Take seats

From Lucian Freud to the Living Music Festival, from the Da Vinci Codex to Don Carlos - the pick of the events scheduled for 2007 are previewed by Irish Timescritics

Sweeney Todd, a comic opera

"Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd," goes the prologue to Stephen Sondheim's macabre and comic opera - which sounds less like a warning than an urgent invitation now that Selina Cartmell is attached to direct the show for the Gate. Cartmell, whose production of Festen so invigorated The Gate in 2006 by expanding the boundaries of its stage, should do something similar with the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This opera - don't call it a musical - is a complex undertaking, but Cartmell, one of the most exciting directors around, is no stranger to compellingly dark and strangely beautiful material. Peter Crawley

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Da Vinci's Codex Leicester

The Da Vinci Code is a much-hyped work of fiction but da Vinci's Leicester Codex is the real thing and this work by the great Renaissance artist is coming to Dublin next year. The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, a jewel among our national cultural institutions, will play host to an exhibition that will include a public display of this great masterpiece of science which now belongs to Bill Gates. The Codex Leicester - so called because it was once owned by the Duke of Leicester - is widely regarded as one of the most important of Leonardo's scientific notebooks and is the only autographed manuscript by Leonardo in private hands. Composed around 1508-1510, it also includes over 300 pen and ink drawings, sketches and diagrams, many of them featuring imagined or real experiments by Leonardo. The Codex will form part of an exhibition which will have other historical works and manuscripts from the Chester Beatty Library's own collection of manuscripts of Arabic science. Gerry Smyth

The Codex Leicester will be exhibited at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, from June to Aug

The dark side of Roger Waters

One of the most successful records ever released; a watershed in the synthesis of progressive rock music and psychedelia; a work of art inspired by psychosis, anxiety and dysfunction; rock music's most fully realised concept album. More than 30 years after its initial release, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon remains a gorgeous enigma, a song cycle that is totally alive yet populated by ghosts. The band's co-founder Roger Waters brought some of this show to Cork during the summer of 2006, but next May he returns (to Dublin's Point) with the whole enchilada: two sets (set one featuring Pink Floyd material from Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, Animals, The Final Cut and solo tracks; set two featuring Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety), large-scale video projections, theatrical staging, an elaborate display of special effects and a 360-degree quadraphonic sound system. Tony Clayton-Lea

Roger Waters plays the Point, Dublin, on May 14. €91.25/€96.25

Garage

Best known as a comedian and for his multiple roles in the popular TV series Killinaskully, Pat Shortt gets to demonstrate his dramatic range in Garage, which marks his first leading role in a feature film. Described by its producers as "an austerely funny elegy to a small-town misfit", Garage reunites director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Mark O'Halloran after their critically admired collaboration on Adam & Paul. The cast of Garage also features 15-year-old newcomer Conor Ryan, Anne-Marie Duff, Don Wycherley, Denis Conway, Tom Hickey, Andrew Bennett and Deirdre Donnelly. Michael Dwyer

Garage will be released in the autumn

Eavan Boland's Domestic Violence

A new collection by one of our most accomplished poets and a distinctive voice in the contemporary canon. Candour and clarity as well as lyric grace have always been distinguishing features of Eavan Boland's poems, whether they are explorations of the female condition, the domestic quotidian or married love. She is, too, a supreme elegist, especially for the myths of history. Her forthcoming collection, Domestic Violence, promises work that centres on "domestic interiors in which the drama of women's lives are played out, seduction and quarrels, anger and grief, the caring of children". Gerry Smyth

Domestic Violence, by Eavan Boland, will be published by Carcanet in March

Georgia O'Keeffe's stylised abstractions

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the great independent voices in American 20th-century art, and this show offers a survey of her career. Born in Wisconsin and educated in Chicago and New York, O'Keeffe was attuned to avant-garde developments when Alfred Stieglitz, the dealer and photographer, began to show her work. Her spare, stylised abstractions were inspired in part by the empty landscapes of the Texas Panhandle, and in time she began to spend part of every year in the New Mexico desert, eventually settling there. She is best known for her severe yet luxuriant studies of flowering plants, bones and the desert landscapes. She resisted interpretations linking her imagery to the body, but that view of her work has been influential over time. Aidan Dunne

