The nation imagines itself in many ways – perhaps most powerfully in its cultural works. Yet the “creation stories” of these creations are often much more complicated than most of us could fathom.

In Anthony Weigh’s bio-fic theatre Sunday we’re invited into a small, intoxicating world of rebellious liaisons and love, patronage and power. The setting is Heide – the bucolic bohemia in north-east Melbourne, now an iconic museum – and the site from which the first vanguard of Australian modernism sprung in the 1930s to ’50s: poets, painters and musicians. At the centre of the “Heide circle” were the owners of the property, and benefactors of its guests, John and Sunday.

Despite often being reduced to a moneyed “muse” in this now legendary covey, Sunday Reed was by many accounts at the heart of it all. Now showing at the Opera House after an acclaimed debut in Melbourne, Sunday presents a thrillingly audacious female icon in its titular character, worthy of the brilliant Nikki Shiels.

It is interesting what has been selectively mined from history to tell the story this play wants to tell. The original circle – which included the likes of Moya Dyring, Arthur Boyd and John Perceval – exists only in snatches of conversation, with the focus exclusively on the complicated menage a trois of Sunday, John (Matt Day) and Sidney Nolan (James O’Connell).

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Under Sarah Goodes’ spirited direction, their repartee is the play’s greatest pleasure, particularly as it is delivered by Shiels. Irrepressible, wickedly smutty and absolutely certain in her analysis of art, it is glorious to hear her dress her men down. In Sunday’s goading of Nolan, her relentless educating, and her insistence on, for example, a “slop of red”, we’re also challenged to consider perhaps all art as collaborative. Are invisible, uncredited influences imprinted just as deeply as the pigment itself?

While entertainingly performed, the men suffer a little under Sunday’s refulgence – John is a golden-hearted debonair who “likes to look”; Nolan a raw lump of clay with provincial prejudices, “genius” potential and a colourful vernacular.

The only other Heide artist introduced is Joy Hester. Apart from dancing on a table during an awkward scene, she is absent bar one cameo in the second act, where – trimming Sunday’s curls – her own hair is remarked upon as “wild” (with race-flipped casting of Ratidzo Mambo). Hester’s presence here is to expand on the play’s themes of ownership and claim – of emotions, bodies and art – in relaying that other gossiped-upon detail of Sunday’s life: that she was infertile, and that Hester gave her her own son Sweeney (an impressive five minutes from Jude Hyland). This act of Hester’s is summed up by John with “She wasn’t up to it” (i.e. motherhood). What isn’t revealed is that Hester had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with a dire prognosis.

When truth is sacrificed for story, it has to be worth it. Is it here?

Anna Cordingley’s grand set is spare and tasteful, with minimal props coming and going until a final-scene oak tree. The wash of grey, watery brushstrokes on the walls is also, notably, the only “painting” in Sunday. Nolan’s works are often described, but visually evoked in just one yellow band. Paul Jackson’s lighting sets a dreamy mood.

More than anything, this Melbourne Theatre Company production (presented by STC) explores the radical idealism of a woman of mid-century Australia trying to “create new rules for living and loving” – and how this noble drive is inevitably muddied by her class privilege and “lesser” gender. While those familiar with Heide may feel the clamour of other ghosts at the edges, Shiels as Sunday radiates a lasting light.

THOM YORKE
Sydney Opera House Forecourt, November 1
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★

The night began and ended with a voice in an expanse of emptiness, firstly with piano and then an acoustic guitar, but otherwise just the humid air and an internalised hum of expectation.

It began with that voice asking, “please excuse me but I’ve got to ask: you only being nice because you want something?” It ended with that voice declaring, “this isn’t happening, I’m not here. I’m not here.” It began with that voice weary rather than forlorn; resigned, maybe, rather than crushed. It ended with loneliness and desolation, accepting.

And it was captivating, from beginning to end.

Thom Yorke solo – not just without his long-time band, Radiohead, or the members of his main side project, the Smile, but a one-man operation within a semicircle of (sometimes semi-organic) machines – was not hiding from his reputation as a borderline misanthrope, a terminal melancholic and that odd bloke from IT who never says a word all year but suddenly breaks into flexi-joint dancing at the Christmas party.

But he did show how that reputation is merely an opening gambit, and in a sense missing the point of how generous emotions exist in all of those sides. How the heart-filling and heart-crushing at the same time Let Down (sung with acoustic guitar, and for many people worth the price of admission alone) cast an inclusive spell, and Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’s rickety beats and tinny sounds made for irresistible rhythms.

