Cosí fan tutte programme book 2023

MOZART 

COSÌ 

FAN TUTTE

IRISH NATIONAL OPERA 

PRINCIPAL FUNDER 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

Special thanks to Queen’s University Belfast Music 

Department, Artane School of Music, UCD School of Music 

and Peter Jordan.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 1756–91 

COSÌ 

FAN TUTTE 

OSSIA LA SCUOLA DEGLI AMANTI 

ALL WOMEN ARE LIKE THAT 

OR THE SCHOOL FOR LOVERS 

1790 

OPERA BUFFA IN TWO ACTS 

Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. 

First performance, Burgtheater, Vienna, 26 Janaury 1790. 

First Irish performance, Theatre Royal, Dublin, 31 August 1811. 

SUNG IN ITALIAN WITH ENGLISH SURTITLES 

The edition of Così fan tutte used in these performances was prepared by Faye Ferguson 

and Wolfgang Rehm and published by Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel. By arrangement with 

Faber Music, London. 

Running time 3 hours with one interval. 

#INOCosiFanTutte 

PERFORMANCES 2023 

Friday 19 May National Opera House Wexford 

Sunday 21 May University Concert Hall Limerick CONCERT PERFORMANCE 

Tuesday 23 May Gaiety Theatre Dublin 

Wednesday 24 May Gaiety Theatre Dublin 

Thursday 25 May Gaiety Theatre Dublin 

Friday 26 May Gaiety Theatre Dublin 

Saturday 27 May Gaiety Theatre Dublin 

Monday 29 May Leisureland Galway CONCERT PERFORMANCE 

Wednesday 31 May Cork Opera House Cork 

Friday 2 June Cork Opera House Cork 

03

ALL STOPS OUT FOR 

MOZART 

FERGUS SHEIL 

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 

Mozart’s Così fan tutte was an early love of mine. When I was 

17 and still at school, I got to play viola in the orchestra for a 

production of Così at the Royal Irish Academy of Music conducted 

by the late Paul Deegan. I had no idea opera could be such fun 

and I vividly remember craning my neck up from the pit to try to 

see all the antics on stage. The joyous bounce of Mozart’s music, 

his heart-breaking arias, hilarious ensembles and whirlwind finales 

have been romping around in my head since then. 

I’m more than delighted to present this work with Irish National 

Opera. It’s an opera without any small roles. It has six big 

characters each with lots to do and lots to say. The production will 

be seen on stage in Wexford and Cork and in concert in Limerick 

and Galway. And, because we are giving six performances in five 

days at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, we have two entirely different 

casts for these Dublin shows. This not only gives us a tremendous 

opportunity to showcase the exceptional vocal talent of 12 brilliant 

artists in total but you’ll really need to think about coming twice to 

experience the full panoply of vocal talent. 

A big welcome back to eight opera stars whose singing I 

particularly love, and who have appeared in previous INO 

productions: Anna Devin, Sharon Carty, Gemma Ní Bhriain, Emma 

Morwood, Dean Power, Gianluca Margheri, John Molloy and 

Milan Siljanov. A very big welcome to those new to the INO roster, 

including the wonderful British tenor William Morgan, brilliant Irish 

baritone Benjamin Russell, who has been working in Wiesbaden, 

Germany, of late, and rapidly-rising Irish soprano Sarah Brady, 

who has taken Switzerland and Germany by storm in recent 

years. And a particular red carpet for one of Ireland’s most-loved 

sopranos and Queen of Cork, Majella Cullagh. Many years ago 

when I conducted my first ever opera, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, 

at the Gaiety Theatre, Majella was on stage as Adina, mentally 

04

showing me the ropes (helping me along with a few glances here and there) and 

inspiring me to do better than I ever believed I could. 

Although the music of Così fan tutte is sublime, the plot has divided opinions. 

Some find it sexist, many find it implausible. The opera has caused a lot of 

argument and directors have gone out of their way to present diverse points of 

view, often inspired by the values of our time. Così is a robust opera and it can 

take many different approaches. 

I always find myself drawn to Mozart’s subtitle La scuola degli amanti – The school 

for lovers. I think that, for both the men and the women in the opera, it is about an 

opportunity for growing up and understanding the world in a more complex and 

nuanced way. But, being an opera, things play out in a way that’s bigger, faster, more 

dramatic and more heightened than in real life. And, of course, everyone in the 

audience gets to grasp aspects of the plot in ways the characters themselves can’t. 

We can see the issues arising and appreciate the inevitability of events. This can be 

profoundly funny, amusing or disturbing. It’s impossible not to have a reaction. 

I’m excited by the production choices of tonight’s creative team. Director Polly Graham 

has chosen to set the opera in pre-revolutionary Ireland in an era that was both fertile 

and febrile, where exceptional things could and did happen. Together with designer 

Jamie Vartan, video designer Jack Phelan and lighting designer Sinéad McKenna, 

she has created a world that is far from Mozart’s Vienna of 1790 where the opera 

was premiered, but which serves as a brilliant context for Mozart’s inventiveness. 

Irish National Opera’s chorus and orchestra are directed by the (drumroll...) 

Olivier Award-winning conductor and INO Artistic Partner, Peter Whelan. I want 

to give a special welcome also to INO’s resident conductor Elaine Kelly, fresh 

back from triumph at LA Opera, who conducts three of the Dublin performances. 

There’s lots to enjoy and definitely a few things to argue about in Mozart’s Così 

fan tutte. I hope you’ll find the experience stimulating and rewarding. 

05

TAILWINDS 

AND HEADWINDS 

DIEGO FASCIATI 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 

One of my all-time favourite operatic trios is Soave sia il vento 

from Act I of Così fan tutte. Da Ponte constructs a simple but 

affecting poem for this trio that conveys a message of hope and 

a longing for happy endings: May the winds be gentle / May the 

waves be calm / And may the elements indulge our desires. The 

way the lyrics are matched by Mozart’s seemingly simple melody 

creates an extraordinary effect. It’s all to do with the intertwining 

and intermingling of the voices, and the way the orchestra 

creates the effect of undulating waves. It is essentially a “smooth 

sailing!” farewell. Of course our friends in this opera will encounter 

some very stormy seas before eventually landing on shore – all 

metaphorically, of course – but not without having learned a very 

real lesson or two about life and love. 

In the course of planning and producing opera we sometimes have 

to navigate rough and tricky waters. That is part of the business as it 

requires a large team of people, working at the top of their game, to 

take an opera from page to stage. Like you, we are now being tossed 

and turned by circumstances beyond our control. The inflation 

we have all experienced and endured over the last two years is 

affecting our work. In particular, the increased costs of transport 

and accommodation are impacting on our ability to tour extensively 

and we’ve had to adjust our plans accordingly. We will not, however, 

increase our ticket prices, as we wish to keep opera accessible. 

Rossini’s William Tell and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier were two of 

our most ambitious productions to date. Beyond the obvious vocal 

and musical demands, both of these visually striking productions 

were difficult to achieve from a technical and production point of 

view. Everyone involved was taxed to the limit. The season began 

with a hardly less spectacular production, Puccini’s Tosca with 

Sinéad Campbell Wallace in the title role. That production won the 

Docklands Business Forum Arts Award 2022 and Sinéad received 

06

an Olivier nomination for her portrayal of Tosca at English National Opera. We look forward to 

presenting Sinéad in another major role soon. 

Director Orpha Phelan and designer Nicky Shaw, the team that created such a magical La Cenerentola 

for us in 2019, conjured up another highly entertaining evening. Their take on Donizetti’s Don Pasquale 

amused audiences nationwide and went on to be nominated as Best Opera at The Irish Times Irish 

Theatre Awards. Orpha and Nicky return to INO this autumn for an opera of an altogether different 

complexion, Puccini’s La bohème, with the always moving Celine Byrne as Mimì, one of her signature 

roles. We have also just concluded a nationwide tour of Massenet’s Werther with two extraordinary 

singers making auspicious role debuts: Niamh O’Sullivan as Charlotte and Paride Cataldo in the title role. 

We were delighted to tour Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The First Child, the final 

instalment in their trilogy of operas. And in January we revived Brian Irvine and Netia Jones’s 

Least Like The Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy for a run at the Royal Opera House’s 

Linbury Theatre. The production elicited plaudits from the UK press and earned an Olivier 

nomination for Best New Opera Production, bringing our tally of Olivier nominations to three, 

with one win. Not to blow our own horn too much, but this is an impressive achievement. 

Last season, in what we believe is a world first, we also premiered a virtual reality opera, 

Finola Merivale’s Out of the Ordinary, that was co-created with communities around Ireland. 

Experienced entirely on VR set, this bilingual opera (English and Irish) will be shown nationally 

and internationally in the coming months. And now, in Mozart and Da Ponte’s Così fan tutte, 

we’re offering not one but two excellent casts of principal singers. 

Our final event of the season is a gala concert featuring our current crop of INO Opera Studio 

artists at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire on 18 June. The Opera Studio is bedrock of our 

work. Investing in talent is key to ensuring the future of opera. 

We thank everyone who supports our company – our principal funder The Arts Council, Culture 

Ireland, who support our international work, and the many INO members whose individual 

contributions significantly contribute to our growth and success. I’m sure you will be as excited 

as we are about our 2023–24 season, which will be announced next month. Until then, may the 

winds be gentle and may the waves be calm. 

07

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07

DIRECTOR’S NOTE 

POLLY GRAHAM 

DIRECTOR MOZART’S 

COSÌ FAN TUTTE 

Così fan tutte is Mozart’s comedy which tells the story of two men 

who are obsessed with proving the idea that their girlfriends will 

always be faithful. With their misanthropic friend Don Alfonso, the 

men make a bet and devise a trick. They pose as soldiers recruited 

for war, and leave their girlfriends to believe they are alone. In 

actual fact the men return immediately, disguised as two other 

men. In these new guises they attempt to seduce each other’s 

girlfriends. Initially this proves difficult (and they feel vindicated), 

but as the day progresses, the girls betray their original lovers with 

these “new men”. The men abruptly end the trick by staging their 

return and then feigning discovery of the illicit new relationships. 

They use this evidence to chastise and shame their girlfriends 

before settling down to live the rest of their lives with them. The 

title, roughly translated from the Italian, means “all women act like 

this”. It implies a judgment and a position of authority. 

“No opera is quite so forthright in its contempt for women” is 

writer and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s view. He is right. 

Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, offered a tagline, maybe to 

win back the 50 percent of his potential audiences who may have 

been alienated by the subtitle – “La scuola degli amanti,” “The 

school for lovers”. Is that what it is? “A school for how to uphold 

a long tradition of putting women in their place,” more like. In 

creating this new production for INO, I’ve flipped the lens, with the 

objective of interrogating the agency of the female characters at 

the centre of the story. Their power at the beginning of the opera 

is very small compared to the men who are playing with the lives 

of these women. However, once the two girls believe in and start 

to relate to the new lovers, there is a shift. A brilliant effect starts to 

take place, where the two girls accept the new reality and step into 

it, embracing power through their newly awakened emotions, with 

their original boyfriends struggling to win it back. In rehearsals we 

call this the “Frankenstein effect” because as the men conduct 

this experiment on their girlfriends, there is a radical shift in power, 

just like Victor Frankenstein and the monster he creates. 

10

I was interested in the idea that the girls undergo a process of self-liberation as they begin to take 

joy in renouncing the values of their past lives, and choose new lovers. This made me wonder what 

other changes the two women could experience. We have located the action in an Anglo-Irish 

stately pile in the 1910s. We are riffing off this period, and using its rich palette to elaborate the 

story. This pre-revolutionary Ireland, as Roy Foster describes so eloquently in his book Vivid Faces, 

posited so many visions of the future as part of the burgeoning debate for nationhood. Feminism, 

socialism, romanticism, Bolshevism are just some of the ideas which intersected in the zeitgeist of 

the era. This situation has allowed us to push the comedy of the piece. 

