New electronic opera, Heresy, premieres in Dublin

Heresy - Roger Doyle (photo of Iestyn Morris in
a previous workshop performance)

Heresy, a new opera by Irish composer Roger Doyle and librettist Jocelyn Clarke, premieres on Friday 28 October 2016 at the Project Arts Centre: 36 East Essex Street Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland. Doyle can be considered the god-father of Irish electronic music and his score for Heresy combines electronics with live voices, with a cast including Morgan Crowley (tenor / counter tenor), Caitriona O’Leary (mezzo soprano), Daire Halpin (soprano), Robert Crowe (male soprano), Aimee Banks. The work is directed by Eric Fraad and presented by Meta Productions as part of Project 50, a season celebrating 50 years of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin.

Heresy is based on the life of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher. Born in 1548, at Nola, near Naples and burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 in Rome, Bruna was a philosopher, priest, professor, playwright and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The opera combines scenes from Bruno's life with imagined scenes including episodes in his cell the night before he is executed where he is visited by a diversity of characters from his life, his works and from the future including James Joyce. Heresy is Doyle's first opera, his disc Time Machine was issued in 2015 (see my review).

Further information from the Project Arts Centre website. You can see scenes from the opera on YouTube.