Tara Erraught: ‘I was terrified. I was, like, Callas probably touched this doorknob’
Singing the same role in the same place as the opera great was a goal fulfilled for Ireland’s leading mezzo and NCH artist-in-residence
Le Convenienze ed Inconvenienze Teatrali at Wexford Festival Opera 2024: A feast of feuds, rivalries and enmities
Paolo Bordogna nails the role of Mamma Agata, the manipulative helicopter mother in Donizetti’s drama of backstage power struggles
The Critic at Wexford Festival Opera 2024: Outstanding Charles Villiers Stanford revival doesn’t miss a trick
Conor Hanratty’s production treats the composer with all the loving care that he himself had first bestowed on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play
Le Maschere at Wexford Festival Opera 2024: Brave effort to animate Mascagni’s hugely problematic work doesn’t really come off
Italian operagoers were unimpressed when Le Maschere premiered in 1901. It remains textually and musically verbose with little grip of character or plot
Wexford Festival Opera 2024: ‘The singers are glad they don’t have to talk much. And the actors are delighted they don’t have to sing’
Director Conor Hanratty on the challenges of bringing two sets of performers together in a doubly Dublin opera
Niamh O’Sullivan: ‘I am obsessed with singing. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else’
Cork mezzo-soprano on her packed schedule, shifting pitch and the sadness of being away from home with constant travelling for performances and rehearsals
Thomas Adès on Simon Rattle: ‘He really does have a composer’s understanding’
The British composer discusses the inspiration behind his new orchestral work, Aquifer, which gets its Irish premiere next weekend
Samson Tsoy: Clean, eager playing overlooks what’s most important in Beethoven’s final piano sonatas
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Kazakh pianist projects too much and too readily. None of these sonatas needs such advocacy
Pavel Kolesnikov: A disappointingly egotistical approach to Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Russian pianist is extraordinarily resourceful, but his style says far too much about him and too little about the composer
Samson Tsoy & Pavel Kolesnikov: Always absorbing take on Rite of Spring sounds as if it’s from a parallel universe
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s work, contrasts are starker and the music’s rhythmic complexities come to the fore
Irish Chamber Orchestra: Deep, detailed performances in a setting that brings out the best in Vaughan Williams’s fantasia
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The programme features Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra
Emma O’Halloran: ‘Why do all the women die in opera? I really wanted to do something that’s not that’
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In Trade/Mary Motorhead, O’Halloran uses music to explore a transactional relationship between two men and also to transcend the confines of a prison cell
The extraordinary life of a Waterford composer who was the leader of 19th century English opera
In Ireland, as an 18-year-old, he had been organist of Thurles cathedral and also taught at the Ursuline convent there, and he had been a violinist at the Theatre Royal in Dublin
West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: A potent, candlelit reminder of Magdalene inhumanity
Second week featured a resplendent Anna Devin, a Levantine exploration and masterly piano performances
West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: Mesmerising Schubert, achingly beautiful Beethoven and lovely Smetana
The Signum Quartet and the Chiaroscuro Quartet were the weekend’s highlights