Dvořák - Rusalka (Dublin, 2026)

Antonín Dvořák - Rusalka

Irish National Opera, 2026

Fergus Sheil, Netia Jones, Jennifer Davis, Ryan Capozzo, Ante Jerkunica, Michelle DeYoung, Giselle Allen, Rachel Croash, Sarah Richmond, Alexandra Urquiola, Benjamin Russell, Andrew Masterson, 

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin - 22nd March 2026

I guess it's probably expected that commentators on opera should have something to say about Timothée Chalamet's views on the value and relevance of opera and ballet today, but I don't think anyone who has actually been to see an opera needs to be convinced that it is far from a dead art form, and probably in far better shape than the movie industry at the moment, certainly in terms of artistic standards and growing audiences. Every new production of an opera - even one that is centuries old - brings out something new, touches on modern day concerns, adds to our understanding of what it means to be human, have feelings and relate to the world around us. And when you have a creative team like Fergus Sheil and Netia Jones working on a production like the Irish National Opera's Rusalka... well, the mind truly is expanded.

All fairy-tales tend to have a moral or present a cautionary tale that touches on deep universal themes and Rusalka's are not difficult to identify, although it's a story that has taken on many different forms over the years in various European guises such as Undine, Melusine, Oceane and The Little Mermaid. Not only does each version or adaptation have its own take on the subject, the universality of the theme is one that each person can relate to from their own experience. As an opera Dvořák's Rusalka is perhaps richer than most, the musical score inviting many ways to interpret its meaning and draw out new ideas. Not all of them need to be as ambitiously transgressive as Martin Kušej's 2010 Bavarian State Opera production or Stefan Herheim's at La Monnaie in 2012, but this particular opera seems to invite imaginative and engaging responses in its productions.

We certainly get that in the extraordinary visual feast created by Netia Jones for the Irish National Opera's 2026 production. Jones might not have any unusual or original take on the subject - opinions will differ on that obviously depending on what expectations you bring with you to the theatre - but instead finds another way to approach and draw out the themes, seeking to make them less magically 'fairy-tale' and more rooted in reality. Being rooted in reality doesn't mean that it has to adhere to naturalistic imagery or a straightforward narrative line either, but rather she presents it in abstract terms that connect with the work's underlying sentiments. The INO production is definitely very much in the abstract and yet it does invite engagement, although there were certainly those around me in the audience who seemed to be less willing to engage with those ideas.

Despite the extravagant sets, creative lighting and stunning projection effects that I've seen Jones produce before (Philip Glass's Orphée and Brian Irvine's Least Like the Other), the INO production bases the story in simple but more familiar recognisable locations that reflect the underlying purpose of the work, if not exactly in any naturalistic fashion. Rusalka is less about being a mermaid who wants to become human than in essence being a coming-of-age story. The first scene in Act I then envisions the water nymphs as children in school uniforms, the watery element suggested by a stage-spanning network of pipes that they wrap themselves around like in a playground, monitored by the plumber/janitor Vodník. He's not so much a sinister water goblin than a man who speaks with the wisdom of age and the experience of disappointment, warning the girls not to dream of growing up too soon.

Rusalka of course refuses to listen and Jones chooses to depict her transformation through the witch Ježibaba as a surgeon employing plastic surgery so that Rusalka can fit into the glamour of the 'grown up' world that she is enchanted by (Vodník taking every opportunity to tell us and Rusalka that we should have listened to his warning). In one of the many extravagant scenes in the production (just to mention in passing the remarkable visuals of the moon in eclipse for the 'Song to the Moon' in Act I, the 3D-like projections for the scene in the forest and the impressive kitchen - all of them suitably scaled-up for the beauty and glamour of the world seen through the eyes of Rusalka), the dances that take place on a chess board reflect the young woman's inability to comprehend the sophisticated social interactions and moves that the Prince, the Foreign Princess and the other guests are able to navigate and control more easily. It's made perfectly clear that Rusalka is not ready for and does not belong to this world.

Aside from presenting jaw-dropping visuals - Netia Jones acting as director, set & costume designer and even the creation of the superb video projections - the production succeeds in establishing the right mood for each scene, allowing the drama and characters to play out within that without introducing any extraneous elements or eccentric touches. It places you within a magical world - it places you in Dvořák's magical musical world - enthralled, not feeling the need to seek to interpret what the director is trying to tell you. If you are familiar with the tale and wish to do so, you can carry over thoughts, impressions and ideas from other productions, each revealing a new facet, or you can relate it to your own impressions and experience. There is certainly the possibility of seeing the opera not only reflecting Rusalka's loss of innocence, but also the rapidly changing modern world itself being a great deal more complicated for a young person to navigate.

Essentially that's at the heart of what the work is about, or at least one main theme, and that's what came across here. It's perhaps most pointedly made in the 'plastic surgery' scene, showing Rusalka rejecting the purity of her nature and the purity of nature, for an artificial and superficial glamour world that doesn't make any sense or offer any true value. It's even reflected in the character of the Prince, who is too often presented in a superficial way, the lure by which Rusalka is drawn away from her true self and finds the truth of human nature in deceit and betrayal. In this production - perhaps something to do with the singing of Ryan Capozzo, perhaps the nostalgic tug of the score under Fergus Sheil - the prince has a more human role to play; a counterpart to Rusalka's desire to leave behind her childhood, his desire for Rusalka is an attraction to and longing for the beauty of pure innocence, but a stark warning that once lost it is impossible to regain.

The singing performances are of course key to keeping you engaged with what each of the characters are living through, and with Jennifer Davis you are with Rusalka unwaveringly all the way. The opera was sung impressively in the original Czech which is very much a part of the character and tone of the work (Davis becoming something of an Irish Dvořák specialist having sung in Armida in Wexford in 2022), but the direction plays an equally important part in the human expression of the characters. Both aspects were managed brilliantly not just by Davis but, as indicated above, allowing Ryan Capozzo to let you see another side to the Prince. Giselle Allen even lets you sympathise to an extent with the Foreign Princess - again too often merely a cipher - or at least understand where she is coming from. Sure, she has a mercenary side - a necessary survival quality in this grown-up world, but she shows some self-respect in having little time for the Prince and his equivocations - get with the programme or go to hell, she literally tells him. Likewise, the excellent Ante Jerkunica overcame the rather repetitive admonitions of Vodník to add meaning and poignancy to each utterance as the inevitability of the tragedy unfolded.

