Partly cautionary tale, morality play and coming of age story, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel has charmed adults and children alike since its premiere just before Christmas 1893. The opera is based on the fairytale ‘Babes in the Wood’ by the Brothers Grimm but adapted to a more family friendly libretto by Humperdinck’s sister Adelheid Wette. Originally written as folk songs to entertain her children it gradually morphed into a full blown opera which married traditional folk tunes with contemporary musical styles and motifs. The work was an instant success and received great praise from such composers as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. A wonderfully captivating drama expressed through beautiful and memorable music which has continued to attract old and young alike.

Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister Adelheid Wette.

Hansel and Gretel are left to do the housework while their parents are away. Mother returns to find the children idling with no work done. They have spent all their time playing and dancing. Annoyed she sends them to the forest to collect berries as there is no food in the house. Father returns from the market buoyed by a good day selling his brooms. He asked where the children were. When he hears that mother has sent them to the woods as punishment he gets very worried. There’s a witch that lives in the woods and children have got lost there and have never been seen again.

The story of Hansel & Gretel has entered our popular culture through book, films & illustrations.

Now deep and lost in the woods the children get very frightened as night falls. The Sandman appears and lulls them to sleep and as they sleep angels descend from the heavens to guard them. Woken by the Dew Fairy in the morning the children see a gingerbread cottage. They go inside and realise it is the house of a witch who intends to fatten them up, cook and eat them. The children eventually trick the witch into looking into her flaming oven and both children push her into it. The oven opens and the children the witch has kidnapped and turned into gingerbread come back to life and are freed. Mother and father appear and everyone dances and celebrates, and they all live happily ever after… I imagine.

Irish National Opera’s production moves a story which was originally set in the forests of Germany to a rather dark and run down hotel with flashing neon lights where a silent night watchman observes the story as it unfolds. The Irish National Opera Ensemble who entered one by one wearing party hats played on stage and were conducted from the piano by Richard Pierson.

The set was a two tire affair which, like the recent production of ‘Griselda’, essentially doubled the stage space. Dark and a touch claustrophobic it echoed the mood of the original setting of the opera and although updated the production stuck very closely to the original opera in mood and feel. Originally written in German this production was sung in English with surtitles each side of the stage.

Left – Raphaela Mangan, Miriam Murphy, Ben McAteer & Amy Ní Fhearraigh & (Right) – Raphaela Mangan (top) Carolyn Dobbin, Amy Ní Fhearraigh & Raymond Keane.

Both Raphaela Mangan and Amy Ní Fhearraigh gave strong and joyful performances as the siblings Hansel and Gretel. They easily and convincingly adopted the youthful mannerisms of their characters. Mangan’s Hansel with his boyish bravado & bluster, Ní Fhearraigh’s Gretel her juvenile dancing and rhymes. Both sung their parts with confidence and clarity with Ní Fhearraigh getting the lion’s share of the virtuoso singing. Her vocal skill and precision was obvious on some of the opera’s highpoint like ‘Little brother dance with me’, and ‘A dwarf stood in the forest’.

Miriam Murphy was a splendidly distraught and stressed Mother with a strong and articulate vocal and character performance. Baritone Ben McAteer’s deep and resonant voice gradually filled the theatre as he made his off stage entrance to ‘Far-la-la-la’ in Act I. A deep and resonant singer with great volume and precision. Carolyn Dobbin was quite spectacular as the Witch. The Act III ‘Now Gretel, you’re the sensible one’ and ‘Now wake up, it’s time to eat’ were a singing and acting tour de force from Dobbin.

Plenty to eat… including the children! Amy Ní Fhearraigh & Raphaela Mangan.

Emma Nash was the Dew Fairy and although a small part with only one real singing opportunity she gave a solid and confident performance while Raymond Keane as the silent Watchman was an interesting addition to the production. Obviously a seasoned actor with a very expressive manner he facilities and witnesses the action from start to finish, almost as a silent observer like the audience itself.

Quite a large number of younger people made up the audience of the almost full house at Solstice Arts Centre in Navan. A slight concern about mobile phones, crunching crisps and rustling sweet wrappers proved unfounded. All were glued to the action on stage. Produced with Theatre Lovett who have a long tradition of children theatre, this was an enjoyable and entertaining production. A wonderful mix of fairytale and highest quality singing and acting. Yet another fabulous production by the team at Irish National Opera.