What if two dimwitted, landed West Britons seriously underestimated their fiancées? What if they 

stupidly assumed the characters of two far more interesting men – Dion Boucicault-inspired artistes 

(based on the “O’Kalem” company, who were making early silent films in Ireland at this time) – to 

test the fidelity of their lovers? What if, in leaving their two girlfriends free to think for themselves, the 

girls tune into and absorb the possibilities of the socio-political movements of the time? What if these 

two upper middle-class ingénues not only discover a new emotional identity in their new-found desire 

with their new boyfriends, but also a new-found intellectual and social mojo? What if, by the end of the 

opera, these girls become Constance Markievicz-inspired political radicals? 

We have developed this theme of the Anglo-Irish stately pile as a kind of constructed container 

for the two cloistered, naive young women, and there’s a parallel between the house and 

the land which it is inhabiting, and their own bodies, which they initially try to lock away from 

society and turn into fortresses, before going on a journey of discovery. There’s a parallel 

between Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the transformation of Fiordiligi and Dorabella. 

The values which confine them at the start of the opera fall away as they listen to the forward 

thinking ideas of Despina, who we have loosely modelled on the radical trade unionist 

and feminist Louie Bennett. Despina encourages Fiordiligi and Dorabella to reframe their 

understanding of love. Once they start rethinking that idea for themselves, the floodgates open, 

and all inherited assumptions about reality are up for debate, leading the two women to the 

question which must prompt all revolutions: does reality have to be like this? 

As Despina says to the girls in Act I “vi par, ma non è ver”, “it seems so but it is not true”. The O’Kalems 

are actually fakes, the constancy of a lover is as fragile as the autumn leaves, and the capability and 

agency of the two young women at the centre of the story, which is assumed by the men around them 

to be nil, only continues to grow as they discover new versions of themselves. Instead of Da Ponte’s 

tagline, I might suggest: All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. 

11

SYNOPSIS 

ACT I 

Don Alfonso dismisses the naïveté of his 

young friends Gugielmo and Ferrando. He 

mocks their belief in the constancy of their 

girlfriends, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella. 

To prove his point, Don Alfonso proposes a 

bet, challenging the friends to test the loyalty 

of their lovers. He advises Ferrando and 

Guglielmo to pretend to go off to war. Later, 

Don Alfonso surprises Fiordiligi and Dorabella 

with news that their boyfriends must go to war 

immediately. The sisters watch the military 

boat sail away. Despina, a maid, encourages 

the sisters to enjoy themselves while their 

lovers are away. Don Alfonso enlists Despina’s 

help and instructs her to introduce two suitors 

disguised as strangers into the sisters’ home. 

Fiordiligi and Dorabella are startled to find 

unfamiliar men in their midst, especially when 

the men start making wild declarations of 

love. Don Alfonso declares that these men 

are his old friends and urges the sisters to 

entertain their advances. However, Fiordiligi 

remains steadfast in her loyalty to Guglielmo. 

The two disguised suitors then drink what 

appears to be poison as a demonstration 

of their desperate love. Don Alfonso and 

Despina rush to find a doctor, leaving Fiordiligi 

and Dorabella to care for the supposedly 

dying men. A disguised doctor, who is actually 

Despina, arrives to revive the suitors. As they 

recover, the suitors declare their love for the 

sisters even more ardently. 

ACT II 

Despina convinces Fiordiligi and Dorabella 

that some recreational flirtation would help 

pass the time. Dorabella chooses to engage 

with the disguised Guglielmo, while Fiordiligi 

selects the disguised Ferrando. Fiordiligi 

takes a walk with Ferrando, while Guglielmo 

pursues Dorabella. Dorabella eventually 

succumbs to Guglielmo’s advances, 

betraying her loyalty to Ferrando. Fiordiligi 

continues to resist Ferrando and he leaves. 

Devastated by the news of Dorabella’s 

quick betrayal, Ferrando makes a second 

attempt to break Fiordiligi’s resolve. Much 

to Guglielmo’s horror, Fiordiligi finally gives 

in to her desires. Despina orchestrates a 

double wedding for the sisters and their new 

lovers. A military chorus signifies the “return” 

of Ferrando and Guglielmo from battle. The 

suitors and the notary, again Despina in 

disguise, hide as Ferrando and Guglielmo 

appear in uniform, pretending to be surprised 

by the cold reception they receive. When 

they discover the marriage contract and the 

notary, they swear revenge on their unfaithful 

fiancées and their suitors. Finally, the men 

reveal their trick and expect a reconciliation 

with their original girlfriends. 

12

A TIME 

FOR OPERA 

Photographer: Frank Doring 

Historian Roy Foster’s book, Vivid Faces, influenced 

director Polly Graham to an Irish take on individual 

growth and the empowerment of women in Così fan 

tutte. Michael Dervan talks to him about his love of 

opera and the artform’s place in Irish society. 

When I ask Roy Foster about how opera came to him, his reply is 

shocking. “Probably real opera came to me when I went to live in London 

in the Seventies,” he says. “I remember during the three-day week going 

to the Royal Opera House when it was very cheap, and half the lights 

were out, and Hildegard Behrens was singing Salome. If the Western 

world is coming to an end, this is the way to go.” 

But it turns out Salome was far from his first opera. He grew up in 

Waterford when the city’s Festival of Light Opera was very vibrant. “We 

used to be dragged along to that. My mother took a very grand attitude 

towards it and thought it was idiotic stuff. She never brought us to 

Wexford, interestingly, but she said this was better than nothing. So I 

suppose that was my initial start.” 

He remembers “bad productions of Tosca” and other things from his time 

in Dublin. London was a turning point and, recently, he says, “it’s not just 

London. It’s Garsington, it’s Longborough, it’s Glyndebourne if somebody 

else takes me. And then English Touring Opera which always starts in 

the Hackney Empire, which is a wonderful place to hear opera. James 

Conway has done terrific productions there.” 

I ask about his taste in opera. “An American friend unkindly says I’m a 

schmalz maven,” he tells me. “I love Strauss and verismo opera, Verdi, 

of course. But one thing I really like about Irish National Opera is the 

way they’re introducing brand new operas into the repertoire, along 

with the classics. I think they’re doing that very adroitly and very well. 

I am fairly omnivorous, I would think. I’m starting to like Britten much 

more than I did. I used not to. Now I’m getting into it. What I’ve come to 

like is a harshness of works like Turn of the Screw and Peter Grimes. I 

13

find them very strong and uncompromising. And, 

in a certain sense, un-English. They’re not pretty, 

they’re not folky. At least not obviously folky.” 

I broach the issue that opera is not very well 

knitted into the fabric of Irish society. “No. It’s 

not. But didn’t Opera Theatre Company [one 

of the companies that formed INO] put on 

Eithne, an opera in Irish by Robert O’Dwyer? 

Which was a complete revelation to me, and 

I’m supposed to know about that period. It was 

absolutely new to me. James Joyce, of course, is 

saturated in opera. Themes from Don Giovanni 

run through Ulysses, as is well known, obviously 

infidelity among them. I’m just trying to think 

of Irish cultural works that privilege opera. 

Kate O’Brien’s beautiful novel, As Music and 

Splendour, is about two young Irish women 

opera singers studying in Rome and falling in 

love with each other. It’s a very transgressive 

novel in many ways. But it puts opera at the 

centre of their existence. And their own life in 

a way replicates a great romantic opera. It’s 

very obviously not set in Ireland, though they 

have escaped Ireland, escaped religion, and are 

finding themselves in Italy, the home of opera, of 

that kind of opera.” 

He demurs when I suggest that official Ireland 

has long been more or less in denial about a 

rich strain of European culture. “I think that’s a 

slight overstatement, but it’s certainly got a lot 

of truth to it. It’s partly because of the nationalist 

agenda of cultural revival in the late 19th century 

– just when Joyce was having the opportunity, 

ironically, to hear all these operas in late Victorian 

Ireland – was when the great claim was being 

made by the avatars of Irish national culture to 

search back into our own native past, or “rock 

and hill,” as Yeats put it. To excavate from that 

the realities of a modern culture. 

“At the same time, and this is too often forgotten, 

the Abbey Theatre was, in Yeats’s and John 

Millington Synge’s minds, certainly, somewhere 

that they hoped to put on avant-garde European 

culture. They’d both been to see avant-garde 

theatre in Paris in the 1890s. They’d seen 

Alfred Jarry’s plays, they’d seen Axël by Villiers 

de l’Isle-Adam, Yeats had, anyway. And they’d 

certainly gone to the Théâtre Libre and seen the 

productions that were put on there. Yeats wanted 

to bring Sudermann and Hauptmann and the 

work of other people to Dublin, as well as to 

rediscover – or in fact actually invent – a native 

Irish form of drama. There was a consciousness, 

among the avant-garde, that there was a 

European connection, a European parallel to be 

exploited out there. 

“One thing I found when writing a kind of cultural 

profile of the revolutionary generation in Vivid 

Faces, was that the young revolutionaries I was 

interested in weren’t really going to The Abbey 

very much. They rather disapproved of Yeats. 

They loved Cathleen ni Houlihan, but after that 

it all got suspect. And they certainly weren’t, 

with a couple of exceptions, very interested in 

avant-garde European culture. Their cultural 

vectors ran much more along the lines of ballad, 

story and rann, as Yeats would put it. Traditional 

versions of Irish history delivered through 

14

popular journalism, popular balladry and agitprop 

theatre, which they were interested in. 

“All this excludes, I think, the world of opera, 

especially of grand opera. Though, again, 

Yeats was conscious of Wagner, though Yeats’s 

musicality is a very complex business. In some 

ways tone-deaf and unmusical, in others he 

had an extraordinary sense of rhythm. And he 

himself believed that music was very important. 

He certainly saw the assonances between what 

Wagner was doing, trying to recreate and project 

a national myth through drama and music 

at Bayreuth. Maud Gonne was a passionate 

Wagnerian, as you might not be surprised to hear. 

She certainly looked the part. So Yeats saw the 

assonances between what he ideally would like the 

Abbey Theatre to do and what Wagner was doing 

at Bayreuth. But, of course, the Abbey diverged 

from Yeats’s original hopes of it, into something 

much more echt-nationalist and predictable.” 

I ask about how complete Yeats’s tone-deafness 

was. “It’s an impossible question to answer 

unless you had him in the room, intoning 

his poems for you. I think he had a sense of 

musicality and an extraordinary sense of rhythm. 

Because, of course, he composed his poems 

out loud, which is one reason why they have 

such a powerful beat to them. At the same time, 

his wife, who was very musical, as were both 

their children, said he could literally not tell the 

difference between one tune and another.” 

Foster sings the praises of Caroline Staunton’s 

INO production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, 

which he wrote about enthusiastically in the 

Times Literary Supplement. “I really liked it, 

with the kind of Irish-inflected, 18th-century 

Ascendancy slant that it took.” It led him to 

think of other operas that could have Irish 

makeovers, “like Rigoletto in Dublin gangland or 

Ballo in maschera at the court of Charles James 

Haughey. There are fertile ways in which classic 

operas could be re-imagined for Irish contexts.” 

He’s had conversations with Polly Graham about 

the revolutionary period in Ireland in which her 

new production is set, “a period where Irish 

women are embarking upon a sense of liberation 

from the constraints of family and sexual and 

social expectations. One such revolutionary, 

Rosamond Jacob, writes in her diary that 

‘promiscuity in both sexes is much better than 

the double standard of morals’. That could be 

said by Despina, couldn’t it, straight from Così?” 

The great thing about diaries, like Rosamond 

Jacob’s, he says, “is that every day she went 

home and wrote down what she had done. 

And often it involved going around and talking 

about sex with friends. She writes about it very 

frankly, and she herself had an unabashedly 

overpowering desire for sexual life outside the 

constraints of heterosexual marriage. Judging by 

that unusual window into her life, many of her 

friends felt the same. You could say in a sense 

Roger Casement’s diaries give you equally an 

unusual window into a life, a very controversial 

one, but still a fascinating insight into an 

alternative sexual life at a time when such things 

were supposed by many people not to exist.” 

