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★★★★★
Text: Jansson J. Antmann
Photos © Gilfeather Photo and Video
A brand-new opera festival has just been launched in Australia under the patronage of Japanese billionaire philanthropist, Dr Haruhisa Handa – sponsor of the acclaimed outdoor opera productions on Sydney Harbour and the annual IFAC Handa Australian Singing Competition. Our Editor-in-Chief attended the inaugural festival set amongst vineyards and cattle stations 250km west of Sydney.
Opera festivals are enjoying a renaissance the world over, especially those that boast bucolic surrounds.
Take the Tyrolean Festival Erl, which has just recorded its most successful winter season ever with Jonas Kaufmann at the helm, or the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, which continues to go from strength to strength under General Director Pierre Audi. Up north, the Baltic Opera Festival has successfully been revived by Tomasz Konieczny and will return to Sopot’s Waldoper in July for a third year in a row.
Even in countries where major opera companies are facing an existential crisis, some festivals like the UK’s Garsington Opera near Oxford and Grange Park Opera in Surrey are bucking the trend, as are Santa Fe Opera and the Opera Theatre of St Louis in the US. On the other side of the globe, Opera Queensland’s Festival of Outback Opera is now in its fifth year and will bring soprano Sumi Jo to the remote towns of Winton and Longreach this July, more than 1000km from Brisbane.
And still in Australia, a brand-new festival – Handa Opera at Millthorpe – opened over the 2025 Easter weekend. The brainchild of former Artistic Director of Opera Australia, Lyndon Terracini, it is nestled among the cool-climate wineries and cattle stations outside Orange, 250km west of Sydney.
Terracini is no stranger to the challenges of presenting operas in non-traditional locations. In 2003, he founded Opera at Jimbour – a heritage-listed homestead in Queensland. In 2012, he established Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, with Carmen on Cockatoo Island following a decade later. In 2017, he presented Aida on the Gold Coast at Coolangatta Beach, and Opera at Uluru between 2019 and 2022. His latest venture, Handa Opera at Millthorpe, is an altogether different proposition, trading grandeur and spectacle for the charm and intimacy of a country town.
Established in 1867, Millthorpe is home to the award-winning restaurant Tonic, several eateries and three renowned cellar doors – Angullong, Tamburlaine and Slow Wine Co. Late-Victorian and Federation-style buildings with Rustic Gothic and colonial details line its bluestone-bordered streets creating an idyllic backdrop for a weekend of fine music.
Beginning on Good Friday, the three-day festival was held over Easter, with a series of open rehearsals, talks and concerts in Millthorpe Hall. Dating back to 1913, its decorative tin ceiling provided the perfect acoustic in which to enjoy some of the finest arias ever written, many of them by Verdi and Rossini.
During his time at Opera Australia, Terracini transformed the national company into a leading exponent of the Italian repertoire, with Natalie Aroyan emerging as the country’s premier Verdi soprano and baritone Giorgio Caoduro performing as a guest artist on no fewer than 12 occasions.
They last appeared together in Adriana Lecouvreur at the Sydney Opera House in 2023, and both were on hand last weekend for the inaugural festival in Millthorpe, Caoduro travelling more than 40 hours from Cardiff, where he had been performing as Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro with the Welsh National Opera.
During the opening gala, Aroyan was joined by fellow Opera Australia performers, mezzo-soprano Agnes Sarkis, tenor Thomas Strong and baritone Luke Gabbedy, with the Ku-ring-gai Philharmonic Orchestra under Paul Terracini.
Aroyan’s vocal prowess was on show throughout, with Ritorna vincitor! from Aida (her signature role) and Pace, pace mio Dio from La Forza del destino giving her ample opportunity to flex her dramatic muscles before she delivered a thrilling and emotionally conflicted Vissi d’arte from Tosca in the second half.
Sarkis, who first came to my attention in 2022 as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, sang both the Habanera and Séguedille from Carmen. She performed the title role during a national tour for Opera Australia in 2021, but her performance in Millthorpe demonstrated that is she more than ready to tackle Bizet’s heroine on the mainstage.
The Duo des fleurs from Delibes’ Lakmé also allowed Aroyan and Sarkis to shine in tandem, just as Strong and Gabbedy did in the duet from Bizet’s Pearl Fishers.
Due to an irritated throat, Strong was absent from the open rehearsal earlier in the day, leading to several ‘will-he-or-won’t-he?’ moments in the Improvviso from Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, Vesti la guibba from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacciand, of course, Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot. To the audience’s relief, he rose to the occasion each time in thrilling fashion.
Gabbedy, who opened the gala with a highly entertaining rendition of the Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville, later changed gears with a powerful and deeply moving Cortigiani, vil razza dannata from Rigoletto, in which he truly captured the desperation of a father whose daughter has been kidnapped and presumably raped.
A further highlight of the evening was the Méditation from Massenet’s Thaïs, performed by violinist Jun Yi Ma. Formerly the Concertmaster of the Opera Australia Orchestra, he now holds the same the position with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
The second day began with Terracini in conversation with Aroyan before an audience keen to hear about her journey from wannabe popstar to Verdi specialist. Recounting her career so far, from her European debut in Bari as Amelia Grimaldi in Simon Boccanegra to her success in Aida at the Verdi Festival in Busetto and last year’s triumph as Tosca in Yerevan, Aroyan shared her insights into vocal technique, discipline and stamina. “One hour of opera is the equivalent of four hours at the gym,” she told an appreciative audience, before explaining the importance of working with a conductor who can “breathe with you.” And there were plenty of laughs as well, including an anecdote about the time she thought Terracini had given her the role of Eva Perón in Evita, when she’d actually been cast as Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
This was followed by an open rehearsal for Giorgio Caoduro’s concert, The Art of the Virtuoso Baritone, which was attended by local families and their very attentive children – a welcome sight at a time when it is proving difficult to attract younger people to performances of classical music.