Vagabones is Raymond Deane’s fourth opera. ‘The Poet and his Double’ and ‘The Wall of Cloud’ were both shorter chamber pieces. These were followed by the full length work ‘The Alma Fetish’ which takes the tempestuous affair between painter Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler as its subject. Vagabones is based on the play Trespasses by Emma Donoghue with a libretto by Renate Debrun. It reimagines events that occurred in Youghal, Co. Cork in 1661. Florence Newton, an elderly woman who has fallen on hard times is accused of bewitching Mary Longdon the maid of prominent local gentleman John Pyne. The opera is set during Newton’s imprisonment awaiting trial and we learn of the events which have lead to her incarceration.

Composer Raymond Deane and Emma Donoghue, author of ‘Trespasses’ on which Vagabones is based.

Raymond Deane, who’s work I am not familiar with aside from listening to some pieces online before attending this performance, is an Irish composer who studied for a time under Karlheinz Stockhausen and is probably best known for his piece ’Seachanges’ which has been on the Leaving Certificate music syllabus for some years.

The rather small attendance at An Táin Arts Centre were greeted by a stage set that was quite bleak consisting of a dark back wall onto which was occasionally projected explanations of the unfolding scenes. This worked quite well but conversely a video screen displaying various images in the middle of the wall didn’t. The images didn’t seem to relate to the action on stage and using a video screen jarred with what was otherwise a very cohesive period set. 

The cast with conductor Sinéad Hayes, composer Raymond Deane and members of Crash Ensemble.

The music was provided by Crash Ensemble, a group specialising in contemporary music,  under the baton of Sinéad Hayes. The 13 musicians included an accordion and a harp in a possible nod to the Irish context of the story and a percussionist surrounded by a large array of drums and chimes. (this set a mildly concerning tone before the opera even started). An issue which often surfaces when larger ensembles perform in smaller regional venues soon made its presence felt. The voices on stage being drowned out by the sheer volume from musicians sitting right in front of the audience over which performers had to sing. 

(I have been to a number of venues, e.g. the Samuel Beckett Theatre, where the musicians are placed behind the performers or upstage which in smaller venues alleviates this problem but some venues cannot accommodate this setup and it limits the type of backdrop a stage set can have)

Rory Musgrave as the Mayor and Carolyn Holt as Florence Newton.

I didn’t in all honesty warm to the music. I’m not a big fan of dissonance and the lack of harmony and beauty in a lot of modern orchestral music. I found Deane’s music very angular, prodding and percussive with very few passages that could be called attractive in a melodic or harmonic sense. The music was undoubtedly very expressive and certainly captured ones attention but to my ears it tended to the unappealing, repetitive and quite mathematical. Not the sort of music I could imagine listening to on its own. It was also problematic that some of the loudest and most percussive passages coincided with and overpowered the accompanying singing. Voice and music fought with each other for dramatic prominence. At times it was hard to hear anything the performers were singing at all. 

This leads me onto another issue. Although sung in English the possible lack of knowledge of the story among the audience and the competition at times between voice and music should have necessitated surtitles. This is not a criticism of this particular opera per se as I have been to numerous operas sung in English and it is the nature of the sometimes rather ‘unnatural’ metre of singing conversational dialogue and the pitch it is often sung at that can make it quite difficult to understand. Surtitles would have been a great advantage. 

Kelli-Ann Masterson, Fionn Ó hAlmhain, Sarah Power & Ross Scanlon.

The highlight of this opera was without doubt the singing. The vocal quality on show was superb in both skill and range. All members of the cast were impressive with particular standouts for me being Carolyn Holt as Florence Newton, a strong, energetic and vibrant mezzo with a great stage presence. Ross Scanlon was a forceful and articulate John Pyne exuding the confidence of his role in presence & voice and Rory Dunne was very much in his character as the healer Valentine Greatrakes. Sarah Power as Mary Langdon had great vocal range but on occasion was a bit thin in the upper registers, Kelli-Ann Masterson again was very articulate and comfortable on stage as was Rory Musgrave as the often conflicted Mayor of Youghal. Vocal performances all round were very impressive and held the attention even though many of the musical passages were quite flat, lacked variety and were accompanied by an almost sung recitative style.