15

OPERAS PRODUCED 

IN DUBLIN IN 1894 

Based on list from Bronze by Gold, The Music 

of Joyce, edited by Sebastian DG Knowles 

AUBER: Fra Diavolo 

BALFE: The Bohemian Girl 2 PRODUCTIONS 

BENEDICT: The Lily of Killarney 

BERLIOZ: La damnation de Faust 

BIZET: Carmen 2 PRODUCTIONS 

BUCALOSSI: Massaroni WORLD PREMIERE * 

DONIZETTI: La fille du Régiment 2 PRODUCTIONS 

DONIZETTI: Lucia di Lammermoor 

FLOTOW: Martha 

GLUCK: Orfeo ed Euridice 2 PRODUCTIONS 

GORING THOMAS: Esmeralda † 

GOUNOD: Faust 3 PRODUCTIONS 

GOUNOD: Roméo et Juliette 

LEONCAVALLO: Pagliacci 3 PRODUCTIONS 

MASCAGNI: Cavalleria rusticana 3 PRODUCTIONS 

MASCAGNI: L’amico Fritz 

MASSÉ: Galathée ‡ 

MASSENET: La Navarraise 

MEYERBEER: Les Huguenots 

MOZART: Don Giovanni 

TASCA: A Santa Lucia § 

VERDI: Falstaff 

VERDI: Il trovatore 2 PRODUCTIONS 

VERDI: La traviata 

WAGNER: Die Meistersinger 

WAGNER: Lohengrin 2 PRODUCTIONS 

WAGNER: Rienzi 

WAGNER: Tannhäuser 2 PRODUCTIONS 

WALLACE: Maritana 3 PRODUCTIONS 

* Procida Bucalossi (1832–1918) and his son Ernest 

Bucalossi (1863–1933) were both British-Italian 

composers of light music whose published music 

usually just carried their surname. They are now best 

remembered for The Grasshopper’s Dance by Ernest. 

† Arthur Goring Thomas (1850–1892), English composer 

whose Esmeralda (1883) is dedicated to the the French 

mezzo-soprano and composer Pauline Viardot; the first 

performance, at Drury Lane in London, featured Irish 

tenor Barton McGuckin in the role of Phoebus. 

‡ Victor Massé (1822–1884), a Prix de Rome-winning 

French composer who composed Galathée in 1852. 

§ Pierantonio Tasca (1858–1934), Italian opera 

composer whose A Santa Lucia dates from 1892. 

He’s optimistic about the health of opera. “I think 

it’s at a pretty vibrant stage. I think it appeals to a 

broader base of people than it used to. My children 

are in their thirties and their forties now. When I 

was their age opera was for older people, generally 

speaking. Now I think there’s a younger audience who 

are availing themselves of it. I notice this at English 

Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire. it’s full of young 

people in hoodies. Opera Up Close, mounting radically 

reduced versions of classic operas in London pubs, 

brings in a young audience. The same is true of INO 

performances, especially of the new operas, Least Like 

The Other, for instance. 

“It’s a different take on opera to the audiences of 

Glyndebourne or I think I would have to say Wexford, 

as well. There is a spread of appeal. I’m not sure why 

this is. It’s partly because I think mixed dramatic forms, 

what could roughly be called musical theatre, is very 

alive and very lively and being canvassed very widely at 

the moment, even in fringe theatre. Much more so than 

when I first began going to the theatre half a century 

ago. There is an appeal to the operatic form that is 

more widely distributed. 

“At the same time, there are things working against 

it. Most of all, perhaps, the huge expense, especially 

of putting on a conventional large opera. The cost of 

putting on a Don Carlo one can hardly begin to imagine. 

At the same time that is where increasing the repertoire 

into small-scale modern operas seems to me a very 

important development, as with the collaborations with 

Enda Walsh that INO have been doing. I think there 

is a liveliness and a future to it. There are moments 

when you find opera crossing into a popular form 

which I think you can isolate as key. Think of the very 

16

fashionable movie of maybe 30 years ago Diva. 

That foreground opera to the kind of audience 

that would have been seeing this very trendy, 

very slick, very young film. It would have made 

quite an impression. And of course there was 

‘Nessun dorma’ and the Three Tenors at the 

World Cup. The first time I really cottoned 

on to Così, I suppose, was when I saw John 

Schlesinger’s wonderful film, Sunday, Bloody 

Sunday, where ‘Soave sia il vento’ is the theme 

tune. It’s about a triangular relationship. This 

wonderful trio pulses through the film. It wasn’t 

the place one expected to encounter a Mozart 

opera. But it brought it to the fore.” 

What would be on his dream repertoire list for a 

company like INO? “I’d just like them to do my 

favourite operas, obviously. I’d like them to do 

Don Carlo, and maybe there would be a way of 

shaping it to some Irish historic situation. I’d like 

them to do some Britten. It would be interesting 

to see Britten played in Ireland. Perhaps you 

could transpose Peter Grimes to Irish village life 

rather than Suffolk village life”. He follows up, 

by e-mail, with Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, which 

“would transpose very well to an Irish setting”. 

He describes the use of Vivid Faces to inform a 

production of Così fan tutte as “very gratifying. 

Polly had read my book very closely. She had 

picked out in it the things that I was glad to have 

concentrated on myself, like the difficulties of 

and the rewards of exploring sexual dissidence 

against conventional morality as part of the 

revolutionary generation’s reactions. 

“One thing that I was very struck by when writing 

Vivid Faces was the extent to which so many of 

the people I was studying were revolting against 

their parents as much as against the British 

state. The British state stood in for their parents, 

and vice versa. I was also very struck by the shift 

of attitudes towards conventional morality that 

that implied, and the way that people changed 

their names. We always think of people who give 

themselves names in Irish as just saying that 

he or she is a passionate Gaeilgeoir. It’s also a 

rejection of the name your parents had given 

you. It’s a rejection of the identity your parents 

had given you. 

“Polly had picked up on those subversive 

elements in that generation. I like her idea – I 

haven’t seen rehearsals – to project those 

subversivenesses or those subversions into her 

version of Così, which conveniently is set when 

there’s a war for the two lads to go off to. As there 

was in the just pre-revolutionary generation. 

And with women who, when freed from the 

trammels of expectations, end up behaving in an 

unconventional and liberated way. 

“That’s not the way that Da Ponte or I suspect 

Mozart would have seen them behaving. I like 

the thought of them not behaving as weak and 

corruptible vessels, but as women grabbing their 

agency for themselves when they see a bit of 

freedom.” 

Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary 

Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923, is published 

by Allen Lane. 

17

KENNETH 

MONTGOMERY 

1943–2023 

The morning after conducting the opening 

night of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the 

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in March, I woke to 

the unexpected news of the death of Kenneth 

Montgomery at his home in Amsterdam. 

I only got to know Kenneth towards the end 

of a career that included recordings for EMI 

and RCA in the 1970s, Schoenberg’s Moses 

und Aron at the Holland Festival in the 1980s, 

and a much-praised Haydn L’isola disabitata 

in Amsterdam just months before his death. 

I knew that he was born in Belfast in 1943, 

that among Irish conductors his career was 

rivalled in the 20th century only by another 

Northern Irish musician, Hamilton Harty, 

who had led the Hallé Orchestra to glory in 

the 1920s and 1930s. That he had trained 

under giants, Adrian Boult in London, Hans 

Schmidt Isserstedt in Hamburg and Sergiu 

Celibidache in Siena. That his career saw 

him work at Glyndebourne, Sadler’s Wells 

and Bournemouth, and in major orchestral 

and choral posts in the Netherlands. That he 

was the first Irishman to become principal 

conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, and that 

he was also the first artistic director of Opera 

Northern Ireland. 

I encountered his work in the 1990s when I 

saw Opera Northern Ireland’s production of 

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Grand 

Opera House in Belfast. It was an opera I loved 

18

from CD, but this was my first time to encounter it live. I vividly remember his way of 

handling the string sound in the sorrowful prelude, the rhythmic spring of the waltz 

and polonaise, and the tragedy of the opera’s conclusion. When we launched Irish 

National Opera in 2018, Kenneth was high on the list of people I wanted to work with. 

I offered him a choice of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 2019 or Bizet’s Carmen 

in 2020, and he opted for Carmen because he felt this was a score that he could 

usefully bring his interest in historical research to bear on. His meticulous approach 

was evident from the first rehearsal. He was steeped in the ideals of historically 

informed performance practice, but there was not the slightest hint of doctrine about 

his music-making. His approach was always collaborative and collegial. 

The 2020 performances were scuppered by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

But, wonderfully, we managed to bring the team back together two years later, and 

Kenneth’s goal of viewing the opera through a classical rather than a romantic lens 

did eventually get realised. He created wonderfully lithe, transparent orchestral 

sounds. He revealed the full texture of the score with apparently effortless ease, and 

he allowed space for the singers to shape phrases as Bizet notated, without having 

to constantly battle to be heard. He reversed the layout of the first and second violins 

in the pit, and divided the four double basses, two on each side of the orchestra. 

His motivation was to increase orchestral clarity by responding to his analysis of the 

acoustic characteristics of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. 

It was an honour to have had this collaboration with him, and a personal pleasure 

to get to know himself and his husband Jan. Kenneth was always upbeat, positive 

and encouraging – not for nothing was he a major teacher of conducting in the 

Netherlands. He enriched his colleagues as well as his pupils. He will be sorely missed. 

I speak for everyone at INO when I say we feel a great sense of loss when we think with 

fondness of his joie de vivre, his continual curiosity and his unending drive for making 

music. We extend our deepest sympathy to Jan, for whom his loss is unimaginable. 

FERGUS SHEIL 

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 

19

BEING MA 

WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THE 

FIRST OPERA YOU WENT TO? 

I remember it well, because, as you know, Cork 

has a great tradition of opera in the city. A lot of 

touring companies would come. It was whatever 

the version of Irish National Opera was then, the 

Dublin Grand Opera Society probably. They came 

around Easter time. They did their spring season 

and brought it to Cork Opera House. My father 

loved classical music. He played symphonic 

music and he played his operas. My mother was 

more of a Frank Sinatra woman. Mum wasn’t 

particularly interested in seeing the opera with 

Dad. So, when I was 11, Dad deemed I was old 

enough to accompany him. We went to see Verdi’s 

La traviata. I cried all the way home in the car 

afterwards. He swore at the time that he’d never 

bring me to another opera. I totally got into the 

story. I remember, towards the end when Violetta 

was dying, she fell and Alfredo had to catch her. 

She must have been a large woman, because I 

remember, just for a split second, coming out of 

the story and thinking, “O my god, she’s going to 

crush him!” Then I got straight back into the story 

again. At the time, operas were obviously more 

traditional. So during the overture, the curtain was 

always down. I got used to going to these operas, 

so that you’d have this 11-year-old, 12-year-old 

sitting there. And people always had their little 

boxes of chocolates. During the overture they’d be 

opening their Dairy Milk or whatever. But the little 

11-year-old was going SHUSH! I just remember 

bawling my eyes out in the car on the way home, 

because Violetta had died, and I was so engrossed 

in the story that I really believed it. 

16

JELLA CULLAGH... 

WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THE 

FIRST OPERA YOU SANG IN? 

