Peter Rose
Cendrillon ★★★★, Lucia di Lammermoor ★★★★★, and Tosca ★★★1/2 (Metropolitan Opera)
ABR Arts’s long day’s journey into operatic night continued with three familiar productions, one of them new to the Metropolitan Opera. Jules Massenet’s fifteenth opera (April 24) is largely unknown to modern audiences, but its neglect is a mystery, for this version of Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale (based on a libretto ...
... (read more)Peter Rose spoke to Beejay Silcox, recipient of Australian Book Review Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, about developments at ABR since the revival of the magazine's second series in 1978. Beejay also discusses her Fellowship essay, 'Defying ...
A cynic once remarked that an editor needs two things: good grammar and a long memory. But we all know there’s a bit more to it than that. As we prepare to send the April issue to press – the four hundredth in the magazine’s second series – it occurs to me that an editor’s main function is to be a recogniser of expertise ...
... (read more)Rainbows and bad losers
The mood outside the State Library of Victoria on 15 November 2017 was exultant – once the precarious line from Canberra had been restored and the ABS’s expatiatory chief statistician, David Kalisch, finally announced that ...
Australian Book Review – like millions of Australians and thousands of organisations – is a strong supporter of same-sex marriage. We welcome the endorsement of marriage equality by the overwhelming majority of Australians in the postal survey.
... (read more)Having comprehensively disposed of that chestnut,
shoved it on a skip,
I have more questions to put to you than the Socratic
in our grocer.
First, I want you to step out of those non sequiturs, comely
though they are.
For decades, centuries, millennia, homosexuals (here as elsewhere) have been insulted, blackmailed, beaten, incarcerated, and murdered. Even now homosexuality remains one of the principal causes of suicide and despair in our society, especially among young males.
... (read more)Der Ring des Nibelungen, presented by Opera Australia three years after its première in Melbourne, was a great success, mostly because of the excellence of the singing ...
... (read more)
Die Walküre, for Arts Update, is the most successful work in Neil Armfield’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, now well underway at Arts Centre Melbourne. And this is fitting, Die Walküre being, for some us, the greatest of operas, with a first act of singular perfection, some of the ...
... (read more)Episode #9 Colin Golvan on new threats to Australia's literary culture from the Productivity Commission
In this week’s ABR podcast Peter Rose talks to Colin Golvan QC – a lawyer specialising in intellectual property – about new threats to Australian creativity, chiefly the proposed removal of restrictions on parallel importation, as recommended by the Productivity Commission.