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Lucian Freud at Imma

Lucian Freud is probably the most famous living painter in the western world, his work eagerly sought by institutions and collectors, and he guards his privacy jealously. Remarkably enough for a contemporary artist - he was born in 1922 - he has earned his reputation by painting, for well over half a century, a narrow range of subjects in a meticulously realist style. The candour of his nudes has attracted some notoriety, but the minute examination of his subject matter, be it the naked human figure, the spartan studio interior, or the untidy vegetative sprawl of the back gardens outside, is what counts for him. A slow worker, he is demanding of his sitters but also of himself. The pigment in his paintings embodies the act of observation with an intensity that can be positively disturbing. This retrospective view features 40 paintings and 10 works on paper, some recently completed. Aidan Dunne

Lucian Freud, Imma, Dublin, Jun 6-Sept 2. Tel: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie Rough Magic's Don Carlos

One of the least predictable and most stimulating forces in Irish theatre, Rough Magic rarely approach a classic without first discerning its urgent message. Their first production of 2007 will be Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, in an adaptation by Mike Poulton. A complex tragedy in which political idealism clashes with the corruption of state, Lynne Parker's production should trace the line from its 16th-century Spanish setting through the 18th-century Enlightenment of Schiller to our contemporary schism between neo-conservatism, fundamentalism and individual liberty. With a proven track record for handling such heady ideas, Rough Magic can be relied upon to match Schiller's vitality with a thrilling contemporary form. Peter Crawley

Don Carlos, a Rough Magic production, opens at Project, Dublin, on Mar 12

Living Music Festival

Building on the success of the 2006 focus on Steve Reich, the 2007 RTÉ Living Music Festival returns to music rooted in American minimalism. The featured composer is John Adams, and artistic director Ronan Guilfoyle has, in a breakout move for the festival, chosen to devote nearly as much concert space to jazz as to Adams. Major Dublin premieres during the festival include the complete Harmonielehre (RTÉ NSO/Pierre-André Valade), John's Book of Alleged Dances (RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet), and the Chamber Symphony (London Sinfonietta/Bradley Lubman). Michael Dervan

RTÉ Living Music Festival, various venues, Dublin, Feb 16-18. Tel: 01-2082617

Dave Douglas at Bray Jazz Festival

Dave Douglas's latest venture is Keystone, a sextet with trumpet, tenor/soprano, Wurlitzer, bass, drums and turntables, playing music written as a soundtrack for the early silent films of the tragically doomed and scandal-haunted actor-director, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. What raises expectations is the trumpeter's penchant for finding musical and intellectual sustenance in extremely varied contexts; his previous ventures include a homage to the music of the late Mary Lou Williams, the first influential female pianist in jazz, and an album, Witness, inspired by the work of such independent thinkers as the late philosopher Edward Said, the executed Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and the exiled Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasrin. Ray Comiskey

Dave Douglas plays the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, on May 4

Terminus at the Peacock

It will have been four years since we last entered the vivid and shocking world of Mark O'Rowe when his new play Terminus opens in the Peacock in June. The Dublin writer's dramas have previously offered grim evocations of the underworld in every sense - his criminal gangs are never far from the shadows of Hades - and won acclaim for his combination of pungent realism and grisly fantasy. The only new Irish play yet scheduled for 2007 by the Abbey, Terminus is an experimental piece, written in three interweaving monologues, which moves from a Dublin pub to an otherworld of demons and devils. Directed by O'Rowe himself, the production promises to break new ground for the uncompromising playwright. Peter Crawley

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Murray Perahia at the NCH

Murray Perahia is just about to leave a prestigious club - ranging from the likes of Maurizio Pollini and Martha Argerich to the winners of most recent major international piano competitions - of pianists who have yet to play at the National Concert Hall. Perahia, who shot to fame by winning the 1972 Leeds Competition, makes his long-awaited NCH debut in January, following a postponement from 12 months ago, necessitated by the recurrence of a debilitating problem with his thumb. The programme for his debut includes works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin.

