Suddenly there's a glut of opera. On top of the 18 days of the Wexford Festival (starting on Thursday), and one of the now regular visits of the Chisinau National Opera company (whose latest tour starts in Dublin on Monday 18th), there's the premiere of a new opera by Raymond Deane in Longford this coming Wednesday. Deane's first opera, the 20-minute The Poet and His Double, based around visits to Dublin by Shelley and Artaud, was presented by Opera Theatre Company in 1991. And it's OTC, again, who are presenting the composer's first, full-length chamber opera, The Wall of Cloud. Deane has based his libretto on an eighth-century Chinese play about a ghostly intervention in an arranged marriage. After Longford, the work, with a cast of four and an instrumental ensemble of seven, will be seen at the Dublin Theatre and Wexford Opera Festivals, as well as Kilkenny and Belfast.
