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We’re in the midst of music, wonderful music, at present.
It’s our Wide Open Opera and Tristan & Isolde radio documentary for RTE lyric fm.
The opera opened at BGET (Grand Canal Theatre to you and me) on Sunday night and the sense of excitement about seeing the production was real.
It’s 50 year since Tristan was last produced in Dublin and Wide Open Opera, a brand new opera company, took it on as its first challenge.
With a predominately Irish cast (the superb Miriam Murphy as Isolde) and an Irish orchestra it has truly created an occasion about opera in Ireland. Newstalk’s Henry audition made fun radio and the Irish Times supported the project with strong coverage. Michael Dervan’s five star review of Sunday’s performance was the most positive thing I think I have ever read by him.
Yet one of the conversations we are having is about the nature of a voice for Irish opera - not just in vocal performances but operas which address modern Ireland. Surely our boom to bust storyline of tycoon families brought to disgrace and prison or NAMA’d developers facing up to collapsing empires is the stuff of opera? Ireland seems made for opera and the Arts Council should match composers with some of our outstanding novelists and see what happens. A Roddy Doyle meets Brian Irvine opera for example. Which would be comic and dark. Or Ann Enright and Siobhan Cleary.
I’d love to see it, to hear it.
Over to you Arts Council.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.