FINE TUNING

IN a freezing attic room in a none too salubrious street in Dublin's city centre, a group of singers sit shivering on rickety benches and regard with a mixture of distrust and dismay the slim young man who has materialised no, erupted in front of them. Hopes of an easy Monday morning evaporate as he begins to paint his picture of the opera they are about to rehearse.

It is to be a semi staged performance in a church with minimal props, costume and set. But easy it ain't. It is a risky mixture of traditional stand and deliver, eyes on the book concert style and an unorthodox, stylised yet earthy theatrical idiom. He talks about natural light giving way to artificial light, and how their characters will echo this in dramatic terms by starting off as motionless cardboard cutouts, coming to life one by one as they reach a defining point in their music.

The singers look dubious They ask questions. They hold out. But one by one, as the persuasive voice with its soft consonants and stout, sensible Canadian vowels keeps talking, they get caught up in his enthusiasm.

Anyone who attended Opera Theatre Company's production of Handel's Tamberlane in a packed Christ Church Cathedral last May will know what resulted from that Monday morning session exquisite music combined with powerful drama to produce an unforgettable theatrical experience. Another risk taken another audience sent home stimulated, stunned, whistling the tunes.

Doing Handel in a church might not seem, to you or me, to offer much of a chance to present something exciting, challenging and new but OTC's artistic director, James Conway, has never been one to go for the obvious option. A previous OTC production of Tamberlane took place in Kilmainham Gaol, using the prison's architecture as an integral part of the set. Conway has toured Janacek and Poulenc to rain drenched rural towns, given Monteverdi an electro acoustic facelift and commissioned libretti from Gerry Stembridge and Nell McCafferty. When you go to an OTC show you may encounter an opera about commuters stranded on the DART, a suicidal woman talking to her ex lover, a hostage imprisoned in Beirut, or a motley bunch of shipwrecked 18th century aristocrats.

So how did a Canadian philosophy graduate who admits that his first love is fiction writing come to be bringing opera to the Irish and the Irish to opera? By a long and winding road which began in his birthplace of Quebec, meandered across the southern tip of India, settled briefly in London and New York and has of late, been marching purposefully from Dublin to the Czech Republic via Edinburgh and Antwerp.

It was a pattern established in early childhood, most of which, he says, he spent on the road. "My father worked for a cigarette factory and was transferred every two or three years often by the time my mother would catch up with him he'd have gone on to the next place, so we saw very little of him when I was very young. Both my parents' families were Irish immigrants to English speaking Canada and I'm the youngest of a big family."

Music seems to have fitted without fuss into his life from the beginning. His mother and sister played the piano on his grandmother's side of the house, there was a family orchestra. A family orchestra?

Yeah, there was one family of 12, and they all played it was the thing for genteel Irish immigrants in Hamilton. It was a musical town. A rough town, though it's a bit of an armpit, to tell you the truth, Hamilton people were there for the railways and the steel industry and so on.

The youngest Conway messed happily about on the piano in imitation of his elders, and shared his brothers' love of records. "All we had in the house in the way of classical music were `pops' records. There was a Readers Digest Guide To Mood Music For Listening And Relaxation In Nine LPs. There was one opera one, which I loved. Nobody sang on it, of course. It was just orchestral excerpts from La Boheme and Carmen on two different sides. I'd sit there with my ears right up to the speaker we always had lousy record players at home I adored it, without knowing why."

WHEN his eldest brother gave him a record of Don Giovanni highlights in German, his joy knew no bounds. "I didn't know what it was I didn't know the story I didn't know it was incomplete and I didn't know that it was odd that it was in German. I just thought it was amazing. And I never lost it. I can still sing Don Giovanni in German."

It was his first encounter with opera as it should more or less be. What age was he when this seminal event occurred? "I don't know. Youth is a blur to me. I suppose I must have started school. Eight or nine, or something like that. Ten?" In due course he persuaded his reluctant mother to take him to the opera in Toronto. "We were a theatrical family my brother had a theatre in education company and my sister wads an actress for about 10 years, very avant garde acting, she used to shame my parents doing, weird things on television and so on. So we did go to the theatre regularly.

"But opera had a bit of a class association and we weren't in the class that would be going to it very much we were just normal people." Another defining moment his first experience of live opera. Aida. It was fantastic such a blast.

Later, as a student in Toronto, Conway devoured any opera that was on the menu. "The first year I was there I saw pieces that I still love Wozzeck, Don Carlos. I wasn't a music student, so the language was strange to me, but exciting for its strangeness. I didn't really think I was going to work in opera, though. All the way through secondary school I was going to be an architect. Then I took a philosophy degree because I thought, well, I should be a well rounded person ugh, it's so pretentious. Architecture went out the window when I worked for an architect one summer."

Instead he came to Ireland, intending to use it as a springboard for a trip to India. Why India? "Well, you know, I'm a Catholic. Or rather I'm not, but I was brought up a Catholic anyway I had this save the world impulse that all kids get in school, when you're shown all these pictures and you think you're gonna do something great. I was so naive. I never thought about the wonderful things that one might go to India to get."

