View from the Green Room: Lights, Camera and a Mary McCabe Classic!
The RTE Concert Orchestra performed Lights, Camera, Classics at SETU Arena.
Downpatrick Soprano Mary McCabe lights up tonight’s concert of composers chosen by film directors with a breathtaking performance that sees three rising standing ovations.
Mary moves effortlessly through a range of arias that demand colour, drama, character and, of course, musicality.
She moves from supplicant lover through devoted lover and on to a daughter’s pleas before finally arriving at a young woman’s declaration for a life of pleasure and freedom, rather than the restrictions that love brings.
The power of Mary’s performance dominates this special concert.
Dvorak’s ‘Song to the Moon’ is the most famous aria in Rusalka (the inspiration for the Little Mermaid) when she asks the Moon to tell the Prince of her love. Mary brings remarkable stillness to the Arena with the pathos and beauty of the piece before moving on to the power and presence of Butterfly.
In ‘One Fine Day’ she speaks movingly of the return of her lover, U.S. Navy Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton, an American naval officer who marries the beautiful young Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly) before eventually abandoning her.
The Downpatrick soprano captures all of Puccini’s manipulation of an audience’s sympathy, who already realise that he has abandoned the beautiful Butterfly, leaving her heartbroken and waiting in vain for his return.
The power of Mary’s spellbinding performance as Butterfly brings the audience to their feet with a deafening ovation.
The ever-popular O Mio Babbino Cara (O my beloved father) from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and the fiery, feisty Verdi’s Sempre Libra brings more deserved ovations for the guest star of tonight’s performance.
Verdi’s ‘La forza del destino’ (Force of Destiny) overture is as dramatic as it comes, with an opening blast from the brass.
It’s a theme that’s carried throughout the overture. Whenever the strings get busy, busy with life, the brass lets us know that Destiny is around the corner and that man has little power to influence life.
A series of crescendos with insistent brass intrusion is, sadly, a musical metaphor for today’s awful world of war and conflict.
Handel’s Queen of Sheeba arrives with her usual pomp and splendour, while Ponchielli’s ‘Dance of the Hours’ ballet from his opera ‘La Gioconda’ is a perpetuum mobile that’s full of madcap things and never stops. Just as it does in Disney’s ‘Fantasia’.
Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ is suitably grave and solemn and is always hanging around British Royal occasions. It also pops up in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ where I remember my Uncle Billy fought, was evacuated and finally made it all the way to Berlin. Massanet’s ‘Meditation from Thais’ seems the perfect follow-up to the Elgar.
Sadly, we had no brides to take to the Arena catwalk for the Mendelssohn Wedding March but we did have Lyric FM winners who coincidentally were celebrating their wedding anniversary and who received a bouquet from Symphony Club’s Artistic Director Liam Daly. Fair play to Liam – he never misses a trick!
Two glorious waltzes from Strauss and Tchaikovsky and a grandstanding Sibelius Finalandia that’s packed with the spirit of the freedom of small nations sees us out the gap after a first-class concert from the Symphony Club of Waterford.
