IT'S A first. An opera written for Carlow, set in Carlow, and performed by people from Carlow. And what's more, Brian Irvine's Shelter Me From The Rainwas commissioned by Carlow local authorities, a local authority first, too.
More than 100 amateur singers gathered on the stage of the town’s GB Shaw Theatre last night to mull musically over issues of love and weather, with just a smattering of professional stiffening from around a dozen members of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in the pit.
Shelter Me From The Rainis anything but a grand opera in the 19th-century sense. Conductor and project curator, Fergus Sheil, wanted the opera to be for and in a sense by the people of a specific community. The doors were open to anyone who wanted to be involved.
Composer Brian Irvine and librettist John McIlduff took their cue from the voices of Carlow. They listened to people in the area – “all the barbers in Carlow,” says McIlduff – so they could respond to people’s real-life concerns.
They did video auditions in which they asked people to sing their favourite song “as if their lives depended on it”. It’s very Irish, in the end, about love and rain, and rain and rain.
Irvine, who gives the impression of being the world’s happiest composer with an almost perpetual grin, doesn’t seem to have been the slightest bit put out at having to write for untrained singers. He just loved the unorthodox sensuality that the mix of voices, young and old, trained and untrained, produced.
Aoibhinn Foley, a real life 53- year-old guidance counsellor and learning support teacher, sings Mary, who’s married for 28 years, and finishes her husband’s sentences. For her, the opera has been a voyage of discovery and rediscovery. She studied singing as a youngster, but had long given it up. “This production has given me back my voice,” she said, and she’s been bowled over by the emotional power it generates, both for the cast and the audience.
Pat Olwill (52), a gardener with no musical experience, says: “I loved the idea that we were going to create an opera for Carlow out of the Percentage for Art budget [it’s actually one of the largest projects of its kind], the idea that maybe the M9 motorway had paid for an opera rather than a piece of sculpture by the side of the road.”
Peg Phelan from Leighlinbridge gives her age as 70-plus, and lost her husband, “the best man in Ireland”, three years ago. “I’m kind of coming together again, now, and this has done wonders for me. I think it’s amazing that, at my time of life, one can get involved in these things.
And 12-year-old Alison Tynan, who wants to be a teacher when she grows up, is still amazed that she’s just been in an opera where she had to take out her phone and start texting. Another first.
Shelter Me From The Rainruns until Saturday.
