Adès - The Exterminating Angel (Paris, 2024)

Thomas Adès - The Exterminating Angel

Opéra National de Paris, 2024

Thomas Adès, Calixto Bieito, Jacquelyn Stucker, Gloria Tronel, Hilary Summers, Claudia Boyle, Christine Rice, Amina Edris, Nicky Spence, Frédéric Antoun, Jarrett Ott, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Filipe Manu, Philippe Sly, Paul Gay, Clive Bayley, Thomas Faulkner, Ilanah Lobel-Torres

Paris Opera Play - 5th March 2024

When it comes to the films of Luis Buñuel, the ideas and sentiment behind them isn't particularly deep or complicated, but it's the surrealist treatment that distinguishes the works. You could possibly break most of them down to the filmmaker rejecting and making fun of the establishment, the bourgeoisie, the church and their perversions, but he does so in a slightly surreal way that gives them an unexpected character, and a very daring one that challenged many sacred cows. Whether it's Catherine Deneuve as a young newlywed housewife who becomes a prostitute at a high-class brothel in order to enact the deepest sexual fantasies that her young husband is unable to fulfil in Belle de Jour, the story of a nun who resists the lecherous advances of her uncle, renounces her vows and gives his estate over to homeless beggars after his death in Viridiana (including a parody of the Last Supper), some of the images and situations in his films are indelible. None more so than The Exterminating Angel.

Again the idea is a simple one where things seem to go wrong at a dinner party organised by Edmundo de Nobile and his wife Lucia after an evening at the opera. They are surprised to find that the servants are not there to collect the coats of the guests, and this initial upset seems to be the catalyst for throwing the evening into turmoil. The scene is repeated as if to suggest that if the servants, the workers, aren't there to look after them, the upper classes don't know what to do or how to function. They drop their coats on the floor and thereafter everything rapidly falls apart. Enrique drops the hors d’oeuvre ragout, and then Pablo the chief wants to go an visit his sick sister. Even though everything has been prepared, Lucia is outraged. She is going to hold these useless servants to account.

The evening and the celebration for Leticia, the opera singer they call "the Valkyrie", never seems to take off and eventually they each decide to leave. This pleases Lucia, as she intends to conduct a little affair when they go, but somehow no-one seems to be able to leave the room. Perhaps the servants aren't there to open the doors for them. Trapped in uncomfortable proximity with each other in a room they are unable to leave, all the little insecurities they have kept hidden rise to the surface and they find themselves forced to enact them. The further the evening progresses and extends into days, the tensions and pretensions intensify and soon turn from petty arguments and affairs to violence and barbarism.

Buñuel's 1962 film is wildly absurd as it is, so imagine how much more the story must be when Thomas Adès and Calixto Bieito put their stamp on the opera version of the work. The essential theme that must carry over is surely to mercilessly rip into the pretensions of the upper classes and have fun in the process. Subtlety isn't essential, the more extreme the better. Adès certainly has fun introducing strange untypical sounds and instruments like the use of the ondes martenot into the buoyant orchestration. It's as richly and creatively scored as you can imagine, and Adès himself has tremendous fun conducting the Paris Orchestra through it. Yet it is not wild, but controlled, the implication being that the guests haven't lost their minds, they are simply being extreme, or perhaps just unrestrained versions of their true selves.

As a dramatic situation, that is inevitably limited. Taking place in one room where everyone seems to be losing their mind for two hours, the point seems to be made very quickly, and it's just a matter of seeing how far they can push this and what the eventual outcome or explanation for the strange event might be. Inevitably, there is no easy answer and there are many ways of looking at the resultant chaos and the ineffective ways they try to deal with it. The image of sheep - which Calixto Bieito manages to introduce in his own way - suggests conformity and inability to think for themselves to the extent that they are unable to leave a room unless everyone else does, or it could have religious connotations, which are certainly treated with scorn by Buñuel. That is also suggested here, even though the opera version does not include Buñuel's horror in the cathedral epilogue.

