Space Odyssey or not, the year 2001 looks like being an exciting voyage into unmarked territory for Irish opera, what with Opera Ireland putting on MarkAnthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie - the first time the company has ever staged a work by a living composer - Wexford Festival celebrating its 50th birthday and Opera Theatre Company putting on a touring opera festival, no less. The big talking point in opera circles of late has been what might be called "the Kaegi factor". When he took over as artistic director at Opera Ireland, Dieter Kaegi's professed ambition was to get away from Butterflys and Carmens - and he proceeded to implement his ideas in spectacular fashion, unveiling top-notch productions of operas never staged in Ireland before. Next year's programme is dynamite; the spring season will see Turnage's acclaimed contemporary setting of O'Casey's The Silver Tassie twinned with Wagner's moody melodrama The Fly- ing Dutchman; while winter operagoers can look forward to Verdi's mammoth spine-chiller Don Carlo - a nod in the direction of the centenary of Verdi's death in 1901, this - plus, oh treat of treats, Handel's masterpiece Giulio Cesare. Wexford Festival Opera may be celebrating its 50th birthday but the mood, says managing director Jerome Hynes, is to look forward rather than back. "There will be a number of events which will celebrate and reminisce, but our main priority is to plan our ongoing programme," he says. Plans to instigate a major revamp of the Theatre Royal are subject to news of government funding "but we'd love to be able to make an announcement during our 50th year". Meanwhile operatic life at Wexford will go on with productions of Flotow's Alessandro Stradella, Dvorak's Jakobin and Massenet's Sapho.
In Belfast the Waterfront Hall will host Chisinau National Opera in April with Puccini's La Boheme and old favourite Cav and Pag - that's Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci to the rest of us. And 10 venues around the country will be visited by Opera Theatre Company's touring opera festival - "the first time we've had a festival so it's big news for us", says OTC's Nicola Murphy. Big news for everyone: lunchtime recitals, talks, schools workshops and two consecutive nights of opera in English, a new production of Benjamin Britten's arrangement of The Beggar's Opera alternating with a revival of Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse. The festival kicks off in the Marketplace Theatre, Armagh on February 2nd.
Arminta Wallace