Rory Dunne, Carolyn Holt & Rory Musgrave.

The story of Vagabones touches on issues of suspicion, fear and mistrust through the lens of the differences between a native community and the colonial community which lives among them. It exposes the tensions that exist when two different identities share the same space and the unfortunate consequences this can have. It did seem to present men in a rather bad light, the only redeeming male character (Dónal O’Dare) being played by a female and the possibly devious & dishonest behaviour of a female character (Mary Longdon) being the result of coercion or fear of rejection by men. A narrative that has certain cultural currency at the moment.

The evening was certainly educational and intriguing with outstanding singing but the music wasn’t to my taste and this certainly compromised my enjoyment. But it is still nonetheless wonderful to see new Irish operas being written and to witness  the singing and performing talent Ireland currently has. 

Opera Collective Ireland’s website is here

Crash Ensemble’s website is here

Looking back through the lens of today it’s hard to appreciate just how revolutionary the operatic innovations of Christoph Willibald Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi were for audiences in the late 18th century. There were established rules and norms about what opera should be about and how it should be presented. It was a fairly locked down formula and deviating from it was not only creatively perilous but also risked courting the displeasure of the royalty & nobility who funded the whole operatic endeavour. In a nutshell being too radical could mean failure and poverty.

Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck and Ranieri de’ Calzabigi. The architects of ‘Reform Opera’.

It was in this atmosphere that Gluck, an established and quite successful composer decided to embark on a project we now call his reform operas. Starting off with Orfeo ed Euridice in 1862 a series of highly successful operas retooled the operatic workshop and set in motion a sea change in operatic themes and presentation. They set about stripping opera of its unnecessary ornamentation, virtuoso adornments, excessive passages and dance scenes all of which they believed hindered the telling of the story. A refocusing on the reality of the drama and the most effective and fluid telling of that story became the priority. To instate a ‘Nobel Simplicity’ as de’ Calzabigi called it.

Orpheus and Eurydice by Edward Poynter.

The story of Orfeo and his wife Euridice is a well-known one from Greek mythology. Orfeo who can thrill man and beast alike with his music finds the body of his beloved wife Euridice and laments her death. Even the gods are overcome by the beauty and sadness of his music so they allow him to go to the underworld to bring her back to earth (what a comment on the power of music). The only condition is that he can not look at or speak to her. After again charming the gate keepers of hades with his music he leads his beloved back to life but on the way she looses heart because he will not look at or speak to her. His resolve weakened and wanting to console and reassure her he turns to look at her and she again dies before him. But true to form as he sings one of the most beautiful arias in opera over her body the gods again relent and restore her to life ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ (What shall I do without Euridice). I know what you’re thinking, an opera with a happy ending!

Janet Baker sings ‘Che farò senza Euridice’

This was a concert performance in St. Peters church in Drogheda so no costumes, no sets, no acting and as relating to this opera in particular, no dancing. Mezzo Soprano Sharon Carty was engaging and in full voice as Orfeo and Soprano Sarah Power an excellent Euridice. Emma Nash took the part of Amore and the wonderful acoustics in the church did the voices of the main characters and the chorus proud. The Irish Baroque orchestra conducted from the harpsichord by Peter Whelan gave an enthusiastic and solid performance.

This was a stripped down version of a fully staged and choreographed production Irish National Opera are touring at the moment with United Fall dance company. Despite the fact that the singing and playing were wonderful I don’t really think a concert setting of this full opera worked all that well. Most operatic concert performances will be a selection of pieces possibly built round a theme, many of which the audience may already know or a full opera which is semi-staged with costume and some contextual setting. A classical work like this, even though it is not overly long at 1.5 hours, being sung in Italian with no staging robbed it of too much context and entertainment for it to be successful. It was a bit of a marathon to have no accompanying drama and indeed no interval. Having said that it was wonderful to have this seminal work from the operatic canon performed in Drogheda by such talented musicians and singers.

Three loud bangs and a cock crowing by way of an overture herald the opening of Franco Leoni’s opera L’Oracolo (The Oracle). There follows some pigeon Chinese shouts and cheers and we are straight into the action as our anti-hero Cim-Fen throws a client out of his opium den. Franco Leoni was an Italian composer whose works are rarely performed and largely forgotten today though he did compose a large body of work for the stage. A composer of ‘charming songs for the most famous voices’ a contemporary review read. Born in 1864 in Milan he spent many years in London composing for the theatre and died there in 1949.

