A controversial new production puts the master composer in chains.

A staged double bill pairing Bach’s sacred cantata BWV82  Ich habe genug with a new Australian work has made waves after being rejected from several prospective church venues for its explicit costumes and provocative questioning of Christian faith.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s I Have Had Enough has found a home at NIDA’s Parade Playhouse for its premiere on November 26 and three subsequent performances. There, the young company will have free reign to explore Bach’s eloquent expression of worldly suffering and spiritual release in death within a visceral mise en scène featuring oppressed women in chains, metal dog collars and human intestines. It is not recommended for children under 15 years of age.

The imagery sounds like something out of a grisly gothic painting. The startling symbolism in Kip Williams’s production (design by Emma Kingsbury) relates as much to the music of Bach as to its companion piece by Australian Jack Symonds, Nunc Dimittis, composed as a contemporary response to religious themes of the original cantata. Williams aims to “set up a musical and dramatic conversation between the worlds of Bach’s 18th-century stoic values and Symonds’ 21st-century existentialism, and the changing...