A round-up of reviews from the arts world
La Bohème at Castleward Opera
Director Tom Hawkes and designer David Craig have taken some effective and refreshing licenses with Puccini's classic tear-jerker, due in part to the constraints of Castleward's stableyard theatre.
Act two dispenses with the children's chorus, and is set within Café Momus rather than on the street outside.
Though that brings new twists to some of the action, it's much the most logical option when the crowd scene has to be so tightly packed. And because the stage can be reached only via an exposed flight of descending steps, Rodolfo quite sensibly inhabits a basement instead of an attic.
Pragmatism aside, there are novelties of a purely entertaining kind.
The Parisian setting is updated from dingy 1830s slums to an artier style of low-life in the roaring twenties. Schaunard makes his first appearance in drag and there's a bawdy-house aura to much of the act two lighting and costume.
In a gloriously risque portrayal of Musetta, Chloë Wright (who's no newcomer to the role) delivers with ebullience.
Dominant at just the right moments, she's the ideal foil to prima donna Anna-Clare Monk - a silvery-voiced first-time Mimi who with unaffected artistry and a natural grace makes the part quite specially her own.
Most of the cast are experienced Bohemians. Despite some conservatism at the top of his range, Wynne Evans is vibrant-toned and likeable as Rodolfo, while his sidekicks Marcello (Daniel Broad), Schaunard (Adrian Powter) and Colline (Pauls Putnis) sing with complementary seriousness, richness, and tender gravity.
Initially, some perhaps overdone stage buffoonery was accompanied by an uneasy urgency in the orchestra, but the pace soon settled, with conductor Brian MacKay securing musical and close- grained timbres from his concentrated cluster of players. Andrew Johnstone
Until June 24th
.Rosanna Cash at Whelans
New Yorker Richard Julien offered pedestrian support to the woman who came to Dublin for her first gig, laden with expectation, and brimful of magnificent songs, all of her own making. Julien loiters at a curious crossroads where the languid observations of Michael Franks intersect with the worldweary cynicism of Randy Newman, though lyrically his songs failed to reach the heights of either.
Cash might come swathed in history and genealogy but she had barely ricocheted through her opening slingshot Runaway Train before she set herself and her band the task of some damn fine electricity-making.
The cosiness of the venue stoked the temperature and she stealthily coaxed her audience to join her as she peeled layer after layer of her life, from the sweetheart romance of her parents' courting days Radio Operator to the title song off her most recent collection, Black Cadillac.
That song that presaged the loss she would experience with the deaths of her father, her mother and her stepmother in a two-year period.
Cash is unmistakeably life- worn, even her body movements reflecting a history that's been wracked with crises, though the precision of her lyricism reflects a spirited writer in her element with words.
Backed by husband and guitarist John Leventhal and a tight trio of musicians, she navigated the wide open plains of the heart, detouring for an impromptu reading of Remember Me, then rocking out to Johnny Cash's Little Tennessee Flat-top Box.
She attempted to leave us with an emotional reading of 40 Shades Of Green, having excised its overt sentimentality and replaced it with a keener affection, but the Cash magnetism lured one final gem from her swag, The Good Intent. A gloriously heady night of music. Siobhán Long
Galway Baroque Singers, RTÉCO/Ó Duinn at the NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Overture, Marriage of Figaro; Venite populi; Vesperae de dominica
Orff - Carmina Burana
The sex in Carmina Burana is tinged with nostalgia. The anonymous, 13th-century Latin texts set by Carl Orff in his popular 1937 work celebrate youth and longing and the first-time awakening of powerful feelings.
Not only just about everyone in Friday night's audience, but also every member of the 70-strong Galway Baroque Singers can no doubt remember what that awakening felt like.
There was quite a buzz in the National Concert Hall.
I believe this collective reminiscence on both sides of the platform can - and here did - add a certain happy wistfulness, a joyful nostalgia, to what was already an exciting performance of these refreshingly forthright verses in Orff's percussive, repetition-led settings.
Conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn tapped into this spirit, unleashing a full-voiced RTÉ Concert Orchestra and drawing out of the singers all the bite and energy necessary to make 800-year-old words come to life and sound as though they had been penned yesterday.
He made the most of contrast in adjacent movements and the build-up to the final return of the famous O Fortuna chorus had a nicely hair-raising edge of anticipation to it.
Soloists Robin Tritschler, in a subtly comic account of the lament of the roasted swan, and baritone Eddie Wade, in fine voice standing in at short notice for the indisposed George Mosley, as a whining, lonely lover, ideally complemented the large-scale forces.
Soprano Cara O'Sullivan may have suffered a slight vocal catch in her high-D at the climax of Dulcissime, but it hardly lessened the impact, such was the slow-boil preceding it over several movements and the way O'Sullivan's sweet-toned, sensuous account of the young girl's narrative finally gave way to a vocal abandon to match the abandon of the text.
In utter contrast, the concert began with music to mark Mozart's 250th anniversary.
After Ó Duinn led the Concert Orchestra in a quicksilver reading of the Figaro overture, the choir demonstrated their customary high standards of tone, blend and musicianship in two lesser-known works. Michael Dungan