Just as vital to keeping you engaged rather than puzzled is the musical interpretation under Fergus Sheil. Rusalka has the potential to be a little bombastic if its romantic sweeps are not handled with delicacy. No mean feat reining in an orchestra of this scale, but Sheil is right at home here with his ability to marshal the vast orchestral forces for this work and gets all the moods, pace and dynamic right for this production. It's gushily romantic in places, robustly Wagnerian in others, sensitive and moody where it needs to be, hitting those punchy crescendos in the right places, working with the delivery of the singers and the visuals to achieve maximum impact. When you have such beautiful music to 'illustrate' those deep emotions, feelings and experiences, it's impossible not to be swept along. I'm sure even Timothée would have been impressed.

External links: Irish National Opera

Wagner - Der fliegende Höllander (Dublin, 2025)

Richard Wagner - Der fliegende Höllander

Irish National Opera, 2025

Fergus Sheil, Rachael Hewer, Jordan Shanahan, Giselle Allen, James Creswell, Toby Spence, Carolyn Dobbin, Gavan Ring

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin - 23rd March 2025

After a number of ambitious productions in the seasons following their 2018 inauguration, it seemed to me that post-pandemic the Irish National Opera had settled down to productions that are a little less challenging and perhaps more accessible to a wider audience that might not regularly go to the opera. That would seem to continue to be the case with their latest production of Der fliegende Höllander, the most accessible of Wagner's works, although performing any Wagner opera can be seen as challenging enough really. While there was no extravagant contemporary reinterpretation of the meaning of the work or sign of any imaginative play on its themes, it can sometimes be enough just to let a 'respectful' production of Wagner's work speak for itself, and in the case of the INO's 2024-25 season Der fliegende Höllander, that proved to be the case.

Not distracted by trying to work out how the meaning of the work could be aligned with contemporary events, it struck me instead that there are two essential qualities that the INO's production chose to focus on for this Der fliegende Höllander. It was not really the commercial considerations of attracting audiences and filling the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, which is important evidently but that should ideally come naturally as a consequence of ensuring that all the other essential elements are right. To successfully achieve that in Der fliegende Höllander it's necessary to recognise above all the importance of the role of mythology in Wagner's world, and the two qualities that the Irish National Opera employed to achieve that were through the specific attention given to the musical treatment and, to a lesser degree, through the direction of the stage production. Getting the basics right, in other words.

I'll take the direction of the stage production first, since my initial impression was that Rachael Hewer didn't appear to have anything special to bring to the work. It was impressively designed and looked spectacular in places, but offering little in the way of commentary on the meaning of the work. The long overture is one way of introducing such ideas and it seemed that this one was heading towards what is now, in the United States anyway, a rather unfashionably 'woke' re-envisioning of the opera as a feminist statement. For those of us not under the influence of a resetting of the world to the agendas of rich white American billionaires however, it's an interesting idea that could have a certain validity if you can carry it off. I'm not sure that Wagner would have seen it that way, but it does reflect belief in the power of myth and art to offer redemption and transformation.

The overture sees a young child in a red coat - a familiar device it has to be said and you could confidently expect to see the older Senta sporting a similar one later - being introduced to all manner of women in traditional small community working roles from teacher to governess to the role eventually mapped out for her as a worker in a factory gutting and packing fish. Young Senta respects all these women's choices but she has other wild ideas for herself inspired by her book of fairy tales. She becomes obsessed with the myth of the Flying Dutchman, but really what she believes in is her ability to make her own choices, the myth giving her the courage to believe in herself, in her inner values.

These are recognised by the Dutchman when they meet, something he describes as a woman's greatest quality; her eternal fidelity. Whatever way you choose to see it however, it's essentially Senta's own self-belief in the value of a deeper truth, one which allows her to feel compassion for the injustice of the fate of the Dutchman. It's a minor distinction or small point used to bring the opera into focus, but it proves to be a critical one as far as the production overcoming its limitations elsewhere.

Fergus Sheils' musical direction and conducting of the INO however was simply masterful. There is no other word for it. Wagner's music for this opera - and indeed any of his operas - should hit you right between the eyes, in the ears and in the heart and that's what we got here. Musically of course Der fliegende Höllander is a bit of a curate's egg, the composer on his way to his long through-composition and radical reinvention of what could be achieved in music drama, but there are a few odd left-over elements like Daland's Bellini-influenced aria that breaks up the flow. Under Sheils this however had a coherence and consistency, the whole composition of the opera and its whole purpose being in the telling of myth through music and singing.

It seems self evident, but Der fliegende Höllander is a sung opera. By which I mean Wagner almost totally dispenses with any idea of naturalism and makes it a condition of the characters that they sing of their life. The Helmsman sings a song of longing for return to land and the love of the woman waiting for him, the women sing while they work, Senta relates the myth of the Dutchman in a song, Act III features a drunken boisterous singalong. It's a way of tying life up with myth in the ritual of song, because the opera is all about the power of myth (and Wagner) to change the world. That's what Senta recognises, that is what sets her apart from the other women - and indeed men, her father dreaming only of wealth - giving her the strength to believe in herself.

Sheil gets that and he gets that Wagner provides everything that is needed in the score. As conductor he gets the right mood for every scene, knowing when to slow the pace down for contemplation, when to let an edge of tension and horror creep in, and when to deliver an effective dramatic or emotional punch. That goes hand in hand with the stage direction here. The raising of the tattered, drenched red sails from the depths of the dark ocean below the stage, dripping water in an eery silence, is just such a moment. The choral challenge of the townspeople to the ghostly crew of the Flying Dutchman is another, loud and boisterous, resulting in a flaming torch being thrown and setting the sails alight. (The fire fortunately a projection this time after an earlier fire alarm resulted in an evacuation from the theatre during the interval). All of this - and elsewhere too - established a highly charged atmosphere, not least in the powerful conclusion with the child Senta being winched out of the sea.

All of which might raise a question over Senta’s lifestyle choices, but there are answers waiting to be found there if you want to take the time to think about it. But you didn't need to. The power of Wagner's opera (one that I'm increasingly coming around to consider underrated in as far as measuring up against his great masterpieces) needs no interpretation or translation. The strength of the singing is certainly another vital aspect in getting that across and Giselle Allen's Senta, Jordan Shanahan's Dutchman, James Creswell's Daland and Toby Spence's Erik all fulfilled all those roles admirably as did Carolyn Dobbin as Mary and Gavan Ring as the Steersman, but it's the INO's note-perfect account of the musical interpretation and the mood of Wagner's work - a supreme account of the power of mythology and practically a legend in its own right - that leaves the necessary lasting impression.

