Béatrice et Bénédict: A mischievous, playful Fiona Shaw brings extra energy to Berlioz’s opera
Opera: Conductor Ryan McAdams draws lively, fresh playing to a concert performance featuring Paula Murrihy, Anna Devin and Niamh O’Sullivan
Irish National Opera
Niamh O’Sullivan: ‘I am obsessed with singing. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else’
Cork mezzo-soprano on her packed schedule, shifting pitch and the sadness of being away from home with constant travelling for performances and rehearsals
Trade/Mary Motorhead review: Compelling double bill reveals Emma O’Halloran’s impressive instinct for opera
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: Operas were originally plays by the writer and actor Mark O’Halloran
Emma O’Halloran: ‘Why do all the women die in opera? I really wanted to do something that’s not that’
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In Trade/Mary Motorhead, O’Halloran uses music to explore a transactional relationship between two men and also to transcend the confines of a prison cell
La Traviata review: Irish National Opera’s season closer features strong singing, but the storytelling doesn’t always work
In Olivia Fuch’s production, conducted by Killian Farrell, Amanda Woodbury, as Violetta, meets every challenge of Verdi’s score with strength and colour
L’Olimpiade review: Irish National Opera’s touring coproduction with the Royal Opera House feels surprisingly full-scale
Theatre: Meili Li, Rachel Redmond, Gemma Ní Bhriain, Alexandra Urquiola and Sarah Richmond star in Daisy Evans’s staging of Vivaldi’s opera
Salome: A brilliant Sinéad Campbell Wallace leads Irish National Opera’s perfectly judged production
Theatre: Richard Strauss’s tale of sex, violence, incest and necrophilia invites excess, but Bruno Ravella instead deploys restraint – to outstanding effect
Sinéad Campbell Wallace on Salome: ‘It’s just an onslaught. You literally can feel it on your skin and in your body’
The soprano is playing the title part – ‘a beast of a role’ – in Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera, based on the Oscar Wilde play, for Irish National Opera
![‘We have come to our senses, and we just buy eggs [now]’](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/GCZPQEPT2JDSPJIFJWYGXO7FUE.jpeg?smart=true&auth=bfede34efe7217f5ae6d1cc23837b13616e358d96485d9362de361916bb813a0&width=800&height=450)
‘We have come to our senses, and we just buy eggs [now]’
Me & My Money: Fergus Sheil, artistic director of the Irish National Opera
La Bohème: Celine Byrne and Irish National Opera leave the audience buzzing
Puccini’s opera is full of antics – and Orpha Phelan gets them all right, from joyous mayhem to emotional darkness
Faust review: Duke Kim, Nicholas Brownlee and Jennifer Davis star in an excellently cast INO production
Dublin Theatre Festival 2023: Production designer Francis O’Connor powerfully realises the updating of the story by Jack Furness
Breathwork review: An extremely intimate performance on a vast, global theme
Dublin Theatre Festival 2023: Everything is minimal in Éna Brennan’s new work for Irish National Opera
Éna Brennan on her first opera: ‘I’m going back to my lovely existential dread that I seem to put into all my work’
The violinist and composer worked with director David Pountney and Portuguese visual artist Hugo Canoilas for a 20-minute piece with ‘its own identity, its own world and its own visual experience’
‘You have to be mad to be a conductor ... We’re a weird breed’
What I Do: Elaine Kelly is a resident conductor with the Irish National Opera
Così Fan Tutte review: Captivating singing, sparky music and superb comic timing
Irish National Opera’s clever, laugh-out-loud production, directed by Polly Graham, relocates the story from 18th-century Naples to an Irish big house in 1914
‘I was five when I saw my first opera and about 14 when my dad started building the theatre’
Polly Graham, who is directing Irish National Opera’s new Cosi Fan Tutte as an antidote to cancel culture, grew up with an opera house in the back garden
Werther: Irish National Opera’s production is a triumph of downsizing a classic opera for the road
Theatre: Paride Cataldo and Niamh O’Sullivan, as Werther and Charlotte, make you hang on their every word as they head for catastrophe
‘We started with Take That and worked backwards’: Irish National Opera’s contemporary Werther
Sophie Motley has set the Goethe story behind Massenet’s 1892 opera in an electrifying rural Ireland
Obituary: Kenneth Montgomery: Doyen of Irish conductors known for generosity towards colleagues
The Belfast native enjoyed a distinguished career which saw him work with the Ulster Orchestra, the NSO, Sadler’s Wells Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival
Der Rosenkavalier: Visually breathtaking production provides sumptuous platform for sumptuous music
Richard Strauss’ work is challenging for first-timers, but chances are they will appreciate opera after seeing this
Old Ghosts: A Joycean chamber opera in an evocative setting
Review: Evangelia Rigaki and Marina Carr’s piece features compelling performances but sometimes struggles with the acoustic challenges of its venue
Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy come full circle with final offering in operatic trilogy
Dublin Fringe Festival 2021: The playwright and composer join forces once more on ‘suburban horror’, The First Child
Michael Palin, Mike Leigh and Christy Moore: This week’s unmissable online events
Celine Byrne and Robert Webb also among the virtual attractions over next seven days
How Aria?: The opera challenging stigma around mental health
Performance combining opera, poetry and mental health launches with First Fortnight
This Hostel Life review: direct provision explored through often-anguished sounds
Staging of Irish National Opera work based on short stories by Melatu Uchenna Okorie in medieval crypt was inspired
Building Enda Walsh’s world: ‘I like the danger of having a blank piece of paper’
Jamie Vartan’s set designs transport audiences – and that’s before the crows move in
Gender balance not being taken seriously by Irish music organisations
Female composers are grossly underrepresented, but fixing the issue may not be easy
Irish National Opera launches with a Big Bang!
A day of celebration and an opera marathon mark birth of a new approach to opera
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