This Thursday, State Opera South Australia opens their 2025 season with Jonathan Dove’s Flight. Flight is a modern operatic masterpiece that blends humour, poignancy, and soaring vocalism. It’s a bold first step that sets the tone for what’s to come. Based around a group of disparate travellers thrown together in an airport shutdown, Flight builds on the tradition that opera must be relevant to everyday people while still elevating the human spirit.
Dane Lam, artistic director of State Opera South Australia, is an Australian-Chinese-Singaporean conductor who has brought a wealth of global perspective to the company. He is a Juilliard graduate and his career has spanned major opera houses and symphony halls across Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. Dane is currently serving as Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia, Music and Artistic Director for the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra in Honolulu, and the Principal Conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra in China.
Dane spoke to Glam Adelaide about his vision for State Opera South Australia, their upcoming season of Flight and what drew him to pursue a career in the performing arts.
“I grew up with my grandmother and my mother playing piano, and my mum always loved going to watch the orchestra or going to watch the ballet. I was taken along to a lot of cultural activities and arts events from an early age, but there were no professional musicians in the family – I’m actually the first!
“I happened to go to a really great state high school up in Queensland, and they had just an extraordinary music program. Every morning and every afternoon I was doing choir, band, orchestra, jazz ensemble or big band – it was never ending. Music has always been a part of my life. I played piano from the age of five, and clarinet and saxophone as well. So when I got to this really wonderful high school that’s when I started to conceive of music being a career.”
We asked what it is about opera that he finds fascinating.
“I don’t think there’s another art form that unifies so many fields and specialties of artistic endeavour. It’s just incredible. You’ve got design, music, drama, poetry, prose, lighting, costume – it’s everything really. Literally almost every field of an artistic endeavour is there. It’s very human when you get all these people on stage, all these people in the pit, all these people backstage and then everybody in the audience sort of willing the impossible into being. It’s like climbing Everest, making opera happen, because there’s an incredible amount of highly skilled people who are topped off by these singers who are really the elite athletes of the vocal world with their unamplified vocal training, throwing their voice into the theatre. It’s always been something that’s making the impossible possible, and I think that’s why it’s been supported by courts, by governments, by individuals, by corporations, by audiences – so many people for hundreds of years.”
Dane spoke about the upcoming season of Flight, and what makes this production so special.
“I think that opera, like every art form, needs to keep on reinventing itself to speak to people in its own time and place. So I think it’s really important that we as custodians of the art form keep on giving voice to new voices, to living voices and to contemporary voices in the arts. When people hear the words ‘new opera’ or ‘contemporary opera’, some people get a little scared of it. But actually, this is telling universal stories that we can all identify with, such as being stuck in an airport. For me, Flight is certainly the most popular opera of the past 80 years in that it has had more performances than any other opera since 1945. I think it’s success is the fact that it’s very funny. It’s hard to write funny operas, and there are very few new operas that are so funny. The music is also catchy. There’s tune, there’s rhythmic drive. It’s a real ensemble opera. So it’s not just one cast member that steals the show, but everybody is equally as important. Flight is a really good introductory piece for people who may not have come to opera before. It really straddles the line between, you know, traditional opera and music theatre.”
The rest of State Opera South Australia’s season will be unveiled later in May, with the remaining productions working towards State Opera’s 2025 vision statement: “Opera Without Borders – A world-class art form. A South Australian stage. A place to belong.”
“I think that all great art is predicated on this whole concept of being without borders. Think about someone like Mozart, who was doing the grand tour of Europe before his 12th birthday. Opera and music and the arts have always benefited from a diversity of voices and it really pushes against this whole idea of nationalistic voices and all that kind of stuff because it embraces diversity. Certainly in the course of my career I have learned so much from education in Australia, as well as from going overseas to New York, London, and Manchester. It’s a really international community and I think it is so important in these times where there’s such a move in some quarters to become more insulated and to close ourselves off to voices that might be different to our own, or to opinions that might challenge us. I think it’s even more crucial that opera and the arts can play this role in helping us to see, not in black and white, but in shades of grey. And it’s this embracing of ambiguity that I think opera can offer to us. That’s the ethos that we’re taking in State Opera. It’s the very best of South Australia, the very best of Australian talent, that also meets what’s happening around the world. You know, it’s an increasingly connected world and we can’t shut ourselves off. I think opera has an important role to play in that, in the life of South Australia.”
Flight
Her Majesty’s Theatre
Thursday 8 – Saturday 10 May, 2025
https://stateopera.com.au/productions/flight/
Photo credit: James Glossop and Ashley Smith
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