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Charlotte and Werther: image courtesy of Opera North
As there’s no established opera company (or house) in Ireland producing work through the year, we have to make do with the short seasons of Opera Ireland, and the valiant work of touring companies, leading to months where very little happens and then times, like the next month or so, when there’s almost too much to see. Given that access to opera is now under threat more than ever before in Ireland (for details of the Irish Arts Council’s plan, read Michael Dervan’s reports here and, more recently, here), October and November might be the busiest for a while, so enjoy it while you can…
First out of the blocks on October 17 is Opera Theatre Company, with the last of its three productions for the Handel anniversary year. After Xerxes and Acis & Galatea, it’s time for one of his greatest operas, Alcina – quite possibly an Irish premiere. Directed by Annilese Miskimmon with design by Nicky Shaw, lighting by Tina MacHugh and conducted by Christian Curnyn, the cast includes Irish sopranos Sinead Campbell-Wallace (Alcina) and Doreen Curran (Bradamante) with Steven Wallace (Ruggiero), Jane Harrington (Morgana), Julian Hubbard (Melisso) and Ed Lyon (Oronte). The touring dates are as follows:
October 17 – Navan; October 20 – Derry; October 22 – Carlow; October 24 – Bray; October 27 – Armagh; October 29 – Tallaght; November 1 – Limerick; November 3 – Galway; November 5 – Dundalk; November 7 – Cork. Booking details for each of the venues is here. A good thing to note is their first date in Carlow, following the opening of the new Shaw Theatre in Carlow town – will this be the first staged opera in the county not under canvas?
Next up, on October 21, is the opening of this year’s Wexford Festival, which carries on through to November 1, with mainbill productions of The Ghosts of Versailles (John Corigliano), Maria Padilla (Donizetti) and a double-bill of Une éducation manquée (Chabrier) and La cambiale di matrimonio (Rossini). As noted earlier, the dates of the festival were cut back to reduce costs, so the whole season is pretty much sold out at this stage, but returns are always possible….
The Grand Opera House in Belfast hosts Opera North‘s touring programme on October 28-31, with productions of Così fan tutte (Mozart) and Werther (Massenet) – sadly we don’t get to see their new production of The Adventures of Mr Brouček (Janáček). Still, the Werther has attracted a lot of interest and good reviews over in Britain (such as Rupert Christiansen in the DT), in particular for Alice Coote’s performance of Charlotte, so it should be well worth seeing.
Finally, of course, there is Opera Ireland, which opens its Winter season on November 14 with Verdi’s Macbeth, with performances on Nov 16, 18, 20 & 22 as well – all at 8pm in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Directed by Dieter Kaegi, designed by Ferdia Murphy, and conducted by Marco Zambelli, the cast includes Bruno Caproni in the title role, with Michele Capalbo (Lady Macbeth), Valarian Ruminski (Banco) and Kamen Chanev (Macduff). Thanks to funding uncertainties, they have shelved doing a second staged production this season (and the next), and instead will present a concert performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold on November 19 & 21 in the Gaiety. Roman Brogli-Sacher conducts, with a cast that includes plenty of Irish singers, including Paul McNamara (Froh), Orla Boylan (Freia), Imelda Drumm (Fricka) and Gerard O’Connor (Fafner), along with Louise Walsh, Catherine Hegarty and Vicky Massey as the Rhinemaidens. The other main roles are sung by Vitalij Kowaljov (Wotan), Rainer Zaun (Alberich) and Arnold Bezuyen (Loge). You can book for these shows through Opera Ireland or the Gaiety Theatre.
A new year, and the ongoing experimental engagement between Irish cinemas and opera takes a new twist, as a new film distributor adds to the mix while different screens shift allegiance or come new to the fray. Saturday October 10 sees the start of the new season of The Met Opera: Live in HD, and it opens – just as the real season did there a few days ago – with Luc Bondy’s controversial new production of Puccini’s Tosca. (If you want an entertaining account of its reception, plus a review, go read Opera Chic here and here.) Unlike last year, though, this isn’t being screened in Ireland by the Movies@ franchise in Dundrum or Swords any more, but will instead be carried by the Screen (D’Olier St) and IMC (Dún Laoghaire) in Dublin, plus Wexford and Cork Opera Houses, UCH Limerick, Gaiety Cinema Sligo, The Eye in Galway, Omniplex in Derry and Newry, and the Storm Cinema in Belfast. Contact details for all these venues are given on Opera Ireland’s Met Screenings page.
