Word: opera
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...this somewhat simplifies architectural history. The curving line survived as a kind of subdepartment of Modernism. It flowed through the work of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, spiraled up the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, filled the sails of the Sydney Opera House and even ballooned into the later work of Le Corbusier, the Ur-modernist himself. "It never went entirely away," Kaplicky insists, and he's right. But on the whole, and for a long time, it was straight lines that carried more authority. For decades contours endured a kind of underground existence. Anything...
...ever a role is going to expose a rising soprano's skills and flaws, it's that of Alcina. Running over four hours, the Baroque opera presents its leading lady with aria upon aria of fiendishly difficult coloratura singing (Ah! Mio cor! alone is a 12-minute, seven-stages-of-grieving emotional roller-coaster) with minimal orchestral backing. With typical understatement, Durkin calls it musical "Ping Pong." Only the finest sopranos can survive such exercise. Handel's original Alcina, Anna Strada, was unkindly described by a contemporary as having "so little of Venus in her appearance, that she was usually...
...What's amazing is that Durkin very nearly didn't parlay "It" into opera. The daughter of a plumber from Perth's working-class Maddington, she first dreamed of a career in musical theater. But after failing her dance audition for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Durkin was offered a place at the conservatorium instead. "Everyone's got this idea of what an opera singer is like," she says, "and for me it was always Wagner-huge, you know, the horns." For an art form looking to reinvent itself and draw new audiences, Durkin is a marketer...
...Alcina, whose affair with the knight Ruggiero brings her crashing to earth. Skype enables the daily video chats she has with her new husband, rising American tenor Matt Morgan, at their home in Manhattan, where he is performing Frederick in Pirates of Penzance for the New York City Opera. That he won't be seeing her Alcina until the Melbourne season in December, "I'm sort of glad," Durkin says with a high-tossed laugh, "because I bare all in the first act ... Definitely a body suit in Act Three...
...Stupenda here. While Durkin admits that Sutherland's perfectly controlled career and "beautiful, bell-like sound" have been inspirations for her own stupendous rise, comparisons can also be unhelpful. She would be the first to point out that she has yet to make a recording or grace the European opera stages that forged Sutherland's fame. But in the budding boldness of her bel canto one can already sense a magical symmetry forming-of another down-to-earth spirit allied to a heavenly voice...