Reviewed today is Die drei Pintos at the Wexford Festival Opera
Opinions have long differed sharply over the merits of Die drei Pintos, the opera Gustav Mahler fashioned out of sketches left by Carl Maria von Weber and borrowings from other works of Weber's he used to fill in the missing bits.
The plot concerns the marital fate of Clarissa (Barbara Zechmeister), who's to be married off by her father, Don Pantaleone (Robert Holzer), to the uncouth Don Pinto (Alessandro Svab), a man neither father nor daughter have ever met. Pinto's encounter with the young Don Gaston (Gunnar Gudbjörnsson) leads to the first impersonation, after Gaston steals Pinto's letter of introduction and plans to wed Clarissa in his place. Gaston's withdrawal from the scene in favour of Clarissa's true love, Don Gomez (Peter Furlong), leads to the second impersonation, creating the three Pintos of the title. Even though the true Pinto turns up in the end, it's the right man, Gomez, who gets Clarissa's hand.
For Hans von Bülow the work was "unadulterated, antiquated trash". For a reviewer in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1888, the year of the première, it was "an enrichment of German comic opera as yearned for perhaps never more dearly than in our present age".
The nature of the new Wexford Festival production suggests that its director and designer, Michal Znaniecki and Kevin Knight, incline to the Bülowian view. They play the work on a steeply-raked set, uncomfortably cramped in Act I, and full of gimmicky detail when it opens out in Act II.
The production depends on fussy funny business that's not very funny, and the singers, chorus included, enter into the counter-productive spirit with a great deal of over-hefty singing that often quite obliterates the charm of Weber's original ideas and the skill with which Mahler integrated them into a stylistic coherent whole.
The cast's German was often impenetrable, the orchestral playing of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus under Paolo Arrivabeni left a lot to be desired, and the over-riding impression at the end of the evening was of a dull opera, dully but energetically done.
The most memorable moments of the evening were provided by the falsetto posturings of Gaston's sidekick, Ambrosio (Ales Jenis) and a few passages of delicate ensemble work.
- The Wexford Festival runs until November 2nd. Details: www.wexfordopera.com tel: 053 22144