In addition, a selection of the operas and ballets distributed by Emerging Pictures (full listing here) seem to have been appearing at all the IMC cinemas (Athlone, Ballymena, Dundalk, Dún Laoghaire, Mullingar and Thurles) as well as Movies@Dundrum and maybe more besides – please correct me if I’m wrong. In IMC Dún Laoghaire, at least, the intended programme (playing Sundays and Mondays) is as follows:
I PURITANI: Sunday 4 & Monday 5 October
COSÌ FAN TUTTE (Mozart): 22 & 23 November
NUTCRACKER (Tchaikovsky): 13 & 14 December
OTELLO (Verdi): 31 January & 1 February
ROMÉO ET JULIETTE (Gounod): 14 & 15 February
LA RONDINE (Puccini): 7 & 8 March
SWAN LAKE (Tchaikovsky): 11 & 12 April
These are given as ‘club screenings’ so that the films don’t have to go through the IFCO certification process, so officially you need to be an ‘opera club member’ – as far as I am aware membership is a nominal €1, though you if you’re going for the first time and want check this out with IMC the contact details are as follows: (tel: (01) 230 1367 or 230 1399, email: dunlaoghaire@imccinemagroup.com).
Comparing this selection with the full list on offer from the distributors (as here) is a bit depressing, seeing as we’re missing out on La Fura dels Baus’ spectacular productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre from Valencia, the L’Orfeo from La Scala, Eugene Onegin from Opèra de Paris, or Daniela Dessì as Bellini’s Norma from the Teatro Communale Bologna, but the quality of what we are getting is very good, and it will be intriguing to see Claus Guth’s new production of Così fan tutte from this year’s Salzburg Festival – expect it to be every bit as challenging as the new Tosca from New York, if not more so. One odd thing though – I wonder what Opera Ireland think of them screening the Salzburg Festival production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette just a fortnight or so before their own staging of the same work?
Finally, and without any fanfare (or at least none that reached me), Opera Ireland has listed its upcoming productions on the website, which may be the closest we get to an announcement till the ads come out. Clearly they are having to be as frugal as the rest of the opera world, and if that means shelving the catered press launches, then who can blame them?
Anyway the lineup is:
Macbeth (Verdi) 14 / 16 / 18 / 20 / 22 November 2009
Das Rheingold (Wagner) 19 / 21 November 2009 (Concert Performances)
Roméo et Juliette (Gounod) 27 February & 1 / 3 / 5 / 7 March 2010
I Capuletti e I Montecchi (Bellini) 4 / 6 March 2010 (Concert Performances)
All performances in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
As they did in 2003 – the last time we had arts funding cuts in Ireland – OI are resorting to concert performances, though thankfully not across the board. We last heard Macbeth in Dublin in 1997 (memorable for the Irish debut of bass Stanislav Shvets) so hardly a hasty return, while the other works are new to the company, which is good news. The Gounod Roméo et Juliette (not seen in Dublin since 1945!) in particular is a welcome choice, given OI’s apparent aversion to French opera, aside from the inevitable Carmen and Faust. Casts and artistic teams are still to be announced.
Donna Elvira and Leporello (Image courtesy of Opera Ireland)
Mozart’s Don Giovanni opened Opera Ireland’s 2009 Spring season in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, last night (full cast details are on Opera Ireland’s website). Having seen some pretty ugly shows from OI in the past, it was quite bizarre to see one that went so far in the opposite direction. This show is pretty to look at, generally well-sung and played, but theatrically oddly inert. Was this intended? After all, Don Giovanni was best-known as a puppet-show in 18th-c Austria and Italy before Mozart and his strange friend Da Ponte turned it into an opera. And the almost mechanistic callousness of Don G and Leporello do have a puppet-like violence to them…
In Jean-Louis Grinda’s whimsical production this two-dimensionality does indeed seem to be the level that is being aimed at. My companion loved it, while I found it tedious and superficial, so I’m not saying that it’s impossible to like… but I couldn’t help thinking that the production team just missed things, a whole bunch of things. The performers wander about the stage, only vaguely connected with each other, the dramaturgy is lazy, character and motivation only generally hinted at. It was a costumed concert. Or it was an apt reconstruction of the late-18th-c mindset. Knowing the brutality of the libretto and the depth of the music, it is hard to accept such a superficial con-job of a production, unless we accept that their concept was one based on the sensibility of contemporary decorative illustration, and leave it at that. If you like your Don Giovanni spicy, intense and politically-aware, though, then you’ll probably want to give this a wide berth. It was also irritating that the production seemed (I can only say seemed – nothing was very clear) to patronise the character of Donna Anna, making it seem that Don G never really attacked her after all, as if she made it all up. Umm, why?
