No opera company can run on adrenaline and goodwill, but Northern Ireland Opera is making a herculean attempt. While others have suffered losses to orchestras and choruses, this tiny organisation – four full-time staff – has staged an ambitious new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with its own 44-strong orchestra in the pit for the first time. (The Ulster Orchestra was hired in the past.) The musicians are “from across the island of Ireland”. Four Northern Irish singers took the lead female roles, an achievement of nurturing and casting. Local singers, trained throughout the year, singing in Russian and learning to dance a creditable mazurka and polka, provided a lively chorus. The company has just been nominated in the International Opera awards 2024 for its outstanding outreach work.
All this is not because plucky NI Opera has been favoured with an Arts Council windfall. On the contrary. The financial situation is dire, the figures stark. Government funding in NI arts has fallen from £14.1m in 2011/12 to £9.7m in 2023/24, with inflation a reduction of around 40%. (Current funding equates to £5.07 per capita, compared with £9.45 in Wales and £21.68 in the Republic of Ireland.) The company can afford to stage only one main work a year. Under the energetic artistic direction of Cameron Menzies, an exuberant Australian who arrived in 2020 and says yes to the impossible, the organisation has become a positive force in the community. Menzies, speaking before the performance, said he would have considered 60% ticket sales to be a success. For many who know it, Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece based on Pushkin is the perfect opera. Far more have never heard of it. This past week’s four performances of Onegin, conducted by Dominic Limburg making his debut in the work, sold more than 90% of seats, many of the audience first-timers.
One of the appeals of Onegin is its raw ambiguity. Early unrequited passion, paths not taken, the fantasy allure of a love now unattainable: Tatyana has married by the time Onegin, too late, falls for her. Menzies and his designer, Niall McKeever, explore all this via a warehouse-like setting. Its grubby, grey-white walls hint at grand house or, conceivably, state of mind. Abstraction is offset by spectacular costumes by Gillian Lennox, which conjure mid-19th-century Russia: flowing white ballgowns, military uniforms adorned with sashes and goldwork.
The soprano Mary McCabe, from Downpatrick and building a promising career, sang her first Tatyana, at once vulnerable and resolute. Ukraine-born baritone Yuriy Yurchuk, a former Jette Parker young artist at the Royal Opera, returned to the company (he was Giorgio Germont in La Traviata) to sing the title role: rich-toned and offering a stylish line in callous disdain. As Lensky, the friend he betrays, the American tenor Norman Reinhardt had ardour, and ringing top notes. Sarah Richmond’s Olga and Aaron O’Hare’s Monsieur Triquet stood out in the well-chosen ensemble cast. The new orchestra, under Limburg, revealed the character, the melodies, the haunting shadows of Tchaikovsky’s score. The cheers were deafening.
Unable to attend the Last Night of the Proms, I dutifully watched later on TV (only occasionally squirming sufficiently to have to fast-forward). The arguments about whether this end-of-season party represents classical music at its best, and whether it says anything about the state of the nation, hardly seem worth having. If you move a step away from the centre of musical life, in which those who play, compose, organise and write about music inevitably exist because it’s our life and passion, you find a different perspective on the Last Night: that it’s fun and harmless if far too long. The TV broadcast (3.3 million watched on BBC One) is for some viewers a rare opportunity to see what an orchestra, or a virtuoso pianist such as Stephen Hough, can do.
The programme was a potpourri of short works but it usually is. Not giving the ever-brilliant Hough more to do was exasperating, but plenty else was well executed. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and choral forces, under the baton of Sakari Oramo, were on spirited form. Angel Blue, the heartwarming American soprano, excelled in Puccini and (with Hough, in his own arrangements) two spirituals. The cello solo in Tom Bowling was beautiful, as was the witty ornamentation in the Hornpipe and the note-bending saxophone in The Pink Panther. On TV, an affecting tribute to the late conductor Andrew Davis, a Proms stalwart, and a new poem by the poet laureate Simon Armitage were bonuses. That’s a pretty high score. And all those EU flags too.
That same night, Bold Tendencies, matching its name, ended another fearless season with as extreme a Last Night antidote as you could wish: Mahler’s Symphony No 2 “Resurrection”. The 90-minute epic with choir and two soloists was played by the redoubtable Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Nefeli Chadouli, making her UK debut. This young Greek, currently working in Berlin and Leipzig, is part of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship 2024-26, mentored by Marin Alsop and others.
Chadouli set off at a decidedly steady tempo, as if securing her aural balance, wisely. Bold’s gloriously loud acoustic does not behave like any ordinary concert hall, no doubt because it’s a disused multistorey car park. (An earplugs dispenser was on hand for orchestral players.) The conductor then built an arc of inexorable tension, sustaining it throughout this expansive work, with fervent, powerful contributions from British soprano Ella Taylor and American mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis. In Mahler’s horrifying but magnificent vision of the last judgment, the earth trembles, the trumpets of the apocalypse sound, then comes resurrection.
A choir, here 100-strong, standing behind the audience, their sound floating up invisibly, sings “Aufersteh’n” (Arise) with soft, utmost serenity. The entire performance could not have been more intense. Flags, knee bends and kazoos at the Royal Albert Hall or the end of the world right next to the railway line to East Croydon and Sevenoaks. There’s room for both.
Star ratings (out of five)
Eugene Onégin ★★★★
Last Night of the Proms ★★★
Mahler Symphony No 2 ‘Resurrection’ ★★★★
