Opera 2005 - a brand new opera company - aims to start a high level and build up, artistic director Kevin Mallon tells Michael Dervan.
Kevin Mallon likes to tell a story about his encounters with Yehudi Menuhin. At the age of 10, it was one of Menuhin's recordings of the Beethoven Violin Concerto which affected him so deeply that he began to get really involved in music.
Their first personal encounter came while Mallon was a pupil at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester. Menuhin was there to play the Bruch Violin Concerto, and Mallon had played it with the school symphony orchestra as part of the preparation for the great man's arrival.
He ran into Menuhin again later, when on tour with the French early-music group, Les Arts Florissants. Les Arts Florissants were involved in concerts to celebrate the opening of French embassies in the Baltic states.
Menuhin, who was conducting Handel's Messiah locally, was, naturally enough, invited to attend, and he and Mallon ended up seated opposite each other at the reception.
"So I said: 'Mr Menuhin, we've met before. You came to Chetham's School of Music to play the Bruch.' He said: 'Oh, yes. I remember.' I knew damn well he didn't remember. And I said: 'We had another rendezvous that time.' And it was one of these embarrassing moments when everybody went quiet at the reception. I thought, OK, in for a penny, in for a pound. I said: 'Actually, before the concert I was standing in the washroom at the urinal, and you came in and you stood next to me. And I remember sort of catching your eye and saying, you do this too, eh?'
"There was a silence. And then he threw his head back and said: 'I've been telling that story for the last 20 years!' "
Both the story itself and the decision to run the risk of telling it in company give a fair indication of the seize-the-moment outlook that has brought Mallon many rewards over the years.
He was born into a musical family in Belfast. His mother was a music teacher at St Malachy's College, his father sang to his own piano accompaniments and collected recordings of Caruso and McCormack.
Mallon was a late arrival at Chetham's, not getting a place there until he won a scholarship at the age of 16. It was there that he met one of the leaders among early-music conductors, John Eliot Gardiner, who had arrived to work with the school orchestra.
"I was interested in both conducting and early music, although I didn't know what it was really," Mallon says. "Within a couple of years I was having lessons with him and staying in his house and playing baroque violin in the back of his orchestra."
For a number of years Mallon was quite active in Ireland, playing mostly baroque music with a wide range of individuals, and conducting too. In the early 1990s he conducted Handel's Acis and Galatea with Anuna's Michael McGlynn as one of the soloists.
He worked with the National Chamber Choir, appeared as soloist and conductor with the ill-fated Baroque Orchestra of Ireland, and conducted Offenbach's La belle Hélene and Orpheus in the Underworld for Castleward Opera.
His only activity here since that time has been in the Orchestra of St Cecilia's Bach cantata series, conducting a single concert each year since 2002. Abroad, however, his career was blossoming.
He spent a year in the European Community Baroque Orchestra, which led to a lot of other work, including becoming leader of Hervé Niquet's Le Concert Spirituel, which in turn led to his stint in William Christie's Les Arts Florissants.
TIRED OF THE pressure of constant touring, he moved from Paris to Toronto, where he became principal second violin in Canada's leading early-music orchestra, Tafelmusik, and taught at the University of Toronto. Within a short space of time, however, Tafelmusik's recording activities for Sony Classical wound down, and he found himself touring again as the orchestra tried to make up for the lost income.
Since 1996, he has also been director of Toronto's Aradia Ensemble, another early-music group, with whom he has recorded around 20 CDs for Naxos.
"I am a better conductor than I ever was a violinist," he says. "I did nice things as a violinist, and I'm still directing my group from the violin, and we're making concerto grosso recordings. But I have a better instinct for the conducting, which brings in the whole psychology of dealing with people. It's a different sort of discipline, which I find is easier and better for me. So in the last couple of years I've been conducting other groups in Toronto and around Canada, including contemporary music groups and contemporary opera companies.
"About three years ago I thought it was time to make a cut from playing in Tafelmusik and working in the university. Around that time I was lamenting that I had left Ireland and was not really involved in the music scene here - that's partly because I'd never tried, either. So when this job in Cork came up, I applied. There were a lot of international applicants, but somehow I seemed to tip the balance, maybe through being from here."
