CASTLEWARD OPERA Castleward House, Strangford, Co Down Fri-Sat Jun 20 £42.50-£57.50 048-92639545

LOUGHCREW GARDEN OPERA

Loughcrew Historic Gardens, Oldcastle, Co Meath Sat, Sun 8pm €85, €105 049-8541356

Summer opera has been a growth area in Ireland for a number of years. Castleward Opera, which has been presenting productions with chorus and scaled-down orchestra in the stables of Castleward House for a quarter of a century, has been joined by other companies trading on an aura of picnics on the lawn and opera that has echoes of the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex.

Standard operatic fare in a tent with a handful of instrumentalists and no chorus may be a far cry from the quality that’s always been offered at Glyndebourne, but that doesn’t seem to have inhibited growth. Now, in this most recessionary of years, summer opera is taking some interesting steps forward. Castleward’s new Tom Hawkes production of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, which opens on Friday (with the last of 14 performances on Saturday, June 20th), will also be heard later this year, in the Wexford Opera House in August, on dates yet to be announced. It will be interesting to see how the move from the most rudimentary of performing spaces to the best-equipped in Ireland will work out.

And other ventures are relinquishing their dependence on touring productions imported from Britain, and turning instead to home-produced fare. This weekend’s performances (Saturday and Sunday) of Puccini’s La Bohème at Loughcrew Gardens in Co Meath will be directed by former Celtic Tenor Niall Morris and conducted by David Brophy. And later in the year Blackstairs Opera, with two nights each at Kilkenny Castle (Friday, July 3rd, and Saturday 4th) and Russborough House (Friday, September 4th, and Saturday 5th), will offer productions involving singers from Opera Theatre Company’s Young Associate Artists’ Programme. The double bill will feature Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne and Handel’s Acis and Galatea.