NI Opera

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Grand Opera House in Belfast, where the offices of NI Opera are based

NI Opera is an opera company founded in 2010 and based in Northern Ireland.[1]

Funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, it began its first season with a budget of £450,000 to launch the company's activities[2] with a remit for performing high-quality opera throughout Northern Ireland, while promoting young talent from the region and forming partnerships with arts organizations from Northern Ireland, Great Britain and further afield. The company is based in the Grand Opera House, Belfast. Its Artistic Director is Oliver Mears.

In his review of the company's first production, Tosca in March 2011, where he notes the enthusiastic response of the first night audience Terry Blain continues by stating that:

[i]n a part of the United Kingdom where opera has suffered constantly over the years from chronic inattention and lack of proper funding, and for long periods has seemed simply an irrelevance, Mears and his team have shown at a stroke that there is hunger for the art-form in an area where historically there has been no coherent or continuous operatic tradition.[3]

Early performance history

After launching in October 2010, in December 2010 NI Opera collaborated with Barry Douglas and his Camerata Ireland orchestra in a Christmas concert at the Ulster Hall, with three singers all from Northern Ireland: Giselle Allen, Susan Boyd and Emma Morwood. In February 2011 it co-produced its first NI-wide tour, with Second Movement Opera, a production of The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti which travelled to venues in Armagh, Downpatrick, Newtonabbey and Omagh, with Derry-born singer Doreen Curran in the title role.

2011 - 2012 season

The company performed its first major production, Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, in three different historic spaces in Derry in March 2011, featuring Giselle Allen in the title role, with Jesús León as Cavaradossi and Paul Carey Jones as Scarpia. The production won the Irish Times Theatre Award for best opera in February 2012.

The company's 2011-12 season also included a concert featuring Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and the winner of the company's inaugural Glenarm vocal competition at the Belfast Festival at Queens, and a touring production of Orpheus in the Underworld, in a new translation by Rory Bremner, and with Nicholas Sharratt in the title role. A co-production with Scottish Opera, it toured Scotland and Northern Ireland in Autumn 2011 before travelling to the Young Vic Theatre in London in December 2011.[4]

In late November 2011 it produced Engelbert Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel in Belfast's Grand Opera House, a production with the Ulster Orchestra in the pit, and which travelled to the Millennium Forum, Derry, in January 2012. The production featured Niamh Kelly and Aoife O'Sullivan in the title roles, and tenor Graham Clark as the Witch. It will travel to Dublin in November 2012, the company's first visit to the Republic of Ireland.

In March 2012 NI Opera toured a new production of The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten which travelled to the Buxton Festival in July 2012. The cast included Fiona Murphy, Andrew Tortise, Giselle Allen and Yvonne Howard. The production was designed by Omagh-born Annemarie Woods, winner of the Ring Award 2011.

2012 - 2013 season

The company launched its 2012-13 season in June 2012. It included five world premieres of works by Northern Irish composers: Brian Irvine, Deirdre McKay, Conor Mitchell, Ed Bennett and Christopher Norby, together with new libretti by writers including Mark Ravenhill and Frank McGuinness at the new MAC theatre in Belfast, in the company's latest collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra. These new works travelled to the Southbank Centre in London in July 2012.

In July the company produced another opera by Benjamin Britten, Noye's Fludde. This site-specific production was performed in Belfast Zoo in August 2012, before travelling to Beijing in October 2012, the first time a production of one of Britten's operas has been to that country.[citation needed]

Other productions included new stagings of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman at the Grand Opera House in February 2013, featuring Belfast-born singers Giselle Allen and Bruno Caproni in the leading roles, and a touring version of William Walton's The Bear in March 2013.

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Northern Ireland Executive online at northernireland.gov.uk
  2. ↑ Brogan, p. 86
  3. ↑ Blain, "A Northern Irish Tosca"
  4. ↑ Christiansen, Telegraph

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.