THE IRISH TIMES
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Monday 25th June 2007

RDS Opera Orchestra/Ó Duinn RDS, Dublin

Benedict - Lily of Killarney

The Bohemian Girl (first produced in London in 1843), Maritana (1845) and The Lily of Killarney (1862) were the most successful operas written in English in the 19th century.

The three became known, initially pejoratively, as the "English" Ring, and later as the "Irish" Ring - the composers of the first two, Michael Balfe and William Vincent Wallace, were Irish, and although the third is by a German, the setting is Irish.

The momentum of their initial success kept these operas alive in a kind of suspended animation into the early decades of the 20th century. They were part of the musical world of James Joyce, and John McCormack could sing the music of all three composers with style.

But, apart from a few tuneful numbers, the operas have long been on the wrong side of public taste.

Even the RTÉ orchestras' commercial recordings of The Bohemian Girl (made for Argo in 1991) and Maritana (for Naxos in 1995) don't seem to have rekindled significant interest in the music.

Last year's Castleward Opera production of The Bohemian Girl was so wide of the mark that it's more likely to have done harm rather than good for the work's reputation.

I missed last year's RDS presentation of Maritana, but this weekend's concert performance of The Lily of Killarney at the same venue was fraught with problems.

Conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn prepared the performing edition from original orchestral parts in the British Library - the publisher's stock of parts was destroyed, following the fate of many stage works that have fallen out of favour.

But his intimacy with the detail of the work didn't prevent his performance of it being a bit too cut and dried. His tendency was to conduct much of the piece as if it were a tight efficient drama. It's not. It's a kind of public version of parlour music, where sentiment is key.

Most of the singers were uncomfortable with both words and musical style. They sounded mostly stiff and often, literally, incomprehensible. They could as effectively have been singing the details of stock market prices set to music.

Bill Golding's narration substituted for the spoken dialogue and provided a few laughs. But his nod and wink guying of the plot offered a clear message that the whole thing was a curiosity not to be taken seriously.

The singer who conveyed the impression of taking it most seriously was Cara O'Sullivan as Eily O'Connor (the libretto is derived from Dion Boucicault's Coleen Bawn). O'Sullivan, of course, had the advantage of getting the best opportunity for vocal showing off.

But this was not the feature which made her contributions stand out.

She conveyed the impression of trying to take the music on its own terms, of searching in it for viable expressive content, and finding inflections in delivery which could hold the attention.

Hardly a word of Anthony Kearns's Hardress could be heard clearly where I was sitting and he suffered from the conductor's robustly pro-orchestra balances.

Celine Byrne's Ann Chute had strength but little subtlety, and Our Lady's Choral Society clearly relished the simple strength of the writing for chorus.

This is music which needs the loving care of specialist performers every bit as much as a little-known baroque opera. Otherwise the qualities which once made it popular will not be made evident again to contemporary listeners.

Michael Dervan