The Tales of Hoffmann

Irish National Opera

offenbach

The tales of hoffmann

Irish national opera principal funder

Acknowledgements The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Cue One, Northern Ireland Opera, Wexford Festival Opera, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, The Lir, Landmark Productions, Eamonn Fox, Laura Mac Naughton and the team at the O’Reilly Theatre, Mairéad Hurley DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama.

offenbach 1819-80

the tales of hoffmann Les Contes d’Hoffmann 1880 Drame fantastique in five acts Libretto by Jules Barbier after the 1851 play he wrote with Michel Carré based on tales by ETA Hoffmann.

First performance Paris, Opéra-Comique, 10 February 1881 First Irish performance, Dublin, Theatre Royal, 19 September 1910 (in English)

Sung in FRENCH with English surtitles The edition used in these performances by David Seaman and Tony Burke is provided by Pocket Publications and arranged by Andrew Synnott with additional material from Schott.

Duration 3 hours including one 20 minute interval after Act III. The performance on Saturday 15 September will be recorded by RTÉ lyric fm for future transmission.

PERFORMANCES 2018 Friday 14 September O’Reilly Theatre Dublin Saturday 15 September O’Reilly Theatre Dublin Tuesday 18 September Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire Thursday 20 September Solstice Arts Centre Navan Saturday 22 September Lime Tree Theatre Limerick Tuesday 25 September The Everyman Cork Thursday 27 September Siamsa Tíre Tralee Saturday 29 September Watergate Theatre Kilkenny Tuesday 2 October Town Hall Theatre Galway Thursday 4 October An Grianán Letterkenny Saturday 6 October Hawk’s Well Theatre Sligo 03

Irish National Opera

VERDI

AIDA sat 24, tue 27, thur 29 NOVEMBER & sat 1 DECEMBER BORD GáIS ENERGY Theatre dublin Ticket €15/€36/€51/€66/€86 booking bordgaisenergytheatre.ie 0818 719 377

In association with Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

In partnership with RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

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FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS

Fergus Sheil Artistic director

Diego Fasciati Executive Director

Here at Irish National Opera we are just back from the thrill of three performances at London’s Barbican Theatre of our production of Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The Second Violinist. And we are proud to announce that, in collaboration with our co-producing partner Landmark Productions, we will present this searing opera rooted in the realities of contemporary life in Amsterdam and further afield in 2019.

At home, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann kicks off our busy autumn-winter season. We planned this touring production for our opening year because of our love for the magnificent score and because it allows us to bring a showcase of Irish singers to each of the four provinces. Soprano Claudia Boyle, one of INO’s artistic partners, takes on the super-human feat of singing all four leading female roles. She is partnered by Julian Hubbard who tackles the titanic title role for the first time. And you will hear an astonishing depth of vocal talent throughout our cast of 16 singers.

Director Tom Creed and conductor Andrew Synnott have prepared a version of the score which sets out to tell the story and present Offenbach’s music as faithfully as possible. They have included scenes in the final act that were only recently discovered. The production tours to ten venues across Ireland, so we have had to use a reduced orchestra. But we are sure you will find the impact of the music undiminished in our beautiful production.

We have just begun rehearsals for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, in a production directed by Enda Walsh that opens at the Gaiety Theatre on Friday 12 October as part of the Dublin 05

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Presented in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival In partnership with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra

Bartók

BLUEBEARD’s CASTLE friday 12, saturday 13, sunday 14 October Gaiety Theatre DUBLIN Tickets from €15 to €46 dublintheatrefestival.com Directed by Enda Walsh Starring Paula Murrihy · Joshua Bloom

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Theatre Festival. The title role is taken by Joshua Bloom with the exciting Irish mezzo soprano Paula Murrihy as his wife, Judith. We will finish our first year as we began it, with a bang: a spectacular production of Verdi’s Aida with Orla Boylan taking on the title role for the first time. We are delighted to present our final two productions of the year in partnership with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

Throughout 2018 we have been hard at work designing and developing the structures of our ever-evolving new national opera company. Our staff has increased from its starting level of four to nine, and we are close to filling all the positions on our board of directors.

There is still time to engrave your name in the history of opera in Ireland by joining our Founders Circle, subscriptions to which will close on 31 December. We are greatly heartened by the support that’s already been committed, and, remember, you can also gift membership to a loved one or take out membership in someone’s memory.

Our first year’s programme has been enthusiastically received and we are chomping at the bit to reveal our plans for 2019 beyond the February tour of our high-praised production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice starring Sharon Carty.

We are most grateful to our principal funder The Arts Council, without whom none of our activities would be possible.

We welcome you to tonight’s performance and hope you will be swept away by both the joy and the heartache in the show.

Fasten your seatbelts and be prepared for an odyssey!

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LIFE AND ART Offenbach was a theatre man. From the 1850s to the 1870s he staged over 100 operettas in Paris and was acknowledged as a master of the form. He owned theatres and had many huge hits, but the theatres sometimes burned down, and he had his share of dismal failures, after which he’d pick himself up, put the hits back on stage to fill the coffers, and get on with his next project. At the same time he longed to be taken seriously as an opera composer, though when the opportunity arose to have The Tales of Hoffmann produced by the Opéra-Comique he sadly never lived to see it staged, dying four months before the premiere.

It’s striking that Offenbach chose to feature an artist as the main character of his last work. He clearly had strong affinities with his vision of the German writer ETA Hoffmann, and his love of wine, women and song. Writing at the end of the 19th century, Offenbach had witnessed the great transformations of the Industrial Revolution, where human life had been changed utterly by technology.

Philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were imagining the individual in radical new ways against the backdrop of a changing world. The concept of the “uncanny”, soon to be expanded on by Freud, was increasingly deployed to describe the sense of strangeness and alienation as a result of discovering familiar things in strange contexts, or the opposite.

