath himself. After all, he had opened that comic triumph with a credible confession: ‘I always wanted more. I never had enough milk or money or socks or sex or holidays or first editions or sol ... (read more)
Dr Johnson famously defined opera as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’, and so it proved on the opening night of Opera Australia’s autumn season – at least until the curtain went up. Lights down, photography admonition underway, conductor due any moment, we became aware of a strange incident in the gloom, as a solitary figure – elderly, well-dressed, seated behind the conductor, c ... (read more)
For more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words, it may not be what the ravenous world had in mind, but it is seriously interesting – interestin ... (read more)
In September 2018, NewSouth published a new edition of A Certain Style.
On a chilly evening in 1980, a stylish woman in her early seventies, wheezing slightly from a lifetime’s cigarettes, climbed a staircase just beneath the Harbour Bridge, entered a room full of book editors – young women mostly, university-educated, making their way in a newly feminised industry – and proceeded, in her c ... (read more)