La Traviata – Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour

Overview

Entertainment is relative to expectation. At slapdash times, a case of beer, a few friends and the digital music collections contained in your pockets will do. But when you're driving piles into the bottom of Sydney Harbour, crafting a nine-metre chandelier out of Swarovski elements and conjuring up a solid 3000-seat outdoor venue where before there were only lawns, you've committed to staging an event that those who witness cannot forget. It was a huge gamble from Opera Australia, Destination NSW and benefactor Haruhisa Handa. The result is a spectacular success and probably the best outdoor event to ever be staged in Australia.

Festivals of all stripes could learn a thing or two from Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. From the moment you enter, it is designed to be a totally comfortable experience that removes you from the everyday. The labyrinthine paths that lead to the seating and social areas take you under arches and over mini red carpets by day and through a prettily lit botanical corridor by night. There's premium catering sequestered somewhere, but the casual dining is perfect, borrowing the efficient layout of Ikea's restaurants to swiftly spit you out with fish and chips or pizza slice in hand. People promenade along the waterfront, which separates the seating from the stage built over the water. The views, the views, the views wash over you from each direction.

By combining the grandeur of opera with Sydney's natural and architectural wonders and the (literal) fireworks of outdoor gatherings, the organisers of Handa Opera on the Harbour have assembled a spectacle heightened beyond what could ever fit in a theatre.

La Traviata is the world's second-most performed opera, but let's be straight: it isn't the most exciting. This is a story that was fleshed out by Baz Luhrmann in Moulin Rouge, and in this incarnation, the consumptive consort's death scene takes an hour. It means the pressure is on the performers to convey the emotional impact of tragedy almost solely through their soaring, reaching, longing voices — and really, isn't that when opera is at its best? Emma Matthews and Gianluca Terranova as lovers Violetta and Alfredo and Jonathan Summers as meddlesome father Giorgio ably lead you on that journey.

But the light narrative also, in this case, gives your eyes a chance to wander from the surtitles and absorb the spectacle on stage, and when they itch for a break from that, time to dance across the city skyline from the CBD over the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and to the bookend of North Sydney. It's sublime. La Traviata is a story made for excess, allowing designers Brian Thomson and Tess Schofield to fill parties with a raucous mix of tuxedoed gentlemen, gypsies, matadors and drag queens and furnish the set with a cartoonishly long banquet table and Chesterfield lounge.

Even when it's lit like a nightclub, the set delivers on scale and glamour. The gilt-frame base is less evocative in reality than concept (it looks a little like a skate park at times), but that much-talked-about chandelier is truly stunning and, given its surrounds, not overwhelming. Most impressively, just when you thought their every use had been thoroughly exhausted by Sydney outdoor events, this one makes fireworks seem wondrous, surprising and meaningful again.

La Traviata is the first of three such Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour events scheduled for the next three years. Not even rain could tarnish your experience of a night you'll carry with you well into next March.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ewpzuXjwAMg