Sydney Festival 2011 – Celebrating Summer, Art And Life

This year’s Festival, held from 8 to 30 January, offers a record number of events with more than 1500 artists from Australia and around the world. Paolo Hooke talks to Festival Director Lindy Hume about the diverse program, and about capturing the ‘Sydney feel’.

‘There are absolutely classic Sydney Festival experiences and they’re to do with the combination of the time of year, the sense of relaxation that people are in, the sense of hope that people feel for the new year, the sense of community that they feel being in a civic space with others sharing a kind of bigger, greater love for the world, and not having a tie on,’ declares Festival Director Lindy Hume.

‘What we think we can capture is that certain feelings can only exist at Sydney Festival time, there are certain moments that can only be found on this part of the planet.’

Hume explains that the biggest challenge for her as Festival Director is to crystallise the two elements of story and heart that need to be present in a festival. ‘When something is as massive as Sydney Festival is, and literally covers so many kilometres and so many time-frames and so many genres and so many disparate stories, to find a single unifying narrative within all that is something you can’t impose. It has a will of its own that you need to tease out and then grab when you see it emerging.’

‘The heart part of things you actively have to inject into the Festival, because the world of developing a festival is a world of transactions in many ways, it’s a world of logistics and budgets and schedules and flight times, so it’s very easy to lose track of not just what you’re doing but why you’re doing it. I always look for what the heart of a festival is and I would say there are two points of connection. One is the free program, our gift with love to the community, and the word ‘love’ is not something I use in any kind of corny way, it genuinely needs to emanate from this Festival,’ she says. ‘And the other is the Trocadero Dance Palace, which is our homage to Sydney’s greatest night club, one that lived from the 30s to the 70s. And that’s our love poem to all of those young Sydneysiders who turned Sydney into a modern city by dancing and getting hot and sweaty with each other and being rebellious and ignoring their parents’ wishes and hoicking those dresses really high and swinging their legs in the air and bringing Sydney into the disrepute that it enjoys today,’ Hume says with a laugh. The Trocadero Dance Palace event will see the Town Hall transformed for four nights into Sydney’s premier swing-dancing destination, with a dance floor, floorshow and live swing music. Participants can also take dance lessons before they take to the dance floor.

One of the headline acts for this month’s Sydney Festival will be John Malkovich in The Giacomo Variations. ‘When you hear the words Malkovich and Mozart in the same sentence, something very intriguing springs to mind. And Malkovich is a very interesting artist, he’s very much his own kind of creature and he’s got a very charismatic kind of confidence,’ says Hume. ‘So having him in a project is interesting [and] the idea that he plays this character Casanova who himself was a fantastically charismatic creature. Malkovich has taken to working with symphony orchestras and this is his second project in that kind of melodrama form where the symphony orchestra has a series of pieces that they play and the character is woven through those pieces.’ Hume explains that The Giacomo Variations is based on the premise that Mozart, Da Ponte and Casanova hung out together in Prague around the time of the opening of Don Giovanni and that Casanova had an affinity with the character of Don Juan. ‘So it’s an interesting premise. It’s a bit of a risk – the show does not yet exist, it will open in Vienna and then come straight to Sydney. It’s a treat for audiences to see something as experimental and as weird as that,’ Hume adds. She explains that Malkovich inhabits a character woven around the theme of a big personality, in this case Casanova, and hears that person and tells their life story through the music. Actress Ingeborga Dapkünaité, soprano Martene Grimson, Russian baritone Andrei Bondarenko and the Sydney Symphony will join Malkovich on stage as he performs excepts from Casanova’s 1790 memoir Histoire de ma vie, intermingled with music from some of Mozart’s most famous operas – Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.

Another highlight of the Festival will be the concerts featuring Philip Glass, described by Hume as the greatest living American composer. Philip Glass: Etudes and Other Work for Solo Piano will feature Glass performing his recent works. The composer will also give a live performance of his score for the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi film Dracula, with musical adventurers the Kronos Quartet to accompany the screening of the film. As part of The Scope: Connecting Art & Ideas, Glass will appear In Conversation with Paul Grabowsky.

And jazz fans will be excited by the concert featuring legendary Polish jazz trumpeter Tomasz Stánko, the Tomasz Stánko Quintet. ‘He’s bringing four young Scandinavian jazz artists with him so it’s a kind of ‘master and these bright young things’ set-up,’ says Hume. Lovers of Shakespeare will look forward to Symphony in the Domain: Midsummer Shakespeare: music inspired by Shakespeare and a rendition by the great Shakespearean actor John Bell. A performance of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet will be followed by Bell enacting scenes from Henry V accompanied by the Sydney Symphony and Sydney Philharmonic Choirs.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON FESTIVAL EVENTS VISIT www.sydneyfestival.org.au