External links: Irish National Opera

Britten - The Turn of the Screw (Brussels, 2021)

Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw (Brussels, 2021)

La Monnaie-De Munt, 2021

Ben Glassberg, Andrea Breth, Ed Lyon, Sally Matthews, Henri de Beauffort, Katharina Bierweiler, Carole Wilson, Julian Hubbard, Giselle Allen

La Monnaie Streaming/Opera Vision, April 2021

Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw perfectly captures the mood and character of the chillingly sinister original Henry James story, but just as importantly it captures much of the psychological mystery and ambiguity within the ghostly tale. A director can enhance or emphasise certain elements of that ambiguity, but it shouldn't reveal too much. Britten's perfect score and the wonderful writing for the voice are more than enough to bring out the deeper character and suggestion that lies within it. 

Andrea Breth does that quite well in the 2021 La Monnaie production, placing the emphasis more on the expression of the horror deriving from the inner delusions of the impressionable governess, but it's not without suggesting that there is indeed something to her fears. The opera certainly hints at dark events, at the loss of childhood innocence and the corrupting influence of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel and the harmful legacy they have left over the children.

The first thing that strikes you in the opening scene of this production - as it perhaps should more than any obvious input or emphasis of the director - is the effect of the music and the mood it creates right from the outset. That has as much to do with Britten's score as with the meticulous performance of the La Monnaie orchestra under Ben Glassberg and by the singing of Sally Matthews as the Governess and Ed Lyon as the narrator. Both demonstrate a gorgeous tone with beautiful enunciation, but also delivering the content of the libretto with suggestion of the horror to unfold.

In setting, lighting and colouration, it's doesn't vary too much from convention and expectations, looking very much like every production of The Turn of the Screw looks. Dark, monochrome and austere, with cool lighting and plenty of shadow, but here director Andrea Breth allows several other spectral figures to appear on the stage. Even in the opening scene, Miss Jessel and a particularly demented looking Peter Quint already make an appearance, moving in and even taking over some of the narrator and the Governess's vocal lines, their influence over the whole tone of the work and what goes on in Bly already made evident.

It's also evident that Breth intends to extend that mood out and make visible some of the more hidden and suggestive undercurrents. Rather like the 2012-2016 Northern Ireland Opera production - back when we were fortunate to have an adventurous and ambitious artistic director of opera in Oliver Mears - this production uses panels, sliding doors and hidden rooms to open up the dark recesses of Bly or the Governess - take your pick: it's open for interpretation who is driving the psychosis that is rapidly escalating, or tightening like the turn of a screw.

It comes from a place "where things unspoken of can be', and Raimund Orfeo Voigt's sets shows the unspoken lying in wait everywhere to entrap. You can never remove the undercurrents of sexual repression of the Governess running up against the suggestion of sexual abuse of the children or some dark influence that they have been subjected to at the hands of Quint and Jessel, there is less of that made explicit in this production of the work. It's certainly hinted at, but if the emphasis in this production is principally within the mind of Governess, we can see that she doesn't have sufficient knowledge of such evil to imagine it playing out.

In some ways I even wonder if there is an angle there to be explored in The Turn of the Screw, and whether it is also important to retain adherence to the period in order to bring it out. There does seem to be a generational conflict in the changing times and attitudes, the older generation fearing the new, seeing it as decadent and corrupt, overturning traditional values. The Governess seems to be in-between, not comfortable with the past or the present, fearing for what lies ahead for the future generation. The loss of innocence that may already have happened and she feels powerless to intervene, or it may indeed be her misguided attempts at over-protectiveness that result in the tragic conclusion.

On a more general note, one of the policies I like about La Monnaie - aside from their adventurous programming and choice of directors - is how they retain a few strong performers on their books who are versatile and supremely capable in a number of varied roles and styles. Sally Matthews is just superb here as Governess, firm of voice, secure in range, but also capable of bringing real urgency and personality to a fairly complex character. Andrea Breth also fulfills perfectly the La Monnaie policy of modernising with purpose when it is appropriate to do so. Although this looks period in costume and set design - there are no mobile phones here - it uses modern techniques to extend the themes beyond the period, breaking down walls - quite literally - to work more closely with the music, not just the dramatic content of the libretto.

Musically too, the production is of an exceptionally high standard, as beautiful an account of this Britten work as you could hope for. Evidence of the quality of the performance is clear from the superb sound mixing that La Monnaie have captured for this streamed live recording. Every instrument can be heard, every little detail that adds to the character of the work, the voices rising clear above the orchestration with a natural theatrical sounding resonance. Aside from the already mentioned Ed Lyon and Sally Matthews then there is much to enjoy in the singing of Julian Hubbard as Quint and Giselle Allen - the quintessential Miss Jessel. Carole Wilson likewise is a fine Mrs Grose and there are good performances Henri de Beauffort and Katharina Bierweiler as Miles and Flora.

Links: La Monnaie-De Munt

Britten - The Turn of the Screw (NI Opera, 2016 - Belfast)

Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw

NI Opera, 2016

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Katie Bird, Garbhan McEnoy, Sam Furness, Giselle Allen, Yvonne Howard, Lucia Vernon-Long

Lyric Theatre, Belfast - 11 March 2016

There are many ways to explore and interpret the themes and the suggestion laid down by Benjamin Britten in his adaptation of Henry James' sinister little tale. Even in a revival of its 2012 production, NI Opera's The Turn of the Screw can reveal other facets of this endlessly fascinating little piece with a few changes of casting and a little tweak of directorial emphasis here and there. Essentially, the tone and the ambiguity of the production remain largely the same, but the whole idea of fear dominating the direction of the drama seemed to be more pronounced in a way that opened up other possibilities.

Fear, of course, is an integral part of what The Turn of the Screw is all about; it is a ghost story after all. It's perhaps not necessary though for the audience to feel fear in the way that a traditional ghost story sets out to do. That would actually be harder to achieve, since everyone has different things that scare them and evidently not everyone believes in ghosts. One of the other problems of this approach is that ghost stories aren't quite as scary when you know what is coming, and I have to admit that I didn't find this production quite as chilling as I remember it being four years ago. Despite this, the sense of fear in the 2016 revival of the production was palpable and effective in other ways.

