Axe-wielding mayhem to make up for lost time
From Elektra in Kilkenny to curtain twitchers and scandal in Clonmel, drama is back… with a vengeance
Previews
IrishNationalOpera/Clonmel Junction Festival/Bewley’s Various dates
Irish National Opera has enhanced its reputation considerably by how it has tack led the problems of the last year with online productions and concerts by individual singers. And it has just launched a very ambitious season running from July 7, 2021, to June 26, 2022, with 58 performances at 20 locations from Dublin to Cork, Listowel to Letterkenny, Wexford to Galway and lots of places in between.
The coming year’s output includes productions carried forward from last year, with nine new operas, six by Irish composers, including four world premieres.
The biggest and most interesting undertaking will be a performance of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in The Castle Yard in Kilkenny. Belfast soprano Giselle Allen makes her INO debut in the main role. When the opera was first performed in 1909, audiences were shocked by the volume of the orchestra and the emotional intensity of the axewielding Elektra’s overwhelming passion to have her mother killed in revenge for having murdered her father.
In the operatic version of the story she dies from the sheer ecstasy of a demented dance of vengeance. Stories were told of how Strauss, at rehearsals, encouraged the orchestra to play louder and louder because the singers could still be heard.
Elecktra is played in one long sequence. There’s not a more demanding soprano role in the whole operatic repertoire. Its persistently high range is an enormous undertaking for the lead singer who is onstage from beginning to end with little emotional or musical relief – ideal for an openair performance. The opera will be performed with a live cast and pre-recorded orchestra.
n Kilkenny Festival runs from August 5–14
Other unusual productions are three filmed operas. Starting on July
7, there will be a series of late-night (10.45pm) outdoor screenings of Lighthouse, by Peter Maxwell Davies, based on an actual event when three lighthouse men in the Outer Hebrides mysteriously disappeared in 1900. Venues are Hook Head Lighthouse, Wexford and Fanad Head Lighthouse in Donegal. Lighthouse goes on a 10performance, eight-venue tour during November and December.
The world premiere of Amanda Feery’s A Thing I Cannot Name, is a new filmed opera exploring female sexual desire, as part of West Cork Literary Festival, on July 27.
The third filmed opera will be Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground later this year.
n See irishnationalopera.ie