Lismore Music Festival
Summer opera away from the confines of an opera house has been a growth area in Ireland in recent years. And the trend towards productions that are homegrown rather than imported continued this year with the first Lismore Music Festival in Co Waterford.
The Lismore team had rather the flavour of an out-of-town venture by Opera Ireland (OI), even though that company has no formal connection with the festival.
The festival’s artistic director is Dieter Kaegi (artistic director of OI) and its manager is Jennifer O’Connell (OI’s communications and development manager). With OI due to cease operations after the new Irish National Opera company gets into action next year, it’s no wonder that existing staff might take the precautionary route of creating an alternative outlet.
The opera chosen for the inaugural festival was Bizet's Carmen, a work whose popularity is only rivalled by the difficulty of getting it right in performance. The performing space was a courtyard in the grounds of Lismore Castle, where the audience was protected from the elements by a marquee, and the tiered seating looked down at a stage area dominated by a fountain or trough. The back of the performing space tempted fate by being partially open to the sky, but, happily, the weather remained dry on the opening night.
A greater novelty than the setting was the musical arrangement, made by guitarist Redmond O’Toole, for an ensemble of violin, accordion, guitar, double bass and percussion. The less said about this the better, save that, without the mediation of a conductor, it created constant problems of ensemble, and it sounded best when the accordion (Dermot Dunne) was dominant.
Kaegi’s production mixed some English dialogue into an otherwise French language presentation, and updated the action to a time when David Adam Moore’s Escamillo could deliver Carmen to the square of Act IV in a red sports car – he also had Kim Sheehan’s Micaëla make her first entrance on a bicycle. He made effective use of doors and windows to project a world beyond the immediate action, and even had a real fire lit for the mountain scene of Act III, with all that implied in terms of billowing smoke.
Taking all the large choruses and crowds out of Carmen focuses attention more than usual on the central relationships. And for me, the chemistry between the strutting Carmen of Fiona Murphy and the naive, possessive, unexpectedly hot-blooded Don José of Richard Crawley never quite worked.
Murphy was simply too anxious to impress to be genuinely seductive, a trait which applied to her singing as well as her demeanour. Crawley also kept the vocal pressure up, and was at his best when that’s what Bizet called for. He showed a thrilling power, when everything gelled. Moore’s Escamillo made a favourable initial impression, but by Act IV he probably needed the sports car to keep up his appeal.
The many smaller roles were strongly cast, and impressive among them was the swaggering self-confidence of Éric Martin-Bonnet’s Zuniga. But it was Kim Sheehan’s emotionally true and vocally sophisticated Micaëla who stole the show. It’s one of the liabilities of Carmen that the other girl can end up with the adulation.
