Hansel and Gretel

August 27, 2005
A dated but enduring work . . . Tiffany Speight and Sarah Castle in Hansel and Gretel.

Photo: Ben Rushton

Hansel and Gretel
by Humperdinck
Opera Australia
Opera House, August 25
Reviewed by Peter McCallum.

Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel ought to be for children, so it was delightful to see a few of the very young at the opening, and even more delightful to see they quite liked it.

For my inner child there were two touching moments. The first was the pantomime at the end of the first part, where the children fall asleep and dream of a picnic blessed with food and parental love. Suddenly angels appear backlit in a spotlit glow, the mother dies and the picnic dissolves.

The second was the final children's chorus based on the hymn first heard in the overture and later used for the children's prayer.

The melody deviates and rises climactically to the fourth scale degree, and the sound of the Children's Chorus on that was superb.

There were, of course, other beautiful sounds, notably from Tiffany Speight's Gretel and Sarah Castle's Hansel, who managed to fall into natural balance while embedding the characterisations of each role in the timbre of their respective voices. Castle had bony strength while Speight had a slimmer, more delicate sound.

The same was true of Elizabeth Campbell, whose slatternly three-packets-a-day stepmother was reflected in harassed hard vowels.

Barry Ryan stepped into the role of the father at short notice with consummate professionalism, ending the first sound with a rounded, rewardingly energised tone.

The Witch character was based either on everybody's primary school headmistress or Amanda Vanstone, and Anne-Marie Owens sang with steely pointedness and brilliance: you could just feel yourself being poked on the sternum.

For the Sandman and the twitty Dew Fairy, the two characters who bookend the children's sleep, Taryn Fiebig conjured soft purity. The rehearsal director, Julie Edwardson, has energised Elijah Moshinsky's 1992 production well (though perhaps it is time for the Vegemite joke to go) and the final scene has a welcome lift in engagement. Mark Thompson's design, lit by Nigel Levings, makes of the wood a nightmarish distortion of the peasant cottage, as though symbolising the temporary loss of parental favour.

Richard Hickox conducted the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra with a mellifluous sense of tempo and narrative pace, although the orchestral sound from the Opera House's inadequate pit lacked the philharmonic blend that the score cries out for.

Dated, yet enduring, the work survives because of the quality of the score and the vulnerability of everybody's inner child.