For our new Irish National Opera production, we have tried to find contemporary reference points to unlock the events and ideas in Offenbach’s opéra fantastique for today. The laboratory of the inventor Spalanzani becomes 08

a product launch at a tech start-up where his dazzling new invention, the humanoid robot Olympia, is being unveiled to the world. The sick and dying Antonia is locked away in a strange and alienating hospital, where her terrified father tries to protect her from a mysterious illness and a charismatic quack doctor with a suitcase of very alternative remedies.

And the courtesan Giulietta is reimagined as a performance artist, with the Venice Biennale taking on the role of a very contemporary version of Carnival. By combining the shock of the modern with a great historical work of art we try to seek out new connections and to create an experience for audiences which is timeless but also strange and new.

That Offenbach never signed off on a finished version of the opera means that nobody can be sure of his true intentions, and there have been many attempts to get to the bottom of this question over the century or so since the premiere in 1881. The original director cut the entire Giulietta act as well as much of the opening and closing scenes, scattering the best tunes throughout the other acts, and the orchestral parts were lost when the Opéra-Comique was destroyed by a fire

a few years later. Extra scenes and music were composed by others for various productions over the years, and so what is consided the “traditional version” of the opera is very likely different to what Offenbach had imagined and is certainly not all the creation of the composer.

Almost 100 years later, 1,250 pages of the composer’s notes were discovered in a house belonging to his descendants. A few years after that almost all of the draft material for the scenes and music cut at the premiere came to light, as well as the libretto submitted to the French censors before the first performance, meaning that there was now an opportunity to get closer to Offenbach’s conception. For this production we have chosen to include material from the most recent edition by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck, notably the restored highly theatrical finale to the Giulietta act, and a final encounter between Hoffmann and Stella. Authenticity is one thing. But what I hope will come across in performance is the strong dramatic quality and theatrical flair of Offenbach’s original intentions, reinforcing the idea of him as a great artist of the stage.

TOM CREED director

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Join Irish National Opera’s Founders Circle THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO BeCOME Part of Irish Opera History We launched Irish National Opera in January with a sold-out concert featuring some of Ireland’s best operatic singers. Since then, we have been performing our bold and ambitious 2018 programme to great critical and audience acclaim.

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synopsis Act I XXXXX

For this production the original 19th-century setting has been updated to the present day.

Act II XXXX Act III XXX Act IV XXXX

Act I We meet Hoffmann in a bar, drunk,

consumed with all kinds of feelings about his lover Stella, who’s performing in an opera – Mozart’s Don Giovanni – in a theatre across the road. He’s drinking with his buddies, including his great friend Nicklausse, and can’t get Stella out of his mind. He begins to tell the people in the bar stories of his three great loves. Of course what we come to discover is that these three great loves actually are imagined versions of Stella. Hoffmann is working out his feelings for Stella, his feelings about his own art and his insecurities about his own relationships as well as the relationship between his art and his life, the destructive quality of that art, and the destructive quality of his life. And he’s working them out through imagining Stella in various guises, and telling stories of various relationships which end up in catastrophe.

Act II He imagines Stella as a robot, Olympia, the creation of the inventor Spalanzani. She’s been made using eyes by another inventor, Coppélius. So we find ourselves at a product launch for this new, extraordinary humanoid, who’s been programmed by Spalanzani to be his version of the ideal woman. She can sing a

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beautiful, meaningless song, and say yes, and nothing else. Olympia is being launched to the world. Hoffmann puts on a pair of glasses he has been given by Coppélius and becomes captivated by this humanoid, non-human Olympia and falls in love with her.

Act III In the next story we hear about his

love for a young woman called Antonia. She longs to be a singer but she suffers from a mysterious illness, the consequence of which is that if she sings it will kill her. There’s no real explanation for this illness, but her father Crespel is terrified she will die the same way as her mother, who suffered from a similar affliction. He has sequestered her away from the world, and away from Hoffmann, who he considers a bad influence, particularly for giving her ideas about art and being a star. Dr Miracle, a quack doctor, turns up, convinces her that she’s hearing the voice of her mother and lures her on to her own destruction.

Act IV The next story is about Giulietta, who in the original is a courtesan in Venice. The courtesans in Venice and the carnival were part of a tourist project on behalf of Venice to open the city, appear cosmopolitan and attract tourists. The Venice Biennale is a kind of contemporary equivalent, with Giulietta as a performance artist, like Marina opening her new art exhibition there. But of

course, because we are in Italy, there are all kinds of Mafia in the background, including her current squeeze, Schlemil, and the mysterious Dappertutto, who’s manipulating everybody. Dappertutto convinces Giulietta to steal Hoffmann’s reflection for him, which this production imagines as a kind of drug deal, but also on a metaphorical level as a total loss of selfhood. So by the end of the scene with Giulietta, Hoffmann no longer has an image of himself.

Act V Then we find ourselves back in the

bar. Hoffmann has told his story, the opera is over, he missed the second half, and Stella comes in. He wasn’t there to meet her after the show as she’d arranged – her letter had been intercepted by the councillor Lindorf at the beginning of the opera. He has his own desires for Stella. Stella says to Hoffmann, I think we should try and make another go of this. Consumed with the failures, with all the disastrous relationships he has in his head, and the inability to distinguish his own real relationship from these fictionalised versions of Stella, he rejects her. All the while Hoffmann’s friend Nicklausse is there, is watching, is trying to intervene and save Hoffmann from himself, while also processing his own feelings for Hoffmann. But at the end of the day, Nicklausse knows that as an artist Hoffmann will be able to transform his failure of a life into triumphant works of art.