Given that, the question must be whether The Exterminating Angel gains anything by being an opera. Unquestionably Adès brings something fresh to the work. Making use of a wide variety of musical instruments and arrangements, it's as musically inventive as you would expect from this composer, finding varied expression for each of the characters, and layering them together with great skill. In terms of transferring those ideas to a stage production, this must be a rare case where the plot of the opera itself has an absurd side that even surpasses what Calixto Bieito usually brings to a production. But then we are talking about Luis Buñuel here, one of the original surrealists, and - while it might not seem like it - Bieito is actually more subtle and suggestive here than the original work. It could be just that the Catalan director has found a work that fits with his own sensibility and indeed I actually would be surprised if Buñuel wasn't a major influence.

If there is one slightly different stance or slant that the opera takes, it's maybe taking the opera evening aspect of the story and making a little more of the idea of musical resolution. This is there in the original, I seem to recall, but unsurprisingly perhaps it takes on another meaning when it is seen in the context of an opera itself, the guests seemingly unable to move until the unfinished playing of Paradisi by Blanca on the piano is brought to a conclusion. As if having to acknowledge that, Adès self-references his own music trapping the guests, and scores the opera singer at a higher pitch than the others, in the same range as Ariel in his version of The Tempest. The finale then, rather than follow Buñuel's cathedral ending, has all the surviving guests emerging dazed from the room, confronting their inner selves and suggesting (in my mind anyway) that the audience do likewise. You must wonder what the audience in the expensive seats at the Bastille make of it, and if that's the only intention in bringing The Exterminating Angel to the modern opera stage, it is surely justification enough.

While occasionally it seems like (controlled) chaos on the stage, there are actually many little touches in both the music, the direction and the singing performances to keep things moving along and give the viewer much to think about. Each of the characters have their own hang-ups and ways of dealing with being locked in that reveals another aspect of the society that the original creator wants to expose and mock. The singing alone is striking enough to grab your attention. There is an exceptional cast assembled here, and each have their own distinctive part to play. It's hard to just pick out one or two in a cast that includes great performances from Nicky Spence, Christine Rice, Philippe Sly, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Paul Gay and Clive Bayley, but Jacquelyn Stucker is exceptional as Lucia di Nobile, Claudia Boyle delivers an impressive lament/lullaby late in the opera for Silvia's son Yoli and Gloria Tronel hits those stratospheric heights as the opera singer Leticia.

External links: Opéra National de Paris, Paris Opera Play

Donizetti - Zoraida di Granata (Wexford, 2023)

Gaetano Donizetti - Zoraida di Granata

Wexford Festival Opera, 2023

Diego Ceretta, Bruno Ravella, Claudia Boyle, Konu Kim, Matteo Mezzaro, Julian Henao Gonzalez, Rachel Croash, Matteo Guerzè

O'Reilly Theatre, National Opera House - 24th October 2023

For 72 years, one of the principles of Wexford Festival Opera has been to present rare, lost and forgotten opera that is worthy of a fresh look. With a history of 400 years of opera to look through, there are hundreds of composers, never mind works, that have been neglected over this time. Donizetti is not a composer you would think of as neglected, but surprisingly few of around 75 operas written by the composer are regularly performed, and it is only through the efforts of Wexford and the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo that more of his works have been rediscovered. Thanks to a joint co-production between Wexford and Bergamo it's Zoraida di Granata that has been dusted off this year and given a smartly polished performance in its world premiere at Wexford.

And it is a bit of a coup for Wexford, since it isn't often that you get to see the world premiere stage production of an opera that was written 200 years ago - one by Gaetano Donizetti no less. The original version of Zoraida di Granata composed in 1822 was never performed due to the death of the lead tenor playing the role of Abenamet in an unfortunate accident. The opera had to be rewritten for a contralto and scenes reduced to suit the hastily arranged replacement. Donizetti took the opportunity to revise and extended the work further in 1824, but the original 1822 version for tenor Abenamet has consequently never been fully staged. What is interesting is that this co-production with Bergamo is being performed in two different versions, Wexford putting on the only performances of original 1822 version, Bergamo working with the revised 1824 version. This was an occasion then that was worthy of being greeted with fireworks - as is traditional at the start of the Wexford Festival - and even the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in attendance at the premiere performance.

