Opera Queensland has announced its 2019 season, and Patrick Nolan’s first for the company as Artistic Director, with a trio of operas from John Adams, Puccini and Gluck on the mainstage.

Nolan describes his approach to programming the 2019 season as a “holistic” one. “One of the big things for me is that as well as being producers and presenters, we’re creators,” he tells Limelight. “As an organisation we are actually feeding into the culture and bringing culture to audiences – if we didn’t exist then that culture wouldn’t exist, basically. I think it’s really important that artistic companies – and in particular major companies that have decent resources – are proactively developing the culture, through new work, through developing new talent, through creating opportunities for artists to develop their skills.”

Opera Queensland’s The Flowering Tree. Photo: supplied

The season opens in April with Nolan directing John Adams’ 2006 opera A Flowering Tree, with libretto by Adams and Peter Sellars, “which is a really beautiful piece, a three-hander for a tenor, a soprano and a baritone,” explains Nolan. The work is a love story revolving...