SO WHAT EXACTLY is Opera 2005, the new opera company of which Mallon is artistic director, and what are its ambitions?
"That's a very good question," he says. "This was John O'Flynn's idea, a guy who had run Opera South and the Irish Operatic Repertory Company. For whatever reason, those companies never really managed to get a footing. The idea initially came from him, and it's a really ambitious thing to do. His dream, and the dream of some opera enthusiasts here, was that they would have a permanent company here, even if it's only to do two productions a year, though it's going to be three for this year as European City of Culture. I think the idea was that this year of culture, 2005, would be the time to establish a company."
The company, he says, has an enthusiastic board of businessmen "who have a dream of making this work". Cork 2005 chipped in €140,000, and three major sponsors - Thomas Crosbie Holdings, Ernst and Young, and Bank of Ireland Private Banking - put their hands in their pockets. But the Arts Council, which awarded the Wexford Festival an increase (€150,000) greater than Opera 2005's largest grant, turned down the company's application.
The projected budget for the year's three productions amounts to not far short of €1 million. Mallon is sanguine about the Arts Council situation.
"You can't expect to get a grant for something that doesn't quite exist yet," he says. "I would be hoping that once we get some work down, that if it's good enough they would be supportive."
The ambition, he says, is not for the company to start at the bottom and build up, but to start at quite a high level. One of the immediate questions this raises is where will the orchestra come from? Mallon points to the strength of string playing in Cork.
"Most of the orchestra is coming from here," he says. "A good lot of them are people who are from here but are living in London and are coming back. There's about 10 coming back, out of an orchestra of 34 people. The rest of the string section are mostly people based in Cork. Ken Rice, who plays with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, is concertmaster. The wind players are coming from the army band. The small chorus, mostly students, comes from the city. In Figaro, it's a very small part. They sing for about six minutes.
"When you have a school of music devoted to people learning things to a high level, society has a responsibility to them. What are they going to do? There's only a finite number of positions in the Symphony Orchestra, the Concert Orchestra and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Presumably we're training more people than that. So we must find a way forward. One has to wonder about the Wexford situation [the Wexford Festival's use of an orchestra from Poland].
"If we have an orchestra that's close enough, maybe that could be employed in Wexford. That's just me this minute thinking of it. There is talk of whether there should be an orchestra for opera around the island. Maybe that would be a good idea. But who'sgoing to organise it? It always seems to be that the ideas are great, but unless you have a driving force like a board - like this organisation - things just seem to stay as ideas."
Two more productions are planned for this year, a Carmen in July (a co- production with Castleward), and a Barber of Seville in November, which, like the opening production, Mozart's Figaro's Wedding, will be directed by Michael Hunt.
As someone who's been away from Ireland a long time, Mallon is impressed with the initiative behind the fledgling company he's now directing.
"We can come up with a great vision," he says. "We will try to fulfil that vision. If it's artistically great enough and if there seems to be the local support, one would like to think that the Arts Council would look on it as something worthy of funding."
• Opera 2005 presents Mozart's Figaro's Wedding at the Cork Opera House next Wednesday (preview), Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Kevin Mallon will also conduct a concert, including Mozart's Requiem, on Friday. Details from 021-4270022 www.corkoperahouse.ie
High notes: opera in Cork
Cork's opera house opened on May 21st, 1855, as the Athenaeum, was remodelled as the Munster Hall in 1873, and was modified again in 1877 to become the Cork Opera House.
Visiting companies in the early years included the Carl Rosa Opera Company, the O'Mara Opera Company, and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
In December 1955, the theatre burned down. The current opera house was built in 1963 and has itself been remodelled over the years.
The Dublin Grand Opera Society performed regularly in Cork in the 1940s, 1970s and 1980s.
Cork City Opera was active in the 1980s and is probably the company closest in character to Opera 2005.
It gave Ben Barnes, artistic director of the Abbey, one of his earliest outings as an opera director.
The Irish Operatic Repertory Company, Opera South, Kinsale Opera and Opera Cork all failed to take root. Opera 2005 is a further attempt to establish a permanent opera company in Cork.