REVIEWS

Don Giovanni, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Opera Ireland's new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which comes to Dublin from the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, has been designed by Rudy Sabounghi to echo the atmosphere of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. The ploy is a good one. The Mediterranean associations are entirely apt.

The sliding shape-changes of the set’s streetscapes seemed effortlessly effective, and the lighting designer Laurent Castaingt put on as subtle a show as I’ve seen on the Gaiety stage.

Director Jean-Louis Grinda deployed the youthful cast with comic and dramatic point. The Don Giovanni of Paul Armin Edelmann showed himself to be genuinely seductive as well as heartlessly brutal, and the Leporello of Peter Edelmann (the two are real-life brothers) portrayed himself as realistically conflicted about wanting a slice of his master’s lifestyle.

Cara O’Sullivan’s Donna Anna, understandably wound up by her attempted seduction and the murder of her father, didn’t quite find the right Mozartean tone at the opera’s start. By the end, though, she had scaled down her voice, to produce some genuinely heart-stopping moments.

Her stalwart supporter, Don Ottavio, often comes across as some kind of wimp, not least because Mozart’s writing for tenor in this opera is so highly demanding. Paolo Fanale took all the challenges in his stride and helped make the case of the righteous all that much stronger.

Donna Elvira is so much of a puppet on Don Giovanni’s string that she regularly strains plausibility. Daria Masiero presented her with vocal strength, but perhaps a shade too richly for the music’s good.

Mari Moriya played Zerlina with the right mixture of perplexity (when it came to the Don’s advances) and control (when it came to keeping her betrothed, Masetto, in line). And she offered some moments of piercing musical truth, which also clearly won the audience’s heart.

Christian Helmer bumbled nicely as Masetto, and Brian Jauhiainen thundered with impressive hollowness as the Commendatore whose dinner invitation seals the Don’s demise.

There was no shortage of fibre and drive in David Brophy’s often zippy conducting of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. But he also often seemed to treat the orchestra as a force independent of the singers’ need for breath and capacity for rapid articulation. A touch more adaptability would have been needed to avoid a sense of unnecessary musical rigidity behind the clear and pointed musical trajectories he had in mind.

Runs until Sun

MICHAEL DERVAN

Mazeppa

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa was a military commander of the Ukraine at the end of the 17th century. He fell foul of Peter the Great and, having lost the Battle of Poltava, died shortly afterwards in 1709.

Tchaikovsky's powerful 1884 opera, Mazeppa, derives not from the historical events, but from Pushkin's poem, Poltava, and focuses on Mazeppa's relationship with his young goddaughter Maria.

It’s an opera that was designed for success. It has a torture scene, an execution and a mad scene. Maria is loved not only by the elderly Mazeppa, but also by the much younger Andrej, whose two duets with the object of his affections are among the most unusual in opera. During the first she’s already obsessed with Mazeppa, during the second he is dying and she has lost her reason after her father’s execution. She takes him for a child, and sings him the lullaby with which the opera ends.

Dieter Kaegi’s new production for Opera Ireland, with sets by Rudy Sabounghi and costumes by Bruno Schwengl, swaps the turmoil of early 18th century for the colourful peasantry and military oppression of the Soviet Union.

Sinéad Mulhern’s Maria is a lost character, hypnotically attracted to Mazeppa, blind to what’s around her, and vocally at her most impressive in the daze of her derangement. The conflict between her lover and her father is fiercely expressed by the full voice of Valeri Alexeev’s domineering but also tender Mazeppa and Michail Ryssov’s forceful and sometimes rather too hoarse-sounding Kochubey.

Vsevolod Grivnov is effective as the never quite more than tokenish Andrej, and Gerard O’Connor blusters with cold violence as Mazeppa’s henchman, Orlik. It’s Elena Manistina as Kochubey’s wife Lyubov who steals the show, portraying a character of revenge-inspiring spine with the firmest of vocal clarity.

The Opera Ireland chorus, joined by members of the Organ Hall Chamber Choir of Moldova who provide valuable reinforcement with a suitably ethnic tinge, makes a sometimes spine-tingling impression, and although the playing of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra is variable, conductor Alexander Anissimov whips up impressive sonic storms, not least when there are added brass bands in the boxes on either side of the stage. Anissimov brings an always absorbing level of conviction to the evening that’s sufficient to make one wonder why this opera should still remain on the fringes of the repertoire in the Western world.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Snow Patrol

O2

Some time before the old Point depot closed, Snow Patrol played it, buoyed by the success of their multi-million selling 2006 album, Eyes Open. They performed in the manner of rabbits caught in headlights, a heretofore indie band very much on the cusp of sustained commercial success yet still nostalgically clinging to the thoughts of nights playing in small venues in Dublin, Dundee, Glasgow and Belfast. Their music was muscular but they were meek.

More than two years on, the band ­ now flush following the success of their most recent album, A Hundred Million Suns­ has clearly come to terms with their present status as a stadia-visiting multi-million selling act: they look and act the part of rock stars, despite lead singer Gary Lightbody's innate unthreatening, endearing demeanour.