Photo: Clive Barda

Written in 1822, Zoraida is an early Donizetti, his sixth opera and his first great success that led to greater things. Based on its presentation at Wexford, it's not difficult to see why. The plot is relatively straightforward for a Donizetti opera, not as convoluted as some of his works and it benefits from its directness. While it has short sections of recitative, musically there is no "filler", the writing passionate and lyrical in its setting of a traditional story of three-way romantic conflict in a time of war. There is no mad scene or any such extravagance, each of the three principals having an aria to express their condition, the soprano in particular having a beautiful aria in the second act that hits all the emotional points. The villain Almuzir also has a powerfully written aria in Act 1, expressing his desire for Zoraida, which serves to balance the work and give added poignancy to Zoraida's aria at her fate.

In terms of the plot it's set in the roughly historical period of 1480, with the city of Granada taken by the Moors but still under siege. Almuzir has deposed and killed the king of Granada and is determined to marry his daughter Zoraida. Zoraida however is in love with Abenamet, the head of the army and Almuzir's rival. Unable to 'persuade' Zoraida to marry him, Almuzir instead plots to be rid of Abenamet, sending him out in command of troops to repulse the Spanish counterattack, but warning him on the pain of death that the city's standard must remain safe in his hands. Almuzir of course plans to ensure that even when Abenamet is successful in battle, that the standard is taken from him. It's only when his scheme is undone that Almuzir feels shame for his actions and repents, accepting the union of Abenamet and Zoraida.

Photo: Clive Barda

That unlikely resolution and change of heart amused the audience at Wexford, which is entirely the point of Zoraida di Granata. It's opera as unsophisticated entertainment, or so you might think, but in reality the musical qualities of Donizetti's composition are evident in the flowing lyricism of the score and wonderful melodic invention. It's actually beautifully balanced musically and dramatically, direct in its focus on the romantic drama of the plot, giving equal concision and precision in the expression of the three leads, never letting it turn into a showpiece for the soprano as you might find in later works. That's the case for the 1822 original version, and you would suspect that there is nothing to be gained and much to lose in forced revisions that could hardly improve on this.

If the quality of the work was evident it was wholly down to the production and the performance of the opera at Wexford highlighting its qualities. The playing of the Wexford Festival Orchestra under Diego Ceretta brought out all the colour and dynamic of Donizetti's vivid score. Claudia Boyle as Zoraida was bright, clear and passionate in delivery, the soprano role nonetheless challenging with some coloratura flourishes in repeated lines, but nothing too extravagant. It suited the directness of the director's approach, delving into the emotional core and content of the work that ties it in with the theme of this year's festival, Women & War, and Boyle came into her own impressively in the second act. Matteo Mezzaro was a little bit wavering as Abenamet, but likewise stormed through in the second act, giving the impression that the cast were buoyed by the progression of the music and plot. Rachel Croash was superb as Ines, but it was South Korean tenor Konu Kim as Almuzir who took the honours and the loudest applause at the end of the opera. He didn't have to play the eye-rolling evil villain, but put everything into flashes of anger and lust, letting it roar out with superb control and projection.

Directed by Bruno Ravella, the production design also played to the strengths of the work with no elaborate special effects being required. The set remained largely the same across the two acts/two halves of the opera with a ruined classical structure backdrop and the ground littered with debris. Only the occasional lowering of a pillar and framework of a destroyed stained glass window as required for dramatic purpose. The lighting was just as effective for varying and matching the tone of each scene dramatically. The challenge for the director - for any director doing a Donizetti opera - is to make a 200 year work with old-fashioned opera conventions feel immediate and relevant, as well as serve the demands of the plot and retain the particular balance that makes this one such a successful opera.

Photo: Clive Barda

There was one other element that the director had to consider which fitted perfectly with the Women & War theme of the 72nd Wexford Festival Opera. While work on this production would have been on-going for some time for it to make any meaningful point about current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, it was hard not to see obvious parallels with the devastation currently being shown on our TV screens and sympathise with the idea of innocent people caught up in it all. And indeed the women who are victims of these atrocities, one of the first scenes you see being a dead woman pulled out of a pile of rubble. It couldn't have been foreseen that such scenes would be playing out at the same time in the real world, but on the other hand not surprising at all really that so little has changed and that war continues to bring nothing but suffering to all those caught up in it.

