Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Tomorrow-Sun Mar 7 10-120 1890-673727
It’s a busy week. Finghin Collins takes on the challenges of that most notoriously daunting of 19th-century piano concertos, Brahms’s Second, with the Ulster Orchestra under Kenneth Montgomery in Belfast on Friday. In Dublin on the same night, Gerhard Markson returns to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for a major contribution to the Schumann bicentenary celebrations. His performance of the composer’s rarely heard
Das Paradies und die Peri
, a secular oratorio inspired by Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, features the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and soloists Sinéad Mulhern, Claudia Boyle, Anne Marie Gibbons, Rachel Kelly, Bernard Richter, Dean Power, and Philip O’Reilly.
Mezzo soprano Tara Erraught gets the NCH stage to herself for this year’s Rising Star recital on Monday, in a programme that includes Solfa Carlile’s Sounds, the winner of this year’s Jerome Hynes Composers Competition. The new Cramer Consort under Colm Carey make their debut in a programme of MacMillan, Palestrina and Leighton at TCD Chapel on Tuesday.
Pride of place, however, goes to Opera Ireland, with the company offering an unusual season that couples a new production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette(last presented by the company in 1945, when it was still the Dublin Grand Opera Society), and two concert performances of a work new to its repertoire, Bellini's I Capuleti e I Montecchi. Nathalie Manfrino and Michael Spyres are the lovers in the Gounod, which is directed by Opera Theatre Company's artistic director, Annelies Miskimmon, making her Opera Ireland debut. The designer is Leslie Travers and the conductor Jerôme Pillement.
The Romeo and Juliet in the Bellini are, in the strange ways of opera, both women – Bernarda Bobro (replacing the originally announced Jessica Pratt) and Fiona Murphy; the conductor is Manlio Benzi.