Lightbody's boy-next-door tone is clearly part of the band's success; his ability to align romantic sincerity with songs that run riot through surefooted ballads and commercially raucous noise is such that he and his band have captured a good portion of the demographic that appeals to the sensitive and the tough. Indeed, one of the best songs played on the night – Chasing Cars– combines sweet lyricism ("If I lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world" ­ what romantic wouldn't want to hear their partner say that before the kids start squawking for breakfast?) with a sandblasted propensity that is equal parts sonically surprising, wholly satisfying and assuredly bad for your ears.

The critics might naysay Snow Patrol's lack of creative adventure, but part of their audience appeal is the fusing of the familiar with a kind of emotional honesty that strikes a chord. The sole flaw in an otherwise celebratory gig was the placing of their latest album's self-indulgent prog-rock triptych, The Lightning Strike, as the constituent part of the encore. Snow Patrol will probably never be an indie band again, but if they want to shore up support rather than squander it, they'd be well advised to shift this section into the mid-part of the concert or ditch it altogether.

TONY CLAYTON-LEA

Franz Ferdinand

Olympia, Dublin

Franz Ferdinand’s stage backdrop might show the illustrated heads of the four band members à la the Three Stooges, but on the evidence of this show, they are closer to Iggy Pop’s shower of misfits.

On record, the band concentrate on controlled energy, but live it’s a rougher affair. Effortlessly elegant frontman Alex Kapranos (shod in one black and one white shoe) is in fine form, stiffly prowling the rangy stage, itchy with energy.

The band swiftly whips the crowd up to a minor frenzy, with the set list rarely pausing for breath during its 85 minutes. Franz Ferdinand are here to conquer with controlled grunt force and punchy pop licks and riffs, and the crowd are more than happy to surrender.

The sound is polished and percussive, though the guitars have a tendency to tread each other’s paths. Meanwhile, Drummer Paul Thomson seems to be challenging Kapranos in the style stakes with a transparent drum kit; the disco look might be on trend but the sound with these kits is almost always compromised, and here the toms have little impact, the dynamic instead coming off the whip-crack snare and solid bass.

On successive albums, Franz Ferdinand have played to their strengths, writing quality off-kilter riffs and building smartly around them with textured effects and keys.

Here, with the guitars dominating all the tracks, the songs can sometimes blend into one another. However, when they bring a bit of variety to bear, the results come out in full technicolour, as on Ulysses.

They recorded their latest album, Tonightin the creaking old Govan Town Hall in Glasgow, and the sound is somewhat funkier. Live this translates into slick interplay, ragged in all the right places and muscular enough to grab the crowd by its collar. Perhaps they've tired a little of chart favourites Do You Want Toand Take Me Out, so in a smart tactic they wrench them out at a blistering volume.

On their early releases, Franz Ferdinand showed they had style, live they’re now showing their substance, and the crowd certainly loves the cut of their cloth.

LAURENCE MACKIN

Woman and Scarecrow

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

The scene is stark. In a rumpled bed, an attractive, middle-aged woman is dying, preyed upon by a strange, semi-mythical being called Scarecrow – her alter-ego, inner self, soul mate and protector from the deathly horrors lurking inside her wardrobe. Looking back, she admits to having martyred herself to mediocrity, squandering the creative, life-enhancing gifts bestowed on her in favour of an unhappy marriage to a philandering husband, who gave her eight children and little else. From the depths of her soul, egged on and goaded by Scarecrow, she summons up a last surge of energy, finally answering to herself and confronting the dusty corners of a life not lived to the full.

Prime Cut’s production of Marina Carr’s intense play is directed with careful, reverential rigour by Emma Jordan, who does not flinch from the hard questions asked of cast and audience. Gina Moxley and Kathy Kiera Clarke make a powerful pairing as Woman and Scarecrow respectively. Moxley’s highly articulate Woman, the recipient of some of Carr’s most savagely beautiful lines, is particularly powerful, drifting between truth and illusion, as the effects of her morphine ebb and flow. In counterpoint, Clarke is a stealthy, feline presence, a bewitching, otherwordly creature, capable of both seduction and menace, a heightened reflection of what Woman might have been, had she not shirked life’s difficult choices.

As Auntie Ah, Helena Bereen provides a welcome injection of energy and barbed humour, one minute infusing the air with the ritual of death, the next taunting Woman with brief glimpses of a hazily remembered childhood. Into this daunting company of women blunders Frank O’Sullivan’s Him, offering champagne while brandishing an overspent Visa bill.

There comes a point late on when Carr’s lush evocation of the central theme turns laboured and repetitive as it builds to a surreally gruesome climax. But this is a well-acted, beautifully designed and lit piece of work, to which every individual will experience a different personal response.

Touring to Portlaoise, Bray, Strabane, Sligo, Newry, Armagh, Monaghan, Lisburn, Galway, Longford, Virginia, Castlebar, Omagh, Manorhamilton, Letterkenny and Cork

JANE COYLE