Front row

Nick Kelly has been appointed the Dublin Corporation/Project Arts Centre playwright-in-residence. The 28-year-old Dubliner will take up the newly established residency at the end of the month and will have two years in which to complete a full-length play. In recent years Kelly has been commissioned by Fishamble and TEAM theatre companies, as well as by the Abbey's outreach department. He wrote his first play, Three Steps Sideways, for the 1994 Dublin Fringe Festival and went on to win a playwriting competition organised by the National Association of Youth Drama in the same year.

Dublin Corporation's support of the performing arts is also evident these days in the melodies drifting from the open-air auditorium of its Wood Quay offices, where pocket versions of popular Italian operas are being performed each Thursday lunchtime at 1 p.m., accompanied by electric piano. Last week, crowds of tourists gathered to watch Tosca (Cecilia Smiga) jump to her death. Faust, Don Pasquale and La Traviata are still to come.

This year's Opera Ireland masterclass will be given by the globetrotting US baritone Sherrill Milnes, who has extensive experience of teaching young singers. He will also give a showcase concert at University Concert Hall in Limerick on Friday, August 31st, which will include the masterclass students. Members of the public are welcome to observe the series of planned classes from Monday, August 27th to Friday, August 31st. Bookings at 061-331549.

Dublin's music lovers will be sorry to hear that John Dexter is leaving his position as organist and master of the choristers of St Patrick's Cathedral after 24 years. He has conducted the choir in innumerable concerts and broadcasts, as well as the sung services each week in the cathedral, including daily matins, which denizens of the Liberties have long regarded proprietorially. His departure will be marked by a farewell concert at St Patrick's on October 13th, at 8 p.m.

Pierre Klossowski, who died in Paris at the weekend, is now known mainly to a specialist group of readers of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, but until relatively recently the name of this essayist, novelist, translator and painter was one to drop in any discussion of French culture.

His erudite if somewhat arcane novels, such as Le Baphomet and La Vocation Suspendue, had a cult following, thanks to their dense classical and theological allusions. Born in Paris in 1905 to Polish ΘmigrΘs, he was the younger brother of the painter Balthus (who died in February). He was introduced as a teenager to AndrΘ Gide, and became his secretary. Decades of prolific translations of German and Latin authors followed, including Heidegger, Kafka, Virgil and Suetonius.

Sade Mon Prochain (Sade My Neighbour), his 1947 work, broke new ground and his studies of Nietzsche influenced the wave of French theorists from the 1960s and 1970s, including Michel Foucault and Jean-Franτois Lyotard. Some of his books are still in print in English, published by Marion Boyars and Continuum International Publishing Group.

Edited by Helen Meany

arts@irish-times.ie