The staging of relatively high-brow opera in a public, exposed venue like the park of Dublin's Civic Offices creates a dynamic cultural clash, writes Patrick Butler.

Dublin's Civic Offices: where there is a constant flow of traffic down to the Liffey; the intermittent rat-tat-tat of a JCB digger; and occasional, if infrequent, shadowy figures who stagger across the well-tended lawn, drunk or drugged.

Then, last month, five bullets were fired at the entrance to the offices.

Ah, yes, where better to perform an opera?

Never mind bullets, never mind drug addicts, never mind the harsh sounds of the city, this year the Opera in the Open show must go on - as it has gone on for the last three years, attracting hundreds of music lovers to each lunchtime performance in the amphitheatre.

It's been a tough year for Dublin's opera aficionados. Cutbacks in funding have meant that the annual Anna Livia Opera Festival and the Opera Ireland Spring Season did not take place.

Little wonder, then, that Opera in the Open has become the most popular of all the free concerts organised in Dublin City Council's "Music in the Parks" series.

"If we ever needed to confirm there was an audience for opera, this is it," says the council's arts officer, Jack Gilligan.

Appropriately enough, the first of this year's series of concerts was composed of excerpts from verismo opera - that is, opera that deals with stories about what happens to ordinary people, as opposed to kings, emperors or deities.

And it is ordinary people, as well as seasoned opera-lovers, who attend these recitals. "The challenge is to recruit people who wouldn't normally listen to opera," says Gilligan.

This is part of the reason why the concerts are held in what at first may seem an unlikely venue for a sophisticated form of music.

Gilligan says there has never been any public order problems at the recitals, though once, he admits, someone who "seemed under the influence" did walk across the stage during a performance.

The shooting incident, which occurred in July - seven days before the start of this year's concert series - certainly didn't faze Sandra Oman, one of those who will be performing in several of the minimally-staged (no costumes, no props) operas this year.

Ms Oman is more familiar than most with the things that can happen around the Civic Offices. Before turning professional as a singer, she worked inside the buildings for Dublin City Council. The shooting incident wasn't a big worry.

"To be honest, I worked there for a long time. That was a random act."

Besides, she has too many other things to worry about. "Singing in the open is a nightmare."

There are innumerable considerations that are unique to singing opera in the open air. Most especially, Oman explains, there is a lack of acoustics: artificial amplification has to be employed, which in turn means the singer must wear a headset with microphone attached. This kind of thing would never happen in a concert hall, where every technical element of a performance can be carefully controlled. "If the wind is going mad, the noise in the microphones is huge," she says.

And then there's the rain. Rain will, at best, lead to the recital being moved inside the Civic Offices, and a lot fewer people being able to sit in on it because of limited space. "Anything in the open is slightly dodgy in this country," says David Wray, musical director of Opera in the Open. "We've been sabotaged a couple of times by the rain."

Wray has been involved with the event since it started. He now feels well able to deal with anything that can occur. He says the staging of relatively high-brow opera in such a public, exposed venue creates a dynamic "cultural clash".

Gilligan has witnessed that cultural clash first-hand. After one Opera in the Open recital, which occurred in a previous year, he got chatting to what looked like a homeless person who had been sitting on the lawn listening to the performance.

The man said he didn't join the rest of the audience seated in the amphitheatre because he "felt a bit alienated".

Ms Oman echoes him when she says that "the whole point of the opera is to bring it to the widest possible audience".

Opera in the Open appears to be achieving its goal.