LAST week saw the formal announcement of the transformation of DGOS Opera Ireland (formerly the Dublin Grand Opera Society) into Opera Ireland, writes Michael Dervan. The major news was the appointment of Dieter Kaegi as artistic director, in succession to the prematurely departed Dorothea Glatt. But some of the claims being made for the re named organisation - in particular, that Opera Ireland has somehow become a "new" and "national" opera company - were little short of breathtaking.
The company is claiming it has undergone a "completion of the transition from amateur to professional status", though what it is that's importantly and genuinely new is not at all clear. It's still going to offer four productions a year, half of them co productions. It's going to continue to use the National Chamber Choir as the core of its chorus, though the development of "a chorus that becomes more proficient in opera all the time" will not, it seems, involve any training in stage or acting skills.
Opera Ireland is continuing to lament the limitations on its repertoire - a deeply disturbing declaration of negative self image from a company which has staged nearly 30 different works within the last 10 years, among them, Lakme, Martha, Les Pecheurs de Perles, Manon Lescaut and Peter Grimes. And, although it's continuing to voice aspirations to provide more and better "product", it hasn't at the moment got the resources to provide more (or, in fact, any at all outside Dublin).
Aspiration, indeed, is actually a far better description of what the company is currently talking about rather than the grander sounding "development plan" mentioned by the press release. General manager David Collopy is certainly upbeat about the significance of internal changes within the company, but his firmest ground in relation to "product" the public might see seems to be a "strategic alliance" with RTE. The first fruits of this will be a Gypsy Baron at the NCH next June, presumably on the lines of the Merry Widow which RTE presented all by itself last June.
RTE's head of music Cathal MacCabe has been appointed to the Opera Ireland board, though in an individual capacity and not as a representative of RTE. This puts him in the potentially invidious position of being on both sides in any future conflict, a possibility not to be underestimated, given that RTE recently wrote off debts from DGOS Opera Ireland to the tune of around £100,000.
The convolution of Opera Ireland's thinking can be gauged from its declaration of a policy of positive discrimination towards Irish singers. "Such discrimination," the company notes, "must be justified in terms of quality, and the company is aware that it must retain that crucial balance of Irish international casting that audiences have come to expect."
Opera Ireland, it explains "is acutely aware that Irish audiences will not suffer declining standards, even if they were to be caused by efforts to give opportunities to Irish singers, and it will cast accordingly." Two of the nine singers in the forthcoming production of La boheme (opening on November 27th) are Irish, though neither the Rodolfo or the Mimi is, and two of the five in L'Elisir d'amore (opening on December 2nd), in which Majella Cullagh is the Adina, are also Irish. So, what's new?
The company also claims to have plans "to create hitherto unavailable performance opportunities for the increasing number of Irish singers, who though enjoying success in Britain and Europe, are rarely heard by Irish audiences." And who exactly, you might well ask, has been responsible for their absence from operatic productions in Dublin for so long?
