15 FEBRUARY 7.15PM & 17 FEBRUARY 2PM “There’s a real buzz and sense of purpose about what this company is doing” ~ The Guardian www.niopera.com Grand Opera House, Belfast Welcome to The Grand Opera House for this new production of The Flying Dutchman. This is, by some way, NI Opera’s biggest production to date. Our very first opera (Menotti’s The Medium, coincidentally staged two years ago this month) utilised just five singers and a chamber band, and to go from this to a grand opera demanding 50 singers and a full symphony orchestra in such a short space of time indicates impressive progress. Similarly, our performances of Noye’s Fludde at the Beijing Music Festival in October, and our recent Irish Times Theatre Award nominations for The Turn of the Screw, demonstrate that our focus on bringing high quality, innovative opera to the widest possible audience continues to bear fruit. It feels appropriate for us to be staging our first Wagner opera in the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, but this production marks more than just a historical anniversary. Unsurprisingly, given the cost and complexities involved in performing Wagner, this will be the first fully staged Dutchman to be seen in Northern Ireland for generations. More unexpectedly, perhaps, this is the first ever new production of a Wagner opera by a Northern Irish company. Northern Ireland features heavily in this production. The opera begins and ends with ships and the sea, and it does not take too much imagination to link this back to Belfast’s industrial heritage and the recent Titanic commemorations. The production stars three of Northern Ireland’s finest opera singers in Bruno Caproni, Giselle Allen and Doreen Curran, as well as the wonderful Ulster Orchestra. Three of our current young artists, as well as three from last year’s programme, are involved in the production, and the chorus is drawn from talented singers all over the country. And of course we are delighted to be back at the Grand Opera House – one of Northern Ireland’s most treasured Victorian architectural jewels. I would like to thank the Peter Moores Foundation for generously supporting this production, and as ever, we are indebted to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for its continuing support and guidance. I would particularly like to thank Rosa Solinas, outgoing Head of Music at the Arts Council, who is in the process of taking up her new position as Chief Executive of the Ulster Orchestra. Rosa has been a strong advocate of opera in Northern Ireland for many years, and a great friend of NI Opera. We wish her every success in her exciting new role. Our second full season closes next month with a Northern Ireland tour of Walton’s The Bear, and we hope to see you again in Newtownabbey, Omagh, Enniskillen, Belfast or Coleraine. Thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy the show. Roy Bailie Chairman DIRECTOR’S NOTES Wagner’s fourth opera was premiered in Dresden is appropriate. Despite its composer’s professed Sean Rafferty Festival of Voice vocal competition, along with in June 1843. With stage sets cannibalised from irreligion, The Flying Dutchman is filled with Patron, NI Opera singers from last year’s Young Artists’ Programme, other productions in the theatre’s repertoire, references to angels and salvation. Perhaps this is Páidí Ó Dubháin, Mary McCabe and Gemma it found only limited success, its audiences to be expected in what is, after all, a remote and When I was asked by NI Prince. nonplussed by the opera’s Nordic bleakness and conservative community on the fringes of northern Opera last year to be Patron dissimilarity to the same composer’s lavish grand Europe. Senta’s commitment to the Dutchman, of the company, I was Away from the opera house, NI Opera’s opera Rienzi premiered in the same theatre only in this context, seems less pathological – more delighted to accept for two development programmes provide them with a year earlier. A transitional work between his understandable, and potentially more heroic. It reasons. First, I believe that mentoring and coaching from some of the earlier, more conventional operas and his later certainly was to Wagner, who stressed that Senta’s Northern Ireland needs and most respected names in the opera world, both music dramas, Wagner continued to tinker with ‘naivety’ was a positive trait; doubtless, Senta was deserves a first class opera here and in London, and give them invaluable Dutchman for the rest of his life, never quite his fantasy as much as it is the Dutchman’s. But company that can bring innovative productions experience through sharing the stage with achieving the final version he sought. Nevertheless, she is also no mere cipher or mental case, to be of the highest quality to people throughout the established singers in recitals. The Flying Dutchman has become one of his most confined to the kitchen or to the asylum. Senta country. Although