REVIEWS

Critics from The Irish Timesreview the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival and David Adams

Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Saint-Saëns - Samson et Dalila.

IT IS NEARLY 30 years since Dublin last saw a presentation of Saint-Saëns's best-known opera, Samson et Dalila. Then, in the 1979 Dublin Grand Opera Society production by Ken Neate, the Dalila was mezzo-soprano Bernadette Greevy. And Greevy is involved in the new production at the Gaiety Theatre, this time as artistic director of the Anna Livia Dublin International Festival.

The Anna Livia production, a typically pared-down, static undertaking (with direction and set design by Roberto Oswald, and costumes by Anibal Lapis), thrusts an extra burden on the two main principals. This is an opera of power-play seduction, and the chemistry which briefly flickered between the Samson and Dalila of Jeffrey Springer and Anna Viktorova in Act I crucially didn't prosper in the cushion-strewn love-nest of Act II.

Viktorova's strong and even singing had far greater appeal than Springer's hectoring heft. Pierre-Yves Pruvot was an appropriately penetrating presence as the High Priest of Dagon. The Anna Livia chorus never quite commanded the body and warmth of tone that the music calls for. Franz-Paul Decker drew a wider range of responses from the orchestra than were to be found in the previous night's Rigoletto, but his musical approach didn't find the larger organic shapes that would have drawn attention away from repetitive elements in the music.

One of the talking points of the 1979 production was the impression made by Joan Denise Moriarty's choreography of the Act III Bacchanale for the dancers of Irish National Ballet. Writing in this newspaper, Charles Acton called it "simply spectacular dancing that was a new experience in a Dublin Grand Opera Society opera". With just four dancers at her disposal, Ester O Brolchain had no chance of repeating those orgiastic impressions in this new production.

• The Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival runs until Sunday MICHAEL DERVAN

David Adams (organ)

St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire

SOME KIND of connection with Ireland was what loosely unified the wildly diverse programme presented by David Adams in a hugely enjoyable performance to conclude the 14 weeks of Dún Laoghaire's 35th annual summer series on the organ at St Michael's Church. The connection was sometimes remote. The late Malcolm Williamson's Vision of Christ-Phoenixwas commissioned in 1960 for the dedicatory recital of the new Coventry Cathedral. It's a set of increasingly dense, rather angry variations on the well-known Coventry carol, leading ultimately to a colossal sense of rising but not exactly of triumph. Adams then switched abruptly, exquisitely, from power and majesty to the light-footed dancing and delicate decoration of renaissance keyboard music in two pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Both had mysterious Irish connections: an anonymous piece called The Irish Dumpeand one by William Byrd whose title, Callino Casturame, may include a transliteration of cailín.

There was another abrupt switch to the high-speed, vertiginous (to use his own word) soundworld of Gerald Barry, whose The Chair(1994) is a thrilling eight minutes of increasingly mad scampering scales and clusters. Barry's influence was then heard in two pieces by Donnacha Dennehy, including an unabashedly untutored exploitation of organ sonorities in Mad, Avid, Sad, dedicated to Adams and an anagram of his name.

Adams played an improvisatory work of his own, Planxty Connolly( d'un Leary), dedicated to series director David Connolly, a traditional tune which he humorously put through the mill. Two 19th-century works by Irish-born composers completed the programme.Much more satisfactory, and providing a perfect end to recital and series, was the Wagner-influenced exuberance of the Concert-Fantasia in D minor of Robert Prescott Stewart. MICHAEL DUNGAN