FROM AROUND THE WORLD: MELBOURNE.(Batavia)(Review)

It's not often that an Australian opera audience offers a standing ovation to anything other than Wagner or a Baz Luhrmann La Boheme. But Batavia, the new work by Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy, specially commissioned to mark the centenary of Federation, prompted this response at its Melbourne premiere -- though one suspects the reasons were not exclusively musical.

Mills and Goldsworthy's previous collaboration was on an opera version of the quintessential Australian play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll; with Batavia, they turned to seventeenth-century history and the first contact of the Old World with the New Sun-burned Continent. In 1629, a Dutch vessel, the Batavia, was shipwrecked off the West Australian coast: 194 survivors were left behind, while the senior officers along with other crew and passengers set off in search of water. In a struggle for survival, victims were murdered at random, the throats of the sick were cut, and, of the 316 who boarded Batavia, only 116 survived.

The theatrical possibilities of this material are evident: whether composer and librettist have fully realized them is another question, since throughout the work the listener is aware of musical and theatrical ideas at war with each other. The work's musical idiom is essentially conservative, with the libretto deliberately opting for an English that refers to seventeenth-century verse forms and diction. Mills, who also conducted, is probably the most versatile and talented composer/musician working in Australia. For Batavia, he chose a musical language that combines post-Straussian orchestral textures (and forces) with a neo-Schoenbergian ordering of sounds that seldom allows the music the space or ebb and flow that the narrative demands. His sense of the relationship between the vocal lines and orchestral support is mostly exemplary (especially for the male voices), though the use of a microphone to allow the vicious Jeronimus (baritone Michael Lewis) to deliver his final hymn of rape and revenge ("My Lust -- ...