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CAST Hoffmann

Julian Hubbard

Tenor

Olympia / Antonia / Giulietta / Stella

Claudia Boyle

Soprano

Nicklausse

Gemma Ní Bhriain

Mezzo-soprano

Lindorf / Coppélius / Miracle / Dappertutto

John Molloy

Bass

Andrès / Cochenille / Franz / Pitichinaccio

Andrew Gavin

Tenor

Crespel / Chorus

Brendan Collins

Bass

The Voice / Chorus

Carolyn Holt

Mezzo-soprano

Spalanzani / Chorus

Fearghal Curtis

Tenor

Schlemihl / Chorus

Kevin Neville

Bass

Nathanaël / Chorus

Peter O‘Reilly

Tenor

Hermann / Chorus

Cormac Lawlor

Bass

Luther / Chorus

Robert McAllister

Bass

Chorus

Amy Ní Fhearraigh

Soprano

Chorus

Corina Ignat

Soprano

Chorus

Martha O’Brien

Mezzo-soprano

Chorus

Conor Breen

Tenor

Cover Stella, Olympia

Amy Ní Fhearraigh

Soprano

Cover Antonia, Giulietta

Rachel Croash

Soprano

ORCHESTRA

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Piano Andrew Synnott

Flute Kieran Moynihan

Viola Andreea Biancu

Clarinet Conor Sheil

Cello Adrian Mantu

Horn Cuan Ó Seireadáin

Harp Dianne Marshall

Creative Team Conductor

Andrew Synnott

Director

Tom Creed

Set & Costume Designer

Katie Davenport

Lighting Designer

Sinéad McKenna

Assistant Director & Movement Director

Paula O’Reilly

Production Team Production Manager Patrick McLaughlin

Chief Electrician Richard Lambert

Hair & Makeup Tee Elliott

Technical Manager Nic Rée

Costume Supervisor Monica Ennis Ciara Geaney

Scenic Artist Istvan Laszlo

Company Stage Manager Paula Tierney

Costume Makers Denise Assas, Raziana Nogib, Sinead Lawlor Niamh O’Connor

Set Construction Ian Thompson Scenedock

Stage Manager Conleth Stanley Master Carpenter Arthur Bell

Costume Assistant Rachel Ennis Niamh O’Connor

Surtitle Operator Maeve Sheil

Additional Thanks to: PR Consultant Mission PR Graphic Design Alphabet Soup

Photography Ste Murray Patrick Redmond Promotional & Archival Video Gansee Films

Transport Trevor Price Programme Edited by Michael Dervan

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being CLAUD WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THE FIRST OPERA YOU WENT TO? The first opera I went to? I’m just trying to think of what it was. It must have been when I was really, really young. I think it was in London. My biggest memory – and I can’t even remember what opera it was – is that it was at Covent Garden, and I was mesmerised by the scale of it, by the drama of it. Opera is all so heightened. You can’t really compare it to anything else. It’s on such a grand scale. That is my biggest memory, of being completely transported.

Drama was always my first love – even before opera or music. It’s something that as a child I always wanted to do. I suppose I was a bit of a clown, an entertainer. But this was something I’d never seen before. It was new and strange and wonderful. To see these singers with unbelievable voices, nothing miked. There was just this natural force coming out these natural bodies. I was a bit bewildered but also excited, and I was really, really amazed by it.

The first opera I remember connecting with was Bohème. I remember crying. Puccini just moves you in that way. It really does give you goose bumps, you know. I still connect that with it.

WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM YOUR FIRST APPEARANCE ON AN OPERA STAGE? My first professional appearance was in Carmen. I was playing Frasquita for Lyric Opera Productions in Dublin. I was still doing singing part-time and

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CLAUDIA BOYLE I hadn’t maybe decided whether I was going to do it full-time or not, because I was studying the cello at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I did my degree as a cellist. It was half-way through that. I was itching to perform more.

It’s not to put instrumentalists down, but for me personally – it’s so subjective – it wasn’t enough.

I missed the drama. I missed giving more of myself. I missed having my own voice. For me it was just so important to have the music and the drama, to have the heightened spectacle that is opera. I just loved every moment of it, I have to say. Carmen is a fantastic opera. I was inspired by it. It certainly motivated me in making my career choice.

My first student opera was Norma. We did excerpts when I was still at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama. I was parttime there. We did little excerpts. Again, I loved that. I love bel canto music.

WHAT WAS THE BEST OPERA OR SINGING ADVICE YOU EVER GOT? I suppose it was when I was working in Italy. I’ve never personally followed a very strict class of technique. There are a lot of teachers who would insist you apply a certain technique. In Italy their whole way of singing is to sing naturally, to sing what feels good. Just to sing with a natural voice, a natural sound, and not to push. That would be the biggest thing. As soon as you start pushing

the tension there’s a lack of connection and there’s a flow that just stops. To sing in your own voice, to sing in your natural voice. Not to try and be anything else. Not to try and emulate other singers by listening to recordings. You can get inspired by recordings. You hear what you like, you hear what you don’t like. But when it comes to singing, do it in your natural voice. Italians are all about beautiful sound. They really are!

You have to be able to cut through an orchestra.

Don’t get me wrong. Once you sing in your natural voice, that will happen, because it’s freer.

Don’t focus on pushing or pressing. When you do that it has the opposite effect of what you want – which is to produce a clear, natural sound.

I’ve been guilty of things like that when I was young. You just learn as you go forward how to sustain nice singing. If you push, if you try to be a bigger voice than you are, ironically, it has the opposite effect. Some of the most beautiful singing I’ve heard is soft singing, when a singer can really take something back, disappear almost to nothing. You can even feel sometimes if you do that, you can feel the tension in the audience.

You can hear a pin drop.

When you hear a big impressive voice it’s great.

It’s great for maybe 10, 15 minutes and then if I don’t hear colours, if I don’t hear musicality, it just doesn’t sustain my interest.

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WHAT IS THE MOST ANNOYING MISCONCEPTION ABOUT OPERA? I suppose people think it’s too highbrow. I don’t think it is. The stories are the most basic stories – love stories, revenge. They’re the most common themes that you’ll find. Yet people think that it’s elitist. I think the language does have a lot to do with that. If people give it a chance they would realise it’s not the case. Certainly in music like Puccini, that music breaks through any language barrier. You know what Rodolfo is singing about when he’s singing to Mimì. It’s quite clear.

WHAT MOMENT DO YOU MOST LOOK FORWARD TO WHEN YOU GO TO A PERFORMANCE OF THE TALES OF HOFFMANN? I love the music. It’s why I wanted to do it. The music and the melodies.

It’s beautiful music. You just can’t deny that. I know it sounds like a basic answer to your question. But it’s the beautiful melody. I do on another level love the challenge of hearing a soprano sing four different roles. It’s fiendish. It’s really, really difficult. But ultimately it’s the melodies that I love most about The Tales of Hoffmann.

WHAT’S THE MOST CHALLENGING ASPECT OF THE TALES OF HOFFMANN? There are two separate challenges. There’s the music and then conveying four different characters, trying to do that convincingly, trying to make them three-dimensional, not just going for the obvious.

Offenbach writes so well. A lot is already written in to the music. In the Doll’s Song, for instance, you have the harp and flute accompaniment, it almost sounds like a musical box. The humour is in the music.

Antonia’s music is so sentimental, so nostalgic. Her act is probably the best written act. Act III has the best music in it. Then Giulietta, she’s

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a courtesan – very difficult, actually, and we’re doing a coloratura version of her aria. It is actually fiendish. From a technical point of view it’s a very difficult sing. The characterisation is a challenge, it’s there, and if you work with a great director like Tom Creed you’re going to find all that.

The different voice types, ultimately, is the biggest challenge. If you want to pin-point it down to the hardest part in the opera, for me it’s maybe the transition from Olympia straight into Antonia without an interval. That’s just such a big gear change. You go from a high coloratura, singing up in the stratosphere, straight into Antonia’s first aria at the beginning of the act, which is very middle voice, very sustained.

Getting the voice to drop in the time available – Tom says we have about five minutes – that is a challenge. But it’s one I’m enjoying.

WHAT IS THE WEIRDEST THING YOU’VE EVER BEEN ASKED TO DO IN A PRODUCTION? I did a production in Germany, and you know what German productions can be like... It was a Calixto Bieto production. It’s not necessarily weird. I really liked the production. It was Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. For me, it worked. It wasn’t weird in the sense of bizarre.

It was just that it was quite a raunchy production, and there’s quite a lot of sex in it.

It’s quite a hard-hitting scene, her first aria. He basically rapes her. That’s about the strongest thing I’ve been asked to do on stage. It’s quite a controversial production but for me it works.

I don’t mind controversial, I don’t mind hardhitting, if there’s a reason for it, if it’s not just gratuitous. If it’s not just for the sake of it.

IF YOU WEREN’T AN OPERA SINGER, WHAT MIGHT YOU HAVE BECOME? Hopefully an actress. I just love performing.

Certainly something in performance, in the arts.

I couldn’t do a desk job. When I was 13 I did my first play in the Gate Theatre. That really gave me the acting bug. I was in A Tale of Two Cities, an adaptation by Hugh Leonard, Alan Stanford directed it. It was my first play. I had real lines.

I wasn’t just a token child in it. I performed at Andrew’s Lane Theatre, and I did a couple of ads for TV, I did a Meteor ad before it became Eir. Then I did a couple of musicals, and I joined an amateur musical society. And here we are!

Although... I do love animals. I have a dog who I love and adore. Maybe a vet. If I wasn’t allowed be in the arts, then something to with animals.

In CONVERSATION with Michael Dervan

Constanza has been basically sex-trafficked and Bassa Selim has me in a cage with a dog collar.

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Composer, cellist, impr As a cellist he was good enough to perform in concerts with Liszt and Anton Rubinstein (he was even dubbed “le Liszt du violoncelle”), but his real calling was the theatre. He had difficulty gaining recognition and he scored his first successes in his mid-thirties only by stumping up the money to hire the Théâtre Marigny to showcase his own work. Operetta was his chosen medium and within a couple of years, in 1858, he produced Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), one of the string of great satirical works for which he is remembered today.

Jacques Offenbach

was born in Cologne in 1819. His family name came from the fact that his father, born Isaac Juda Eberst, was from Offenbach am Main, just across the river Main from Frankfurt. The composer moved to Paris to continue his musical studies in 1833 – his instrument was the cello – and he stayed in the French capital for the rest of his life. It was in Paris that his first name changed from Jacob to Jacques.

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The dancing in Offenbach’s Orphée, unlike that in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (which INO presented at Galway International Arts Festival in July and will tour nationwide next February), includes a cancan for the gods. Irreverence and incongruity – much of it involving other people’s famous tunes in unexpected contexts – were important tools of his trade. And it was not just other people’s music that he quoted. He recycled his own work, too.

The famous Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann, his last work and only opera to survive in the repertoire, was originally an Elfenchor (Elves’ Song) in Die Rheinnixen (The Rhine Mermaids), first performed in Vienna in 1864.