Gosh! I was extraordinarily fortunate. A lot 

of people go to music college and do music 

in university. I went straight from school 

into work, a job. And at the time there were 

a lot of amateur dramatic musical societies 

and I always joked that I killed off amateur 

dramatic work in Cork, because I got the tail 

end of that. I appeared as a solo “artiste” 

in about ten different productions in three 

years. That’s a lot, Gilbert and Sullivan, and 

Cara O’Sullivan [Cork soprano, 1962–2021] 

and myself were in a Lehár operetta. By the 

time I went to the National Opera Studio 

in London, I was the only one not to have 

come out of full-time music education. But 

in a way I was more advanced. Because I’d 

learnt by treading the boards with people 

like James N Healy [1916–93, Cork actor, 

writer and producer] in Gilbert and Sullivan, 

and lots of other people. By the time I had 

my first professional engagement, I was a 

pretty seasoned performer. And one of the 

very, very first professional engagements 

I had was singing Musetta in Puccini’s La 

bohème for Opera Ireland, after I came out 

of the National Opera Studio. Which, hold on 

to your seat, was in 1993. Little did I know 

then that, 30 years later, I’d still be singing 

and performing. I’m so proud of that. Regina 

Nathan was Mimì. It was just wonderful. The 

chorus at the time was a mixture, more or 

less an amateur chorus. There were stalwart 

singers like Frank O’Brien around. They 

were so encouraging, so proud that here was 

another young Irish singer on the way. I did a 

lot of Musettas then and then not again for ten 

years. And one of my scariest moments was 

doing the role in the Royal Albert Hall, directed 

by Francesca Zambello. It was opera in the 

round with roller-skating waiters, set in Paris 

around 1947. I had the amazing, Lana Turneresque 

hair and had to walk on a table singing 

“Quando m’en vo”. I would put out my foot 

and a table would appear by the time I put my 

foot down. I walked across the middle of the 

Albert Hall not seeing anything in front of me, 

but walking, and the table would miraculously 

appear each time I put my foot down. 

WHAT WAS THE BEST OPERA-RELATED 

ADVICE YOU EVER GOT? 

There were lots of little moments along the 

way, for different reasons. One of the best 

pieces of advice was to shut up, basically. I 

was singing Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux for 

Opera Holland Park, and Richard Bonynge 

was conducting. When I was in my dressing 

room, warming up my voice, I’d hear a little 

knock at the door. Richard Bonynge would be 

there with his finger up to his mouth, going 

“Shush”. Basically telling me not to keep 

singing. Because it’s something that singers 

do. Once you warm up your voice, you should 

be done, and you should be cooked, and you 

should just relax. It’s a nervous tic. Singers 

just tend to keep vocalising in the dressing 

room, keeping it going. You’re just tiring 

yourself out and it’s unnecessary. He was so 

21

experienced, he knew that. I was someone 

who suffered from performance anxiety and 

nervous tension, and a choreographer once 

advised me, just before going on stage, to 

take a piece of your sleeve in your fingers. 

Just feel the material in your fingers and 

bring yourself into that moment. The opposite 

of being nervous is being focused and 

concentrated. That was another good tip. 

WHAT IS THE MOST ANNOYING 

MISCONCEPTION ABOUT OPERA? 

There is this pronounced knowledge that 

opera is too hifalutin’ or not understandable 

or too expensive or elitist. But I see 

arguments to the contrary all the time. I’m 

making a stand that that is fake news. They 

say that young people aren’t interested in 

opera. And yet they’re pouring out of music 

colleges all the time wanting to be opera 

singers. Charles Mackerras [Australian 

conductor, 1925–2010] had a very long 

career and he said to me once that he was 

quite young when he got his first conducting 

job at Covent Garden. He turned around and 

he saw all these grey heads in the audience. 

He went, “Oh my god! What have I done? I’m 

in a dying artform.” 50 years later he turned 

around and saw a similar sea of grey heads. 

WHAT MOMENT DO YOU MOST LOOK 

FORWARD TO WHEN YOU GO TO A 

PERFORMANCE OF COSÌ FAN TUTTE? 

Obviously, the music is just divine. We’re 

talking about a genius here. He wasn’t 

messing around. He knew how to write 

absolutely glorious melodies, but melodies 

that speak to the heart. And of course, in 

Così fan tutte, like in most other things, the 

central message is about love. And what is 

love? And what should love be? There are so 

many extraordinary moments. I’m a sucker 

for the trio in Act I [“Soave sia il vento”]. 

Every time I hear it I’m just transported away. 

It is gorgeous. It’s music that feeds the soul 

and that lifts you up and that brings you 

somewhere else. Music has that power. 

WHAT’S THE MOST CHALLENGING 

ASPECT OF THE ROLE OF DESPINA? 

Not to make a caricature. To find more 

substance and depth in her pronouncements 

on love. Because she believes in choice, in a 

woman’s power, and that love should make 

you happy. She really doesn’t buy into the fact 

that love should be tortuous and painful and 

horrible. She doesn’t have much soulful music. 

And yet, in her more bouncy, in-your-face 

music, I need to find the soul and the essence, 

and imbue the music with that, as well. 

WHAT PROJECT HAS GIVEN YOU THE 

GREATEST SATISFACTION? 

I’ve derived so much pleasure out of my work, 

my experiences in opera, my colleagues. 

There was one particular thing which felt 

really special, important in some way beyond 

what we were doing. It was during the Peace 

Process, in the run up to the Good Friday 

Agreement. The Arts Council of Northern 

22

Ireland (ACNI) contacted Scottish Opera, 

because they had a designated department 

that worked on outreach projects. What 

ACNI wanted was to give money to a project 

that was going to bring both sides of the 

border together in some artistic way. So they 

commissioned a piece of musical theatre. 

They brought in a wonderful man, David 

Munro, who was at the time in Scottish Opera, 

a composer, and later musical director of the 

Celtic Tenors, and now Celtic Thunder. He 

composed a musical based on the William 

Trevor short story, The Ballroom of Romance. 

People from Leitrim and Enniskillen were 

encouraged to take part. He wrote a beautiful 

arietta that Bridie sang to herself in the mirror 

before going into the ballroom, and tenor 

James Nelson had the role of Mr Dwyer, who 

owned the ballroom. But everybody else 

was either from Enniskillen or somewhere 

in Leitrim, from communities that had been 

separated by the closing of border roads. It 

was one of the most moving experiences I 

had. At the wrap party there was a table where 

everyone was crying and hugging. It appears 

that two of the young girls who were in the 

chorus had become great mates during the 

production. It transpired, during the party, 

that when their mothers were of a similar age, 

they, too, had been great friends. But they’d 

lost touch. It made a very deep impression 

on me about the difficulties and struggles of 

ordinary people, and not even the people who 

had suffered death or injury. Just how the 

social history of the area had been impacted. 

For a brief, shining moment, as it were, that 

production brought these communities 

together. The very special warmth that was 

generated has stayed with me. It touched me 

deeply, how much love there was in that whole 

experience, and also how much sadness. 

IF YOU WEREN’T A SINGER, WHAT 

MIGHT YOU HAVE BECOME? 

I do feel there was a fork in the road for me 

at one point. When I was young I saw music 

as a hobby. So when I left school I qualified 

as a dental nurse. This was at the very tail 

end of the Aids epidemic in Ireland. Nurses 

were being asked to volunteer to work with 

HIV positive patients. I understood the true 

risks and had no fear about it. So I ended up 

being involved in preparations for surgeries. 

The surgeons noticed I wasn’t squeamish, I 

was calm. One day they offered to send me 

to England to train as a theatre nurse. And 

I remember having to say to the HR person 

that my problem was that I was interested in a 

different kind of theatre. 

IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL DERVAN 

23

CAST IN ORDER OF VOCAL APPEARANCE 

Ferrando Dean Power Tenor 

an officer, lover of Dorabella 

19, 21, 23, 25, 27 (AFTERNOON), 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

William Morgan 

Tenor 

24, 26, 27 (EVENING) MAY 

Guglielmo Benjamin Russell Baritone 

an officer, lover of Fiordiligi 

19, 21, 23, 25, 27 (AFTERNOON), 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Gianluca Margheri 

Baritone 

24, 26, 27 (EVENING), 29 MAY 

Don Alfonso John Molloy Bass 

an old philosopher 


Milan Siljanov 

Bass 


Fiordiligi Anna Devin Soprano 

a lady from Ferrara 


sister of Dorabella Sarah Brady Soprano 


Dorabella Sharon Carty Mezzo-soprano 

a lady from Ferrara 


sister of Fiordiligi Gemma Ní Bhriain Mezzo-soprano 


Despina Majella Cullagh Soprano 

maidservant to the sisters 


Emma Morwood 

Soprano 


24

CREATIVE TEAM 

Conductors 

Director 

Set & Costume Designer 

Lighting Designer 

Video Designer 

Chorus Director 

Associate Director 

Assistant Director 

Répétiteur & Continuo 

Language Coach & Répétiteur 

Peter Whelan 

19, 21, 23, 25, 27 (AFTERNOON), 29, 31 MAY; 2 JUNE 

Elaine Kelly 


Polly Graham 

Jamie Vartan 

Sinéad McKenna 

Jack Phelan 

Elaine Kelly 

Davey Kelleher 

Stephanie Dufresne 

Aoife O’Sullivan 

Annalisa Monticelli 

PARTICIPATING INO STUDIO MEMBERS 

Fiordiligi (cover) 

Dorabella (cover) 

Guglielmo (cover) 

Despina (cover) 