Michael Dervan

Murray Perahia (piano), National Concert Hall, Dublin, Jan 23, 8pm. 70. 01-4170000. www.nch.ie

Stefan Jackiw, Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander is one of the most distinguished Mahler conductors around. He returns to Belfast in March for a performance of Mahler's First Symphony, in a concert which also brings the Irish debut of 20-year-old US violinist Stefan Jackiw. Jackiw's London debut at the age of 14 - also with Zander and also in the Mendelssohn concerto he will play in Belfast - won him a mention on the front page of the London Times. Zander, who is also a celebrated management guru, is to give one of his fascinating pre-concert talks an hour before the concert. Michael Dervan

Stefan Jackiw (violin), UO/Benjamin Zander, Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Mar 9, 7.45pm. £8-£23.50. Tel: 048-90668798

Tacita Dean at the Hugh Lane

Canterbury-born, Berlin-based Tacita Dean is probably best known for Disappearance at Sea, a group of works based on the strange story of Donald Crowhurst, who faked his participation in a round-the-world yacht race before disappearing. The project is typical of Dean in several ways: the extensive historical research involved, the idea of an anomalous group of works, the central role of the sea and indeed the other elements, and the fraught question of the human interaction with the wider environment, entailing endeavour and delusion. This show marshals works made since the year 2000, including several films, and her Cork 2005 commission Presentation Sisters. Aidan Dunne

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Scottish Ballet Cinderella

It might be Cinderella but, apart from Prokofiev's score, there's not a lot of tradition in Scottish Ballet's version coming to Belfast in February. First there's the design by award-winning designer Antony McDonald, with its nods to Vivienne Westwood, the 18th century and The Simpsons, with costumes described by Guardian critic Judith Mackrell as "a fashionista's paradise of lace and crinoline, colour and fabric".

Add to this Ashley Page's twisted choreography with its black humour, physical comedy and extravagant set-pieces, performed by dancers such as Clare Robertson, Erik Cavallari and Paul Kiburd, and you have a potent blend that sets conventions packing. Page has turned Scottish Ballet from the brink to one the brightest ballet companies worldwide, not by relying on past glories but by forging ahead with a single-mindedness that is transforming how audiences relate to ballet. Formerly a dancer and choreographer with the Royal Ballet, his innovations are never flippant, but carefully judged and intelligent. Those who prefer dustier interpretations will be left behind. "Ballet is art, and you do what you have to do to tell the story," he says. "If audiences can't make that jump, well, that's too bad." Michael Seaver

Cinderella is at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, from Tue, Feb 6 to Sat, Feb 10. £11.75-£37.50. Tel: 048-90241919

Alex Katz's NY in Dublin

Born in New York in 1927, Alex Katz is a subtle, disarming painter, and a peculiarly American one. His images, while straightforwardly representational, are simplified in a way that recalls the graphic economy of comic-book illustrations, but he is not a Pop artist like Lichtenstein. The individuals and the world he depicts seem drained of emotion, yet his cool, distanced style is visually elegant and involving, and has been enormously influential on contemporary painting. This show focuses on New York, and includes portraits of family and friends, plus architectural views of the city. Aidan Dunne

Alex Katz: New York, Imma, Feb 28-May 20. Tel: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie

Wexford Festival Opera

The 2007 Wexford Festival will be unique - the repertoire is all from the 20th century. Dvorak's Rusalka was written in 1900 and premiered in 1901. Kurt Weill's Der Silbersee was first seen in 1933. And there's a double bill of Busoni's Arlecchino (1917) and Stravinsky's Pulcinella (1920), the latter, of course, not being an actual opera at all. But exciting even greater curiosity is the timing (May and June), the location (Johnstown Castle) and the venue (a temporary theatre which folks at the festival swear will not be a tent). Expect all the changes to make for freer availability of tickets and a rather different atmosphere, assuming you can handle the record prices of €80 for weekdays and €100 for weekends.

Michael Dervan

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Atonement on film

Following his impressive cinema debut with Pride & Prejudice last year, director Joe Wright reunites with that film's star, Keira Knightley, for one of the most eagerly anticipated literary adaptations of next year in Atonement. Based on Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, the screenplay is by Christopher Hampton. The drama is triggered by cathartic events on a hot summer's day in 1935. It features Knightley and James McAvoy as Cambridge graduates Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, with Brenda Blethyn, Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave, and, in the crucial role of Cecilia's 13-year-old sister Briony, Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, who had recurring roles in the RTÉ TV series Proof and The Clinic. Michael Dwyer

Atonement will be released on Sept 14

Jan Garbarek and quartet

While the great Norwegian saxophonist has played in Dublin twice with the Hilliard Ensemble, this time it will be in a more musically rewarding context, at least in jazz terms, fronting his outstanding quartet featuring Rainer Brüninghaus (keyboards), Eberhard Weber (bass) and Manu Katché (drums). This is the band, with Marilyn Masur on drums instead of Katché, that played so wonderfully in Cork a few years back. But Katché, who made a stunning ECM debut, Neighbourhood, as leader with Garbarek, will bring a different but no less compelling dimension to the distinctive music of this accomplished quartet. Ray Comiskey

