Remember last year's Garth Brooks Croke Park fiasco? Some 240,000 tickets were sold in 90 minutes, and an extra 160,000 later added, for shows that would never take place. Dedicated fans know what they want, and are quick to snap it up.
There’s not much in the classical music world to compare with that level of interest, although demand for tickets at the Bayreuth and Glyndebourne festivals has at times been so high that people have waited years before managing to secure a ticket.
Here in Ireland, back in the years of the Celtic Tiger and for a while after, Wexford Festival Opera was the closest we had to the Bayreuth-style phenomenon. The festival itself fanned the flames, as the dates on which it announced it was booked out came earlier and earlier in the year. There was almost a whiff of the black arts about anyone who could secure a seat after that announcement had been made.
Those good days are long gone. Post-recession blues wiped out a third of the festival’s performances. Back in 2008, at the first festival held in the newly built opera house, the three main productions ran for 18 nights, as they had since 1991. In 2009 things skipped back through the decades to just 12 nights, the same as in 1988.
It’s not a like-for-like comparison, of course. The new opera house, branded this year as the National Opera House, has a capacity of about 40 per cent higher than the old Theatre Royal. So 12 nights in the new house can accommodate about as many patrons as 17 nights in the old theatre.
Demand for tickets at Wexford has been recovering, and if you're looking to get to any of this year's weekend performances of the main operas – Delius's Koanga, Mascagni's Guglielmo Ratcliff and Hérold's Le Pré aux clercs – you're out of luck. They're already sold out, as are a number of the piano-accompanied ShortWorks performances of Puccini's Tosca. The other ShortWorks operas – Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel and Massenet's Portrait of Manon – will be your best option. With six weeks to the opening night, booking for the main operas is currently at over 95 per cent. Try your luck at wexfordopera.com, 053-9122144.
The change down to 12 from 18 nights was not a smooth transition. An 18-night festival was announced in November 2008. The contraction to 12 nights was made public in March 2009 and a revised line-up of operas was revealed the following May.
The commitment and dedication of Wexford fans should not be under-estimated. After the change of dates I was contacted by an irate German friend who found himself in the position of having booked non-refundable travel to Ireland and accommodation in Wexford for dates on which there would be no opera.
And Wexford has made the change again, this time in relation to 2016. At the end of July, nearly four months earlier than usual, the festival announced dates for next year. There was a change of pattern. Instead of ending on the first Sunday in November, the festival would now end on the October bank holiday Monday.
Last week, the festival announced that “due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts,” the new dates were being revised back to the earlier pattern, and the opening night was moved back six days.
The explanation I was given was that the problem “centred on the availability of off-site venues during what would have been the rehearsal period” and that other businesses in the town had also expressed concerns about the new dates.
There’s actually a similarity with the Garth Brooks concerts. Just as Aiken Promotions presumed that its ill-fated Garth Brooks gigs would be facilitated by some kind of rule-bending exercise, Wexford Festival Opera seems to have presumed that it would be given access to facilities that other businesses rent out.
Rocky ride in Queen’s
At the other end of the country, the Belfast Festival at Queen’s has had a much rockier ride than Wexford, and the very future of the festival has been in doubt more times than anyone cares to remember.
The historic link of more than half a century between the festival and Queen’s University was finally broken earlier this year when Queen’s announced that it was no longer going to provide funding for the event.
However, the festival's main commercial sponsor, Ulster Bank, has remained on board, and the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's of 2014 has been replaced by the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival in 2015. It will run from October 9th to November 1st.
As far as classical music goes, the offerings are a pale shadow of former glories. They embrace concerts directly from the Ulster Orchestra’s subscription season rather than the independent programming of yore.
Other tie-ins include the Belfast Music Society's Northern Lights Mini-Fest (a showcase of young, local talent), three BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists Concerts, and NI Opera's Calixto Bieito production of Puccini's Turandot (with a health warning about "graphic scenes" and an age restriction of 16 and over). The headline concert is an evening of left-handed piano music played by Nicholas McCarthy, who was born one-handed in 1989 and is making his Irish debut.
The most essential prerequisite for success, of course, is survival. And against what often looked like insurmountable odds, the Belfast Festival is still with us. It’s an achievement not everyone would have believed possible.
- mdervan@irishtimes.com