Studio Conductor 

Kathleen Nic Dhiarmada 

Madeline Judge 

Eoin Foran 

Jade Phoenix 

Medb Brereton Hurley 

25

IRISH NATIONAL OPERA CHORUS 

Sopranos 

Jade Phoenix 

Niamh St John 

Jessica Hackett 

Megan O’Neill 

Mezzo-sopranos 

Leanne Fitzgerald 

Madeline Judge 

Sarah Kilcoyne 

Heather Sammon 

Tenors 

Andrew Masterson 

William Pearson 

Ben Escorcio 

Ciarán Crangle 

Basses 

Matthew Mannion 

Kevin Neville 

Lewis Dillon 

David Scott 

IRISH NATIONAL OPERA ORCHESTRA 

First Violins 

Sarah Sew LEADER 

David O’Doherty 

Anita Vedres 

Cillian Ó Breacháin 

Jennifer Murphy 

Second Violins 

Larissa O’Grady 

Aoife Dowdall 

Christine Kenny 

Emma Masterson 

Violas 

Adele Johnson 

Andreea Banciu 

Gawain Usher 

Cellos 

David Edmonds 

Yseult 

Cooper-Stockdale 

Aoife Burke 

Double Bass 

Dominic Dudley 

Flutes 

Meadhbh O’Rourke 

Naoise Ó Briain 

Oboes 

Daniel Souto 

Jenny Magee 

Clarinets 

Conor Sheil 

Suzanne Brennan 

Bassoons 

Sinéad Frost 

Clíona Warren 

Horns 

Hannah Miller 

Caoime Glavin 

Trumpets 

Darren Moore 

Pamela Stainer 

Timpani 

Noel Eccles 

26

PRODUCTION TEAM 

Production Manager 

Michael Lonergan 

Company Stage Manager 

Paula Tierney 

Stage Managers 

Elizabeth Barry 

Anne Kyle 

Assistant Stage Managers 

Rachel Ellen Bollard 

Rachel Spratt 

Technical Stage Manager 

Danny Hones 

Technical Team 

Abraham Allen 

Martin Wallace 

Joey Maguire 

Pawel Nieworaj 

Peter Boyle 

Fergus McDonagh 

Chief Electrician 

Donal McNinch 

LX Programmer 

Eoin McNinch 

LX Team 

Nathan Lennon 

Paul Hyland 

Video Assistant 

Eoin Robinson 

Wigs, Hair, Make-up Supervisor 

Carole Dunne 

Wigs, Hair, Make-up Assistant 

Tee Elliott 

Costume Supervisor 

Sinead Lawlor 

Tailors 

Denis Darcy 

Gillian Carew 

Costume Makers 

Denise Assas Tynan 

Anne O’Mahony 

Wardrobe Supervisor 

Niamh Kearney 

Costume Breakdown Artist 

Molly Brown 

Costume Intern 

Kellie Donnelly 

Dressers 

Marie Brady 

Jessica Healy Rettig 

Rebecca McConnan 

Guia A Macapez 

Perseus E O’Brien 

Saoirse Wadding 

Jenny Whyte 

Specialised Prop Makers 

Scenedock 

Ancient Lights 

High Nelly Engineering Ltd 

Teresa Young 

Frances White 

Props Supervisor 

Stephanie Ryan 

Costume Hire 

Peris Costumes 

Set Construction 

Theatre Production Services 

Scenic Printing 

Showtex, Plustec 

Scenic Artist 

Sandra Butler 

Assistant Scenic Artist 

Susan Crawford 

Armourer 

Laurence Thermes 

Crewing Contractor 

ESI 

Lighting Provider 

QLX 

Video Hire 

SSS 

Surtitle Operator 

Maeve Sheil 

Transport 

Trevor Price 

Odhran Sherwin 

Photography 

Agata Stoinska 

Ruth Medjber 

Ros Kavanagh 

Video 

Charlie Joe Doherty 

Graphic Design 

Alphabet Soup 

PR Consultant 

Conleth Teevan 

Programme edited by 

Michael Dervan 

27

BIOGRAPHIES 

PETER WHELAN 

CONDUCTOR 

Olivier award-winner Peter Whelan 

is among the most dynamic and 

versatile exponents of historical 

performance of his generation, with 

a remarkable career as a conductor 

and director. He is artistic director 

of the Irish Baroque Orchestra as well as curator of 

Early Music for Norwegian Wind Ensemble. He is 

also an acclaimed solo artist with an extensive and 

award-winning discography as a solo bassoonist. As 

conductor he has a particular passion for exploring 

and championing neglected music from the Baroque 

and Classical eras. Orchestral highlights of the 2022– 

23 season include Antwerp Symphony Orchestra 

and Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, as well as 

returns to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the 

National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin. Recent 

opera productions have included Gluck’s Orfeo ed 

Euridice (for his debut with San Francisco Opera), 

Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute 

with Irish National Opera, and Handel’s Radamisto 

with English Touring Opera. In 2022 he conducted 

Vivaldi’s Bajazet for INO, a co-production with the 

Royal Opera House which was met with outstanding 

reviews and for which he won an Olivier Award for 

Outstanding Achievement in Opera. His work in 

concert and the recording studio has been widely 

praised for its “rich insight, style and charisma” (The 

Guardian), its “stylish verve” (BBC Music Magazine) 

and “phenomenally energetic direction” (Artsdesk). 

As an early music champion, he represents “the very 

best of contemporary trends in bringing this music to 

life: flex and zest with tempi...an incredible alertness 

to colors and moods” (Operawire). 

ELAINE KELLY 

CONDUCTOR 24, 26, 27 (EVENING) MAY 

CHORUS DIRECTOR 

Elaine Kelly is the resident 

conductor of Irish National Opera. 

Upon her appointment in late 

2021, she conducted a national 

tour with Peter Maxwell Davies’s 

The Lighthouse. She made her US 

debut in Emma O’Halloran’s Trade/Mary Motorhead 

in New York’s Prototype Festival in January, and 

her Los Angeles Opera debut in the same double 

bill in April. She also conducted nine new works by 

Irish composers in INO’s internationally praised 20 

Shots of Opera in 2020 as well as the film of Amanda 

Feery’s A Thing I Cannot Name in 2021. She held the 

position of studio conductor in the INO Opera Studio 

from 2019–21, and worked as assistant conductor 

and chorus director on performances of Rossini’s 

La Cenerentola, Mozart’s The Abduction from the 

Seraglio, Puccini’s La bohème, Strauss’s Elektra, 

Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The First Child, 

Beethoven’s Fidelio, Bizet’s Carmen, and films of 

Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and Gerald Barry’s 

Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In March 2022 she 

was invited to work as assistant conductor on Opéra 

National de Bordeaux’s production of Donizetti’s 

L’elisir d’amore. In 2014 she won the inaugural ESB 

Feis Ceoil Orchestral Conducting Competition which 

led to engagements with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. 

She was Musical Director of the University of Limerick 

Orchestra (2019–21), the Dublin Symphony Orchestra 

(2017–19) and has worked with the National Symphony 

Orchestra, Dublin Youth Orchestra and Cork Concert 

Orchestra. Elaine is a BMus and MA graduate of the 

MTU Cork School of Music. 

28

POLLY GRAHAM 

DIRECTOR 

JAMIE VARTAN 

SET & COSTUME DESIGNER 

Polly read English at Trinity 

College Dublin and completed her 

masters at RADA. Her directing 

credits include Olga Neuwirth’s 

Orlando (Vienna State Opera), 

Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in 

patria (Longborough Festival Opera), a triple bill which 

included the world premiere of Freya Waley-Cohen’s 

WITCH (Royal Academy of Music, London), Mozart’s 

Die Zauberflöte (Royal College of Music, London), 

Dani Howard’s Robin Hood (The Opera Story), 

Orlando Gough’s Bloom Britannia (Barefoot Opera), 

Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis (Loud Crowd 

at Bold Tendencies), Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas 

(Blackheath Halls), Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé 

(Welsh National Opera and Theater St Gallen), Karl 

Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus 

(Independent Opera Director Fellow 2016), Peter 

Maxwell Davies’s Kommilitonen! (Welsh National 

Youth Opera), Unheard Voices: CREW (WNO), and 

Nighthawks (New Earth Theatre). Her associate 

director credits include Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto 

(Teatro di San Carlo, Naples), Gordon Getty’s Usher 

House and Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher 

(San Francisco Opera). Earlier this season she 

directed the world premiere of Pierangelo Valtinoni’s 

Il piccolo principe at La Scala, Milan. Polly is artistic 

director of Longborough Festival Opera. 

Jamie Vartan studied Fine Art at 

Brighton Polytechnic & Theatre 

Design at Central St Martins. He has 

worked extensively as a designer in 

theatre, opera and dance in Ireland, 

the UK and Europe. His designs for 

opera include Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s 

The First Child, The Second Violinist and The Last Hotel 

(Landmark Productions/Irish National Opera); Bartók’s 

Bluebeard’s Castle, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel 

(INO) and Rossini’s William Tell (INO and Nouvel Opéra 

Fribourg); Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (Wide Open 

Opera); Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Tchaikovsky’s The 

Queen of Spades (La Scala); Verdi’s La traviata (Malmö); 

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Opéra national du Rhin); 

Anthony Bolton’s The Life and Death of Alexander 

Litvinenko, Puccini’s La bohème (Grange Park Opera); 

Bizet’s Carmen (Lisbon); Ariadne auf Naxos (Salzburg); 

Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (Oldenburg); 

Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (Wexford Festival 

Opera, winner best set design, The Irish Times Irish 

Theatre Awards); Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (Bilbao 

and Valencia); Verdi’s Falstaff (Grange Park Opera, 

Oman and Parma). His designs for theatre include 

Medicine, Woyzeck in Winter, Arlington, Ballyturk and 

Misterman, winner best set design, The Irish Times 

Irish Theatre Awards (Landmark Productions/Galway 

International Arts Festival); Happy Days (Olympia/ 

Landmark Productions); Grief is the Thing with 

Feathers (Complicité/Wayward Productions/Landmark 

Productions/Galway International Arts Festival); 

Bondagers (Edinburgh Lyceum); Ravens: Spassky v 

Fischer (Hampstead Theatre); Knives in Hens (Perth); 

Have Your Circumstances Changed? (Artangel), and 

The Lost Child Trilogy (David Glass Ensemble). His film 

design includes The Last Hotel (Sky Arts). 

29

BIOGRAPHIES 

SINÉAD McKENNA 

LIGHTING DESIGNER 

DAVEY KELLEHER 

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR 

Sinéad McKenna an internationally 

renowned Irish set and lighting 

designer working extensively 

across theatre, opera, dance and 

film, and has received two Irish 

Times Irish Theatre Awards for best 

lighting design and a Drama Desk nomination for 

outstanding lighting design for a musical. Previous 

designs for INO include Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, 

Puccini’s La bohème (Bord Gáis Theatre livestream), 

Vivaldi’s Griselda and Offenbach’s The Tales of 

Hoffman. Recent set and lighting designs include 

Walking with Ghosts and The Approach (Landmark 

Theatre). Lighting designs include Ghosts (Landmark 

Productions/Abbey Theatre), Faith Healer (Abbey 

Theatre), Piaf (Gate Theatre), Dēmos (Liz Roche 

Company), Parade (Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris) and 

Once Upon a Bridge and Epiphany (Druid Theatre). 

She has designed for many notable companies 

including Donmar Warehouse, The West Yorkshire 

Playhouse, Cork Opera House, The Everyman, Lyric 

Theatre Belfast, Rough Magic, CoisCéim, Decadent, 

Gare St Lazare, Corn Exchange and THISISPOPBABY. 

Davey is a director based in Dublin, 

working across opera and theatre. 

His work with INO includes directing 

Conor Mitchell’s A Message for 

Marty (or The Ring) for INO’s 

acclaimed 20 Shots of Opera series 

in 2020. He was assistant director for Puccini’s Tosca, 

Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Aida (INO) as well as 

Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Wide Open Opera). 

He has directed outreach projects with Music 

Generation and Maynooth University, and recently, 

Music Rooms with The Ark and INO. He was a 

member of the INO Opera Studio 2021–22. Theatre 

directing credits include the award-winning Tom 

Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar, Michelle 

Read’s Bang! for Dublin Theatre Festival 2020 & 

2021, A Short Cut To Happiness for the Edinburgh 

Fringe Festival (nominated for Scotsman Mental 

Health Award), comic drama Seahorse, multiform 

music & puppetry works, Glowworm and 

Birdy, spoken-word sci-fi, These Lights, and the 

geopolitical allegory The Olive Tree, which has toured 

internationally. He produced the revival and tour 

of TRYST with Sickle Moon Productions (The Civic/ 

Project Arts Centre/Lyric Theatre Belfast/VAULT 

London) and has worked as an associate director 

with the Cork Opera House (ProdiJig: The Revolution, 

The Wizard of Oz, and The Cork Proms), and continues 

to work with their emerging outreach programme. 

He is the artistic director of Dublin Youth Theatre, 

a guest tutor and director at The Lir Academy, 

Dublin, an associate artist at The Civic, Tallaght, 

and a director and playwriting mentor for their 

Tenderfoot programme. 

30

STEPHANIE DUFRESNE 

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR 

AOIFE O’SULLIVAN 

RÉPÉTITEUR 

Stephanie is a dancer, actor and 

choreographer from the west 

of Ireland. She holds a BA in 

dance from the Rotterdam Dance 

Academy and is a graduate of the 

full-time programme for screenacting 

at the Bow Street Academy in Smithfield. 

Since graduating she has enjoyed combining her 

skills for companies and choreographers like Protein 

Dance, Chrysalis Dance, Dam Van Huynh, Marguerite 

Donlon, Liz Roche, Emma Martin/United Fall and Junk 

Ensemble. She played the lead role of Karen in Selina 

Cartmell’s production of The Red Shoes for the Gate 

Theatre in 2017 and has appeared as a performer in 

music videos for Talos, Dean Lewis, Crash Ensemble 

and Galia Arad among others. Stephanie’s show 

After Love premiered at the Galway International Arts 

Festival in 2021. She has collaborated previously with 

Irish National Opera on Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice, 

Gerard Barry’s Alice’s Adventure’s Underground, 

Bizet’s Carmen and Rossini’s William Tell. She was 

one of four performers in INO’s Least Like The Other 

which recently finished a run at the Royal Opera 

House in London, where it was nominated for an 

Olivier Award. She made her opera-directing debut 

in Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s Dust in INO’s highly 

praised 20 Shots of Opera. 

Aoife O’Sullivan was born in Dublin 

and studied at the College of Music 

with Frank Heneghan and later 

at the RIAM with John O’Conor. 