How Present Tense, with its almost Costa del Sol guitar figure and rhythm, felt light and cocktail-hour, and Black Swan had its twisted, bass-driven rhythm make a cruising-speed descent into a netherworld’s fringes so darkly funky.

Even more so, All I Need, a sparse mood piece of disturbed love and unhealthy need that still was something to revel in; finding low-key euphoria in the line “yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon”; and offering Fake Plastic Trees, teetering on the edge of abandonment but warm and strangely exultant, was fan servicing of the first order.

Don’t worry, fans of glum reading this; as the swirling wind around the centre of piano and solid unsettledness in Bloom showed, discomfort – and not just the rain that arrived 80 minutes in, providing a soft soaking but resisting a storm – was always part of the deal, too. There is pleasure in it, after all, as with the pinging machines, bracketed beats and dislocated voice samples of a hospital ward coming to life in Not the News, all “swimming in treacle”.

The way the piano interacted with expanding machines and the suggestion of bouncing atomic particles in Cymbal Rush, the wheezy synth and brittle drums in Truth Ray creating the sense of being lost in the city but not yet searching for a route out, or using the instrumental Volk’s soundtrack to a sinister laboratory scene as a preamble to the spectral sounds and crumbling psyche of Pyramid Song, made shadows appear even in the dark.

But then, like that vulnerable voice in that boundless space, shadows can be beautiful, too.

Mozart’s Jupiter
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
City Recital Hall, October 30
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra under conductor and artistic director Paul Dyer began Mozart’s Symphony in C, K. 551 (the so-called Jupiter) with sharp peremptory strokes from the full orchestra, clipping the notes to a jabbed, almost aggressive, staccato.

This is not quite as Mozart wrote them. He omitted staccato markings here though wrote them elsewhere, and for the opening possibly had in mind something more majestic and less pointy. Nevertheless, the effect of Dyer’s approach was arresting, and the ABO went on to deliver a carefully prepared, thoughtfully considered and energised reading of Mozart’s final symphonic masterpiece, which respected its drama, extended lines and polyphonic richness.

The period trumpets gave clamour to the sudden burst into C minor, and concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen led the second and third themes with light elegance. In the second movement, with muted strings and delicate wind playing, Dyer and the orchestra preserved the long melodic curve through carefully varied textures, maintaining mellifluous continuity through the cadences and avoided untoward mannerism or over-emphasis of the forte chords that keep interrupting the theme.

The Menuetto was rollicking and well pointed. Mozart’s finale is one of music’s small miracles for its combination of learned counterpoint and galante elegance in a movement of pure joy. Dyer began quickly and the ABO maintained clarity and precision with focused concentration. When, after repeats of each section, the horns led off the great coda with a return to the movement’s main theme, Dyer wisely let the tempo ease ever so slightly to capture the magnificence of the close without helter-skelter excitement.

Before interval, fortepianist Francesco Corti played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K. 488 with a restrained and delicate approach, relying on the instrument’s lightness and his own discerning ornamentation to convey its charms. After playing the first theme of the first movement with neatly traced precision, he drew back the second and third themes for expressive, albeit slightly mannered effect.

He opened the second movement with plaintive quietness and when the opening returned even more softly he adorned it with decoration of gossamer lightness. He then leapt into the finale with robust vigour, giving the fortepiano a welcome full-bodied sound and engaging with the ABO in captivating momentum.

To start the concert, the Brandenburg Orchestra began Mozart’s Overture The Marriage of Figaro in a whispered hush, with bristling rapidity and flashing colour from the strong wind section they had assembled for the program.

This all-Mozart program is among the most artistically mature performances I have heard from the ABO and their performance of the Jupiter Symphony showed admirable musical growth since their performance of its predecessor, the Symphony in G minor, K. 550.

Ingrid Fliter Performs Chopin
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall, October 30
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter played Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, with a distinctive pearly sound, expressive intensity and an intuitive rhapsodic rhythm that flowed mellifluously with the current of the music’s narrative.

After Chopin’s extended (arguably over-extended) orchestral exposition, which gives out musical ideas with a sense of formal stiffness as though rehearsing for the coming drama, she entered to establish an authoritative, flexible and passionate persona, playing the first theme with sharp melancholy and the second with dreamy wistfulness.