That evening, a capacity audience filled Millthorpe Hall to marvel at Caoduro’s rapid-fire coloratura in a selection of arias from his Rossini album. Singing highlights from La Cenerentola, Torvaldo e Dorliska, La gazza ladra, Il Signor Bruschino and Semiramide, among others, he was accompanied by pianist Jonathan Wilson, who also played a delightful selection from Liszt’s Soirées musicales de Rossini. Together, they brought the audience to its feet several times throughout the evening.
Caoduro returned the following morning to discuss his career with Terracini, describing it as “a constant battle” with his voice, especially after turning 40. Fortunately, there was no sign of struggle during the previous night’s performance.
“If you master bel canto, you can sing anything,” he continued, adding that he will be performing in Puccini’s Messa di Gloria in Catania next month, and in Handel’s Resurrection at Rome’s Caracalla Festival in July.
Caoduro also surprised everyone by revealing his secret passion for Gilbert & Sullivan, dubbing the latter the “English Rossini” and admitting he’d love to perform the role of Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance someday.
The Easter Sunday program then continued with Stars of Tomorrow – a showcase of emerging talent accompanied by Swiss pianist André Desponds.
Those of us in attendance were privileged to witness the birth of a true Wagnerian soprano in Bronwyn Douglass, who brought the house down singing Dich, teure Halle from Tannhäuser and Elsa’s Dream from Lohengrin. Her voice is perfectly balanced, with a rich timbre ideally suited to Wagner’s music. However, far more importantly, Douglass’s warm vocal colour and well-developed chiaroscuro afford her great emotional depth (as heard in her thrilling renditions of these powerhouse arias) and help her avoid the piercing quality other singers often encounter in the upper register. Europe definitely awaits.
The program also featured soprano Imogen Faith-Malfitano, whose glorious reading of Sempre libera proved she is more than ready to take on Violetta in La traviata. Countertenor/mezzo-soprano Robert Adam showed off his beautiful coloratura in Venti turbini from Handel’s Rinaldo, and American Heldentenor Nicholas Paul bravely tackled Winterstürme from Die Walküre.
The festival came to a close with Desponds still at the piano but now joined by Terracini’s wife, Swiss soprano Noëmi Nadelmann, for their Cole Porter and George Gershwin concert – an act they’ve performed together since 1987, recording it in Zürich ten years later.
Desponds is not just a virtuosic pianist au fait with every musical genre imaginable, from classical and chamber music to jazz and musical theatre, he is also an eternal showman, wowing the audience with a surprise rendition of Rhapsody in Blue that did Gershwin proud, and later performing his own arrangement of Waltzing Matilda, initially lying back to front on the piano stool and even bringing his knees up behind his ears to tickle the ivories with his feet!
Underpinning it all, however, was Nadelmann’s artistry at interpreting a lyric, her impeccable timing and effortless transitioning from her chest voice to a full-blown operatic upper register – a style that sadly went out of fashion when audiences became more accustomed to amplified sound, and it was no longer necessary to project to the back of a 1500-seat theatre.
Nowadays, singers who practise this technique are saddled with the label ‘classical crossover’, but it’s hardly a recent phenomenon, and Nadelmann delivered a masterclass in the acoustic delivery of standards such as A Foggy Day, I Concentrate on You and the Kurt Weill/Ira Gerswhin classic, The Saga of Jenny, which was performed as an encore.
In a recent interview for the Australian magazine Limelight, Lyndon Terracini told me that he hoped to emulate Hans Werner Henze’s 1976 Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte in Montepulciano, Italy, where he saw first-hand how community engagement inspired creativity at a grassroots level.
Judging by the way the local residents and business owners embraced the inaugural Handa Festival at Millthorpe, it’s clear Terracini has succeeded.
For the first two nights of the festival, Tonic’s Head Chef and proprieter, Tony Worland, curated two different mouthwatering degustations that showcased local produce, each course paired with wines from nearby vineyards.
Each morning, staff at the Millthorpe Providore, located in the town’s Old Buttershop, were keen to chat about the festival as they brewed their signature coffee blend, and despite it being the Easter weekend, businesses throughout the township sold branded festival merchandise and extended their trading hours to capitalise on the influx of opera lovers.
Perhaps the most heartwarming example of the festival’s reach were the posters designed by local primary school students – an initiative also inspired by the Montepulciano festival. Proudly displayed in shopwindows around town, one of them even depicted an outdoor feast, pre-empting Terracini’s plans to host a street party at future festivals.
It was also announced that Terracini would establish of a community choir for all ages, uniting residents across the region through the power of song. The response was immediate, with locals signing up, while visitors planning to return next year quickly discovered that hotel rooms are already in short supply.
A world-class festival with a distinctly local flavour, Handa Opera at Millthorpe has clearly hit the right note.
N.B. Mr Antmann attended the performances and two degustations at Tonic as a guest of the festival, however he paid for all other meals, travel expenses and accommodation.