She graduated from TCD with 

an Honours degree in Music. In 

September 1999 she began her studies as a Fulbright 

Scholar at the Curtis Institute of Music and in 2001 

she joined the staff there for her final two years. She 

was awarded the Geoffrey Parsons Trust Award for 

accompaniment of singers in 2005. She has worked 

on the music staff at Wexford Festival Opera, and on 

three Handel operas for Opera Theatre Company 

(Orlando, Xerxes, and Alcina), and for Opera Ireland 

on Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and Britten’s 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She also worked at 

the National Opera Studio in London and was on the 

deputy coach list for the Jette Parker Young Artist 

Programme at the Royal Opera House. She has played 

for masterclasses including those given by Malcolm 

Martineau, Ann Murray, Thomas Allen, Thomas 

Hampson and Anna Moffo. She worked on Mozart’s 

Zaide at the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme 

and on Britten’s Turn of the Screw for the Cheltenham 

Festival with Paul Kildea. She has appeared at the 

Wigmore Hall in concerts with Ann Murray (chamber 

versions of Mahler and Berg), Gweneth Ann Jeffers, 

Wendy Dawn Thompson and Sinéad Campbell 

Wallace. She is now based in Dublin where she 

works as a répétiteur and vocal coach at TU Dublin 

Conservatoire and also regularly for INO. 

31

BIOGRAPHIES 

ANNALISA MONTICELLI 

RÉPÉTITEUR 

LANGUAGE COACH 

Annalisa Monticelli is a highly 

sought-after musician who has 

performed and recorded in Europe, 

Asia, North and South America as a 

soloist, with vocal and instrumental 

ensembles, and with various 

orchestras. She studied piano, voice, conducting, 

chamber music, jazz and education in Italy and 

the USA with renowned musicians including Bruno 

Canino, Daniel Rivera, Eugenia Rozental, Cinzia Gizzi 

and Douglas Weeks. She gave her first solo recital 

at the age of 10 and gained her first piano degree at 

the age of 16 with maximum marks. She started her 

professional coaching career working for the Montalto 

Opera programme in Montalto Ligure in Italy under 

the guidance of tenor Ugo Benelli and accompanying 

masterclasses by Wagnerian soprano Rebecca Turner 

and others. After three years in the USA, she moved 

to Ireland in 2014 to work as a répétiteur for the Royal 

Irish Academy of Music, where she later became 

Italian and vocal coach. Since then she has performed 

in all Irish major venues, released CDs, worked as 

Italian coach, accompanied masterclasses for the 

Institut StimmKünst in Zurich and performed and 

taught in Italy, England, Poland, France, Lithuania, 

Malaysia and north America. To further her education, 

she is undertaking a PhD in TU Dublin. Her research 

focuses on Michele Esposito and his piano school 

based in Dublin in the late nineteenth century. She 

is currently programme director/répétiteur at DkIT 

Dundalk; conductor of Anam Chamber Choir and 

executive director/chief accompanist/Italian coach 

for the Bassi Brugnatelli International Symposium. 

ANNA DEVIN 

SOPRANO 

FIORDILIGI 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 AFTERNOON, 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Irish soprano Anna Devin is widely 

admired for her “impeccable 

Baroque style” (Bachtrack), and 

“vocal control...artistry and musicodramatic 

intelligence” (Opera 

News). In addition to Così fan tutte, 

her engagements in the current season have included 

a tour of Bach’s Mass in B minor with the Orchestra of 

the Age of Enlightenment and upcoming concerts in 

the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. She has also 

performed Elisabetta in Rossini’s Willian Tell for INO, 

Almirena in Handel’s Rinaldo with Glyndebourne Tour, 

Michal in Handel’s Saul at the Théâtre du Châtelet 

in Paris, Rosane in Vivaldi’s La verità in cimento at 

Zurich Opera House and the title role in Cavalli’s 

La calisto at Teatro Real, Madrid. In concert she has 

performed Handel with the Irish Baroque Orchestra, 

the Royal Northern Sinfonia and at the London Handel 

Festival. She has also appeared at the Albert Hall 

with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, given a New 

Year’s Day concert with the RTÉ National Symphony 

Orchestra, and performed Mendelssohn’s Symphony 

No. 2 (Lobgesang) with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. 

In addition to her work on stage, she is proud to be 

an Ambassador for the British Dyslexia Association. 

She is passionate about nurturing new talent and 

has given masterclasses at the Royal Irish Academy 

of Music as well as coaching at the Royal Academy 

Opera Course, London. When not on stage, she is a 

keen runner and enjoys keeping fit and relaxing with 

her husband, two daughters and a Norwegian Forest 

Cat in their Bedfordshire home. 

32

SARAH BRADY 

SOPRANO 

FIORDILIGI 24, 26, 27 EVENING MAY 

Irish soprano Sarah Brady is a rising 

star on the operatic and concert 

stages. A graduate of the Royal Irish 

Academy of Music, she joined the 

prestigious young artist program 

OperAvenir at Theater Basel in 

2017. In the 2019–20 season, she became a member 

of the ensemble at Theater Basel and was nominated 

as Upcoming Artist of the Year by Opernwelt for her 

achievements during this year. Since the 2020–21 

season, she has been a member of the ensemble 

of Staatsoper Hannover. Highlights of the 2022–23 

season in Hannover include the Swan Princess in 

Rismky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Gretel in 

Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, and a revival of the 

Governess in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, which 

was nominated as “Important Stream of the Year” by 

Opernwelt in 2021. Outside of Hannover, she makes 

her debut with the Nederlandse Reisopera singing 

Gretel, and her orchestral engagements include 

Jörg Widmann’s ARCHE at the Concertgebouw, 

Amsterdam, and Haydn’s Theresienmesse in 

Utrecht. This year also sees the release of her debut 

album Matters of the Heart, a CD of songs by Robert 

Schumann and Richard Strauss recorded at SRF 

Studios in Zürich for Prospero Classical. She makes 

her INO debut in Così fan tutte. 

SHARON CARTY 

MEZZO-SOPRANO 

DORABELLA 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 AFTERNOON, 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Irish mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty 

has firmly established a reputation 

as a respected interpreter of both 

early and contemporary works, 

and she also has a busy schedule 

in mainstream opera and concert 

repertoire. She is an alumna of the RIAM, Dublin, 

University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, and 

the Oper Frankfurt Young Artist programme. She is 

an Irish National Opera artistic partner, and was a 

creative associate on the Arts Council’s pilot Creative 

Schools scheme. Her opera repertoire includes many 

of the important lyric and coloratura mezzo-soprano 

roles, and on the concert platform she has sung most 

of the major sacred concert works, including all the 

major works of Bach, as well as Handel’s Messiah, 

Mozart’s Mass in C minor, and numerous chambermusic 

works. She is also a dedicated song recitalist, 

most recently appearing in song recitals with pianists 

Finghin Collins, Jonathan Ware and Graham Johnson. 

Recent highlights include her London and Amsterdam 

opera debuts with Donnacha Dennehy and Enda 

Walsh’s The Second Violinist, and her Wexford Festival 

Opera debut as Lucy Talbot in the European première 

of William Bolcom’s Dinner at Eight. 2019 saw her 

tour in the title role in Irish National Opera’s critically 

acclaimed production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, 

and Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Netherlands, 

as well as her debut at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, in 

Silvia Colasanti’s new opera, Proserpine. She received 

critical acclaim for her first disc of Schubert Songs 

with pianist Jonathan Ware, released in May 2020. 

33

BIOGRAPHIES 

GEMMA NÍ BHRIAIN 

MEZZO-SOPRANO 

DORABELLA 24, 26, 27 EVENING MAY 

Dublin mezzo-soprano Gemma Ní 

Bhriain graduated in June 2014 with 

a BA in Music Performance from 

the Royal Irish Academy of Music 

where she studied with Veronica 

Dunne. She spent two seasons 

as a member of the Atelier Lyrique Opera Studio at 

Opéra national de Paris, where she debuted in five 

roles, including two world premieres. From 2016 

she spent two seasons at the International Opera 

Studio at Zurich Opera House. There her many roles 

included Cléone in Charpentier’s Médée, Le Pâtre, 

La Chatte and L’écureuil in Ravel’s L’enfant et les 

Sortilèges, Zweite Dame in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, 

Valletto in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea 

and Ramiro in Mozart’s La finta giardiniera. Over the 

past number of years, she made her concert debuts 

at Théâtre de Champs-Elysées and for Radio France, 

and gave her solo recital debut at Amphithéâtre 

Bastille, Opéra national de Paris. In 2018 she made 

her company and role debut with Irish National Opera 

as Niklausse in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. 

In 2020 she performed in Linda Buckley’s Glaoch for 

INO’s 20 Shots of Opera and last year she sang Anna 

in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and Mother in the Coviddelayed 

premiere of Elaine Agnew’s Paper Boat, 

presented by Music for Galway in association with 

INO. She is also part of a new chamber ensemble, 

Trio Cantare, with pianist Cahal Masterson and cellist 

Yseult Cooper-Stockdale. Their debut recital, at the 

Drogheda Classical Music Festival in October 2021, 

was later broadcast on RTÉ lyric fm. 

BENJAMIN RUSSELL 

BARITONE 

GUGLIELMO 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 AFTERNOON, 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Benjamin Russell is currently 

a member of the ensemble of 

the Hessisches Staatstheater 

Wiesbaden, and studied at the 

International Opera Studio of Zurich 

Opera House after having received 

his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Royal 

Irish Academy of Music. There he studied singing with 

coach Brenda Hurley and teacher Sylvia O’Regan. 

At Wiesbaden he has sung Yeletsky in Tchaikovsky’s 

The Queen of Spades, Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Le 

nozze di Figaro, Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, 

Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Figaro in Rossini’s 

Il barbiere di Siviglia, the title role in Mozart’s Le 

nozze di Figaro and Sharpless in Puccini’s Madama 

Butterfly. In June 2011 he sang Junius in Britten’s 

The Rape of Lucretia at the Aldeburgh Festival, the 

recording of which was nominated for a Best Opera 

Recording Grammy Award. He performs regularly in 

concerts, at home and abroad, including Mahler’s 

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Bach’s Cantata 

No. 82 with the Wiesbaden Symphony Orchestra, 

Puccini’s Messa di Gloria with the Hungarian National 

Philharmonic Orchestra and Fauré’s Requiem with 

the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra 

at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Competition 

successes include Richard Tauber Prize at the 

Wigmore Hall Song Competition 2019, third Prize in 

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Singing Competition 

2018, and finalist in the Veronica Dunne International 

Singing Competition 2010. 

34

GIANLUCA MARGHERI 

BASS-BARITONE 

GUGLIELMO 24, 26, 27 EVENING, 29 MAY 

Born in Florence, Gianluca Margheri 

began to study music dramaturgy 

before studying singing at the 

Cherubini Conservatory of Music in 

Florence. In 2009 he won the Toti 

dal Monte International Competition 

in Treviso, and debuted as Villotto in Haydn’s La vera 

costanza under Jesús López-Cobos at Teatro Real 

Madrid, at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège and the 

theatres of Saint-Étienne, Rouen and Reggio Emilia. 

Recent highlights include his debut in the title role 

of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Hungarian State Opera), 

Rossini’s Stabat Mater (Opera Firenze), Alidoro in 

Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Teatro Massimo, Palermo), 

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (Hungarian State Opera), 

the title role in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Theater 

St Gallen), Asdrubale in Rossini’s La pietra del 

paragone and the Count in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro 

(Teatro Lirico di Cagliari), and Talbot in Donizetti’s 

Maria Stuarda in Riga. He sang Asdrubale under 

Daniele Rustioni for his Rossini Opera Festival 

Pesaro debut, and Garibaldo in Handel’s Rodelinda 

for his Gran Teatre del Liceu debut in Barcelona. 

He made his INO debut in the title role of the Olivier 

Award-winning production of Vivaldi’s Bajazet, a coproduction 

with the Royal Opera. He is an enthusiastic 

concert singer with a repertoire encompassing works 

by Charpentier, Handel, Mozart, Fauré and Brahms. 

