Kylemore the setting for spooky lighthouse opera

An outdoor screening of Peter Maxwell Davies spooky chamber opera, The Lighthouse, in a new film version by Edwina Casey will take place at Kylemore Abbey next Wednesday, July 14, after darkness falls.  The 70-minute film version is being presented by Irish National Opera in association with County Galway Arts Office.

The opera is based on a real event in December 1900 when three lighthouse keepers mysteriously disappeared from the Flannan lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides, in Scotland.  A visiting supply ship found the building to be in order, but the keepers had vanished without trace.

The words and music were written by English composer, Peter Maxwell Davies and it was first performed at Edinburgh in 1980. The Lighthouse was later described by the New York Times as “a chamber opera [that] builds to a shattering conclusion worthy of opera at its grandest”.

In this film version, the cast of three singers, bass John Molloy, baritone Ben McAteer and tenor Brenton Ryan, perform multiple roles as the piece explores the psychological state of the fractious men, relives an official investigation and projects a supernatural explanation.  It’s sung in English with English subtitles.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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