Performer: Daire Halpin

Enda Walsh und Donnacha Dennehy ziehen die Zuschauer des Opera Forward Festivals mit ihrer Oper in ihren Bann.

Top accolades go to soprano Mary Plazas, whose Duchess was at once despicable for her sense of entitlement and her racist and anti-Semitic views, and heartbreakingly vulnerable with her realisation at the end that "the only people who were ever good to me were paid for it".

Roddy Doyle's new translation is ingenious more often than incongruous; John Molloy's Leporello steals the show in the Opera Theatre's Don Giovanni.