Optimistically hanging on in there

As befits the most extravagant of art-forms, opera requires a lot of optimism and enthusiasm.  That and, of course, large amounts of ready money.  With the latter nowadays in short supply,  opera companies – like businesses of all kinds – are suffering right now, with some already reporting big losses in revenue (including even the hallowed Met in New York) and others having to go out of business altogether.

So far two Irish opera companies are also in this boat, with Opera 2005 losing all of its Arts Council funding and the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival also out of the complex funding loop it had hitherto managed to secure.  Anna Livia always – despite all the late Bernadette Greevy’s best efforts on behalf of Irish singers – seemed an eccentric amalgam of charity case and vanity project, with its productions a bizarre throwback to the 1950s or 60s (surtitles? – no way!).  The Festival also managed to access some unconventional funding streams which, while ingenious, didn’t endear it to the rest of the arts community (the best summary comes half-way down this article from the Irish Times).  Opera 2005, on the other hand, as Cork’s sole professional opera company, has consistently ticked all the boxes in terms of education and outreach, and judging by its reviews was gradually developing its artistic standard as well, so for it too lose the mere €110,000 that somehow managed to fund most of this does make it the bad-news story of the season, and we have to hope that the company will survive.

Away from such Darwinian concerns, Opera Theatre Company and Opera Ireland remain, along with Wexford, relatively unaffected (for now…), and there are upcoming shows to report:

Friday Feb 6 sees the first performance of Fergus Johnston’s new opera The Earl of Kildare, presented at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray by OI in association with Living Opera.  The libretto (in English) is by the poet and dramatist Celia de Fréine.  This will be a one-off workshop production with minimal staging and piano accompaniment, so I don’t know if it really counts as a full ‘premiere’, and there will be a post-performance discussion with the composer and artistic team, for those who are interested.  The narrative concerns the story of ‘Silken Thomas’ (the nickname of Thomas FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare and deputy Governor of Ireland), who led an ill-fated uprising against King Henry VIII in the 1530s. This will be Fergus’ second opera (the first, Bitter Fruit, was staged in collaboration with OTC in 1992), and production info and booking details for this gig can be found here.

Talking of Opera Theatre Company, they too begin a new national tour the following week.  Having ventured in recent years into Romantic and even Modernist Opera (with Debussy’s Pelléas), they relive former glories by returning to Handel, with three productions planned this year to mark the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death in 1759, starting with one of Handel’s silliest – and most popular – operas, Xerxes.  This is the one where the king sings an ode to his favourite tree, in the aria “Ombra mai fù”, before heading off to compete with his brother for the same girl, in a plot of escalating love triangles and mistaken/hidden identities that can be enormous fun.  If you’re curious to see how this plays out, there’s the famous 1980s ENO production by Nicholas Hytner, still available on DVD; it’s aged noticeably, though arguably this just brings out the campery all the more (Lesley Garrett as Atalanta… !!).  Still, why this work, of all Handel’s operas, has achieved such prominence is beyond me, though OK the music is excellent, with Atalanta’s aria at the finale of Act I an absolute cracker.  OTC’s tour is quite fleeting – only two showings in Dublin, and one of them an “open dress”, for goodness sake… – so rush if you want to see this: details here.