Irish Times writers give their verdict.

Opera 2005/Mallon
Opera House, Cork
By Michael Dervan

Mozart - Figaro's Wedding

Cities of the size of Dublin and Belfast have had more than enough trouble sustaining their opera companies over the years. So it might look as if the much smaller city of Cork is being a little over-ambitious by seeking to establish a new opera company of its own on the coat-tails, as it were, of the city's celebration of its term as European Capital of Culture in 2005.

However, the injection of innovative artistic enterprise represented by Cork's new company, Opera 2005, is exactly the sort of valuable long-term legacy that the current cultural celebrations can aspire to leaving in their wake. After all, both the Cork International Choral Festival and the Cork Film Festival are legacies of An Tostal, a national festivity which epitomised Irish attitudes to culture and tourism in the 1950s.

On the evidence of Opera 2005's production of Mozart's Figaro's Wedding the company offers a blend of elements and an aesthetic orientation that already sets it apart from other operatic enterprises in Ireland.

The key factor at the Cork Opera House on Thursday seemed to be the company's artistic director, Kevin Mallon, who is also the conductor of this début production.

He's chosen a young and light-voiced cast and assembled an orchestra capable of such airiness of tone and nimbleness of movement that no singer on stage had to force or strain in order to be heard.

From a musical point of view this was a rare pleasure indeed, particularly in a work by Mozart. But the interaction between stage and pit, the give and take between voices and instruments, is about much more than issues of balance and style. The music and the singing need to connect with the drama; the orchestra needs to be not only a driving force within the whole, but also to be capable of responding to elements outside itself.

Mallon's approach had an air of purism about it, as if the orchestra were somehow above and apart from the voices and the action, as if those other concerns were being left to look after themselves in the face of clearly - and sometimes stylishly - defined musical givens of speed and shape.

It's possible that with enough rehearsal time it could all have worked out with perfect timing. On Thursday there were disconnections and misalignments between stage and pit, so that the ebb and flow of both music and situation was more than a little stilted.

Michael Hunt's production, with minimalist designs (including mostly black and white costumes) by Soutra Gilmour, and colour-coded style lighting by Paul Denby, remained oddly flat, in spite of some effortful though laughter-generating exaggerations. The musical approach, it must be said, did not make the director's task particularly easy.

The Countess of Norwegian soprano, Anne-Helen Moen, whose words were sadly indistinct, stood out for momentarily elevating the evening onto a high musical plane. Words or no words, the spine tingled and the heart melted in the face of her creamily-contoured, high-altitude phrasing.

British baritone Riccardo Simonetti's Count was an engaging presence, altogether firmer of voice and manner than the Figaro of South African bass baritone, Ewan Taylor. And vocal pleasures were not enough to distract from the fact that the Marcellina of British mezzo soprano, Harriet Williams, was implausibly young to be Figaro's mother and the leggily slender Cherubino of Finnish mezzo soprano, Katherine Haataja, was decidedly unboyish.

Irish soprano Sandra Oman carried the key role of Susanna with a certain theatrical zest, but her dragging of musical rhythm was at the opposite end of the scale to the achievements of Irish tenor David Murphy, doubling as Basilio and Curzio, who showed just how sharply Jeremy Sams's translation can be enunciated.

Not everything in this new production gelled. But it sounded altogether different from the Mozart you would normally expect to hear on an Irish stage. It's not often you'll find a production here in which the conductor seems so fully to be calling the shots. For striking out in such an adventurous direction, Opera 2005 deserves hearty congratulations.

Pondjiclis, RTÉ CO/Wagner
Mahony Hall, The Helix, Dublin
By Michael Dungan

Weber - Oberon Overture
Elgar - Sea Pictures
Wagner - Wesendonk-Lieder
Haydn - Symphony No 104 "London"

Thursday's concert - third in the RTÉ Concert Orchestra's Spring Series at The Helix - was a mix of romantic, pictorially conceived music and Haydn, the thread running through the series.

After a spirited evocation of a world of magic in Weber's Overture to Oberon, featuring fine horn solos from David Carmody, there were works for voice and orchestra on either side of the interval.

First, Elgar's Sea Pictures, five now programmatic, now abstract settings of poems with a maritime theme.

Even with his relatively small orchestra, principal conductor Laurent Wagner delivered a sonorous, broad palette ranging from the gentle swell of waves in the initial "Sea Slumbering Song", to the delicate mood and complete absence of audible allusion to a storm in "In Haven" by the composer's wife, Alice.

The orchestra produced a similarly rich, velvety response in the Wesendonk-Lieder, Richard Wagner's five settings of poems by his lover, Mathilde Wesendonk. Even though two are subtitled "Study for Tristan und Isolde", the songs were originally composed with piano accompaniment and are more intimate than operatic.

It was only in the most intimate moments of both the Wagner and Elgar that mezzo-soprano Sophie Pondjiclis was able to make any impression.

The best of these moments was in the third of the Wesendonk songs, Im Treibhaus (or "In the Hothouse"), Wagner's languorous portrayal of unhappy longing set against the backdrop of a tropical greenhouse. There was an aching intensity in Pondjiclis's singing that made this a concert highlight.

Elsewhere, unfortunately, whenever the score called for louder playing, the mezzo's warm but seemingly underpowered voice was lost.

And the many words that could not be heard could scarcely be read in the printed programme because the house lights were down.

The concert closed with Haydn's Symphony No. 104, his last essay in the genre. Wagner's blend of precision and vigour delivered so much of what makes Haydn wonderful: joy, wit, warmth, and life.

The RTÉCO's Spring Series at The Helix concludes next Thursday with music by Gounod, Haydn and Ravel.