By the time he came to write The Tales of Hoffmann he had become something of a yesterday’s man. He managed the Théâtre de la Gaîté in the 1870s and the losses he endured on Sardou’s La haine in 1874 literally bankrupted him. Part of his solution was to tour the United States, where he conducted over 40 concerts. On his return he wrote a book about his experiences, Offenbach in America, Notes of a Travelling Musician. This even includes a chapter on restaurants and waiters in which he noted that “Nothing is easier than to eat a meal in the French, Italian, Spanish, or German style. Nothing is more difficult for a stranger than to eat an American dinner in America.”

resario, travel-writer He began discussions about an opera on The Tales of Hoffmann in the early 1870s and was still hard at work on it at the time of his death at the age of 61 in 1880. He did not manage to finish it and the completion of the Act V Epilogue and the orchestration were carried out by Ernest Guiraud (1837-92), a composer whose other claims to fame include writing the recitatives for Bizet’s Carmen, arranging the second orchestral suite from the same composer’s L’Arlésienne, and being one of the composition teachers of both Debussy and Dukas.

In the event, the version of The Tales of Hoffmann performed with spoken dialogue at the OpéraComique in 1881 was subject to a large number of changes and cuts. In spite of that the production still ran to three and a half hours. The first production with recitatives, which took place in Vienna in December 1881, was different again. The situation surrounding the musical text was complicated further when various early printed editions effectively created versions of their own.

The Tales of Hoffmann is what Donald Trump might call a “fake news” opera. Not because of the permutations and combinations of what has been left in or out of productions over the years, but because of the title. The libretto is based on stories by the fantastical German writer ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822), whose work also provided the basis of ballets by Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker) and Delibes’s (Coppélia) as well as the eight fantasies of Schumann’s piano work, Kreisleriana.

The opera presents Hoffmann’s stories not as works of extraordinary imagination, but as if they are about the writer himself, telling of episodes from his real life. No one man, you would think, should be forced to fall so unfortunately in love – with a singing doll, a singer afflicted with a disease which means that if she sings she will die, a courtesan who is in league with the devil as the hero of Offenbach’s masterpiece. Nor should anyone be so afflicted by malign forces ranged against him. At the end of the opera of course we learn that all three women are to be taken as difference facets of Stella, the real-life love of the character of Hoffmann in the opera.

The Tales of Hoffmann is not the only new opera from 1881 to have a convoluted performance history. Four days before its premiere, an opera by Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford was staged for the first time in Hanover. Although the libretto of The Veiled Prophet was based on Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, the Hanover production was given in German as Der verschleierte Profet. When the work was revived at Covent Garden London in 1893, the original English libretto by WB Squire was again passed over, this time in favour of an Italian translation by GA Mazzucato. The original English version still awaits a production.

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BIOGRAPHIES

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Andrew Synnott music director

Tom Creed director

Andrew Synnott has conducted for Opera Theatre Company (his own Dubliners; Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Bastien and Bastienne and The Magic Flute; Haydn’s Life on the Moon; Monteverdi/Alcorn’s Orfeo; Handel’s Xerxes and Acis and Galatea; Grigory Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank; Bizet’s Carmen; Wolf-Ferrari’s Susanna’s Secret and Poulenc’s The Human Voice). For Co-Opera (Verdi’s La traviata, Bizet’s Carmen, Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus).

For Glasthule Opera (Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte). And for the Royal Irish Academy of Music (Menotti’s The Telephone, Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, Jake Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch, Stravinsky’s Renard, Jonathan Dove’s Greed, Kevin O’Connell’s Sensational!, Puccini’s Suor Angelica, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and La finta giardiniera, and the world premiere of Siobhán Cleary’s Vampirella). His arrangements of Puccini’s La bohème, Wolf-Ferrari’s Susanna’s Secret and Mozart’s The Magic Flute have toured extensively in Ireland and the UK. He has conducted at the Buxton Opera Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in Australia, Portugal and France. In January 2015 he conducted the premiere of his first opera, Breakdown, in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. His second opera, Dubliners, was premiered at Wexford Festival Opera last year. He is currently working on a commission from Wexford which will be premiered in the 2019 festival. He is a former artistic director and conductor of Crash Ensemble, a group he co-founded in 1997, and is a member of the vocal faculty in the RIAM. He holds a PhD in composition from the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama.

Tom Creed is a theatre and opera director based in Dublin.

Recent opera productions include Handel’s Acis and Galatea, WolfFerrari’s Susanna’s Secret and Poulenc’s The Human Voice (Opera Theatre Company), Britten’s Owen Wingrave (Opera Collective Ireland/Opéra de Paris), and world premieres of Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger (Opera Theatre of St Louis and Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York), Annelies van Parys’s Private View (Muziektheater Transparant at Opera Vlaanderen, Operadagen Rotterdam, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and on tour), and Jürgen Simpson’s air india [redacted] (Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver). Private View was awarded the FEDORA Rolf Liebermann Prize for Opera in 2014, Best Production at the Armel Opera Festival in Budapest in 2015 and was named as one of 14 notable productions of the last three years, “which are aesthetically innovative and reflect new developments in this genre” by Music Theatre NOW in 2016. His extensive work as a theatre director includes productions for the Abbey Theatre, Gate Theatre, Rough Magic, Thisispopbaby, his own company Playgroup and a range of independent Irish companies, which have played in Ireland, the UK, Europe and the USA. He was nominated for Best Director at the Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2007.

He was festival director of Cork Midsummer Festival from 2011 to 2013 and was nominated for an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award in 2012 “for original and dynamic use of local spaces at Cork Midsummer Festival”. He has previously been theatre and dance curator of Kilkenny Arts Festival and associate director of Rough Magic Theatre Company.

Katie Davenport designer

Sinéad McKenna lighting designer

Katie is a set and costume designer and she trained in production design for stage and screen at IADT. After graduating in 2014 she worked as an associate designer at the Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, Galway Arts Festival and the Gaiety Theatre.

