Exil by Kancheli, st 11 dec 2013, Od (2013/2013), Režírované Adena Jacobs, Dirigent Jack Symonds, Carriageworks, Sydney City, Australia

Internationally acclaimed soprano Jane Sheldon joins Sydney Chamber Opera to perform a transcendentally haunting monodrama, Exil. Contemporary Georgian composer Giya Kancheli originally conceived his 1994 song cycle as a concert work, not for the stage. A setting of Biblical Psalms alongside post-Holocaust poetry by Paul Celan and Hans Sahl, it is an abstract twentieth-century drama of the soul in the face of unspeakable horror. Melbourne’s Adena Jacobs stunned audiences when she staged an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona in 2012 for her company Fraught Outfit (restaged for Belvoir in August 2013) with The Monthly describing it as “stylishly austere, confronting and deeply intelligent.” Jacobs makes her music-lead theatre debut by staging Exil, creating a performance that is at once intimate and cosmic.