Antonio Scotti as Cim-Fen in 1915 and a printed libretto from a production at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York.

Of all his operatic works L’Oracolo which was premiered in Covent Garden in 1905 is his best known mostly thanks to Italian baritone Antonio Scotti who heard the piece in London and used his influence at the Metropolitan Opera in New York to have it staged there with himself in the leading role of Cim-Fen. It’s a relatively short one-act opera but full of intensity and emotion & there is very little let up as the action surges forward from high drama to tragedy and back again. Scotti so liked the role of Cim-Fen where he could immerse himself in a deplorable character with no apparent redeeming characteristics that he chose it for his final performance at the Met in 1933. Leoni had studied with Amilcare Ponchielli who was also the teacher of Puccini and there are certainly similarities between the two composers work, both being very emotionally intense and delving into the darker and seamier side of life.

Pauline Lightstone Donalda who sang the role of Ah-Yoe in the world premiere at Covent Garden in 1905 and Joan Sutherland who recorded it in 1973.

Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown it’s a pretty violent and lurid affair full of greed, evil, and revenge. The drama is laced with a kidnapping and two murders, one with an axe to the head, around the foggy docks of San Francisco. There’s no shortage of intensity in the action and indeed the singing moves quickly from one highly dramatic scene to the next with very little let up in intensity. In fact, one of the criticisms levelled at L’Oracolo is that it’s perhaps a bit too full on. In a nutshell, the evil Cim-Fen wishes to marry Ah-Yoe, niece of the rich merchant Hu-Tsin. Secretly Cim-Fen kidnaps Hu-Tsin’s young son and then offers to find the boy if he can have Ah-Yoe’s hand in marriage. There’s almost always a love triangle and L’Oracolo is no exception as Ah-Yoe is in love with San-Lui who also offers to find the boy for Ah-Yoe’s hand. Cim-Fen brutally murders San-Lui with an axe but his father Win-Chee discovers that Cim-Fen has kidnapped the boy and hid him under his opium den. He eventually rescues the boy and kills Cim-Fen. So there you have it. Evil fiend, innocent young maiden, tragic young lover… I know, but it’s opera and you’re not even guaranteed a happy ending.

If you like verismo opera you will love this one. Plenty of impassioned singing & although it is a bit different in that Ah-Yoe is not a great role for the leading lady and the spotlight is mostly on Cim-Fen a scheming and malignant baritone. Very odd indeed. Some pundits say this otherwise strong opera has fallen out of favour because it doesn’t have a strong female role that great sopranos were interested in performing and they are vital to putting bums on seats.

The 1973 recording featuring Tito Gobbi as Cim-Fen and Joan Sutherland as Ah-Yoe.

I was only able to track down two recordings of L’Oracolo doing the rounds. One is a quite strong live recording by Oper Frankfurt from 2010 and the other, which is probably better known is a 1975 recording with Joan Sutherland and Tito Gobbi taking the lead roles and conducted by Richard Bonynge. This is the recording I have and Gobbi is amazing as our evil anti-hero. His voice is deep, intense and booming even though it was recorded only a couple of years before his retirement. Both these recordings are available on Spotify and Amazon so make your own assessment of their merits. Some wonderful singing, plenty of action and, if staged right, great costumes & atmosphere all in a one-hour performance. What’s not to like.

Wexford Festival Opera are presenting L’Oracolo as part of their 2018 programme.

Continuing its well-established tradition of reviving forgotten or at least neglected works Wexford Festival Opera are presenting a production of L’Oracolo this year in a double bill with Mala Vita by Umberto Giordano. A nice doubleheader of little performed Italian verismo styled pieces which should provide a very emotionally intense and draining evening.

Owen Wingrave had its premiere broadcast in May 1971. I say broadcast as this later work by Benjamin Britten was commissioned by the BBC as a work for TV, it didn’t get its stage premiere until 1973. The story is of a young man from a military background who refuses to continue the family tradition of service, is summoned back home to explain himself and ends up the victim of an unexplained and somewhat macabre and tragic death.

