THE
ORESTEIA

The Sydney exclusive of a key work of Australian opera by our leading composer internationally, Liza Lim.

Electra, Cassandra, Orestes, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are summoned to relive their murderous hatreds in Liza Lim’s first opera The Oresteia. A landmark in Australian music, Lim’s “visceral, confrontational, and totally compelling” (The Guardian) work exploded onto the scene in the early 90s, yet The Oresteia has never been produced after its world premiere in Melbourne.

With a libretto adapted by Barrie Kosky, this opera marked Lim out as the leading Australian composer of her generation, an epithet borne out today by her music’s ubiquity on the world stage and her recent win of the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (the highest international honor for new music). A new generation of Australian artists now take on Lim’s taut hour-long distillation of this immensely powerful Greek classic. Imara Savage (Antarctica) directs six of Australia’s most adventurous and virtuosic singers in this unique collaboration with the world-leading instrumental specialists in Lim’s music – ELISION Ensemble, returning to Carriageworks after more than a decade.