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Enda Walsh premiere in Galway

Two years after the culmination of their Synge cycle, Druid's renewed commitment to premiering the work of living Irish writers now seems peerless. In March, Garry Hynes directs Leaves, the debut play from young Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell (in a co-production with the Royal Court) before Enda Walsh directs the English language premiere of The New Electric Ballroom, his companion piece to last year's mesmerising The Walworth Farce.

To call Walsh one of the most striking voices in Irish theatre may not be entirely accurate - his work now premieres as often in London and Munich - but when Druid's production opens in the Galway Arts Festival in July, the cry for Walsh's artistic repatriation may grow louder. Peter Crawley

The Galway Arts Festival takes place in July

Stephen Rea in Sam Shepard premiere

Which counts as the Abbey Theatre's bigger coup? To have secured a world premiere from one of the most critically acclaimed American dramatists of his generation? Or to have attracted the actor Stephen Rea back to its stage after so long - and often frosty - an absence? Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse represents an early flowering of the Abbey's relationship with the leading chronicler of contemporary Americana, having staged his seminal True West last year. Destined to make the theatre the centre of international attention when it opens in March, the play brings the scuffed and tarnished American dream to the national stage of Ireland. An unmissable theatrical event.

Peter Crawley

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Mahler in Tallaght

Belfast has a concert hall large enough to accommodate Mahler's Eighth Symphony, nicknamed the Symphony of a Thousand because it requires so many performers on stage. Dublin doesn't, and won't have for a couple of years yet. So the RTÉ NSO's current Mahler cycle under Gerhard Markson will take Mahler 8 to the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght at the end of May. Between January and April the orchestra offers Mahler's other symphonies from the Fourth onwards, and on Saturday, January 13th, the NCH hosts a performance of Mahler's Ninth, from the Dresden Staatskapelle under Daniel Harding. Michael Dervan

Mahler: Symphony No 8, National Basketball Arena, Tallaght, Dublin, May 26, 8pm. 27-38. Tel: 01-4597500

Alice Maher's diverse art

One of the most important mid-career artists working in Ireland today, Alice Maher has a large and diverse body of work to her credit. This show offers a survey of her output. An early series of strongly stated drawings cast her, autobiographically, as a wilful Alice in Wonderland, and a preoccupation with the articulation of empowered feminine identity has remained central to her various endeavours. Her pieces often feature the idea of a capricious, subversive presence, drawing strength from reservoirs of myth and dreams. In a nice piece of programming, she is paired at the RHA with the Finnish artist Sala Tykka's Cave trilogy of short films, which together make up a cryptic, allegorical account of the self-realisation of a young female protagonist. Aidan Dunne

Alice Maher, Royal Hibernian Academy, Sept/Oct

Thimar unites musical styles

The coming together of master Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem with the great British baritone and soprano saxophonist, John Surman, and bassist Dave Holland (also British but based in the US since the late Miles Davis brought him over to join his group decades ago) unites three gifted musicians from quite different musical cultures - jazz and Tunisian classical music, in which the oud, a stringed instrument, has a key role. Holland is a virtuoso, one of the finest jazz bassists ever, and Surman, like both Holland and Brahem, is a perennially curious and adventurous musician, so their collaboration should be something special; supporting will be the Irish all-saxophone quartet, RISE. Ray Comiskey

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Terry Riley's Ragtime

The great landmark of 1960s minimalism is Terry Riley's In C, a piece that epitomises the repetitive patterns of the style, but, also, in the true spirit of the Sixties, does so in a way which gives extraordinary freedoms to the performers. In C naturally features in May's forthcoming mini-Terry Riley festival in Drogheda. And the programme also includes his 1987 saxophone quartet, Chanting the Light of Foresight, which was inspired by the Táin Bó Cuailnge. Performers include the Crash Ensemble, the Arte Quartet from Switzerland, and Riley himself, making his Irish debut with contributions which will include some of his famous piano improvisations. Michael Dervan

Terry Riley: Spirals of Ragtime and Raga, St Peter's Church, Drogheda, May 4-6. Tel: 087-7601631