Benjamin Britten & Henry James. Britten had previously adapted another story by James, The Turn of the Screw, for the stage.

The opera opens with Wingrave and his friend Lechmere receiving instruction in tactics from Mr. Coyle, a family friend and military instructor. Lechmere is very gung-ho and is looking forward to his career in the army, he can’t wait for the adventure and excitement of military life and combat. At one stage he sings a fragment of ‘The Minstrel Boy’ in his excitement to get into action. All this grates on Wingrave and it’s during these lessons that he finally reveals his hatred and detestation of war and the military which sets in motion the chain of events that will eventually lead to his death in the haunted room at his family home of Paramore (par amour?)

Back at Paramore his family and presumed fiancé Kate find the news Coyle has brought them about Owen hard to believe and when he himself arrives home their jokes about straightening himself out and having to grow up turn to charges of disloyalty and cowardice. When Owen is disinherited by Sir Philip Wingrave, Kate sees the future she has planned wit him crumble in front of her eyes and she taunts Owen about his stupidity, selfishness and cowardice. To disprove her charge of cowardice he takes up Kate’s challenge to sleep in the haunted room at Paramore. A room where a tragic death had befallen an ancestor. A father had killed his son and then mysteriously died himself in the room and none at paramore goes into it. Owen gets Kate to lock him in to prove he is not a coward but the house is woken during the night to screams and shouts and Owen is found mysteriously dead in the room.

Peter Pears in the role of General Sir Philip Wingrave.

The opera is an adaptation of a story by Henry James which caught Britten’s eye because of its pacifist theme and he makes this the overriding message of the opera. Pacifism was an issue that was very close to Britten’s heart and informed a number of his other works, most famously the War Requiem. Britten himself was a prominent pacifist and was excused from military service during World War II as a conscientious objector. He fled to America with the tenor Peter Pears in 1939 as the tanks of totalitarianism rolled across Europe and after returning to Britain many considered this an unforgivable act of cowardice (rather like with Owen Wingrave himself?). (Not for Britten were concert tours to support the war effort like another operatic hero of mine, the amazing English contralto Kathleen Ferrier). Owen Wingrave was broadly a comment on the Vietnam War which was at its height in 1968 when Britten began to work on the opera and was becoming protracted and bogged down by the time of its broadcast in 1971. A conflict whose moral compass appeared to be much less clear cut than the one Britten has absented himself from in the early 1940’s.

Britten is not a composer I particularly enjoy in the main as I find a lot of his work quite challenging musically and a touch hard to digest. Sometimes sharp and jarring, sometimes percussive, disconcerting and un-melodic, and occasionally there is a moral undercurrent I find a touch unsettling in some of his work, not least his ability to quite happily return to a Britain saved from the evil of nazism by a military he so patently despise.

Britten conducts Owen Wingrave for the BBC TV production.

The music in Owen Wingrave can be quite sparse and often merely forms a backdrop to the dialogue and action. One advantage from a singers point of view of this often withdrawn musical background is that it leaves a lot of space for voice to shine and can really show up a singers talents (or flaws). For me Britten is quite heavy handed in Owen Wingrave as he forces his political message a bit too stridently. An example of this is the continual and unabated verbal assault Owen comes under in Act II. He is attacked from all sides and Britten delineates his interpretation of right and wrong far too cleanly and then proceeds to hammer away at it continually. The situation can really only end in tragedy.

Opera Collective Ireland are currently touring Owen Wingrave in a co-production with the Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris.

Details of Opera Collective Ireland’s production are Here

The debut album from French mezzo Marianne Crebassa has certainly brought a warm glow to my new year at any rate. A wonderful collection of arias from some of the great trouser roles in opera sung with a beauty, power and skill that is truly inspiring. Trouser or breeches roles in opera are male characters that are played by women. Called ‘travesty’ roles in Italian, many of these roles were originally sung by castrati but are now performed mostly by mezzos but increasingly by counertenors who have a similar vocal range. (Countertenors are the highest register in male voice and with changing musical training and styles are coming back into fashion. See Philippe Jaroussky for example).

