Perth Festival: Eucalyptus in concert an Australian Gothic opera with Grimm overtones

Eucalyptus, a gothic folktale based on the novel by Murray Bail with music by Jonathan Mills and libretto by Meredith Oakes, opened as a tone poem and closed like a film score on its world premiere at Perth Concert Hall on Thursday.

The Perth Festival project, with WA Symphony Orchestra and WA Opera Chorus, conducted by Opera Australia’s Tahu Matheson with interstate soloists, has been a long time in gestation.

Commissioned in 2006 by OA, with a 2020 Sydney premiere COVID-cancelled, it also took a long time to deliver in a noticeable overrun on its advertised two hours 10 minutes.

Rumbling percussion and deep-voiced undertones open up a forest scene, strings swelling the theme as Matheson directs a swirling soundscape with fluid gestures.

A gradual build up through low brass and female voices with breath effects in trumpet seems more atmospheric than overture, with the chorus reciting the leitmotif — 500 different eucalyptus species in common and Latin names.

The protagonist Holland (baritone Simon Meadows) has planted the trees to protect his innocent daughter Ellen (soprano Desiree Frahn) from the perils of a world that took her mother and twin brother.

The Sprunt sisters (Natalie Jones and Dimity Shepherd) take up narration in a beggar-my-neighbour way, plying fine comic acting skills to dramatise the plot like an operatic Kath & Kim.

Ellen’s entry presents an ingenue, a dreamer, musing on the elements around her; the orchestra ebbing and flowing in balance with a crystalline soprano lead.

Holland appears at a railway station, its mechanistic function modelled in angular orchestral sound and male voices, as he frets over Ellen — ”there’s no innocent like my daughter” — his frustration echoed in scurrying strings.

It’s small town stuff, with a hint of Sculthorpe in the theme, and the score here is as much cinematic as operatic in texture.

At times the palette is oppressive, reflecting Holland’s defensive disconnect from his surrounds, labelling trees and neighbours alike with distant disdain.

Meadows deftly captures the tidy-minded isolation; the widower in the forest a meme redolent of European folklore.

Ellen is even more isolated — having no memory even of her mother — and Frahn’s development of her burgeoning self-awareness is a strength in this production.

Townspeople — the chorus, hovering high above the stage — speak to dystopian interest in Holland’s moral dysfunction as he offers Ellen’s hand in marriage to any man who can name all 500 of his eucalyptus species.

Ellen, too, is disturbed; inner turmoil palpable in Frahn’s portrayal as word spreads and she is trapped in her dilemma, projecting well beyond the concert stage despite its dramatic limitations.

Enter the suitor Mr Cave — “a demon for identifying gums” — and baritone Samuel Dundas aptly captures the meticulous, fastidious nerd who will never win fair lady.

As the interval looms this bizarre, sexist scenario seems set up for a dark denouement.

Instead, tenor Michael Petruccelli broaches the second half as Stranger, sleeping beneath a eucalypt as Ellen, still full of minute observations, ruminates on Holland’s warning against men — fathers are also men, she notes.

Stranger engages Ellen in conversation and Petruccelli’s mellow tones invite reflection in contrast to Cave’s dry realism and Dundas’ crisp delivery.

While Stranger speaks in parables — folktales at the heart of a broader folktale, the first traced in ethereal trumpet by Jenna Smith — Ellen struggles to follow and Cave totally doesn’t get it; the archetypal trainspotter reciting the 500 species with special relish for one Eucalyptus dundasii, aka the Dundas blackbutt.

Following scenes dwell on internal reflection — the bedrock of novels, though less so of opera — as Ellen, Holland and eventually even Cave arrive at a new awareness.

Stranger’s reveal would be a spoiler, but it crystallises the plot and triggers the full flowering of Frahn’s voice in a love duet with Petruccelli that demands and delivers the best from each artist.

Finally, all are on the same page, tolling out the leitmotif to close.

Happily ever after? Yeah, nah.

3.5 stars

Eucalyptus’ premiere season continues in Queensland with Brisbane Camerata and Opera Queensland Opera Chorus, and in Melbourne with Orchestra Victoria and Victorian Opera Chorus.