This performance of Zoraida di Granata has been filmed and will be available to view on OperaVision from 3rd November 2023.

External links: Wexford Festival Opera, OperaVision

Offenbach - Tales of Hoffmann (Dublin, 2018)

Jacques Offenbach - Tales of Hoffmann

Irish National Opera, 2018

Andrew Synnott, Tom Creed, Julian Hubbard, Claudia Boyle, Gemma Ní Bhriain, John Molloy, Andrew Gavin, Brendan Collins, Carolyn Holt, Fearghal Curtis, Kevin Neville, Peter O’Reilly, Cormac Lawlor, Robert McAllister

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin - 14 September 2018

At this rate I could get to like Tales of Hoffmann. Up until fairly recently it's been an opera whose attraction and qualities have mostly eluded me. Part of the problem could be down to the work having been left unfinished, Offenbach dying before his only full opera (as opposed to his numerous operettas) was completed. Subjected to cuts, revisions and additions from sketches left behind by the composer to try to approximate what Offenbach might have had in mind, there's never been any clarity over the intended final shape of the work. But then, I've never been taken with the idea of purpose of the work or find that it has any great insights or truths to reveal.

It's a romance above all, a single troubled one taking shape across four different incarnations, but drawn from stories by the German writer ETA Hoffmann, Offenbach includes Hoffmann as the main character in the work, making a connection between the creator and his creations, the inspiration for them and the suffering an artist has to endure to bring them to life. That's all well and good, but the stories themselves are strange, fantastical and almost hallucinogenic in their obsessions, fuelled by alcohol and tainted with madness, the music likewise somewhat overblown.

There's a lot to work with here and certainly richness in the situations, but a good production should be able to draw it all together, bring some kind of coherence and try to make sense of it all. My experience of Tales of Hoffmann however - until fairly recently - has been that directors similarly tend to go overboard and add another level of complication and distraction. A stripped-down reduced-orchestration production by the English Touring Opera however demonstrated for me that there is much to enjoy in the work, and following a similar policy in their new production, the Irish National Opera have confirmed that impression.

Of course what is true of the approach taken towards Tales of Hoffmann is true of any opera; it can be seen at its best when music, direction and singing all come together in a cohesive production with a strong central theme. The central theme of the varied three related love stories that attest to Hoffmann's unfortunate choice in women is of course his singular love for Stella in all her varied moods and character (and an opera singer to boot!). Offenbach of course makes the connections by having not just Stella in the roles of Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta, but he keeps a thread of adversity in the combined villains of Lindorf's Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Dappertutto.

Created as a INO touring production and having to work within the limitations of the O'Reilly Theatre in Dublin, which is not equipped for major scene changes or special effects, director Tom Creed is somewhat limited as far as stage designs go, but in a way this helps consistency and fluency not just between the stories, but with the framing device of Hoffmann the storyteller and the connections the stories have to Stella. The lack of atmosphere in the venue also threatened to work against the efforts of the production which with only a reduced ensemble of seven players felt initially cool and detached, not really engaging with the audience. By the time Claudia Boyle's Olympia took to the stage however, that all changed.

The detached from reality aspect of the stories can still be a problem, but Tom Creed finds suitable modern updates that take some of the old-fashioned eccentricity out of the work. Rather than an automaton or living doll, Creed re-envisions Olympia for this production as a robot AI, Hoffmann dazzled by its brilliance of science but disillusioned by its lack of humanity, immune to the charm of his poetry. In the second story Hoffmann's trust in love is dashed by the inadequacy of medicine to cure Antonia if she sings. Hoffmann is charmed in the third story not by a seductive courtesan who is charged with stealing his reflection, but by a performance artist in the Venice Biennale who attempts to destroy his soul through drug addiction.

