ADELAIDE — On first impression, traditions, whether they are celebrations, rituals, or customs, have a way of bringing people together and offering a sense of cohesion. Except when it comes to festivals, when keeping to the familiar becomes an Achilles heel. This is the case for the 2025 Adelaide Festival. Due to the unexplained turnstile of quickly exiting artistic directors over the past three years, Brett Sheehy, its interim, one-year-only 2025 director, has reverted to the traditional and regrettably recurring structure of the 64-year-old festival.
To steady the ship, Sheehy has pivoted to the familiar formulaic of the Adelaide Festival: begin with an opera (contemporary, if possible), program an international dance company, feed classical-music audiences more chamber music than they would normally see in a year, add the well-made play, and make sure you offer a platform for the under-30s. Voilà, your festival program is complete. Despite this structural safety net and the sudden departures of its past two artistic directors, the Adelaide Festival manages to lure some of the who’s who of the current international touring circuit. Many of the offerings are not the traditional works of the canon. They are freshly minted. And for these reasons, salvation appears, first with Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence and then, in a different way, with Rocío Molina’s flamenco work Caída del Cielo, both of which take their respective centuries-old art forms to unexpected territories.
When a festival opens with Innocence — which will make its Metropolitan Opera debut in April — the salvation arrives in a blaze of virtuosity. Innocence, with its exemplary libretto by Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen and interpolations care of Aleksi Barrière’s multi-lingual English, German, Greek, French, and Spanish threads, is one of the most extraordinarily crafted operas of our time, of any time. While the story is fictional, beyond its reference to two actual Finnish school shootings in 2007, the opera juxtaposes two timelines and stories: a wedding celebration and a school-shooting tragedy that occurred 10 years previously. The characters sing in their native languages. In conversations with each other, they sing in English. Described as a thriller, the opera succeeds as a modern-day morality play with the exploration of guilt as its pivoting multi-viewed theme. The title is ironic.
Saariaho and Oksanen’s five-act treatment of the theme is shared among 13 characters ranging from the teacher and students present at the shooting in an international school to the family and guests at the wedding. Predictably, the stories slowly mesh. Saariahio’s setting of Oksanen’s canny play-libretto is conceived as an extended melodic, recitative-like construction, proving that there is no need to rely on extended arias to extemporize emotion.
Saariaho’s rich, kaleidoscopic score (unshakably performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, with an offstage chorus) never fails in its contribution to this taut drama. There are no pauses. The horror and the gravity build by furtive stealth to a climactic end, where you as the audience member, having been riveted by the unfolding human drama, are completely overwhelmed by the emotional weight of the moral dilemma. At the same time, our senses have been lulled by lyrical beauty. Simon Stone’s direction and Clément Mao Takacs’ musical leadership are completely in sync and offer a lucid space for the work to succeed. As a result, the cast, made up of both actors and singers, can offer their individual best. Innocence is a virtuosic achievement.
If virtuosity is the hero of Innocence, it is curiously the downfall in Caída del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven) — and not because there was none of it. Caída del Cielo is a post-modern, avant-garde flamenco theatrical tour de force from a — you might have guessed it — virtuosic Spanish dancer and choreographer, Rocío Molina. Molina was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale in 2022. Watching her perform Caída del Cielo is the equivalent of experiencing the full gamut of meanings of the visceral and the passionate. Molina reincarnates the rituals of flamenco through both the male and female perspective with a 21st-century perspective. Her dexterous ability to perform fiendishly fast and complex cross rhythms with flamenco tapping and clapping defies belief. The performance is as bloody as a Lorca play and as curious as an Almodova film. So why didn’t the virtuosity succeed? The answer is simple. When virtuosity, no matter how extraordinary, overstays, the awe of its brilliance sadly loses its luster. Caída del Cielo gave us its themes and variations for an hour. Then came a series of codas that repeated until exhaustion. Virtuosity betrayed.
At the opening weekend, the cool kids were hanging out with Polish electronica, ambient-house musician Hania Rani (Hanna Maria Raniszewska), whose breakout album Biala flaga in 2015 earned her the kind of instant fame many only dream of. Rani’s solo performance at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre needed no coaxing from the audience. Her fans were ready to be mesmerized. It was strangely gothic-like performance, intentionally distant and icily cool. But this was its intent. For the fans, this vibe is the secret to her success.
As part of the Daylight Express lunchtime concert series at the Elder Conservatorium, soprano Claire de Sévigné (from Innocence), pianist Michael Ierace, and clarinetist Lloyd Van’t Hoff gave a well-mannered recital called “From Mozart to the Merry Widow.” The title says it all. One wonders how such a program, however accomplished in execution, makes it into an international festival, but this throwback to nostalgia and the insistence on keeping to traditions will be among the issues new artistic director Matthew Lutton will have to consider when he takes the helm in 2026.