The Turn of the Screw is more a study of fear than it is a traditional tale to scare the reader or the listener. Fear is contagious in the way that it spreads through Bly household here, and it isn't too much of stretch to consider it a model for how fear spreads in a wider community. Henry James didn't need to overstate the psychological implications of repressed impulses of the Governess in relation to the Victorian society of his time, and the wider implications don't need to be be spelled out for a modern audience either if the telling of the tale is true. When you have ghosts in a story this could present a problem, but the key to the story lies in how convincing we find the perspective and the actions of the Governess.

In as far as it was sung and played by Katie Bird, the importance of the role of the Governess as the propagator of fear in The Turn of the Screw is wonderfully effective. Fear, or at least anxiety that will later develop into fear, is evident from her first appearance on the stage just after the narrator's prologue. Will she like her new post? Will the children be nice? Will her employer be pleased with her? These concerns develop into a kind of over-protectiveness that infects Mrs Grose and leads, arguably, to a kind of mass hallucination that manifests the fear in the form of ghosts. Or it could be that the constant watching over Flora and Miles and pushing adult concerns down on them doesn't allow the children to be children.

What could be considered to be normal healthy behaviour for children, even if they are just a little bit naughty, is viewed with suspicion by the anxious Governess. It could be that the Governess, prompted by Mrs Grose's distaste for former employees, dredges up issues related to Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, conflates them with her own complexes and twists them in the minds of the children and the Governess into something more sinister. A lot of this is just speculation, and it's very much dependent upon what one wants to read into the work, but the greatness of The Turn of the Screw is that the ambiguity it creates around such situations allows events to be interpreted in a variety of ways.

It's harder to retain that sense of ambiguity on the stage, where concrete decisions and interpretations of one sort or another have to be made, but I think Oliver Mears' production manages to do this very well. I've already covered how the direct and simple stage designs work effectively to open up and close down the drama in my review of the original 2012 production at the Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey, and it still works here. What was great about the revival of the production, seen this time at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, was experiencing how well the singing and the musical performances were also attuned to project this sense of 'fear' consuming everyone who comes into contact with the Governess.

Principally, a lot of that was to do with Katie Bird's interpretation of the role. This was an outstanding singing performance that projected the fears of the Governess outward. There's a balance to be found between appearing to be neurotic or all out crazy and just letting anxiety break down the Governess's grip on reality, and Katie Bird covered that gradual disintegration almost imperceptibly. The Governess isn't aware of the fear she is sowing, believing her behaviour to be reasonable, proportionate, and indeed proper, but there's an edge of hysteria that becomes more and more apparent as events spiral and ghosts appear, and that was well integrated into the performance.

What is marvellous is not only could you detect this in how Bird sang and played the role, but the acoustics of the Lyric and Nicholas Chalmers' conducting allowed you hear how well Britten also scores and ramps up the tension, tightening the screw with little musical runs on the piano and the double bass. It's far from just eerie atmospherics and is suggestive of something much more complex in its psychology. Having just won an award for his ETO Hoffmann, Sam Furness was a good fit for this production's Peter Quint, while Giselle Allen reprised her chilling Miss Jessel. It's telling however that this production and the careful direction didn't allow either of the ghostly apparitions to overshadow Bird's Governess. Garbhan McEnoy brought a brittle vulnerability to Miles, working wonderfully alongside Lucia Vernon-Long's innocently teasing Flora to keep that delicious sense of ambiguity that is exploited so well on every level by NI Opera's still effective production of this ever intriguing work.

Links: NI Opera

Strauss - Salome (NI Opera, 2015 - Belfast)

Richard Strauss - Salome

NI Opera, 2015

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Giselle Allen, Michael Colvin, Robert Hayward, Heather Shipp, Adrian Dwyer, Carolyn Dobbin, Paul Curievici, Nick Sales, David Lynn, Conor Breen, Cormac Lawlor, Brendan Collins, Padraic Rowan, Rory Musgrave, Hayley Chilvers

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 6 & 8 February 2015

The Grand Opera House in Belfast has never seen anything like it. Oh, I'm sure it has seen its fair share of Oscar Wilde plays, theatrical violence and gore, and even a little bit of nudity on occasion, but almost certainly never together. It's in opera terms however that Salome is a new experience for audiences at the Grand Opera House. The Belfast opera-goer has - in my experience at least over the last 25 years - never been subjected to an opera as intense, shocking and set to a production challenging to both delicate and not-so-delicate sensibilities as last weekend's Salome. That's testament to the ability of Strauss's opera to still have such an impact over 100 years after it was written, but it's also an indication of how NI Opera has been steadily upping the dose of less common but vital works to wean the audience away from the relatively safe fare of Mozart and the Italian bel canto repertoire.

It's ironic in this respect that the two most challenging opera works to appear on the stage of the Grand Opera House under NI Opera's brief term of office, have been adaptations of Oscar Wilde plays - Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest and Strauss's Salome. Who would have thought that Oscar Wilde's gently amusing late-Victorian domestic dramas could still be the source of so much shock and subversion? What both operas have in common is the ability to translate the genuine transgressive and subversive challenges to conventional social, family and sexual mores of Wilde's period into a more modern context where they still have impact and relevance. The relative rarity of performances of Wilde's dramas perhaps indicates that the nature of opera, with its timeless musical language, seems to be better placed to present Wilde on the stage nowadays than traditional theatre.

Particularly when you see it done in a performance like this. The key towards representing Richard Strauss's Salome on the stage has always been that of preserving the essential mood. Strauss's score (a challenge in itself) represents the florid decadence and dark sensual undercurrents of Wilde's play to perfection - and takes it further - but there's a risk of losing some of the seething Oriental lusts and the subversive religious flavour of the work if it is taken out of its Biblical context. I personally haven't seen any production of Salome that has risked straying too far from its original setting, so it's surprising and very daring of Oliver Mears to do so for a Belfast audience by setting it in what looks like the protected and security monitored estate of a drug baron or corrupt wealthy businessman in the deep American south.
 

What is more surprising is not only does the work lose not a fraction of its dark intensity, but by divorcing the work from its Biblical setting it actually reveals much more of the intent and hidden meaning of Oscar Wilde's original play. Which, it seems, when performed as well as it is here, can only enhance what Strauss brings to the work musically. A lot of the reason for it being quite so powerful, it has to be said, has to do with the performance of the Ulster Orchestra, its numbers boosted here to take on Strauss's huge orchestral arrangements, as well as the impressive direction of Nicholas Chalmers to channel and deliver those forces at the appropriate points with subtle but devastating impact. Even though Belfast received its first ever staging of a Wagner opera last year (The Flying Dutchman), it has rarely witnessed musical forces wielded so powerfully in a fully staged opera as in these two NI Opera performances of Salome.