Katie Davenport's set designs cleverly provide suitable locations for Creed's updated settings that bring more of a sense of reality to the metaphor, but it still looks magical and just as importantly retains a sense of humour. The consistency and continuity is brilliantly maintained in the three major singing roles, with Claudia Boyle in particular simply outstanding. The ability to sing all the four highly challenging soprano roles is never in doubt, but there's personality and presence there as well, which makes a difference in this opera. Julian Hubbard also sang well but wasn't quite as successful in finding any deeper humanity in his character. The multiple Lindorf villain role posed no difficulties for John Molloy, an expert in this register, but he was perhaps a little too declamatory for the reduced instrumentation. Gemma Ní Bhriain's Nicklausse was exceptional and Andrew Gavin provided good support for Molloy's different incarnations. With fine performances in secondary roles and a fine chorus, the INO clearly have a strong ensemble of singers.

It was in that reduced seven-piece instrumentation, alive to the subtleties of the melodies that I feel that the Irish National Opera's production was truly successful in revealing the qualities of Offenbach's writing for Tales of Hoffmann. Andrew Synnott directing from piano is always strong with this kind of arrangement (his own composition for Dubliners at the 2017 Wexford Festival benefitted from the same treatment). As well as simply being able to appreciate the detail of the instrumentation and quality of the playing, too often lost in larger arrangements, it more than anything else helped bring consistency and cohesion to the work, while still finding plenty of room for colour and expression.

Links: Irish National Opera

Dennehy - The Last Hotel (Dublin, 2015)

Donnacha Dennehy - The Last Hotel

Wide Open Opera, Dublin - 2015

Alan Pierson, André de Ridder, Enda Walsh, Robin Adams, Claudia Boyle, Katherine Manley, Mikel Murfi

Sky Arts, 2016

The concept and playing out of the first opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh is what you might call situational; which is why it's called The Last Hotel, I guess. It involves only three characters who come to a run-down and quite sinister hotel with some rather unsettling if somewhat vague intentions, plus one non-singing character, a demonic hotel porter.

Sinister and demonic are perhaps the key words here, as there's little that you'll find common or inviting as you try to figure out who these people are, what has brought them together and what they are doing at the hotel. There is very much a 'huis clos' kind of feel to a situation that is quite divorced from any kind of realism, and you do indeed even wonder if the Last Hotel is indeed some kind of waiting room for the after-life where these characters have met up in death.

As it happens, no-one has died yet, or at least none of the three principal characters; I can't say anything for sure about the existential state of the demonic porter who is seen rapidly cleaning up the blood from the last guests, but it's clear that death is not far away. As the Woman introduces herself and makes small-talk conversation about the journey over to the hotel with the Man and his Wife, we find out that death is very much on the agenda.

The exchanges and the interior monologues that each of the three of them express are however rather vague and poetically impressionistic. All of them however are rather nervous, a little bit panicky about what is to take place, and all of them are trying to put a brave face on what they are about to participate in. A rehearsal is proposed and it becomes apparent that the Man and his Wife have agreed to come to the hotel to help the Woman end her life. For reasons that are similarly unclear, but edgily urgent...

If there is an edgy urgency to the situation and a sinister and demonic aspect to what is to transpire, it's conveyed primarily by the driving propulsion of Donnacha Dennehy's distinctive music score. Performed by the terrific Crash Ensemble, Dennehy's music has the percussive energetic chug of Michael Nyman, but supplemented with flute, accordion and electric guitar it is underpinned by a structure and rhythm that has all the cadences, repetitive loops and shifts of Irish traditional music.

It's the music that gives the otherwise fairly obscure and poetic reverie of Enda Walsh's libretto its essential character. The three characters do interact, but it's mostly nervous small-talk that skirts around the purpose of their being at the hotel. They do break out or rather slip inward into more reflective consideration of their condition, but there are no specifics that reveal anything about the circumstances that have brought them together at this point. If it comes together at all, it's very much down to the music keeping up a tone and a momentum.

If the words don't carry much in the way of information or insight, there is at least some expression of character and situation in the writing for the voice. It's a surprisingly lyrical piece and not as recitative heavy as you might expect a contemporary English-language opera to be. Again, I think much of this has to do with the Irish music rhythms that align lyrically to the voice, and the urgent continuity of those rhythms and the tensions that are generated inevitably pushes the voices into the higher registers.

