Melbourne Recital Centre
August 3, 2018

Stuart Skelton has been in the news a great deal lately. His debut solo CD, Shining Knight, has been greeted with superlatives in the press, and Limelight interviewed him for the cover story of its August issue. He now embarks on a schedule of appearances in most capitals, singing in recitals, orchestral concerts and opera.

The first of these was a highly anticipated recital, part of the Great Performers Concert Series in the Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Hall in the Melbourne Recital Centre on a cold and forbidding Friday evening. It should have been a sell-out. Safe to say that, for those who braved the weather, traffic congestion and a riot in the Bourke Street Mall, it was an experience that will live very long in the memory.

Stuart Skelton. Photograph © Sim Canetty-Clarke

The true heldentenor is a remarkable phenomenon, a joy to encounter in whatever guise. Skelton’s extraordinary international career plants him well in the slender tree-line of his predecessors and models, singers like Ben Heppner, Max Lorenz, Jon Vickers and James King. On stage, the not-quite-50-year-old cuts an imposing presence, rather like those bronze statues of monarchs...