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Canberra Today 14°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Lorina relishes her new domain

LORINA Gore isn’t the obvious choice for the role of Musetta in Sydney’s latest staging of “La Boheme”, directed by Gale Edwards, but she’s relishing the role of the life-loving, high living Parisian girl and the beautiful melodies of Puccini. 

The petite, Canberra-trained, Opera Australia star and 2012 winner of the Dame Joan Sutherland Scholarship, you see, is a coloratura, not the usual lyric soprano.

“My kind of soprano is normally quite high and quite florid, but Musetta is a little different… the register is huge.”

Being a diva is tough work, “CityNews” discovers. She’ll be straddling two worlds when she plays Musetta in OA’s coming Opera in the Domain, an annual free event worth the trip down the road to Sydney and inaugurated in 1982 when Sutherland starred in “La Traviata”.

Gore, who got her start doing musical shows for Tarzan’s and Canberra Philo, relishes the chancier aspects of opera, such as when, last year, while starring as Leila in “The Pearl Fishers”, a moth became entangled in her false eyelashes.

Indoors, she’s been enjoying the chance to work with major theatre directors such as Edwards, famed for her international stagings of shows such as “Les Miz.”

“Gale [Edwards] is very clear in what she wants and gives you a motive and the reason for what you do and makes you think about the psychology behind your character” she tells “CityNews”.

“And what a character Musetta is to play,” she says.

Edwards’ production updates “La Boheme” to the German Weimar Republic so Gore plays Musetta as a cabaret singer with a sugar daddy – “she enjoys her life, but she is actually the only one who really cares about Mimi and goes to search for her.”

Marauding moths and fruit bats aside, Gore is psyching herself up for the night, describing it as: “Incredibly exciting… there’s a party atmosphere… we have lots of people coming in who never seen opera before, you can see them bringing strawberries and caviar in with picnic baskets… it’s a brilliant night.”

“La Boheme” (in Italian with English surtitles), Saturday, February 2, The Domain, Sydney, 8pm-10.30pm. Food and beverages are available from early afternoon or patrons may bring their own picnics.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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