New kids on the operatic block tackle Puccini’s nun-fest. The results could be habit forming.

Paddington Uniting Church, Sydney, September 25, 2013

Puccini allegedly declared that the sad tale of Suor Angelica, the young girl locked up in a convent after her family refuse to countenance her living with them after producing an illegitimate child, was the favourite of all his operatic children. And with the coming to light of the goings on in Ireland’s Magdalene homes as late as the 1990s it appears that it’s not such an old, old tale either.

For their second production, and their first fully staged operatic outing, Sydney’s Harbour City Opera show that they have serious ambitions and, at least as far as women’s voices go, some big hitters to call upon.

Presented in the appropriate and atmospheric austerity of Paddington Uniting Church, not everything in Andy Morton’s accomplished production comes off but the hits far outnumber the misses. Morton is keen to highlight the brutality of a system where innocent girls are locked up for life as the price of a moral ‘fall from grace’. In his convent, punishment often takes priority over prayer and those who meet it out appear to take far...