And when I say fully-staged, that is vital to the impact of any opera, particularly when the music, the staging and the performance work hand-in-hand. If the revealing of a dark underbelly of American society with suggestions of abuse and incestuous relationships within the family unit inevitably brings to mind the films of David Lynch, director Oliver Mears nonetheless carefully avoids the Krzysztof Warlikowski route of direct movie cross-over references. Likewise, Mears wisely sidesteps any local religious context, even if NI Opera are not afraid to risk the wrath of religious fundamentalists in the province with their last-minute announcement of a "content change" to introduce a dancer appearing nude for ten seconds into the production. While that didn't produce any serious controversy this time, it did result in predictable outrage from a few rent-a-quote extremists, clearly unfamiliar with the work, unable to recognise the irony of accusations of introducing 'sensuality' into a Biblical story that centres on the Dance of the Seven Veils. In any event it would turn out that there was nothing in any dance that could be as controversial as a fully-clothed blood-soaked Salome writhing on top of the decapitated head of John the Baptist at the finale.

There were nonetheless a few murmurs of surprise from the outset when the curtain rose on Friday night to reveal a near full-sized house with a roof, on the heavily guarded and high-fenced compound. In the house, a rather sleazy-looking bulging-waisted, balding Herod with his wife Herodias, dressed in a jump suit and heels like a character out of Dallas or Dynasty, preside over a rowdy dinner party. Guarding a yellow cistern, from which the booming voice of the prophet emanates, stand a nervous group of guards wearing cowboy hats, some stripped to the waist, carrying rifles. Seen through a large window, the seediness of the dining room setting, where a pawed-over and harassed Salome looks wistfully out at the moon, is characterised brilliantly by the boorish behaviour of Herod's Jewish guests. As they settle down to watch a projected porno movie after the meal, outside the house Salome pours her lustful thoughts out to the frightful masculinity and shocking pronouncements of the imprisoned prophet Jokanaan.

What this brings out is not so much any imposition of modern sensibilities onto old Biblical material - although that is a valid aim, and one that does update the relevance of the play - as much as bring you right back to the source material and consider what Wilde was saying about the hypocrisy of society and religion, repression of illicit sexual desires, and the corrupting influence of dysfunctional family life. By making you think about how that relates to Wilde's own secret life and how that comes out in his works ("Each man kills the thing he loves..."), it's not so much taking the work back to Victorian times, as much as doing exactly what Strauss does with his musical interpretation of the work. It's delving far beneath the surface drama - as torrid, violent and twisted as it is - to the darker places that those repressed human impulses arise from. Salome oversteps the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable (by anyone's standards - but all the more so here for effect), and as such, she must die, condemned by the hypocritical authorities.

It was amazingly premonitory and daring of Wilde to write like this - right before his conviction for 'unconventional' sexual practices and his death soon after. NI Opera's setting of the work, Mears direction, and particularly the performances, explore all the facets and the resonances of the source, and bring it out meaningfully and magnificently without having to make any direct references. Salome ought to be shocking, still ought to take your breath away in its approach to its subject matter, and musically it should pretty much hammer you into submission, and that is entirely the impact achieved in the NI Opera production. To do that, it also needs singers of ability and sheer nerve to not only take on the challenges represented by the characters, but even to surpass the content and rise over the vast orchestral surges and cacophonic flourishes that make these characters and their dark desires convincing and horribly compelling.

As Salome, Belfast soprano Giselle Allen demonstrated why she is also a big name on the international opera circuit, her voice powerful enough to carry over that huge orchestral sound arising from the pit. It was a performance however that was, as it needs to be, sensitive to the changing moods, dipping softly but still able to be heard, rising to anger and violent expression and sustaining that for a large part of the unbroken one hour and forty-five minutes of the one-act performance. As well as managing this with barely a waver of pitch, strong at every register (in a role that is testing at every register), Allen also brought a degree of subtlety and conviction to the characterisation in her revulsion towards Herod and in her wild desires for Jokanaan, with recognition that there is a connection between those two states. Everything about this performance was mesmerising - you couldn't take your eyes off her for a second. If you haven't got a Salome like that, you haven't got a Salome.

Fortunately, the NI Opera production also had a prophet of immense charisma in Robert Hayward's Jokanaan. A terrifying presence, booming even from within the cistern tank, his appearance on the stage, dripping grime, gravely intoning dire warnings of the the coming of the Son of God and apocalyptic damnation for all the sinners present created a tremendous impression, Hayward's huge voice carrying utter conviction as well as fanaticism. Heather Shipp's Herodias and Michael Colvin's Herod had a little more of a challenge at times rising above the orchestra - and the translated English text didn't always make their parts scan quite as well (or match Wilde's poetry) - but the performances were well-sung and delightfully characterised. Paul Curievici's First Jew and Adrian Dwyer's Narraboth stood out from an overall very strong supporting cast. If there were many things that the Grand Opera House has never seen the like of before in NI Opera's scandalous production of Salome, perhaps the most satisfying is that of largely home-grown talent like this being given the opportunity to really show what they can do.

Wagner - The Flying Dutchman

Richard Wagner - The Flying Dutchman

NI Opera, 2013

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Bruno Caproni, Giselle Allen, Stephen Richardson, Paul McNamara, Adrian Dwyer, Doreen Curran

Grand Opera House, Belfast, 15th & 17th February 2013


The outcome was never really in doubt.  NI Opera's award-winning track record has been impressive since their inception two years ago, the scale and calibre of the works presented increasingly ambitious, from Menotti's The Medium and Puccini's site-specific Tosca in Derry through to newly commissioned work for NI Opera Shorts and a production of Noye's Fludde that travelled to Beijing.  Putting on a Wagner opera however is a challenge on another scale entirely.  Even if Der Fliegende Holländer is one of the composer's shorter works, it is scarcely any less demanding in the very specific orchestral and singing requirements that are quite different from the popular aria-driven Italian opera.

