Least Like The Other - Searching for Rosemary Kennedy
Premieres at Galway International Arts Festival 14 July 2019.
“….deeply disturbing art, and deeply moving and humbling”
★★★★★ Irish Times ★★★★★ Times
This is deeply disturbing art, and deeply moving and humbling. The way it hits you goes well beyond the gut-wrenching details of its now long-ago true story. Instead, it does that thing that good art so fluently does: make us reflect critically on ourselves. And it’s good art in the form of opera, but with no opera pedigree required: anyone could be left breathless by this.
With tremendous power, Least Like the Other produces this response even though it avoids simply converting an already compelling story into a traditional operatic narrative. This was a conscious decision by its co-creators – composer Brian Irvine and director/designer/video designer Netia Jones – partly because they knew indulging the sensational would detract from its enormous themes, and partly because material relating to what actually happened was very hard to come by.
Which was no accident. The Kennedy family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, attempted to obscure the existence of his daughter Rosemary, believing her intellectual disability would damage the high-profile perception of his family in general and the ambitions of his sons John F, Bobby and Ted in particular. By the time she was 23, her convulsions and violent episodes proved beyond the capacity of medical expertise at the time. So in 1941 Joseph had Rosemary lobotomised. The now discredited procedure was a disaster, leaving her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old for the rest of her long life (she died in 2005).
Instead of a libretto, Irvine and Jones have assembled fragments of letters, biographies, speeches, intelligence tests and so on. These – either animated with cold brutality by actors Stephanie Dufresne and Ronan Leahy via multiple personas, or sung with pathetic intensity by mezzo-soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell, chiefly as Rosemary – chillingly lift the lid on mid-20th-century America’s acceptance of the unquestioning compliance of women in society and on attitudes to intellectual disability, to children, to publicity, and to subservience before big institutions in medicine, the media and religion.
Irvine’s music rises and falls, harshly expressing the story’s harsh content, quietly and sometimes lyrically reflecting on its tragedy. This is ideally paired with the clinical, era-specific coldness of Jones’s set and the incisiveness, power and sometimes sheer beauty of her video projections.
Conducted by its artistic director Fergus Sheil, this was the two-year-old Irish National Opera’s first world premiere, in association with Galway International Arts Festival, and further evidence that with INO, opera in Ireland can be for all, and can be vibrant, relevant and compelling.
Washington Post
“Some of the most exhilarating and imaginative music you'll ever hope to hear……musical play in the highest sense: exuberant, spontaneous and irresistibly alive.”
- Stephen Brookes
All About Jazz
“Energetic and energizing, the musically adventurous, tempestuous fiesta that was 13 Vices proved that entertainment and intellectual stimulation are not incompatible. Sometimes they go hand in hand in wholly unexpected guises”
“Visceral and abstract, ear-splitting, serene and melodic in turn… artists like Irvine and (Jennifer) Walshe almost never get invited to perform the national anthem before big sports events but life would be far more entertaining if they were allowed a little carte blanche.”
- Ian Patterson
Downbeat Magazine
“Mr. Irvine is a great composer who draws from various sources and streams: Ives or Copland-like Americana to more dissonant European extremes one of the most successful combinations of modern classical and modern jazz without any of those stale third stream cliches that only hard-nosed critics complain… a gem.”
- Bruce Lee Gallanter
The Guardian
"Exhilarating stuff….Brian Irvine’s body of work is an example of the musical treasures half hidden in the cracks between the categories….smart music in a culture that often over rewards the dumb and/or the well connected….the Bath festival audience banged the tables to demand an encore”
BBC Music Magazine
“wondrous… frightening virtuoso deployment of his vast orchestra conjures giddy, Ivesian swirls …a richly textured palette….Praise Aloud the Trees is a triumph, .a work of considerable sonic daring and imagination.”
Irish Times
“Ingenious… magical… truly inspirational “ ****
22 Oct 2014 - A Most Peculiar Wintry Thing
Irish Times 26/07/2012
“NEST is innovative, moving, surprising, stirring - epic in both scale and inspiration….This is barnstorming, exuberant music, performed with impressive flair and brio. Irvine's oratorio is a rich, multi-sensory experience"
Opera Magazine
“The evening’s highlight was undoubtedly Brian Irvine’s May Contain Flash Photograph. Funny fast moving and temmingly inventive.”
May Contain Flash Photography - Sept 2012.
Culture NI
“Brian Irvine’s eccentrically individual music creates a sensitive and sympathetic space in which these operatic characters can find a voice. I don’t think this is 'an opera with a mission' but like all good art, Postcards from Dumbworld can generously transform the unlikeable into the acceptable - and, through its many moments of humour and pathos, maybe provide us with a sensitive little glimpse of whatever heaven is to us."
Postcards from Dumbworld 2010
BELFAST TELEGRAPH
“Northern Ireland’s most colourful and charismatic composer”
Postcards from Dumbworld, Grand Opera House, Belfast. Friday 22 October 2012
BBC Music Magazine
“Brian Irvine’s mind is a microcosm of huge energy and chaos, intricately engineered to blow your head off!”
“An imaginative, kaleidoscope of contrasting moments that ranged from fragile lyricism to down right anarchy”
THE LIST 23 October 2010 - Postcards from Dumbworld, Grand Opera House.