Conductors he has collaborated with include James 

Conlon, Zubin Mehta, Marco Armiliato, Friedrich 

Haider, Riccardo Frizza, Andrea Battistoni, Roland 

Böer, Alan Curtis, Jonathan Webb and Gabriele Ferro. 

DEAN POWER 

TENOR 

FERRANDO 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 (AFTERNOON), 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Irish tenor Dean Power is a former 

member of the ensemble at the 

Bavarian State Opera in Munich, 

and started his residency after 

graduating from the company’s 

Opera Studio at the end of the 

2011–12 season. After nine years as an ensemble 

member, 2020–21 was his final season and he is 

now expanding his already growing career as an 

international solo guest artist. Recent and upcoming 

notable house debuts include Graf Elemer in 

Strauss’s Arabella (Zurich Opera House), Snout in 

Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opéra de 

Lille) and Puccini’s Il Trittico (Salzburg Festival). 

In October 2021 he created the role of Gary in 

Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh’s The First Child 

at Dublin Theatre Festival (Landmark Productions/ 

Irish National Opera). On the concert platform recent 

performances include Acis in Handel’s Acis and 

Galatea with Irish Baroque Orchestra, Bach’s St John 

Passion with the National Symphony Orchestra in 

Dublin, Ryba’s Stabat Mater with Prague Symphony 

Orchestra, his Portuguese concert debut in Bach’s 

Christmas Oratorio with the Orquestra Sinfonica 

Portuguesa. In his 2022–23 season Dean makes his 

company debut at the Teatro Real Madrid as Graf 

Elemer in Arabella, followed by his Salzburg Easter 

Festival debut as Heinrich der Schreiber in Wagner’s 

Tannhäuser and a return to the Bavarian State Opera 

as Third Jew in Strauss’s Salome. 

35

BIOGRAPHIES 

WILLIAM MORGAN 

TENOR 

FERRANDO 24, 27, 27 EVENING MAY 

British tenor William Morgan’s 

current and future engagements 

include the title role in Bernstein’s 

Candide, Marco in Gilbert & 

Sullivan’s The Gondoliers (Scottish 

Opera), Talus in the world premiere 

of Michael Zev Gordon’s Raising Icarus (Birmingham 

Contemporary Music Group), Victorin in Korngold’s 

Die tote Stadt (English National Opera), Le Chevalier 

de la Force in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites 

(Teatro dell’Opera di Roma), and the world premiere 

of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Scenes from the Wild, 

a song cycle commissioned by City of London 

Sinfonia with the tenor solo written for him. Recent 

engagements include Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don 

Giovanni and Ferrando in Così fan tutte (Longborough 

Festival), Prunier in Puccini’s La Rondine (West 

Green Opera), First Priest in Birtwistle’s The Mask of 

Orpheus, Reporter in Philip Glass’s Orphée, Writer in 

the premiere of Iain Bell’s Jack the Ripper (English 

National Opera), Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to 

Music (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at BBC 

Proms), Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s 

Progress (Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), Tamino 

in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Scottish Opera), and 

a Johann Strauss Gala tour by Raymond Gubbay. 

William has performed concerts at the Oxford 

Lieder Festival, Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room, the 

Royal Overseas League, the Royal Festival Hall, The 

Barbican, St John’s Smith Square, and Canterbury 

Cathedral, and in broadcasts for BBC Radio 3. He is 

a graduate of London’s Royal College of Music, was 

a National Opera Studio young artist sponsored by 

English National Opera, and continues to study with 

Tim Evans-Jones. 

MAJELLA CULLAGH 

SOPRANO 

DESPINA 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 AFTERNOON, 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

Majella Cullagh is one of Ireland’s 

foremost international opera 

singers. Her repertoire spans 

baroque to bel canto, verismo to 

contemporary music. Engagements 

include Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda 

(Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and Royal Swedish 

Opera), Rossini’s La gazza ladra (Arena di Verona), 

Handel’s Amadigi (Opera Theatre Company/Covent 

Garden Festival), Massenet’s Manon (Opera New 

Zealand), Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Opera North), 

Verdi’s La traviata (Glyndebourne On Tour), Puccini’s 

La bohème (Royal Albert Hall) and Zemlinsky’s Der 

Zwerg at the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples. Oratorio 

performances include Verdi’s Requiem in Milan and 

Amsterdam, Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall 

and Rossini’s Stabat Mater at the Rossini Festival in 

Bad Wildbad. Majella has an impressive discography 

of over forty recordings including Rossini’s Le siège de 

Corinthe (Naxos), Mercadante’s Zaira (Opera Rara) 

and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (Chandos). She joined 

the vocal faculty of the MTU Cork School of Music 

in 2020 and has adjudicated at competitions and 

conservatoires in the UK and Ireland. 

36

EMMA MORWOOD 

MEZZO-SOPRANO 

DESPINA 24, 26, 27 EVENING MAY 

Born in Belfast, Emma Morwood 

studied at the University of 

Edinburgh, the Royal Northern 

College of Music, where she was 

a major award winner, and she 

currently studies with Karen 

Cargill. She has sung with many of Europe’s finest 

orchestras and conductors. Concert highlights 

include Handel’s Messiah with the Irish Chamber 

Orchestra at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, and 

with Edinburgh Royal Choral Union (ERCU) at the 

Usher Hall, Edinburgh; Berg’s Sieben frühe lieder at 

the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow; Barber’s Knoxville: 

Summer of 1915; Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 

2 with the Edinburgh Quartet; and Verdi’s Requiem 

(ERCU). She sang the lead role of Iris Robinson in 

Conor Mitchell’s Abomination: a DUP Opera at the 

Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 2022. Other roles include 

Musetta in Northern Ireland Opera’s (NIO) critically 

acclaimed production of Puccini’s La bohème; Ulster 

Touring Opera’s inaugural concert series A Night at 

the Opera; Costanza in Vivaldi’s Griselda with Irish 

National Opera; Amore and Minerva in Monteverdi’s 

The Return of Ulysses with Opera Collective Ireland. 

She also appears in the award-winning NIO film Old 

Friends and Other Days. Future performances include 

Haydn’s Creation with the Ulster Orchestra and Alien 

in the world premiere of Anna Pidgorna’s A New World 

with Red Note Ensemble. As well as being a qualified 

paraglider pilot, Emma has two children, Lucas and 

Orla, and in her spare time enjoys climbing, wild 

swimming and yoga. She is grateful for the continued 

support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and 

National Lottery. 

JOHN MOLLOY 

BASS 

DON ALFONSO 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 AFTERNOON, 29, 31 MAY, 2 JUNE 

John Molloy is one of Ireland’s 

leading basses and hails from Birr. 

He studied at the DIT Conservatory 

of Music and Drama, the Royal 

Northern College of Music in 

Manchester and the National 

Opera Studio in London. He made his INO debut in 

2018 as Antonio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro 

and in March 2021 performed Colline in Puccini’s 

La bohème. Roles he has undertaken for Opera 

Theatre Company include Sparafucile in Verdi’s 

Rigoletto, Trinity Moses in Weill’s Mahagonny, the 

title role in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Zuniga 

in Bizet’s Carmen and he also appeared in Stephen 

Deazley’s children’s opera BUG OFF!!! Other roles 

include Alidoro in Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Scottish 

Opera), Guccio in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (Royal 

Opera House, London), Masetto in Mozart’s Don 

Giovanni (English National Opera), Arthur in Peter 

Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and the title role in 

Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (Nationale Reisopera, 

Netherlands), Le Commandeur in Thomas’s La cour 

de Célimène (Wexford Festival Opera), Angelotti in 

Puccini’s Tosca, Luka in Walton’s The Bear, Banco in 

Verdi’s Macbeth and Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L’elisir 

d’amore (OTC and Northern Ireland Opera), Raimondo 

in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Opera Holland 

Park), Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Sarastro in 

Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Bonze in Puccini’s Madama 

Butterfly (Lyric Opera Productions), Snug in Britten’s 

A Midsummer Nights Dream (Opera Ireland) and 

Henry Kissinger in John Adams’s Nixon in China (Wide 

Open Opera). International concert repertoire includes 

Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Verdi’s Requiem, 

Mendelssohn’s St Paul, Haydn’s Creation, Handel’s 

Messiah and Stravinsky’s Renard. 

37

BIOGRAPHIES 

MILAN SILJANOV 

BASS-BARITONE 

DON ALFONSO 24, 26, 27 EVENING MAY 

Milan Siljanov is recent graduate of 

the Bavarian State Opera’s Young 

Artist Programme and a current 

member of the company itself. He 

is a Samling Artist and he studied 

on the opera course at the Guildhall 

School of Music and Drama under the tutelage of 

Rudolf Piernay. He won the prestigious Wigmore Hall/ 

Kohn Foundation International Song Competition 

in London in 2015 and took second prize at the 

ARD Music Competition in Munich in 2018. Recent 

engagements include Leporello in Mozart’s Don 

Giovanni (Bavarian State Opera), Der Einarmige in 

Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (Verbier Festival), 

Haydn’s Nelson Mass with Staatskapelle Dresden, 

recitals at the Hugo Wolf Academy in Stutgtart, 

at the Oxford Lieder Festival and the Wigmore 

Hall with pianist Nino Chokhonelidze, a Japanese 

tour with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra 

performing Mozart’s Requiem; and Beethoven’s 

Choral Symphony with Bilbao Symphony Orchestra. 

Current roles at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich 

include Montano in Verdi’s Otello, Peter Besenbinder 

in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, Sprecher in 

Mozart’s Die Zäuberflöte, Haraschta in Janáček’s 

The Cunning Little Vixen, Donner in Wagner’s 

Das Rheingold, Kilian in Weber’s Der Freischütz, 

Schaunard in Puccini’s La bohème and Dulcamara 

in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. He made his INO 

debut in Bizet’s Carmen in 2022. 

38

INO ORCHESTRA & CHORUS 

IRISH NATIONAL OPERA CHORUS 

IRISH NATIONAL OPERA ORCHESTRA 

The Irish National Opera Orchestra, which performs in 

all of INO’s larger productions, is made up of leading 

Irish freelance musicians. Members of the orchestra 

have a broad range of experience playing operatic, 

symphonic, chamber and new music repertoire. The 

orchestra’s work includes Strauss’s Elektra in 2021 

and Der Rosenkavalier in 2023 (“delivers all the 

swelling romanticism and range of tone and colour 

you could ask for,” Irish Examiner). It is equally at 

home in music by Donizetti and Rossini (“wonderful 

energy and musical vision,” Bachtrack in 2022 on 

Rossini’s William Tell). The orchestra also performs 

chamber reductions for touring productions including, 

most recently, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (2022) 

and Massenet’s Werther (2023). The orchestra’s 

contemporary repertoire has included Thomas 

Adès’s Powder Her Face (2018), Maxwell Davies’s 

The Lighthouse (2021), and Brian Irvine and Netia 

Jones’s Least Like The Other, Searching For Rosemary 

Kennedy, in which it made its international debut 

at the Royal Opera House in London in 2023. The 

orchestra can be heard on the INO recording of 

Puccini’s La bohème on Signum Classics. 

The Irish National Opera Chorus is a flexible ensemble 

of professional singers that has ranged in number 

from four, in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, to 60, in 

Verdi’s Aida. The chorus is a valuable training ground 

for many emerging singers and has been heard in 

venues large and small throughout Ireland as well 

as internationally. The membership is mostly drawn 

from singers based in Ireland. There is currently a 

core of 16 singers who perform in all of the company’s 

large-scale productions. In 2022 the chorus 

appeared in Rossini’s William Tell, one of the most 

chorally demanding operas, and in 2023 many of 

the members also featured in solo roles in Strauss’s 

Der Rosenkavalier; members were also heard in solo 

roles in a touring production of Offenbach’s The Tales 

of Hoffmann. The chorus has collaborated with TU 

Dublin Conservatory of Music and Drama and the 

Royal Irish Academy of Music, with senior students 

offered positions in the chorus, usually in tandem 

with specially devised professional development 

programmes for emerging singers. 