Admittedly however, while the First Act of the English language version of The Flying Dutchman was capably performed here at the Grand Opera House in Belfast - the first ever fully-staged performance of the work in Northern Ireland - it did feel a little flat.  Something was missing.  Still, no cause for immediate concern.  The First Act of The Flying Dutchman is quite difficult, the stormy overture a prelude to a gloom-laden hour of long passages of deep, grave male singing - mostly basses and baritones - as the dark figure of the Dutchman recounts the horror of his curse, doomed to sail the seas for eternity, finding land again after seven years in the vain hope that the love of a good and faithful woman will set him free.  There's not a whole lot of light and shade here, much less dramatic action and, even with the familiarity now of Wagner's brilliant leitmotifs and their hints of what is to come, it's always been a fairly demanding opening sequence.

Like much of Wagner though you just have to bear with it, as the forthcoming rewards more often than not merit the long drawn-out pacing and slow development of situations.  (And yes, I realise that this review seems to be adopting the same principle - long-windedly positing doom and gloom with the promise of redemption to come).  That's because Wagner has a secret weapon in reserve for the Second Act, which is the arrival of Senta.  It's a device that Wagner would unleash in a more fluid manner in the revised version of the opera - played straight through with linking sections and no breaks between acts - but if you listen carefully she's there in a leitmotif during the Vorspiel to Act One.  Recognising this, NI Opera's production did indeed effectively and with musical validity try to lift the First Act by bringing forward Senta's first appearance to the dreamily melancholic Senta leitmotif in the overture, the young woman walking across a stormy shoreline as the snow starts to fall.  And it even sounded to me like conductor Nicholas Chalmers wrung an extra ounce of romantic sensitivity out of the Ulster Orchestra during this sequence.  Despite the dramatic shortcomings then and musical unevenness of the weighty first Act (Daland and the Dutchman's duet sounding like something that has wandered in from an Italian opera) with a staging was unable to give it any kind of boost, this nonetheless boded promisingly for what was to come.

We had to wait until after the interval then for the deployment of Wagner's incendiary device, but NI Opera clearly also had one or two secret weapons of their own in their armoury to ensure that this Dutchman took flight.  One was the remarkable performance of Giselle Allen as Senta, the other was the energetic drive and virtuosity of the Ulster Orchestra.  OK, nothing there that will really come as any great surprise to those of us familiar with the qualities Northern Ireland's finest, but the way they were brought into play was impressive nonetheless.  You could virtually hear a sigh of relief from the audience as the curtain lifted on what looked like a church assembly hall in the 1970s - a bright, colourful scene-shift from the gloom of Act One - where the ladies sat spinning at their Singer sewing machines, the beauty of the assembled female voices soaring with optimism and hope that the sea would deliver the safe return of their men.

Doreen Curran's glowering Mary wonderfully kept the proceedings from getting too cheery, but it was of course the ringing tones of Giselle Allen's Senta whose romantic spinning of the tale of the cursed captain and his crew dominated and directed the whole tone of the Second Act.  Responding to the urgings of her fellow seamstresses, this Senta did indeed seem to be possessed by a demon, sitting down and seeming to slip into a trance as she recounted the myth of the Flying Dutchman.  Much as Chalmers managed to place some emphasis on the Vorspiel's dreamy Senta leitmotif, stage director Oliver Mears similarly allowed Senta's romanticism to invade the whole work whenever she was present, allowing the necessary spell to be woven that would make the Dutchman's arrival - and the long silent gaze that lies between them - all the more dramatic.  Retaking the same positions into this locked gaze after their duet, it was as if the romanticism of the encounter takes place in more in Senta's head than in reality.

Dramatically then, as well as in the all-important delivery of the exceptional singing demands that are necessary to make this work convincingly, NI Opera's The Flying Dutchman succeeded at least in finding the right tone.  It even allowed for one or two moments of humour to sit well alongside all the weighty recounting of ancient legends, such as Senta's father Daland approving of the couple making each other's acquaintance while they are in the middle of a hot-and-heavy, passionate, sweeping-everything-off-the-table kind of entanglement on the nearest available substitute for a bed.  Quite why the setting of the seventies was chosen however wasn't entirely clear.  There didn't appear to be any real attempt to connect the legend of the Dutchman to the Troubles, even if there is a certain amount of recognition of Belfast's history as a port and ship-building city.  There's no obligation of course for NI Opera to make every local production site-specific, and attempting to do so with Wagner could lead to some ill-advised and ill-fitting parallels that would never work convincingly (Senta a militant activist waiting for the delivery of an arms shipment?  The homeless "Dutchman" seeking to rid himself of the curse of his nation's occupation?), so perhaps allowing the work to speak for itself in the 70s is enough.  It certainly worked on those terms alone.

Well, not quite alone.  Both the male and the female choruses were in wonderful voice and with the driving accompaniment of the orchestra, their powerful contribution to the impact of the overall work was well directed and delivered.  Crucially however there were also solid performances from the main roles in Bruno Caproni's brooding Dutchman and Giselle Allen's obsessive Senta.  The Belfast soprano sustained a magnificent tension right the second act and the close of the third, a veritable Senta-bomb that exploded on the stage of the Grand Opera House in a blood-drenched death scene climax of nerve-shattering high notes.  If my own reaction is anything to go by, the audience were surely gasping for breath by that point.  If you can't achieve that kind of impact doing Wagner though, there's really no point even attempting it, but when you have Giselle Allen and the Ulster Orchestra at your disposal and operating on the kind of form shown here, there was never likely to be any serious concern about the outcome.

NI Opera Shorts

Various - NI Opera Shorts

NI Opera, 2012

Fergus Sheil, Rachel O’Riordan, Giselle Allen, Alex Connolly, Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones, Mary McCabe, Eamonn Mulhall, Aaron O’Hare, Gemma Prince, Marcella Walsh

The MAC Belfast, 29 June 2012

Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill.
Jackie’s Taxi by Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg.
The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly by Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness.
Driven by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer.
May Contain Flash Photography by Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty.

The most ambitious project undertaken yet by the recently formed NI Opera, following an award-winning season that wasn’t exactly short of innovation or experimentation - NI Opera Shorts is a bold venture into the risky territory of contemporary opera. Commissioned as part of the London 2012 Festival celebrations around the summer Olympics, NI Opera Shorts consists of five new short opera works - each running for no more than 15 to 20 minutes - showcasing the work of five local composers, written with local, UK and Irish playwrights. Despite the considerable differences between them in terms of approach, style and tone, there was however a remarkable consistency and coherency that arose out of bringing them together in this way, a fact undoubtedly due to a large extent to the creative team’s vision of the concept and the exceptional performances of the singers and the Ulster Orchestra.

