Béatrice et Bénédict, Irish National Opera, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - sung and spoken triumph

As Fiona Shaw’s shiningly free and easy narration told us, Shakespeare’s sparring Beatrice and Benedick are merely counterpoint to a supposedly comic plot that becomes a potential tragedy, and tests the japers’ seriousness. Berlioz wanted none of that in his last opera, all southern sunlight and moonshine, caprice and reverie. Last night we got the best of all possible worlds in a concert performance that showed an ideal way forward for this beauty of a numbers opera.

Irish National Opera seems to have an infallible instinct for casting. Admittedly it has a seemingly inexhaustible well of international Irish singers to draw upon. Mezzo Paula Murrihy’s world-class Octavian in the triumphant Der Rosenkavalier complemented two magnificent sopranos (Celine Byrne and Claudia Boyle); here she had no less than three splendid Irish women to join her, Shaw included. Anna Devin, an iridescent Cleopatra earlier this year in Blackwater Valley Festival’s Giulio Cesare, had the first big aria as the passive and (in Berlioz) untested Héro, stylistically perfect. At the end of the first act came one of the most ravishing duets in opera: it was hard to take one’s eyes off the charismatic, lustrous-voiced mezzo Niamh O’Sullivan, perfectly blending with Devin and already doing great things though still a BBC Young Generation Artist. Nuance-perfect, the two singers’ hymn to the summer night was capped by exquisite playing from the INO Orchestra’s clarinets and tremolo strings: as magical as it gets. American Ryan McAdams, principal conductor of Ireland’s Crash Ensemble, was a revelation to me. From the parrying inflections and songful poetry of the Overture onwards, he was a live wire, responsive to all the singers’ needs, expert young chorus included. Bénédict needs special alertness in this respect; the trio in which he’s mocked by Claudio (Paul Grant) and Don Pedro (Padraic Rowan), mere stooges in Berlioz stripped of their plotline, needs to be razor-sharp, and it was. Tenor David Portillo (pictured above between Grant and Rowan while McAdams conducts and Fiona Shaw looks on) is an impeccable light tenor with plenty of charm, moving off-score to join the other men just as O'Sullivan moved closer to Devin. His buoyant aria was as much a joy as anything in this box of delights.

Though the plot never thickens, Act Two gave us so much more. It brought first raucous comedy with the hack composer-conductor Somarone, usually not very funny but here full of panache, and backed to the hilt by chorus and orchestra, as played by John Molloy, who’d earlier given us some verbal swordplay as Shakespeare's Benedick with Shaw (pictured below with Murrihy, McAdams and Portillo). Her essential role rose to magnificent heights as she told us about the conflict Berlioz had left out, and took on both now-serious lovers in part of the crucial “Kill Claudio!” scene. The music rises to further heights on its own terms. Murrihy set up the pin-drop stillness of an audience hanging on every note in Béatrice’s lovely aria – unShakespearean, but so what? – and then gilded the previous perfection of Devin and O’Sullivan in the gorgeous trio, another of opera’s great exquisites.

As if that weren’t enough, the little nuptial chorus with guitar (Berlioz’s instrument, poetically handled here by Ewan Cowley), the last thing the composer wrote, held the silence. And then the happy end: wedding epithalamion, and the return of the overture’s winks and bounces to send everyone away nearly delirious with delight. This is the way to do it, and it seems a shame it was for one night only; the 2025 BBC Proms would be a perfect second home for a perfect line-up.

• Niamh O'Sullivan at the Wigmore Hall on Monday 7 October
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk