Pergolesi

Stabat Mater

A site specific multi media production with Irish Baroque Orchestra in the grotto in the slate quarry on Valentia Island.

“When I saw the grotto my immediate desire was to hear a beautiful voice singing there. The cave is an extraordinary place of overlapping elements; a giant excavation into the side of the mountain, an arena and theatrical amphitheatre, an industrial slate quarry and a shrine to the Virgin Mary.

"Stabat Mater is about striving for passion: remembering and forgetting pain and pleasure. Locating such beautiful music in the damp, dripping, cave where workers cut and slice rock all day is a beautiful collision of territories. We hear music that was written nearly 300 years ago by a man who died at the age of 26, in a place that has a history of providing slate for the roof of the Paris Opera House and where crowds attended pilgrimage masses in the last century.” Dorothy Cross.

3 performances Valentia Island

Thursday 19 August 2004 Valentia Island Slate Quarry
Friday 20 August 2004 Valentia Island Slate Quarry
Saturday 21 August 2004 Valentia Island Slate Quarry

"a brilliant collaboration of visual artist, baroque orchestra and wonderful singers; and the fact that it was in a slate quarry – it was magical. And the music is beautiful. That really stood out as a different and important event……’ Olive Braiden"
Review of 2004 Irish Times
"But while she’s been to the opera at Verona and the Met, nothing beats Opera Theatre Company’s performance she attended last August in the quarry on Valentia Island, Co. Kerry…… Kate Holmquist"
Irish Independent
"And there was an aura of intangibility and fragility that attached itself to the experience of music in such strangely spectacular surroundings, induced perhaps by the contrasting scale of visual image and sound.’"
Irish Times
"was strangely transfixing, an event whose atmosphere was even added to by persistent drizzle.’"
Irish Times
"‘Opera Theatre Company (OTC), the small –scale modern touring ensemble, is one of Ireland’s brightest hidden gems. Variously entertaining, charming, challenging or experimental, an OTC show never fails to excite and there is always something appealingly anti-Establishment about its approach to things…………….An andtidote to the serious and predictable offerings from larger companies…………their most adventurous production to date, Stabat Mater "
Belfast Newsletter

Production Information

Soprano Lynda Lee
Counter-tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny

Creative Team

Music Director Jonathan Peter Kenny
Direction & Design Dorothy Cross
Conductor & Harpsichord Mark Duley
Director of Photography Belinda Parsons
Trumpet Eamonn Nolan

Irish Baroque Orchestra

Violin Anita Vedres
Violin Aoife Durnin
Violin Diane Daly
Violin Jorge Jiminez
Violin Clodagh Venres
Viola Samantha Hutchins
Cello Sarah McMahon



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