Each of the five short works however has its own dramatic impact, particularly when condensed down into the highly-charged form of the opera short. Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill has perhaps the most intense experience in terms of its subject and how it relates most directly to the Troubles, but it’s also extraordinarily ambitious in how it concentrates all complex history and emotional content of that experience into one day and into 15-20 minutes of musical and vocal expression. Dealing with the reaction of one family to a British soldier found wounded on the street, the fear, suspicion, hatred and pain is felt on both sides, mixed in with deeper natural human feelings of grief, loss and compassion that have been suppressed or twisted beyond all recognition. Ravenhill sets this one moment of concentrated feeling moreover on one day in 1972 - at the height of the Troubles when, like that famous Christmas football match on the WWI trenches, all Northern Ireland stopped and came together to celebrate the Olympic gold medal win of Mary Peters, a positive moment of beauty, amazement and achievement that throws the twisted reality of what is happening on the streets into perspective.

The raw emotion of that moment is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level of tension - I could feel myself clenched up in my seat - as guns are waved and shot, as voices are pitched against each other in hatred and fury almost to the level of a scream, with Conor Mitchell’s discordant and aggressively disturbing atonal accompaniment matching the extremity of all those complex, contradictory feelings compressed into such a small time-frame. It put me in mind of Strauss’ Elektra for the intensity of feeling, and dissection of moment-to-moment conflicting emotions, and I daresay you could even apply twisted family archetypes to the arrangement of the protagonists, so rich in allusion is the piece. A large part in putting this across relied on singers being pushed to their limits, and really, the work of Giselle Allen, Marcella Walsh and Eamonn Mulhall was extraordinarily powerful and genuinely chilling.

Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg’s Jackie’s Taxi is, by contrast, much more up to the minute with the everyday reality on the streets of contemporary Belfast. It may throw in all the expected topical buzzwords of Facebook, blogs and references to Steve Jobs, but it does so in a way that is specific to present-day Belfast - or at least certain parts of it. I never thought I’d see the day when Belfast hoods, millies and spides would appear on an opera stage, but Jackie’s Taxi successfully manages to do that, and do it in a naturalistic way that doesn’t feel too forced or over-dramatised. The language is appropriately as colourful as the subject matter. Sung in English, in chanted lines with strong Belfast accents, it wasn’t always easy to follow the narrative context - something to do with a taxi driver who makes a few drug deliveries on the side complaining about the hazards of her profession and the standard of her clientele - but musically, with Ed Bennett’s Steve Reich-like percussive rhythms, Jackie’s Taxi captured the Belfast beat much better than any of the other pieces, without having to resort to evoking folk or traditional arrangements. In the music, you can sense the pulse of Belfast, the tension and aggression, the humour and the tendency to enjoy a good moan and it fitted perfectly with the use of language and the content, the staging and choreography ensuring that the piece functioned fully in operatic terms.

I felt that this comprehensive operatic dimension that was evident in the first two pieces, was missing from Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness’s The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly. McGuinness is one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, and his evocation of two parents commemorating the death of their daughter at the site where she jumped to her death from a motorway bridge was beautiful in its concision as a short drama piece. The monologues of the two characters interweave without ever fully connecting, reflecting how each of them is caught up in the torment of their own shattered lives, caught up in a dance of death and despair that holds them together yet keeps them separate. Those sentiments are expressed just as lyrically in Christopher Norby’s Avro Pärt-like score, but it all felt too interiorised and the whole piece never came together in operatic or dramatic terms, the two singers - finely sung by Doreen Curran and Paul Carey Jones, the voices beautifully arranged for the score - looking out for the most part towards the audience over the motorway. The sound of passing cars and the daughter’s voice added additional textures and tone to the work, but if there was a wider dimension to the relating of the circumstances to the daughter’s death, it was difficult to grasp from this single performance.

Evidence however that a dramatic monologue can be operatically expressive (in the manner of Schoenberg’s monodrama Ewartung or Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank) was provided here by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer’s Driven. Like Mitchell and Ravenhill’s Our Day, the success of the work lies in how it bridges the complex relationship between the interior and the external, between what drives one to unfathomable actions in response to a distorted view of nature that has been corrupted by war. Driven relates to the figure of Blair Mayne, a highly-decorated soldier who survived dangerous WWII operations and was named as a threat by Hitler, yet this man comes to meet his death driving a red Riley car at speed down a road in County Down. Entering into the mindset of Mayne, the inner conflict, the nightmarish visions that plague him, his attempts to come to terms with his experiences was powerfully expressed by Eamonn Mulhall and vividly put across through his pacing on the all-purpose staging through effective choreography and lighting. The whole piece was given a perfect musical expression in McKay’s driving Nyman-esque chugging cellos and blaring brass that blended the furious churning of memories and impressions with the momentum of the speeding car. An occasional lilt of traditional Irish arrangements could be detected underlying parts of the score - the only work to draw from such sources - but it was used meaningfully and lyrically in the context of the work. For a monodrama to work so well, it demands a compelling performance on the part of the singer and the orchestra and Driven was consummately dramatic, operatic and emotionally charged.

Drama was predominately to the fore in Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty’s May Contain Flash Photography, but coming from the pen of one of Northern Ireland’s foremost and most successful contemporary playwrights, that’s not unexpected. The strength of McCafferty’s writing here is the same as in his regular dramas, finding an authentic tone and language for the province’s sense of humour and tying it into a peculiarly absurdist outlook that reflects the self-awareness of hopeless cases who would like to believe that somehow they can overcome the odds - as many have done - but somehow realise the dream itself can be more than enough. Here in May Contain Flash Photography, a family watch a curious alternate-reality lottery where the balls relate to emotions, colours and materials rather than to numbers, hoping that the winning combination will change their lives. The humour is a little hit and miss (and not always each to catch on a single run-through), but humour is difficult to achieve in an opera in any case, particularly in such a short piece. It’s fairly ambitious however to attempt this with a relatively large cast of six characters, all of whom have distinct dreams and expression, but the interaction was exceptionally good. Musically, I wouldn’t have thought a Britten-like style of scoring would have worked in such a context, but Brian Irvine fitted the musical arrangements to the drama very well, the composer particularly strong in bringing the whole range of voices, feelings and overlapping monologues together into a harmonious whole.