39

MON 20 – SUN 26 NOV 2023 

BORD GÁIS 

ENERGY 

THEATRE 

TICKETS FROM €15 

BOOKING: bordgaisenergytheatre.ie 

Prices include a €1.50 facilities fee per ticket. Internet bookings 

are subject to a maximum s/c of €7.15 per ticket/Agents €3.40

FOUNDERS CIRCLE 

Anonymous 

Desmond Barry & John Redmill 

Valerie Beatty & Dennis Jennings 

Mark & Nicola Beddy 

Carina & Ali Ben Lmadani 

Mary Brennan 

Angie Brown 

Breffni & Jean Byrne 

Jennifer Caldwell 

Seán Caldwell & Richard Caldwell 

Caroline Classon, in memoriam 

David Warren, Gorey 

Audrey Conlon 

Gerardine Connolly 

Jackie Connolly 

Gabrielle Croke 

Sarah Daniel 

Maureen de Forge 

Doreen Delahunty & Michael Moriarty 

Joseph Denny 

Kate Donaghy 

Marcus Dowling 

Mareta & Conor Doyle 

Noel Doyle & Brigid McManus 

Michael Duggan 

Catherine & William Earley 

Jim & Moira Flavin 

Ian & Jean Flitcroft 

Anne Fogarty 

Maire & Maurice Foley 

Roy & Aisling Foster 

Howard Gatiss 

Genesis 

Hugh & Mary Geoghegan 

Diarmuid Hegarty 

M Hely Hutchinson 

Gemma Hussey 

Kathy Hutton & David McGrath 

Nuala Johnson 

Susan Kiely 

Timothy King & Mary Canning 

J & N Kingston 

Kate & Ross Kingston 

Silvia & Jay Krehbiel 

Karlin Lillington & Chris Horn 

Stella Litchfield 

Jane Loughman 

Rev Bernárd Lynch & Billy Desmond 

Lyndon MacCann S.C. 

Phyllis Mac Namara 

Tony & Joan Manning 

R. John McBratney 

Ruth McCarthy, in memoriam Niall 

& Barbara McCarthy 

Petria McDonnell 

Jim McKiernan 

Tyree & Jim McLeod 

Jean Moorhead 

Sara Moorhead 

Joe & Mary Murphy 

Ann Nolan & Paul Burns 

F.X. & Pat O’Brien 

James & Sylvia O’Connor 

John & Viola O’Connor 

Joseph O’Dea 

Dr J R O’Donnell 

Deirdre O’Donovan & Daniel Collins 

Diarmuid O’Dwyer 

Patricia O’Hara 

Annmaree O’Keefe & Chris Greene 

Carmel & Denis O’Sullivan 

Líosa O’Sullivan & Mandy Fogarty 

Hilary Pratt 

Sue Price 

Landmark Productions 

Riverdream Productions 

Nik Quaife & Emerson Bruns 

Margaret Quigley 

Patricia Reilly 

Dr Frances Ruane 

Catherine Santoro 

Dermot & Sue Scott 

Yvonne Shields 

Fergus Sheil Sr 

Gaby Smyth 

Matthew Patrick Smyth 

Bruce Stanley 

Sara Stewart 

The Wagner Society of Ireland 

Julian & Beryl Stracey 

Michael Wall & Simon Nugent 

Brian Walsh & Barry Doocey 

Judy Woodworth 

41

OPERA ALL OVER 

– AND FOR EVERYONE 

Opera is our passion. And we want to share that 

passion. Not just through live events in cities and towns, 

large and small, but also through educational initiatives 

in schools and colleges, and community activities that 

appeal to young and old alike. 

OPERA WHEREVER YOU ARE 

We take our productions to all corners of the land, from Dublin 

to Galway, Tralee to Letterkenny, Wexford to Sligo. Projects such 

as our site-specific production of Strauss’s Elektra in Kilkenny’s 

Castle Yard offer a unique way of engaging with our work. INO 

has developed its digital output and grown its online content. You 

can come to us wherever you happen to be. Our innovative online 

project 20 Shots of Opera was highly praised, as also were our film 

productions of Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 

Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse and Amanda Feery’s 

A Thing I Cannot Name. Outdoor screenings take our filmed 

productions to some of the most remote corners of Ireland and 

our revamped Street Art projected operas will allow us to increase 

our reach. Our partnership with Signum Records brings highresolution 

recordings of our work to new audiences worldwide. 

Image: Watching Peter Maxwell Davies’s 

The Lighthouse at Hook Head 

TRAILBLAZING DEVELOPMENTS 

IN THE COMMUNITY 

In June, our first youth opera, David Coonan and Dylan Coburn 

Gray’s Horse Ape Bird, gave young people the experience of 

performing in a professional operatic production. Our groundbreaking 

virtual reality community opera, Finola Merivale’s Out of 

the Ordinary/As an nGnách premiered at the Kilkenny Arts Festival 

and was also seen at Dublin Fringe Festival. It’s a voyage into the 

unknown and places people from diverse communities directly at 

the heart of the creative process. In October our World Opera Day 

42

“Irish National Opera is one 

of the great success stories... 

it is a dazzling achievement.” 

NICHOLAS PAYNE, DIRECTOR OF OPERA EUROPA 

pop-up chorus allowed 100 choristers and opera enthusiasts to workshop and perform with 

a professional orchestra and soloists. Our pre-performance In Focus talks delve into varied 

aspects of opera with opera makers, from the histories of specific works, the development of 

the characters and the issues facing performers and composers. 

NURTURING THE NEXT GENERATION OF OPERA TALENT 

The professional development and employment of Irish artists are key to the success of Irish 

National Opera itself. The Irish National Opera Studio is our artistic development programme. 

It provides specially-tailored training, professional mentoring and high-level professional 

engagements for singers, répétiteurs, conductors, directors and composers whose success 

is crucial to the future development of opera in Ireland. We also work with third-level music 

students through workshops designed to give them a fuller understanding of the inner workings 

of the world of opera, that heady mixture of musical, artistic, theatrical and management skills 

that make possible the magic that is opera. Colleges and universities we have worked with 

include University College Dublin, National College of Art and Design, Maynooth University, 

University of Galway, TU Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. 

WE PURSUE AND EMBRACE INNOVATION 

We are at the forefront of operatic innovation. Our award-winning virtual reality community opera 

Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách uses new technologies to widen participation in the arts at 

community level. It explores the cutting-edge relationship between opera and digital technology. 

In 2023 we will bring this ground-breaking work on a national tour to all 32 counties. We recently 

won a major grant from FEDORA to develop a cutting-edge Street Art Performance app that 

has the potential to redraw the reach of performing arts and improve accessibility in the sector. 

Watch out for its availability on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. 

WE PRODUCE GREAT WORK 

Our commissioned works explore issues from climate change to mental health. We present opera 

in thought-provoking and relevant ways. We nurture and develop emerging talent to ensure that 

the Irish opera landscape provides equitable opportunities and pay. We champion gender equality 

in the creative teams we work with. Opera is for everyone, and we are committed to inclusivity and 

diversity. Everyone, regardless of socio-economic, ethnic or national background, or physical and 

mental challenges, should have access and the opportunity to participate in opera. 

43

IRISH NATIONAL 

OPERA STUDIO 

STUDIO MEMBERS 2022–23 

JADE PHOENIX SOPRANO 

KATHLEEN NIC DHIARMADA SOPRANO 

MADELINE JUDGE MEZZO-SOPRANO 

EOIN FORAN BARITONE 

KATIE O’HALLORAN DIRECTOR 

CHRIS KELLY DIRECTOR 

MEDB BRERETON HURLEY CONDUCTOR 

ÉNA BRENNAN COMPOSER 

The Irish National Opera Studio is key to delivering a core 

aspect of INO’s mission, the development of the very best 

operatic talent we can find in Ireland. The studio is the 

company’s artistic development programme. The membership 

is selected annually, and the studio provides specially tailored 

training, professional mentoring and high-level professional 

engagements for a group of individuals whose success will be 

key to the future development of opera in Ireland. 

Members of Irish National Opera Studio are involved in all 

of Irish National Opera’s productions, large and small. They 

sing onstage in roles or in the chorus, understudy lead roles 

– enabling them to watch and emulate great artists at work – 

and, for non-singing members, they join in the world of opera 

rehearsals as assistants. 

Studio members also receive individual coaching, attend 

masterclasses and receive mentorship from leading Irish and 

international singers and musicians. Brenda Hurley, Head of 

Opera at the Royal Academy of Music, London, is the vocal 

consultant who guides our singers throughout the year. 

Other areas of specific attention are performance and 

language skills, and members are assisted in their individual 

personal musical development and given professional career 

guidance. They benefit from Irish National Opera’s national 

and international contacts and Irish National Opera Studio 

also develops and promotes specially tailored events to help 

the members hone specific skills and showcase their work. 

For information contact Studio & Outreach Producer 

James Bingham at james@irishnationalopera.ie 

44

Conductor Elaine Kelly was a 

member of the INO Opera Studio 

from 2019 to 2021. She has 

been INO’s resident conductor 

since 2021, and conducts three 

performances of Così fan tutte. She 

made her New York debut in Emma 

O’Halloran’s double bill TRADE/ 

Mary Motorhead, an INO/Beth 

Morrison Projects co-production, 

at New York’s PROTOTYPE festival 

in Janaury. And she conducted the 

West Coast premiere of the two 

works for LA Opera last month. 

“Elaine Kelly is a discovery, tracing 

the musical lines with exactitude” 

wrote the Los Angeles Times. 

45

INO TEAM 

Pauline Ashwood 

Head of Planning 

James Bingham 

Studio & Outreach Producer 

Janaina Caldeira 

Bookkeeper (part time) 

Sorcha Carroll 

Communications Manager 

Aoife Daly 

Development Manager 

Diego Fasciati 

Executive Director 

Lea Försterling 

Digital Communications 

Executive 

Sarah Halpin 

Digital Producer 

Cate Kelliher 

Business & Finance Manager 

Audrey Keogan 

Development Executive 

Anne Kyle 

Stage Manager 

Patricia Malpas 

Studio & Outreach Executive 

James Middleton 

Orchestra & Chorus Manager 

Cathy Stokes 

Artistic Administration 

Manager 

Gavin O’Sullivan 

Head of Production 

Fergus Sheil 

Artistic Director 

Sarah Thursfield 

Marketing Executive 

Paula Tierney 

Company Stage Manager 

Robert Walters-Dorchak 

Marketing Intern 

Board of Directors 

Jennifer Caldwell (Chair) 

Tara Erraught 

Gerard Howlin 

Dennis Jennings 

Gary Joyce 

Sara Moorhead 

Suzanne Nance 

Ann Nolan 

Bruce Stanley 

Jonathan Friend 

Artistic Advisor 

Elaine Kelly 

Resident Conductor 

Irish National Opera 

69 Dame Street 

Dublin 2 | Ireland 

T: 01–679 4962 

E: info@irishnationalopera.ie 

irishnationalopera.ie 

@irishnationalopera 

@irishnatopera 

@irishnationalopera 

Company Reg No.: 601853 

Registered Charity: 22403 

(RCN) 20204547 

46

JADE PHOENIX SOPRANO 

KATHLEEN NIC DHIARMADA SOPRANO 

MADELINE JUDGE MEZZO-SOPRANO 

EOIN FORAN BARITONE 

INO STUDIO 

GALA CONCERT 

SUN 18 JUNE 2023 

PAVILION THEATRE 

DÚN LAOGHAIRE 

TIME: 4PM TICKETS: €20/€15 

BOOKING: 01–231 2929 paviliontheatre.ie 

irishnationalopera.ie

Cosí fan tutte programme book 2023

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