Cloé Fournier

One hundred and fifty years ago, a troubled author railed against a world that twisted every decent impulse into weakness and every meaningful thought into paradox. Six years ago, a young composer had the impulse to tell this story with music, and the thought that opera could be as aggressive and modern as any artform.

The first was Fyodor Dostoevsky. The second was Sydney Chamber Opera’s co-founder and current artistic director Jack Symonds. The work is Notes from Underground, and its brief first blossoming established SCO as a “force to be reckoned with”. This year, the Underground Man lives again.

Notes from Underground is the Russian spirit reborn with Australian vigour. It is bursting with intellectual savagery and foiled joy. It is a wild scream heard through a dead snowfall. It is an opera made of every brilliant thought you have almost had and every declaration of passion you have almost made. Sydney Chamber Opera revisits their history-making debut in a brand-new production for the Carriageworks stage.