The Company We Keep: an intimate celebration of Opera Australia

Text by Annarosa Berman and photographs by Bridget Elliott

Published by Opera Australia and Currency Press $49.95

ISBN 0 86819 786 6

Reviewed by Elizabeth Silsbury

Just in time, this collection of interviews and  photographs about what the general public does and does not see of Australia’s biggest and busiest opera company and its mainstage operations in Sydney and Melbourne. Presumably the book was already with the publishers when the news broke that Victorian Opera was about to challenge OA for the Melbourne opera dollars. Big changes in the wind for an organization that had ruled the roost without competition for a decade and in tandem with the Victoria State Opera for many years before that.

Putting on record how things are now will make a good base for how they might shake down in the near future.

The Company We Keep is not a history. For the full story, go to Moffatt Oxenbould’s Timing is Everything (Music Forum, July 2006). But Company is more than the coffee table decoration that first impressions indicate.

Annarosa Berman’s language about the people who perform the multifarious jobs both on and offstage that this most complex of all art forms demands is deliberately couched (not coached – there’s a funny typo on p225) in simple words. Nothing technical, nothing to puzzle lay readers. While her choice of subjects and her questions to them show no great knowledge of the operas in question, she is very savvy about what actual and would-be audiences want to know. Her level of sophistication matches well with that of most opera lovers.

By contrast, Bridget Elliott’s black-and-white photographs are, in the main, both artistic and significant. See her panel of tools of the trade from Wardrobe on the Contents page for proof of her gifts and a statement that opera is work as well as play.

Initially Berman’s focus is on singers of the current generation – Emma Matthews, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Angus Wood, David Hobson, Catherine Carby. Michael Lewis gives a slightly longer view, which might have been extended by including a few of the recently retired sopranos, tenors and baritones whose experience goes way way back. Everyone who reads this, and any other book on opera in Australia, will grizzle that their pets have been left out. And so do I.

Still, Berman soon gets over the ooh-aah factor of how wonderful they all are, though she comes back later with a rather soppy chapter about managing children and career. Doesn’t everybody?

Once the writer’s attention moves off the stage to what goes on behind it, she skewers mine. Most opera followers have a vague idea that what they see on stage is only a part of the story. Berman reveals it as the tip of the iceberg. The middle chapters – ‘Sense of Direction’, ‘Masters of Design’, ‘Costume Drama’ and ‘Getting it Together’ – convey not only the skill,  knowledge, experience and tact of  the army who work making things for singers to wear, to hold, to sit, lie and jump on, and to drink and eat – champagne is apple juice and soda water, but roast chicken is roast chicken. And the anguish of putting up the money to pay for it all. Wish lists of the artistic director and designers come in every year $7 million above the possible. Pruning the coat to make it fit the budget is painful but makes a lively story. And don’t even mention the shoes.

On the Road follows Ozopera around the country to places where the nice manners of Melbourne and Sydney are unknown. In one such, a busload  (‘pissed to begin with’) rocked up and made so much noise the orchestra could not hear themselves tuning. The SM politely requested silence for the purpose. The not so polite response was ‘Show us your tits!’. ‘The performance was a resounding success’, Ozopera reported.

The Company We Keep, a bargain at under $50, will increase the respect for OA and opera itself of the already converted, and could well add to their ranks.

Music Forum Vol 13 No 2