Premiered at the Edinburgh festival, Wide Open Opera's The Last Hotel also ran at the 2015 Dublin Theatre Festival (Dennehy's second opera with Enda Walsh The Second Violinist will feature there in the 2017 festival) and it was filmed there at the O'Reilly Theatre for Sky Arts. Originally conducted by André de Ridder, Alan Pierson takes over the direction of the 12-piece Crash Ensemble for the filmed performance.

The film version retains the minimal sets of the stage production for the live performance, but includes filmed cut-aways in and around a hotel when the focus turns on the individuals having their 'moments', giving the opera a little more room to expand outwards without losing any of its intensity. The intensity of the work and the kind of challenges of the singing are taken up well by the cast, with Claudia Boyle the Woman, Robin Adams the Man and Katherine Manley his Wife.

It took a week to get B*Witched's C'est la Vie out of my head.

Links: The Last Hotel, Wide Open Opera

Adams - Nixon in China (Wide Open Opera - Dublin 2014)

John Adams - Nixon in China

Wide Open Opera, Dublin 2014

Fergus Sheil, Michael Cavanagh, Barry Ryan, Claudia Boyle, James Cleverton, Hubert Francis, John Molloy, Audrey Luna, Sharon Carty, Imelda Drumm, Doreen Curran

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin - 11 May 2014

For a modern opera that is based on a relatively recent historical event, John Adams' Nixon in China is proving to be an enduring work that continues to gain new productions worldwide. What is even more surprising, and which perhaps accounts for the place it is gaining in the repertoire, is how each production manages to find a new way of approaching the work's themes. It's clear that Nixon in China is about more than one specific event of historical significance only to the 1970s, but is a work of multifaceted complexity that makes it open to continuous reinterpretation and re-evaluation.

Undoubtedly, that's got a lot to do with Alice Goodman's libretto. It doesn't entirely hold together and it can be difficult to comprehend at times, getting bogged down in the competing ideological, political and philosophical views of each of the participants in US President Nixon's visit to Communist China in 1972. Certain passages of the opera feel the weight of some very obscure esoterica, but the libretto also has the ability and the insight to look beneath the jargon, the showmanship and the politicking to make some very pertinent points about the nature of the figures in question as human beings.

In order for the work to endure however, it needs to extend this out beyond the specific to the universal, and while the political landscape has changed much in the intervening years, with the respective powers and influence of both China and the USA starting to reverse, the human aspirations behind them hasn't changed that much. Even if Nixon in China were only to remind us of this fact, highlighting the present by showing us how it once was, or how indeed it all started to change from a globalised technological perspective, it would still be an interesting work, but as this latest Dublin production from Wide Open Opera makes clear, there's evidently much more to the opera than that.

Wide Open Opera's Dublin production of Nixon in China for example threw up a new aspect to the work that I had never considered before. Is Nixon in China a feminist opera? It seems unlikely for a work set in the 1970s based on the meeting between two male heads of state alternately back-slapping each other and competing to prove the supremacy of their vision of the world. In fact, with Henry Kissinger's reputation and attitude towards women satirised in the dances of Act II ("Whip her to death!"), with Pat Nixon being the model First Lady and housewife, deferential to her husband's important career, and China's treatment of women hardly being anything to be proud of, despite Chiang Ch'ing's contribution to the Cultural Revolution, it's not surprising that the possibility of the work having a feminist agenda is rarely considered.

The fact that these issues are shown at all, even in a seemingly unfavourable light, is significant, but the women in Nixon in China are actually very strong personalities, and can even be said to be the true heart of the work. Part of this might be to do with the librettist being female, but in reality it's much more to do with there being considerable thought and attention paid equally to all of the main characters. In attempting to make them real, in attempting to look beneath the surface and see a real person, those issues and how Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch'ing might feel about them are taken into consideration. If there is a feminist view in Nixon in China, what is wonderful is that it's not presented in any dogmatic fashion, but arises out of treating each of the characters as equals in human terms. It's when this conflicts with the public personas, and with the male and the political agendas, that the whole question becomes much more complex.