The album opens with an absolute show stopper ‘Amour, viens rendre à mon âme’ from Orphée et Erudice by Christoph Willibald Gluck. A tour de force of shimmering singing from this seminal work which clearly announces that you are in for a real treat with this album. Mozart who wrote some great trouser roles has, at six, the greatest number of tracks on this collection. Two from the rarely performed early opera Lucio Silla from 1772. The restless and uplifting ‘Il tenero momento’ from Act I as Cecelia anticipates meeting his beloved Giunia and the heart wrenchingly beautiful ‘Pupille amate’ from Act 3 as he prepares for the last farewell to his beloved from his prison cell before being put to death. (he is pardoned eventually, and gets his girl… a happy ending, in opera!).

On an album of great trouser roles the impish and lovestruck Cherubino from Le Nozze di Figaro has of course to make an appearance. Crebassa performed this role with aplomb for the Dutch National Opera last year and here we are treated to accomplished renditions of ‘Non so più’ where Cherubino tries to explain to a rather bemused Susanna his infatuation with women and later with ‘Voi che sapete’ he treats the distraught Countess Almaviva (our friend Rosina from ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia’) to his inner romantic machinations and torments. The rather urgent and dramatic ‘Va’ pure ad altri in braccio’ from the early and rarely performed La finta giardiniera is also included while the suitably climatic ‘Parto, ma tu ben mio’ from Mozart’s last opera La Clemenza di Tito closes the collection.

Mozart’s mark on this collection doesn’t end there as there is also a tune from Reynaldo Hahn’s Mozart, an homage to the great man written in 1925 where the young Mozart is played as a trouser role. Although of a different era and style to the other pieces in this collection ‘Alors, adieu donc, mon amour!’ sits quite comfortably amongst them.

Jacques Offenbach, that most French of composers.

That most French of composers Jacques Offenbach (think, the Can-Can!) is represented by the beautiful ‘Vois sous l’archet frémissant’ with its weeping violins from his masterpiece Les Contes d’Hoffmann where Nicklausse tries to consoles the heartbroken Hoffmann by telling him that only in art can true love be found. ‘Poet, give your heart! It consoles your tears.’ We are also treated to ‘Voyez dans la nuit brune’, the beautiful ballad from Act I of the again rarely performed Fantasio where Crebassa hauntingly sings the title role of the young student.

Continuing the roll call of great French composers Charles Gounod makes his presence felt with ‘Versez vos chagrins dans mon âme’ from Faust and the jaunty and uplifting ‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle’ from Roméo et Juliette where the loyal Stéphano taunts the Capulets that their beloved young Juliet will soon be amongst the Montagues with his master Roméo.

Cécile Eyreams as Urbain in ‘Les Huguenots’ and the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Certainly one of the highlights here is the astonishing ‘Nobles seigneurs, salut’ from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots. It’s an enormous four-hour work which recounts events around the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 from a composer who was wildly popular in his day but broadly ignored today. Les Huguenots with over 1000 performances at the Paris Opéra by 1900 is possibly the most performed opera in the 19th Century (Surely a credit to the attention spans of earlier generations). Crebassa absolutely sparkles here with an incredibly agile and technically brilliant rendition. Stunning.

Another wonderfully romantic aria is ‘Ô petite étoile’ from Emmanuel Chabrier’s opera L’Étoile, an underperformed work which is returning to favour with The Royal Opera giving its Covent Garden debut last year (it was premiered in Paris in 1877). There is certainly a strong showing of lesser known works in this collection and the slow and aching  ‘Sommeil, ami des dieux’ from Psyché by Ambroise Thomas is no exception as indeed is ‘Cœur sans amour’ from the very rarely performed work Cendrillon by Jules Massenet.

Emmanuel Chabrier, Jules Massenet and Ambroise Thomas.

From start to finish this album is technically stunning and a pleasure to listen to. Incredible singing and beautiful orchestration by the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg under the baton of Marc Minkowski mean this album should be on your player with earphones at the ready for anytime you think the world isn’t romantic or beautiful enough. Without a doubt it is my first great recorded opera discovery of 2017.

Favourite tracks!

Orphée et Eurydice – ‘Amour, viens rendre à mon âme’

Les Huguenots – ‘Nobles seigneurs, salut!’