In 2017 she was designer in residence at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. She has designed for directors Selina Cartmell, Graham McLaren, Oonagh Murphy, Ronan Phelan, Lynne Parker, Tom Creed, Ben Barnes and Dan Colley. Recent artistic achievements include representing Ireland at Evolving Design for Performance, an exhibition of European Theatre Design (National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, 2016) and receiving a prestigious ICAD award for art direction for iD Mobile’s TV ads (2016). She has also worked as assistant designer in film and TV for Ardmore Studios, RTÉ, PBS and Sky Arts and is a committee member of ISSSD, the Irish Society of Stage and Screen Designers.

Sinéad has received two Irish Times Theatre Awards for Best Lighting Design and a Drama Desk nomination for Best Lighting Design for a musical. Her previous designs for opera include Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro (Opera Theatre Company); Verdi’s La traviata (Malmö Opera); Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia (Irish Youth Opera); and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Ireland). She recently designed the set and lighting for Mark O’Rowe’s The Approach (Landmark Productions) and has also designed the lighting for numerous other Landmark productions. Recent designs include Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami for Blinder Films and Angela’s Ashes The Musical.

She has worked extensively with Druid Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, the Gate, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Cork Opera House, the Everyman, Cork, Rough Magic, Cahoots, CoisCéim, Opera Theatre Company, Decadent, Gare St Lazare Ireland, the Lyric, Fishamble, Corn Exchange, THISISPOPBABY, Siren, Second Age, Performance Corporation, Semper Fi and Gúna Nua.

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Julian Hubbard tenor

Claudia Boyle soprano

Hoffmann

Olympia / Antonia / Giulietta / Stella

Julian Hubbard’s recent and future engagements include Priest in Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero (Théâtre de la Monnaie and Oper Stuttgart), Malcolm in Verdi’s Macbeth, and Il messaggero in Verdi’s Aida (La Monnaie, Brussels), Don José in Bizet’s Carmen and Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Lyric Opera, Dublin), and Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Longborough Festival Opera). Past engagements have included Jimmy Mahoney in Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Opera Theatre Company), Huntsman/Prince in Rusalka (La Monnaie and Scottish Opera), Walther in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (Longborough Festival Opera), Juan in Henze’s Das Wundertheater (Montepulciano Festival), and Pontio Pilato in Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot (in concert in London and appearances with English National Opera and Opera Holland Park). His concert repertoire includes Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Haydn’s The Seasons, Puccini’s Messa di Gloria and Verdi’s Requiem. He has performed at the Edinburgh and Aldeburgh Festivals, the Wigmore Hall and for BBC Radio 3. He also appears on the La Monnaie DVD of Rusalka. He has worked with conductors Richard Bonynge, Adam Fischer, Carlo Rizzi, Alain Altingolu, Paolo Carignani, Stuart Stratford and Anthony Negus and directors Stefan Herheim, Andrea Breth, Anthony Macdonald, Stewart Laing, and Alfred Kirchner. He trained at the Royal College of Music and the National Opera Studio, London, supported by the Peter Moores Foundation and the Scottish Opera Endowment Fund.

He is also an alumnus of the Britten/Pears Young Artist Programme. He currently studies with Janice Chapman and Julian Gavin.

Dublin soprano Claudia Boyle, a former member of the Salzburger Festspiele’s prestigious Young Singers Project, has dramatically raised her international profile in recent seasons through highlyacclaimed performances in Zurich, Rome, London, Berlin, and New York. Important roles and house debuts have included Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Komische Oper Berlin, Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at Semperoper Dresden, Leïla in Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers for English National Opera, Tytania in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, and Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with Danish National Opera. She received particular critical praise for her company debut with English National Opera as Mabel in Mike Leigh’s production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and as a testament to her linguistic strengths, she made her debut as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma to overwhelming audience and critical acclaim. She has attracted considerable praise for her exceptional vocal versatility and dramatic strength. She created the role of May-Shan in Christian Jost’s opera Rote Laterne in her house debut at Opernhaus Zürich.

She made her Edinburgh International Festival debut in the world premiere of Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The Last Hotel and has appeared as Dede in Bernstein’s A Quiet Place with Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (released on Decca). She has appeared with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden as Cecily Cardew in Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in performances at the Barbican, London, and on tour at the Rose Theater, New York, with the New York Philharmonic.

Gemma Ní Bhriain mezzo-soprano

John Molloy bass

Nicklausse

Lindorf / Coppélius / Miracle / Dappertutto

Dublin mezzo-soprano Gemma Ní Bhriain graduated with a BA in Music Performance from the Royal Irish Academy of Music where she studied with Veronica Dunne. She joined the International Opera Studio of Opernhaus Zürich in September 2016 and her many roles there have included Cléone in Charpentier’s Médée, Un Pâtre, La Chatte and l’Écureuil in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Zweite Dame in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Valletto in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Ramiro in Mozart’s La finta giardiniera. From September 2014 until July 2016, she was a member of the Atelier Lyrique Opera Studio at Opéra National de Paris.

During her two seasons in Paris she debuted in five roles, including two world premieres – Dorabella in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Diane in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Proserpina in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Etienne in Mikel Urquiza, Julian Lembke, Didier Rotella and Francisco Alvarado’s Maudits les Innocents, and Le Garçon in Joanna Lee’s Vol Retour. She also made her main stage debut at Opéra Bastille as Alisa in Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor. Previous roles include Mercedes in Bizet’s Carmen with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Jenny’s Girl in Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with Opera Theatre Company/Rough Magic. She makes her recital debut at Opéra Bastille in January 2019 and will return to Opernhaus Zürich to perform Alisa in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Une Prêtresse/ Une Matelote/Une Chasseresse in a new production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie.

John Molloy is one of Ireland’s leading basses and hails from Birr.

