Today's offerings are for opera lovers.

Bastien and Bastienne

Civic Theatre, Tallaght

Mozart's Bastien and Bastienneis a good vehicle for youthful voices, and three of Opera Theatre Company's young associate artists do it proud in the company's touring production that opened at the Civic Theatre. Written when the composer was aged only 12, this short bucolic Singspiel consists of a brief overture (which includes the phrase that Beethoven would open his Eroica Symphonywith 35 years later), 11 arias, two duets and a trio.

Bastienne, the heroine, gets the lion's share of the music and soprano Claudia Boyle performs the part delightfully. Her sweet soprano is enhanced by clear diction and she delivers the spoken dialogue with conviction. Her range of facial expressions helps to convey the character's frequent mood swings between melancholy and petulance.

Bastien, her tenor swain, is a stick of a role that offers very little for a performer to grab onto, but Andrew Boushell's easy stage presence and youthful good looks make the lad almost believable.

Vocally he offers a drier sound than his partner, although he warms considerably in the love duet at the end. Colas, a rustic rake with designs on Bastienne's virtue, is played by Gavan Ring, a 20-year-old whose already quite mature baritone belies his age. He is also an adept comedian.

Andrew Synnott is a supportive accompanist, although from my seat across the theatre the actual sound of the upright piano lacked presence. Dramatically, the opera has very little going for it, but Annilese Miskimmon's deft production keeps the interest alive with lots of inventive comic business. The action is updated to the present time and staged in David Craig's tractor-dominated farmyard set.

The un-credited spoken dialogue is bang up-to-the-minute, very competently spoken by all three artists, and altogether more racy than the staid English translation of the sung lyrics.

Continues on tour until Sat 5 July

JOHN ALLEN

Alfie Boe: made for opera

Boe, RTÉCO/Brophy

NCH, Dublin

Picture a young Michael Douglas who speaks like Mick McCarthy. And however hard that mix is to imagine, now try adding a nice tenor voice. It's the English tenor Alfie Boe who was making his Irish début with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in its ongoing Signature Series.

Handsome and suave, comfortable in front of an audience, he is made for opera and yet appears to have sung in just two productions, notably Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann's La bohèmewhich did nine months on Broadway. In November, he sings in Elektraat Covent Garden.

In the meantime, with three classical chart-topping CDs, he is a successful and well-managed, well-packaged concert tenor who here performed a programme that included arias from some of the operas in which perhaps he hopes some day to appear. A pleasing prospect.

He was tender in Cavaradossi's death-row reflections "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca, avoiding the sobbing excesses of the Italian stereotype. There was both anxiety and resolve in Lensky's pre-duel aria from Tcaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and a reserved bittersweetness in "La fleur que tu m'avais jetée" from Carmen. Boe's range has a consistency of quality from his baritone-like low register up to the controlled high C which rang out at the end of "Salut! Demeure chaste et pure" from Gounod's Faust.

The concert's second-half offered more of sentiment than of substance, and Boe sounded right at home in Neopolitan-style songs by Tosti, Bixio, Leoncavallo and others. It's not a big voice, and principal conductor David Brophy did a fine job maintaining balance between orchestra and soloist throughout - even in big-scored music like the Tchaikovsky - as well as leading his opera-savvy players in lively performances of instrumental extracts including overtures from Verdi's La forza del destinoand Rossini's La gazza ladra, the Waltz and Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, and the ballet music from Faust.

MICHAEL DUNGAN