For ten years, BK Opera has been making opera with teeth. Since Kate Millett founded the company in 2016, it has forged a fiercely distinctive voice in Melbourne’s independent arts culture, creating visceral and psychologically charged productions that drag opera into the present tense, strip away the safe distance, and expose the raw nerve of the form.
Across more than 20 productions, BK Opera has built a reputation for bold, uncompromising work, taking opera’s greatest hits by the throat, enticing audiences into its stranger, darker corners, and embracing the full, unruly breadth of the form. Without the infrastructure of a major opera institution behind it, BK Opera can assemble exceptional artists, programme without restraint and put its own distinctive vision on stage. The result is opera with a pulse: seductive, unsettling and unafraid to get its hands dirty. That attitude can be summed up in three words: Dirty Sexy Opera.
This is opera for the converted, the curious and the uninitiated. BK Opera insists that opera is living and volatile; not something to be embalmed in a museum. It lures audiences into uncomfortable places, drives performers deeper and makes old stories dangerous again. Its work can be intimate, consuming and, in the company’s own words, “slightly traumatising”.
That appetite for risk has earned the company the 2017 OperaChaser Innovation Award, while Kate Millett was named Outstanding Director at the 2024 OperaChaser Awards for Don Giovanni. BK Opera has also received multiple Green Room Award nominations, including recognition for The Sea and Don Giovanni.
Ten years in, BK Opera is still hungry. So naturally, they chose a mountain.
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
This October, BK Opera goes straight for Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Millett calls it the “Mount Everest of opera”, choosing the monumental work as the summit of BK Opera’s first decade. It is the company’s largest production to date.
What happens when a company built on intimacy and experimentation takes on one of opera’s most demanding works? Tristan und Isolde traditionally demands vast theatrical resources. Wagner called it his most dangerous work. For an independent company built on risk, it is an irresistible challenge. And BK Opera isn’t approaching it lightly. Dual Helpmann Award-winning tenor James Egglestone, acclaimed Wagnerian soprano Lee Abrahmsen, and Heldenbaritone Warwick Fyfe bring formidable Wagnerian experience to Tristan, Isolde, and King Marke respectively.
Egglestone has performed Wagner with Opera Australia and Melbourne Opera; Abrahmsen is one of Australia’s most sought-after young Wagnerian singers and returns to Isolde following an OperaChaser-awarded performance of the role; and of course Fyfe is one of Australia’s most highly respected singers and exponents of the Wagnerian repertoire, according to the Wagner Society itself. He is also a Helpmann Award winner and Churchill Fellow, having studied Wagnerian vocal technique in Germany, the UK and USA.
These are voices built for Wagner’s grandest stages. Here, they find themselves in the unexpected intimacy of Northcote Town Hall. There is no cavernous auditorium here, instead the singers and audience share the same space, bringing Wagner’s work into much closer range.
Millett’s production plunges into the darkness beneath Wagner’s vast, intoxicating score. What emerges is closer, darker and more feverish – desire, shame, obsession and the slow violence of avoidance collide. Wagner’s famous love story is not treated as tragic romance, but rather at its centre is the cowardice of a man who chooses silence over truth until his avoidance destroys everyone around him. Isolde is driven not simply by love, but by rage, shame and terrible clarity.
What begins in beauty starts to rot. Beautiful. Obsessive. Decadent. Destructive. The production is conducted by Australian conductor-curator Kelly Lovelady, founder of London-based Ruthless Jabiru, returning from the UK to bring Wagner’s score to the stage in a two-piano arrangement.
The staging puts Wagner’s music under intense pressure, using this two-piano reduction to strip back the machinery of grand opera and expose its extraordinary physical and emotional force. It is not simply heard. It is felt.
The wider cast includes Daniel Szesiong Todd, Henry Shaw , Alison Lemoh and James Penn each bringing their own considerable experience to this ambitious production.
This is not Tristan und Isolde to be admired from a comfortable distance. It is one to be survived.
For BK Opera, it is the culmination of everything the company has spent ten years building. With another major production already planned for 2027, the summit is only the beginning.
For now, there is a mountain to climb.
October 29 – 31
https://arts.darebin.vic.gov.au/Whats-on/Tristan-und-Isolde https://www.bkopera.com.au/tristan-und-isolde