He studied at the DIT Conservatory of Music, the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, and the National Opera Studio, London. He made his Irish National Opera debut in April as Antonio The Marriage of Figaro. Roles for Opera Theatre Company include Sparafucile in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Trinity Moses in Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Figaro in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Zuniga in Bizet’s Carmen and he also appeared in Stephen Deazley’s children’s opera BUG OFF!!! Other roles include Alidoro in Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Scottish Opera), Guccio in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (Royal Opera, London), Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (English National Opera), Arthur in Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and Figaro in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (Nationale Reisopera, Netherlands), Le Commandeur in Thomas’s La cour de Célimène (Wexford Festival Opera), Angelotti in Puccini’s Tosca, Luka in Walton’s The Bear, Banco in Verdi’s Macbeth and Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (OTC and NI Opera), Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Opera Holland Park), Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Bonze in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Lyric Opera), Snug in Britten’s A Midsummer Nights Dream (Opera Ireland) and Henry Kissinger in John Adams’s Nixon in China (Wide Open Opera). His concert repertoire includes Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Shanghai Opera), Verdi’s Requiem and Mendelssohn’s St Paul (RTÉ Concert Orchestra), Haydn’s Creation (Continuo Rotterdam), Handel’s Messiah (Rheinische Philharmonie Hallé) and Stravinsky’s Renard (London Sinfonietta).

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Andrew Gavin tenor

Brendan Collins baritone

Andrès / Cochenille / Franz / Pitichinaccio

Crespel

Andrew completed his Masters in Music Performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music Dublin in 2016, achieving First Class Honours under the tutelage of Mary Brennan. He is also a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he attained First Class Honours in English Literature; he also holds an M. Phil in Children’s Literature from Trinity College Dublin. He made his Irish National Opera debut in April as Curzio The Marriage of Figaro.

In October 2017 he created the roles of Alleyne, O’Halloran and Bob in Andrew Synnott’s Dubliners at Wexford Festival Opera, and later performed the work with Opera Theatre Company in Dublin. Earlier in 2017 he sang the role of Damon in Opera Theatre Company’s national tour of Handel’s Acis and Galatea with the Irish Baroque Orchestra. He made his Wigmore Hall debut in 2016 as part of Irish Culture in Britain: A Centenary Celebration. At the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2016 he sang the role of Arbace in a concert performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo, and he was a winner of the 2016 PwC Wexford Festival Opera Emerging Young Artist bursary. Notable oratorio engagements include Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Liszt’s Coronation Mass, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (Lobegesang), CPE Bach’s Magnificat, Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s Mass in C, Bach’s St John Passion and the complete Mozart mass series of the Dún Laoghaire Choral Society.

Brendan trained at the Cork School of Music and the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama and was granted a scholarship to study at the Opera Studio of La Monnaie de Munt in Brussels under renowned bass-baritone José van Dam. His Opera Theatre Company credits include Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Marullo in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Elviro in Handel’s Xerxes and Bartolo in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Other roles include the title role in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Conte Almaviva Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Marcello in Puccini’s La bohème, Escamillo in Bizet’s Carmen, Tonio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Alfio in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Germont père Verdi’s La traviata, Paolo Albiani in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Yamadori in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Fiorello in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Count Gil in Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna.

He has appeared in productions by Opera Ireland, Cork Operatic Society, Wide Open Opera, Lyric Opera Productions, Dublin, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, English Touring Opera, Scottish Opera, Iford Arts Opera, Longborough Festival Opera, and Northern Ireland Opera. He has performed across Ireland, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and the United States at many of the world’s leading venues including the Royal Albert Hall, London (at the BBC Proms under Andrew Davies), Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York (under Mark Elder), Kennedy Center, Washington DC, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Théâtre de Luxembourg, and at the Stephansdom in Vienna, and the Katejanerkirche in Salzburg.

Carolyn Holt mezzo-soprano

Fearghal Curtis tenor

The Voice

Spalanzani

Carolyn Holt recently graduated with Distinction from the Royal Academy of Music, where she was a Kohn Foundation Bach scholar and was awarded a DipRAM for outstanding performance, the Cork Scholarship and Isabel May Walton Scholarship. She is continuing her studies as a member of The Alexander Gibson Opera School at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

She has performed internationally as a recitalist and soloist with various choral societies. Highlights include recitals at the Royal Overseas League with Irish Heritage and the Rudolf Kempe Society, Rossini’s Petite messe sollenelle (Choeur de Lux Aeterna, Normandy), Mozart’s Requiem, Mendelssohn’s Elijah (Penzance Choral Society), Handel’s Messiah (under Edward Higginbottom), soloist in Royal Academy and Kohn Foundation Bach Cantata Series, Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, Rutter’s Feel the Spirit (Chichester Cathedral) and Mass in D (Wexford Festival Singers). Other recent performances include Elgar’s Sea Pictures with Lambeth Orchestra and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the Esker Festival Orchestra.

She is a regular winner in competitions both at home and abroad, including the inaugural Irish Heritage Bursary, the Trench Award and a number of prizes at the ESB Feis Ceoil. She has performed with Opera Theatre Company, Wide Open Opera, Drogheda International Concert Series, Birr Arts Festival and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and was a finalist and winner of the Audience Prize at NI Opera’s Festival of Voice 2017. She is generously supported by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Sybil Tutton Award.

Fearghal is from Dublin and is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London, and the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, Dublin. Most recently he sang the role of Stephen Dedalus in Eric Sweeney’s Ulysses (Bloomsday Festival) and the role of Taoiseach in the first modern performance of Robert O’Dwyer’s Eithne (Opera Theatre Company).