Roméo et Juliette – ‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle’

La clemenza di Tito – ‘Parto, ma tu ben mio’

Marianne Crebassa’s Website

‘Oh Boy!’ on Amazon

The Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg

As an opera lover I won’t pretend there isn’t something slightly odd about hearing songs that are meant to be part of a dramatic narrative acted out on stage being sung as a concert in formal evening wear. I want to get this personal observation out of the way before I go on to talk about this evenings performance as it relates to opera recitals in general and not this evenings concert particularly. There is of course an argument that the music is in and of itself inspiring and uplifting and that in a recital you get all the best bits without having to sit through a full opera. It is of course a wonderful treat to hear these show stoppers sung back to back like an operatic greatest hits and I know recitals are a vital part of the earning stream of many classically trained singers. Recitals also creates an opportunity for a wider audience to experience opera sung live which is certainly good so having said that I would earnestly encourage anyone who enjoys recitals to please go to full staged performances and hear these wonderful tunes sung in context alongside their brother and sister arias and choruses.

Sopranos Aoife Gibney & Amy Ní Fhearraigh.

We were back in the historic St. Peter’s Church of Ireland in Drogheda with its wonderful atmosphere and acoustics for this concert. In his introductory remarks the Reverend Iain Jamieson reminded the audience that this is primarily a place of worship but it has to be said that it is also a wonderful performance space. Our singers this evening were Amy Ní Fhearraigh, Aoife Gibney, Owen Gilhooly and Gavan Ring with accompaniment on piano by Aoife O’Sullivan. Earlier this year I had the pleasure of seeing Amy Ní Fhearraigh perform as Suzanna in a fully staged production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama (Aoife Gibney also performed Contessa Almaviva but not on the night I attended). For my review click here

Tenor Owen Gilhooly & baritone Gavan Ring.

The recital itself was in a word wonderful and for me at least the programme very appropriately opened with the aria that first caught my ear and helped me realise there was this thing out there called opera. ‘Largo al factotum’ from Rossini’s masterpiece The Barber of Seville. Sung rather energetically by Gavan Ring, this classic bel-canto tongue twister set the tone for the quality of the evening to follow.

The first half of the concert featured some of the best known arias and duets in the operatic canon. After Rossini we moved to tunes by Puccini, Donizetti, Mozart and Bizet from their great operas. Aoife Gibney and Amy Ní Fhearraigh performed two fabulous duets, ‘Sull’aria’ from The Marriage of Figaro and an incredibly elegant and accomplished rendition of the ‘Flower Duet’ from Léo Delibes’ Lakmé. A slightly surprising inclusion in the programme was ‘Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen’ the tragically sad aria from Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) written when he was only 23 and many years before he moved to America in 1938 to write some of his most famous pieces for Hollywood movies. The first half of the programme closed with Owen Gilhooly and Gavan Ring treating us to the famous duet ‘Au fond du temple saint’ from George Bizets’ The Pearl Fishers. What a run into the intermission…

During the intermission we all retired to the parish hall for a chat and a complimentary coffee or glass of wine, well done and thank you to the organisers! It was obvious from talking to some of the concert goers that they were very impressed with the concert and keen to retake their seats for part two.

To open the second half we returned to the Italian canon with more treasures from Puccini, Donizetti and Verdi and Owen Gilhooly singing a beautiful yet powerful version of ‘Pourquoi me réveiller’  from Jules Massenet’s Werther. This half also had its little surprises as well in the form of ‘O Carlo ascolta’ from Verdi’s Don Carlos sung with resonance and presence by Gavan Ring. Gavan is certainly a Baritone to watch. We also had an English language contribution in the form of ‘Tiny’s Song’ from Benjamin Britten’s early operetta Paul Bunyan sung by Aoife Gibney and for a finale we were treated to a rousing all hands on deck rendition of the ‘Brindisi’ from Verdi’s La Traviata with all the singers dancing ’round the stage.

One observation I would make is that on an evening that was essential a greatest hits of opera, 14 of the songs were in Italian, 4 in French and 1 each in German and English. This rather clearly illustrates the grip Italy has on the public perception of opera or at least the type of opera that triumphs at wonderfully memorable tunes at any rate.

I thoroughly enjoyed the concert with its selection of operatic classics peppered with a few off kilter contributions that added a bit of variety to the programme and the standing ovation for the performers at the end of the evening was very well deserved.

http://www.droghedaclassicalmusic.com/

http://www.gavanring.co.uk/

http://www.owengilhooly.com/