Passio

Don’t miss the exclusive world premiere of this major new work combining music and image. Arvo Pärt’s Passio, based on the Passion in St John’s Gospel, will be performed live by The Theatre of Voices with musical accompaniment by organist Christopher Bowers Broadbent [UK], the Adelaide Chamber Singers and musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the internationally acclaimed Paul Hillier, in an Australian exclusive.

Poet Rika Lesser once wrote to Pärt, “Yours is the only music I’ve ever wanted to live inside. Sometimes I wish that the music would stop, congeal, erect a lasting structure around me, one that would silently vibrate and, resonating, enclose me.”

Paolo Cherchi Usai has taken up that challenge, creating a profound, and profoundly moving film that will take this musical experience into the sublime. Cherchi Usai, the director of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive and one of the world’s most respected film historians and scholars, has drawn on his immense knowledge of world cinema to create a masterwork of the first order, a stunning and revelatory film of surprising emotional and narrative power, that explores the impending crisis of visual culture and its reflection in politics and society. Its unsettling images, drawn from a century of filmmaking, are woven into a tapestry of mysterious beauty and violence.

Ticket price: Adult $58/Concession $42

In the 1970’s, an engraved disc was sent out on one of the Voyager missions which left the solar system, and is headed for deep space since then. The disc contains our human existence in shorthand: a man and a woman saluting the aliens out there, a schematic depiction of our solar system, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After having seen Cherchi Usai’s Passio, I think the experiment must now be repeated. If a similar mission is planned for the future, I propose that NASA launches this masterpiece into outer space.

Werner Herzog