Part of the reason why there are so many ways of interpreting and looking at Nixon in China is just down to the nature of its creation, and the nature of opera itself. It's not just Alice Goodman's libretto that is important or the only aspect of the opera that plays with ideas, but rather it's the multidisciplinary nature of how it interacts and conflicts with real-life, with the focus, structure and dramatic concept of Peter Sellars' original idea, and with John Adams' music. That reflects and complements the competing personalities on the stage and it creates a dialectic that really opens the work up. And when you hand that over to a new stage director, a new music director and new singers, you have something that can be even more fluid and mutable.

Wide Open Opera's production of Nixon in China originates from Michael Kavanagh's 2010 production for Vancouver Opera. It's a very fine production that retains the historical basis of Nixon's visit to China and adheres relatively closely to Peter Sellars' structuring of the work. At the same time however it finds its own way to capture the spectacle and the grandeur of the event and get underneath to the rather more difficult to define aspects of the personalities that are brought out by the libretto and the music. Broadly speaking however, the tone of the work and the stage direction is defined by its three-act structure.

Act I is all show, making use of impressive projections that show Air Force One landing in Peking Airport, using bold colours and national flags to indicate the jostling for power, position and philosophical superiority between the leaders of the two great nations. There is at the same time a mutual respect and appreciation for each other, for the power that they wield and how they exercise it, and both are fully aware that this is a unique and unprecedented opportunity to extend their influence and reputation across the world via new satellite technology. The staging fully supports the joyous fervour that this generates, each of them dancing around, drunk on power, lost in their own wonderfulness.

Dancing in fact plays a large part in this production, and it highlights just how important it actually is as another means of expression in the work itself. Aside from the obvious Revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women in Act II (a dance of death, liberation), there are references to dancing at the ball put in honour of the Nixons in Act I (a dance of celebration, assertion, joy) and there's a melancholy waltz in Act III (a slow dance of sadness and introspection), each of which conforms perfectly to the tone of the three acts. The deeper interiority of Act III is more difficult to stage and make work than the more obvious tone and the action of the first two acts, and it doesn't quite come together in the opera itself, but Michael Cavanagh's direction, the use of mists (for time, memory, distance) and the use of connections made though the dancing, finds a through-line that holds it all together surprisingly well.

It's important that all this works with the music and singing performances. The musical challenges alone are considerable for a work that makes use of unconventional orchestration with saxophones and electronic keyboards, but Fergus Sheil and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra provided an invigorating and thrilling performance that balanced the rhythms with the nature of the drama expressed in the libretto and on the stage, as well as with the expression of the singers. The program notes that microphones are required to amplify the singers above the orchestra (although a reduced orchestration allowed the Châtelet in Paris to perform it acoustically), but the singing, diction and expression was so strong here that you scarcely believed it was necessary.

As if to confirm the importance of the women figures, the singing was particularly impressive from Claudia Boyle and Audrey Luna. Claudia Boyle's Pat Nixon was confident and accomplished, but touching too, with a real sense of sympathy for her character and the importance of her as the heart of the opera. Audrey Luna's Chiang Ch'ing saw more of the stratospheric notes the coloratura soprano hit in her Met performance of Ariel in Adès' The Tempest. Where the use of microphones might have been useful here was in allowing the male singers to sing rather than project. Barry Ryan's Nixon was accordingly wonderfully musical, showing the lyrical qualities that are in the writing of this character which we rarely hear in English language opera. Like Ryan, we also had sensitive performances from James Cleverton as Chou En-lai, Hubert Francis as Mao Tse-tung, with John Molloy fully entering into the spirit of the playful but sinisterly depicted Henry Kissinger.

Presenting a modern opera to a Dublin audience was always going to be a challenge, but it's one that, following their marvellous The Importance of Being Earnest, has again paid off impressively for Wide Open Opera. This is a far cry from La Traviata or Madama Butterfly, and a new and sometimes challenging experience for many, but judging from the enthusiastic response of the audience at the opening night at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre for Nixon in China, many were clearly struck at the possibilities this form of music theatre can offer. That's clearly a mark of Wide Open Opera's approach to ensuring quality at every level, and genuinely having something new to bring to the arts and theatre-going public in Ireland.