Carriageworks, Sydney
May 2, 2015

Fly Away Peter, David Malouf’s poignant 1982 novel about the bond between Jim, a bird-watcher, Ashley, a landowner and Imogen, a photographer, travels movingly from the Queensland coast to the battlefields of France during World War I. Using a highly poetic language as much as standard narrative techniques, it immediately strikes you as eminently singable. Its expression of simultaneous viewpoints of home and abroad, plus its intense reflections on the meaning of life, love, war and nature through the crucial subjective detachment of the central character, in many ways make Fly Away Peter a perfect vehicle for opera. Those (and a few other laudable reasons) help make Sydney Chamber Opera’s premiere of librettist Pierce Wilcox and composer Elliott Gyger’s operatic adaptation an unqualified triumph.

Firstly, Wilcox’s text is a brilliantly efficient edit of Malouf’s novella revelling in the sheer poetry of bird and place names while honing in on certain lines that echo and re-echo throughout the work’s 75 minutes. Relishable words like dotterel, tattler bird and whimbrel; an casual observation like “dollar bird down from the Moluccas”; memorable phrases such as “I have...