only two years old, NI Opera is popular operas, its compact directness giving the embodies other values important to Wagner, doing that already. NI Opera has been fortunate enough to receive lie to Wagner’s reputation – persistent amongst important to the Wagner who only six years after generous funding from the Arts Council of non-admirers – for tedious long-windedness. the opera’s premiere would man the barricades in Equally important is recruiting and nurturing the Northern Ireland to bring its development revolt against capitalism and the established order. most promising local talent. We have a long and programmes to life, but we need more help to give A large part of the reason for the opera’s The Dutchman is a criminal who has alienated rich tradition in Ireland of producing wonderful more young people even greater opportunities. directness lies in the very personal circumstances himself from the world – and hence, mankind – opera singers, musicians, directors, designers The present economic climate makes funding all of its composition. Certainly, the essence of the by challenging it, by engaging in a fruitless and and conductors, but without enough support the more difficult to come by, and so it is even story – the eternal wanderer, a strong-willed martyr ferocious battle with life as it is. By energetically and encouragement the current generation of more important to have your support and help. doomed to a lonely existence on the turbulent choosing him and offering him a ‘home’ in herself, young professionals may not be able to fulfill their seas of life – appealed to Wagner’s image of Senta also makes an abdication from the world, but undoubted potential. Please think of sponsoring our young artists. himself (as well as being a staple for Romantic it is constructive and joyous. It is a positive choice For a relatively modest financial commitment art in general). Feeling his way towards a new to reject a conventional, patriarchal, conservative Bold initiatives such as NI Opera’s Young Artists’ you can make a real difference. aesthetic, and dismissing in ever more combative society - locked in surface relationships and Programme and its annual Festival of Voice in terms what he regarded as the debased work of his acquisitive greed - in favour of love. Glenarm give young people with exceptional talent If you enjoy the performances of our young artists contemporaries (as well as the corruption of society the chance to develop and become genuinely in The Flying Dutchman and would like to know in general), Wagner was in any case a difficult man. Nevertheless, the opera’s tragedy lies in the world-class. more about opportunities to sponsor them, please Perpetually falling out with managements and certainty that both the Dutchman and Senta are call Clíona Donnelly, NI Opera’s General Manager endlessly accumulating debts, restlessly seeking a trapped in their pasts as much as the other. Senta This performance of The Flying Dutchman is a on 028 9027 7734, or alternatively send an email to country in Europe that was worthy of him, Wagner and Wagner offer a possibility for redemption that good example. Of the current class of NI Opera [email protected]. nursed a keen sense of injustice matched by a the Dutchman – the nameless Everyman – and Young Artists, Eugene Monteith is Assistant sense of being not only victimised, but Other. mankind have the opportunity to seize. For the Conductor for the production, and Laura Sheerin Thank you for supporting NI Opera and its young In 1839, harried by creditors in Riga where he was characters, the outcome may even actually be and Aaron O’Hare are singing in the chorus. Also artists. Enjoy the show! principal conductor of the opera house, Wagner spiritually redemptive or transfiguring; Wagner’s in the chorus is Dawn Burns, the winner of the 2012 (plus wife and dog) escaped through the Baltic Sea subsequent modifications to the opera worked in a melodramatic episode culminating in a forced hard at emphasising this. But in human terms, night landing on the Norwegian coast. This landing neither Senta or the Dutchman have been able provided fruitful sonic and atmospheric material to escape the worlds from which they come, for the first scene of his already germinating opera, the decisions they have taken, and the people and Wagner (in characteristically self-mythologising they are. Perhaps Wagner, for all his personal mood) later laboriously altered the libretto’s preoccupations and subsequent mysticism, original Scottish setting to a Norwegian one, thus recognised this predicament to be the reality of identifying even more with his nameless wanderer. the human lot. It’s fortunate, at least, that while it is this tension that leads to the opera’s fatal outcome, The other essential component of Wagnerian it also generated its imperishable music and lasting music drama, that of the woman unconditionally place in the art of the world.