He was a member of the chorus in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Irish National Opera), and in the awardwinning production of Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The Second Violinist (Wide Open Opera/ Landmark Productions). Other opera highlights include Damon in Handel’s Acis and Galatea (OTC), Box in Sullivan’s Cox and Box and the title role in Rameau’s Pygmalion (Opera in the Open), Prologue/ Quint in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Orpheus/ Mercury in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama) and Apollo/ Spirit/Pastore/Ensemble in Monteverdi’s Orfeo (OTC, while he was an Associate Young Artist with the company). He also recently toured around Germany as lead classical tenor of The World of Musicals tour with GFD Promotions.

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Kevin Neville bass-baritone

Peter O’Reilly tenor

Schlemihl

Nathanaël

Limerick-born bass-baritone Kevin Neville began his training with Olive Cowpar. He completed his BA (Hons) in Music and English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and his MMus with First Class Honours under the tutelage of Emmanuel Lawler at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama. He has won numerous competitions for opera, Lieder, oratorio, sacred song, art song and musical theatre at Feis Ceoil Dublin, Sligo Feis Ceoil, Féile Luimní (Limerick), Feis Maitiú (Cork) and Birr Festival of Music & Voice. Among the principal roles he sang as a student were Pirate King in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, Mr Gobbineau in Menotti’s The Medium, Landy Worker in Andrew Synnott’s Breakdown, the title role in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Sarastro, Sprecher, Erster Priester and Zweiter Geharnischter Mann in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Regent in Balfe’s The Sleeping Queen. He understudied Don Basilio in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville for Wide Open Opera, Benoit in Puccini’s La bohème for Opera Theatre Company and Don Alfonso in Mozart’s Così fan tutte for Northern Ireland Opera. Most recently he completed the NI Opera Studio programme touring three productions in Northern Ireland. He has performed oratorio across Ireland with conductors Peter Barley, David Brophy, John Dexter, Stephen Doughty, Cecilia Madden and David Milne including solo performances at the NCH and Ulster Hall. He has also sung in the chorus in productions for Opera Theatre Company, Wide Open Opera and NI Opera.

Peter O’Reilly is a graduate of the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, where he was awarded a First Class Honours B.Mus. Whilst there, he was under the tutelage of Emmanuel Lawler, with whom he is continuing his training. Peter has also received coaching from Irish répétiteurs Mairéad Hurley, Trudi Carberry and Úna Hunt. Peter has been an extremely successful prizewinner over recent years at the ESB Feis Ceoil, most recently winning the Cuisine de France John McCormack Bursary. He has also taken part in masterclasses with some of the world’s finest musicians, including Graham Johnson, Patricia Bardon, Brenda Hurley and Benjamin Appl. He made his professional operatic debut in 2017, playing the role of Lechmere in Opera Collective Ireland’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave. Previous notable engagements include two world premieres – Odhrán Ó Casaide’s Marbhna 1916 and Andrew Synnott’s Breakdown. He has also played leading roles for Lyric Opera Productions at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton Opera House, and the Rathmines & Rathgar Musical Society in the National Concert Hall, Dublin. He has also featured as the tenor soloist for oratorios performed by Dublin County Choir, Culwick Choral Society, Tallaght Choral Society, and the Guinness Choir. Last December he sang for Our Lady’s Choral Society’s performance of Handel’s Messiah in the National Concert Hall with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

Cormac Lawlor baritone

Robert McAllister bass-baritone

Hermann

Luther

Cormac is a graduate of the Royal Irish Academy of Music where he studied under Veronica Dunne.

He is currently studying under Judith Mok. He is a member of NI Opera’s opera studio and previously completed a term as a Young Associated Artist with Opera Theatre Company in Dublin before going on to work with companies such as NI Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Opera Holland Park. In 2017 he created the role of Farrington in Andrew Synnott’s Dubliners (Opera Theatre Company and Wexford Festival Opera), and his other roles include Bonze in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (RTÉ Concert Orchestra), Third Jew in Strauss’s Salome (NI Opera), Colline in Puccini’s La bohème, the King of Egypt in Verdi’s Aida, Kromow in Lehar’s The Merry Widow, An Old Gypsy in Verdi’s Il trovatore and Baron Douphol in Verdi’s La traviata (Lyric Opera Productions). As a student at the RIAM his roles included Superintendent Budd in Britten’s Albert Herring, David in Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, Cadmus in Handel’s Semele and Simone in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. His concert work includes Haydn’s Stabat Mater, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Magnificat, Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Bass-baritone Robert McAllister achieved a joint honours degree in Business and Law at UCD before he started pursuing his operatic dreams. He studies with Veronica Dunne and répetiteurs Dearbhla Collins and Alison Young at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He is a member of the INO Opera Studio for the 2018/2019 season. His operatic roles at the RIAM include Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Bottom in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Pluto in Monteverdi’s Il ballo delle ingrate. In 2017, he performed the role of the High King of Tír na nÓg in a concert performance and recording of Robert O’Dwyer’s Eithne with Opera Theatre Company and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. He is an experienced oratorio performer and has performed Handel’s Messiah, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, Liszt’s Coronation Mass, Mozart’s Spatzenmesse, Charpentier’s Messe de minuit pour Noël, Schubert’s Mass in C, Bach’s Coffee Cantata, Duruflé’s Requiem and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. He has performed with the RTÉ NSO and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, and earlier this year travelled to Halle, Germany to perform Messiah with the Staatskapelle Halle. He has performed in concerts and series throughout Ireland and recently traveled to New York and Paris to perform in the Writer’s Choice Concert Series. He has won many competitive awards and in 2017 was chosen as one of GoldenPlec’s Ones to Watch. He has participated in masterclasses and coaching sessions with Brenda Hurley, Ann Murray, Iain Burnside, Iris dell’Acqua, Roy Laughlin and Anna Devin.

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