Having said that, the music is very well performed. It’s great to see Cara O’Sullivan on stage again, and she sang a beautiful Donna Anna. Her Don Ottavio (Paolo Fanale) is also a real find – so often you get rather limp Ottavios (the role desn’t help, admittedly) that it was great to have it sung strongly and well by such a seriously promising tenor.
Contemporary woodcut of Silken Thomas laying siege to Dublin Castle in 1534
Workshop production of The Earl of Kildare
Composed by Fergus Johnston, with libretto by Celia de Fréine
Presented by Opera Ireland/Living Opera in Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow, on 6 February 2009
Cast: Nyle Wolfe (Thomas Fitzgerald); Joan O’Malley (Frances Fitzgerald); John Owen Miley-Read (Leonard Gray); Eugene Ginty (Christopher Paris/De Nealan); Deboragh Abbott (Janet Eustace); Jeffrey Ledwidge (Conor O’Brien); Martin Briody (Archbishop Alen/Fr Travers); Ross Scanlon (Lord Lieutenant/Master of the Rolls/Skeffington); Simon Morgan (Montague/James Delahide); Seán Bean (Gerald Fitzgerald)
Conducted by Fergus Sheil, with pianist Miles Lallemant. Directed by John McKeown.
Fergus Johnston’s opera about Silken Thomas (Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare) was given what you might call a preliminary outing at the Mermaid last night, with a staged realisation of what was openly couched as a ‘first draft’. So, the books were down and the singers were moving about the stage, with some basic costuming, but some text was unset (which explained some awkward shifts in action) and the accompanying ensemble consisted of Miles Lallemant at the piano – doing a great job – occasionally supplemented in some of the scene changes with a computer simulation of the full score. Being a young cast the performances were inevitably mixed and a bit sketchy at times, though some performances stood out – Nyle Wolfe as Fitzgerald especially – and most of the singers acquitted themselves perfectly well, considering that they’d had to learn some hard music within a very narrow timeframe.
In the (brief) post-show discussion, director John McKeown reflected on experiences he’d had working on new works (notably Sally Beamish’s Monster for Scottish Opera) where the ‘first’ performance had led those involved to wish that there’d been more of a phased process of development, and so this had been the idea here. On those terms, this workshop was a success and it was a great performance overall, though the discussion afterwards was unfortunately truncated, which left one wondering what the point of a ‘public workshop’ had been, as only three questions from the audience were actually taken. There are broader issues worth exploring that a longer discussion might have been able to open up. As it was, we were able to at least broach the stuctural limitation of the piece, in that its reliance on following historical narrative makes it highly episodic, with a lot of scene changes, some of which had music, some in stark silence (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing). The brief discussion on this that followed only touched on the musical implications of this, whereas to me the episodic nature of the piece is quite possibly the main problem in itself.
Personally, I’d rather they expand some of the scenes, maybe let others go altogether, find some way of injecting a counter-narrative device, and to explore the story rather than simply tell it. It would be nice to see some symbolic thread running through, apart from the inevitable onrush of history. As it stands, the theatrical orientation of the opera – the dramaturgy – is too obviously cinematic and needs to be disturbed, so as to push the expressive potential that only occasionally comes through. The strongest scene, musically and theatrically, occurred near the middle, when Fitzgerald hears of his father’s death in the Tower of London, and the exercise of grief allowed for a broader sense of how this could work as an opera, with Fitzgerald’s solo lament and the ensemble that followed. On the other hand, the scene where Fr Travers persuades Fitzgerald and O’Brien to appeal for the support of the Papacy is almost comically perfunctory in its present state.
As theatre, this Earl was largely conventional and naturalistic, and I would have loved to heave heard what Fergus Johnston’s theatrical vision for this piece actually was, and whether he had thought about the possibilities of non-vocal music theatre, such as dance or mime. Also, given the inevitable lack of any stage design, it would have been interesting to know if anyone had any visual concept for the piece, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. With Celia de Fréine’s clear libretto, Johnston was at least freed from the nightmare of setting banal or dead prose, which so often dogs modern opera.
If anyone is interested in hearing some of Fergus Johnston’s music for ths opera played instrumentally, a suite (‘Scenes and Interludes from The Earl of Kildare‘) will be played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James MacMillan, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on February 27, and transmitted live (and online) by RTÉ Lyric fm.
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