A spell teaching English and maths in a town on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent at persuaded him of the latter after a quick jaunt back to London to do an MA in cultural policy at the Barbican "I went to get an application form for a friend and met a lecturer who interviewed me on the spot and offered me a place and, well, it seemed like an interesting change of direction" he spent three months with the travelling opera companies of West Bengal.

Resolutely commercial, steadfastly conservative, these companies produced everything from gung ho proletarian propaganda extolling the virtues of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to religious operas celebrating the life of Krishna. Armed with a working knowledge of Bengali, he returned to London and landed a job with a Bengali festival, followed by another at a British Asian film company.

In 1987 came the offer of working with a young Irish opera company which had been founded the previous spring by the theatre director Ban Barnes, the conductor Proinnsias O Duinn and the administrator Randall Shannon, who was working with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the time.

"What OTC needed me to do at that stage, basically, was marketing and it was a good way for me to come in, at the pure hustle level. I spent my time racing up and down the country trying to charm people into doing things." It was something of an on off relationship to begin with Conway left after six months to work on a novel in Canada, returned for a few years and left again to work on another fiction project in New York.

WHEN he returned for the third time, it was to a more challenging position which combined artistic and administrative matters and there he has remained ever since, developing, expanding, fine tuning. He admits to being a perfectionist and a control freak. If he is, it seems to have paid off. Under his artistic direction Opera Theatre Company has ventured into territory opera companies in Ireland have generally preferred to avoid, working with a potential new audience in a far seeing schools programme, consistently commissioning new pieces, setting up an annual bursary and a recital series and all on a shoestring budget. Following ecstatic reviews in the British broad sheet press for its production of Handel's Flavio at the Covent Garden Festival in 1994, OTC has been a sellout visitor not only at that festival but at Edinburgh, at Brno in the Czech republic and in Belgium, carving a reputation as a consistent exporter of high quality Mozart and, especially, Handel and it is celebrating its tenth birthday this year with an ambitious series of tours, the first of which, a production of Mozart's Zaide in association with RTE and Transparant Muziektheater, Antwerp, opens at the RDS tomorrow week.

How much of this would have happened anyway, and how much is a direct result of Conway's influence as artistic director, is one of those questions which could be debated until the fat lady sings. There can be no doubt, however, that the leap into Handel opera was his idea. Exporting Handel to London is quite a feat, and one of which he is justifiably proud.

"I honestly didn't pick a Handel opera because I thought they were going to come into fashion. I picked it because I think they're completely fantastic. I knew we couldn't ask youngsters to sing them they call for incredible vocal agility and a range of colours.

"But just looking at the singers who were around, Irish singers like Alison Browner and Lynda Lee and Therese Feighan, I thought, `hey, we can do this'. Of course it was scary going to London. All those early music orchestras, and here we were working with a freelance orchestra, people we had just put together. But with Seamus Crimmins conducting we've discovered a real talent there it all came together and then I realised, `hey, we can do this as well as anybody'."

It has been a productive decade, but Conway still has plenty of ambitions, both for Opera Theatre Company and for him self. "We have a great team here, committed people who love their jobs, and I've got a real good board, they're hard working people, they like me and they trust me. But at the same time I'm scraping around trying to get sponsorship together.

"I know everybody has to do it, but we're at the stage where we badly need a sponsor who will be associated with us for a year or even three years so we can plan ahead. We've had good relationships with, say, Norwich Irish they've sponsored and sponsored again it's worked for them and it's worked for us and it's so much better than charity. I mean charity is great, sure, give it to us but when you've got a business partner, when you know what they want and you give it to them, a lot more could be done."

More? He sighs. "I'm a pusher, you know? When we have a successful show, I'm there saying, `yes, but if we had had a set of dimmers the lighting would have been more consistent'. When there's a successful recital, I'm there saying, `yes, but we should have had a bigger audience'. Always pushing. He pushes himself just as mercilessly, by all accounts. "I'm always studying music I read poorly, so I'm taking solfege classes and I've started in a choir. I got a fantastic Christmas present the complete scores of the Shostakovich string quartets. Every Sunday evening I listen to them. I know it's bad to listen to recorded music too much but I can't help myself.

"My favourite kind of concert is a string quartet I live for it. I divide my timed between Stoneybatter [in Dublin] and, at weekends a house in Wicklow where I do a lot of outdoorsy things. I studied painting for a very long time. I read a lot I'm a history buff, especially cultural history, cultural exchange, that interests me. I spend a lot of time alone, to be honest.

"And I still write, although I've stopped beating myself up about it. I no longer expect to do a full day's work and then go home and do two hours' writing but I'll go back to it one day."

If indeed he does, expect the unexpected. His first book, a collection of short stories, consists of "meditations on one chapter from the Gospel of John". He describes his as yet unpublished novel, which attracted interest from a quality British publisher, as "a parodic version of the life of the Virgin and the whole idea of Luke as biographer of Mary and the moment which, for me, is the most exciting in religious iconography, the Visitation". Looks like James Conway's story has a chapter or two or three to go.