La bohème livestream concert programme

A YEAR OF REINVENTION
FERGUS SHEIL
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
DIEGO FASCIATI
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
We’re delighted to welcome you to our socially-distanced concert
performance of Puccini’s La bohème with our regular partners at
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. We had originally planned a fully-staged
production by director Orpha Phelan and designer Nicky Shaw,
the team who brought us such a magical vision of Rossini’s La
Cenerentola in November 2019. Circumstances don’t allow this just
now, although we will return to it later. Instead we have kept the cast
together to bring you tonight’s livestreamed concert performance.
The performance has involved exceptionally meticulous preparation.
It could only have been achieved in a large venue like Bord Gáis
Energy Theatre. We have the orchestra on the stage (everybody a
minimum of two meters from each other), the chorus in the stalls
(distanced from each other and the stage), the children’s choir in
the circle, and the marching band for the second act occupying
two boxes within the theatre. Singers who travelled from abroad
were quarantined and tested, performers were kept apart by using
different entrances and exits to the theatre. Everyone and everywhere
was regularly sanitised, and even toilets were strictly allocated.
The act of coming together to make music was only possible by
making sure nobody could come close to anybody else.
It’s just 12 months since our daily lives became dominated by the
effort of dealing with the pandemic. For many of us it’s been a year
like none other in terms of lost loved ones, disrupted livelihoods,
and unparalleled separation and isolation. Cultural life, too, was
hit early and hard and, like other arts organisations, Irish National
Opera has had to cancel everything that was originally planned
for performance since March 2020. And we’re still facing an
immediate future in which uncertainty remains the only certainty.
Yet for INO the past year turned out to be a time of busy reinvention,
of feverish behind the scenes activity, of planning with ever-shifting
sands, and of projects that have had to be continually adapted to
the unpredictability of the world in which we have been living.
Last March, the speedy and supportive intervention of the
Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon meant that, unlike some
long-established international companies, we were able to pay
cancellation fees to the artists that had been rehearsing our
production of Bizet’s Carmen. Happily, that production is not lost.
It is currently rescheduled for our next season.
Early in the pandemic, we turned our focus to a series of online
concerts, Friday Opera Sessions, in partnership with Insituto
Italiano di Cultura, Dublino. Singers and pianists made recordings
remotely in their own homes, an undertaking that turned out to
be a logistical and artistic challenge beyond what anyone had
imagined in advance. But it all helped keep a sense of operatic
community in a difficult time.
We could not perform Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio,
but we reimagined the opera as an innovative eight-part online
mini-series, Seraglio. It was mini only in the sense that it consisted
of excerpts. Seraglio employed a full cast, the Irish National Opera
Chorus and the Irish Chamber Orchestra – 55 artists, all making
recordings in their own homes. Later in the year we managed to
livestream a concert performance of this remarkable score from
the National Opera House, Wexford.
The optimism of the summer allowed us to hope we could
bounce back in September and present our 2019 world premiere
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