Fliter drove the development section with sinewy decisiveness and led the build-up to the cadenza and coda with turbulent energy and fiery spirit. In the elaborately ornamented melody of the slow movement, each glittering arabesque grew out of the continuous line, taking on its colour and intensifying that colour.

In the finale, the piano rang out with brilliant light as she leapt forward with jaunty spirit and frisky impetuousness (so frisky that the SSO under conductor Eduardo Strausser was a few milliseconds behind Fliter on the final note). This was playing that captured the essence of all that listeners cherish in Chopin’s music.

The other music on the program explored the imagination for the gothic and the grotesque, which Chopin himself avoided but which exerted such a strong pull on his Romantic contemporaries. In his Manfred Overture, Opus 115, Schumann creates a musical sketch of the Faust-like character from Byron’s eponymous poem.

After a brooding introduction, Strausser presented the stormy main theme as turbulent without at any point stirring the music to mania. The haunting opening melody of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, Opus 56, Scottish, conceived on a visit to the ruins of Holyrood House in Edinburgh, was given melancholy and rich colour from the woodwinds and violas.

Later, the lower strings created howling gales of chilly edge. Clarinettist Francesco Celata played the folk-like tune of the Scherzo with lively spirit and warmly coloured hue. In the march-like theme in the middle of the third movement, horns, bassoons and trumpets evoked the ghost of a medieval pageant as though painted with once-brilliant, now dry and faded, colour.

The string sound, under concertmaster Andrew Haveron was finely edged and wonderfully clear. In recent concerts, the SSO has experimented with hanging fine black drapes over the walls of the concert platform.

My vote would be to go without as was done on this occasion, so as to allow the recently installed wavy-patterned wood panels to provide that extra, slightly iridescent edge and clarity that makes the refreshed acoustic of the concert hall so rewarding.

Nobuyuki Tsujii in Recital
Opera House Concert Hall
October 29
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Nobuyuki Tsujii (Nobu) sits low at the piano, with loose, but by no means flailing, arms and flexible wrists that create a full sound of ringing clarity, carefully graded to musical purpose and the composer’s precise markings.

There is no mannerism, either musical or gestural, and his rhythmic focus is insistent, deviating from the pulse only where the music or stylistic common sense demands it. This sometimes gives his playing a literal quality, playing just what was written without interpolation or distortion. Far from being a limitation or lack of personality, this gives his interpretation a degree of purity, untarnished by personal caprice, which is itself distinctive.

Being blind, he is distracted neither by the audience nor the keyboard’s terrain, measuring the keys out and dusting them with a handkerchief before he starts and then relying purely on sound, tactile contact and memory to shape the musical path.

He began Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, Opus 31 No.2, The Tempest, with hushed softness, and these passages (including the ghostly recitatives when they return) turned out to be some of the most reflective moments of the concert until he played Debussy’s Clair de lune (beautifully) as an encore.

When he began the agitated Allegro, the attack was tightly driven, and when the music finally lands on the tonic chord, the stormy theme rolled out from the piano in great torrents of sound. The slow movement was quiet though slightly less poetic, and the finale swept through, deftly and swiftly. In the Gondolier’s Song, which begins Liszt’s three-piece set, Venice and Naples, from the second volume of the Years of Pilgrimage, he revealed the simplicity of well-shaped melody, surrounded by glimmering watery adornment.

The second piece (Canzone) was stark and portentous and the Tarantella was manically agile and brilliantly virtuosic. Again the central melody unfolded with undistorted, carefully shaped beauty.

Nobu began the second half with a bracket of pieces by Ravel, bringing well-defined clarity to the Minuet on the name of Haydn and perfectly balanced control to the haunting melancholy of Pavane for a Dead Princess. Jeux d’eau (Fountains) cascaded and rippled with immaculately defined arabesques and sprays. Nobu made the Eight Concert Etudes Opus 40 by Nikolai Kapustin into studies of open-spirited vitality, mixing the pianistic style of Rachmaninov with the harmonies and rhythmic contours of jazz.

The more vigorous numbers were particularly successful. Reverie is not a particularly dreamy piece, but Raillery is argumentative and truculent, and Nobu’s fluid command of the keyboard in the Toccatina and Finale were a wonder to behold.

I left at the fourth encore (which had included a quietly tender rendition of Waltzing Matilda) though the capacity crowd in the Opera House Concert Hall may well have kept him there all night.