What was most memorable about the NI Opera Shorts however wasn’t the quality of the individual contributions, but the sheer variety and the broadness of the scope that they covered. It was thrilling to see the diverse range of ideas that these individual voices brought to the project - an impressive showcase of contemporary Northern Irish opera work that one would rarely have the opportunity to hear performed - but despite the wide spread of musical and dramatic approaches, there was actually a wonderfully complementary diversity to the project as a whole that reflected so many aspects of Northern Irish history, personality and culture. A lot of credit for allowing that to happen has to go to the NI Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears for pulling this hugely ambitious work together and to the stage director Rachel O’Riordan, who met the considerable challenge of making one stage set suit five very different works, but also found the most effective means of putting each of them across in terms of mood and theatrical presentation.

The highest credit of all however must be given to Fergus Shiel and the Ulster Orchestra who brought these short intense works fully to life in all their rhythmic and lyrical complexity as well as their often difficult serial discordance, switching tone between one work and the next with scarcely a pause other than to adjust to the varied instrumental requirements of each piece. In the relatively small venue of the newly opened Belfast MAC, the audience were able to witness the intricacy of the orchestra’s performance of those arrangements, and it was impressive to behold. The intimacy of the venue (one hopes it will be used again for similarly smaller-scale and even local operatic works in the future) means that there is nowhere to hide any weaknesses, and in this respect the singing of such difficult works must also be judged to be of the highest order, with some fine new talent on display as well as the reliable strengths of Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones and Giselle Allen. I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything that the recently formed NI Opera have put on, but with the opening work of their second season, they continue to take on fresh new challenges. Their most ambitious project so far, NI Opera Shorts was another resounding success.

Britten - The Turn of the Screw

Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw

NI Opera, 2012

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Fiona Murphy, Andrew Tortise, Giselle Allen, Yvonne Howard, Lucia Vernon, Thomas Copeland

Theatre at the Mill, Newtownabbey, 2 March 2012

There was nothing too clever attempted in NI Opera’s new production of The Turn of the Screw, certainly nothing as ambitious as their award-winning production ofTosca on the walls of Derry City, but Britten’s atmospheric little chamber piece doesn’t really need anything more than an intimate environment to achieve optimum effect, and that was certainly achieved with the choice of venue at the Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey. The attention to detail then was in letting the music and libretto of this powerful little piece speak for itself, and with the benefit of an excellent cast of fine singers that was admirably achieved.

This is the third production from the recently formed NI Opera that I’ve seen at the Theatre at the Mill (with only one production so far, Hansel and Gretel, at the more traditional venue of the Grand Opera House in Belfast), and while one of those productions was a scaled-down romp through Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (in conjunction with Scottish Opera), the venue has been particularly well-suited to the theatrical intimacy of something like Menotti’s The Medium and now with Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. The smaller-scale staging of course makes the works suitable for touring – an important remit of the opera company to attract new audiences from traditionally neglected parts of the province – but it’s also the best way to introduce an audience to the close relationship between a music score and a theatrical performance that takes expression to another level, and in that respect The Turn of the Screw is perhaps the most challenging of the NI Opera productions thus far.

Henry James’s novella is well-enough known, adapted numerous times for TV and cinema, and highly influential in the field of Victorian ghost stories because of the dark ambiguities that lie at the heart of the work. The story of a Governess who is engaged to look after two children, Flora and Miles, on a country estate, there are disturbing hints of child abuse or at least bad influence in the children’s relationship with two former servants, Quint and Miss Jessel, who had been engaged there previously. The Governess, half in love with the guardian of the children but forbidden from disturbing from his work in the city on any pretext, seems to conjure the spirits of the malevolent former servants – both now dead – partly out of concern for strange behaviour she witnesses in the children, partly from her own repressed urges at the suggestion of Quint and Miss Jessel’s scandalous behaviour, and partly as an excuse to get in touch with the children’s guardian.

Nothing however can be pinned-down to simple cause and effect in The Turn of the Screw and there’s no easy separation of rational and supernatural. All of what happens could be caused by the projections of the mind of the Governess, her behaviour, repression, suspicion and hysteria (heighted by stories told to her by housekeeper Mrs Grose) and her desire to protect the innocence of the children from baser adult desires (that she herself is subject to), in turn creating its own pernicious stifling repressive atmosphere. Or it could indeed be that she and the children do indeed operate under the influence of past events instigated by Quint and Miss Jessel, who are shown as ghosts and apparitions who appear throughout the work and seem to interact with the children, awakening troubling memories.

The Turn of the Screw is by no means then an easy work on a narrative or musical level, particularly for a newer audience in a non-traditional venue for an opera, but the power of the work and its ability to provoke and unsettle can surely be felt by anyone. It’s not just about creating effects with half-glimpsed apparitions in dark rooms, but it’s rather in the haunting motifs of the score and the singing that other ambiguities and unsettling ideas are suggested. If the set designed by Annemarie Woods for the NI Opera production tended towards functional minimalism, and the direction of Oliver Mears didn’t seem to attempt to add any new conceptual spin to the story, it was all the more to allow the score to speak of these ambiguities itself and not point the listener towards any safe or easy conclusion.

The sets in fact, were highly effective, not only suggesting mood and location with the shifting of walls, doors and windows, but in their arrangement being capable of opening up space or closing it down with suffocating angles. Mears directorial touches did emphasise some unnatural closeness developing in the physical contact between the Governess and Miles, but this relationship with the younger boy is undoubtedly a crucial aspect of the work, certainly in as far as it concerns Britten and his own inclinations (or indeed those of Henry James), and it shouldn’t be overlooked. At the same time, it didn’t attempt to impose a definitive reading, and it’s left – as it should be – to each member of the audience to draw their own conclusions. The Turn of the Screw can indeed be just a ghost story if that’s all you want to see in it, and Britten’s music can be seen as purely spectrally unsettling as well as being suggestive of other abstract notions and concepts.

While the score – brilliantly performed by the orchestra under the direction of Nicholas Chalmers – and the setting for the drama provided much to consider in its own terms, they were most successful in the relationship it formed with the singers. Really, the singing in all the principal roles was beyond reproach, with Fiona Murphy pushing all the ambiguities of the role of the Governess with some fine singing, Andrew Tortise a seductively dangerous Quint, and Giselle Allen reprising the role of Miss Jessel that she performed last year to such powerful effect at Glyndebourne. Yvonne Howard however deserves special mention for Mrs Grose, one of the best singers I’ve heard in the role. The children also, critical to the whole ambiguity between innocence and experience in the opera were, were played well by Lucia Vernon and particularly young Thomas Copeland, who sang Miles wonderfully, his refrain of ‘Malo’ simultaneously wistful, regretful and sinister, and his famous condemnation of Quint at the finale was powerfully effective.