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Wexford Festival Opera at Johnstown Castle
Stravinsky - Pulcinella; Busoni - Arlecchino.
The Wexford Festival adventure at Johnstown Castle continued on Friday with a most unusual commedia dell'arte double-bill.
Stravinsky's Pulcinella, a ballet with singing, was paired with Busoni's Arlecchino, a work the composer variously described as a "marionette tragedy" and a "theatrical caprice", and in which the title role is actually a speaking part. It was a hit-and-miss evening with the ballet working out rather better than the opera.
Exceptionally for Wexford, the double-bill is not new but a co-production with the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and the Teatro Rossini in Lugo, and performances have already been presented in Italy. The Italians won the day by a long margin. A pre-recorded spoken introduction for Pulcinella was left in Italian (and heard twice in Wexford, due to a problem with a curtain fall which forced a restart), and the surtitled Arlecchino was sung to an English- speaking audience in an Italian translation rather than the German original.
The Busoni was given a vivacious treatment which ended up like a poor sparkling wine, all fizz and no flavour. The paciness of the performance had a kind of de-anchoring effect, which individual achievements - even that of the indefatigable Arlecchino himself, Marco Alemanno - seemed unable to counteract. There was misdirected energy in the music-making, too, with David Agler's conducting finding skittishness in the score, but no substance.
Agler and his colleagues, director Lucio Dalla, designer Italo Grassi, and choreographer Luciano Cannito, turned out to be on much safer territory with the transfer of Pulcinella to the work environment of New York's Wall Street.
Grassi's heavily-ducted, gray set, like something out of the dystopian future of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, was wonderfully atmospheric, and to my non-expert eye, the dancing had a pointed finesse and energy. Among the singers, only mezzo soprano Sabine Willeit found a delivery of consistency and style. But the audience simply roared its approval for the Pulcinella of dancer Alessandro Riga. Michael Dervan
Wexford Festival Opera at Johnstown Castle
Dvorak - Rusalka
The third opening night of this year's Wexford Festival at Johnstown Castle made a couple of things perfectly clear. Dvorak's Rusalka is opera pure and simple, and the Wexford audience much prefers the experience it offers to the previous two nights' dalliance with in-betweens and experiments.
The change in the weather showed that the tent, or "temporary theatre" that the festival is so proud of, is not quite a viable theatre when there are electric motors or fans providing a background murmur and the rain is descending on the roof.
It was probably a good thing that the inclement conditions were encountered at the opening night of the strongest work of the current season. Dvorak's penultimate opera, a re-working of de la Motte Fouquée's water spirit tale Undine, is his most successful work for the stage. In fact, it's the kind of piece that Wexford normally shies away from, as it doesn't fall comfortably into the rare opera category which the festival has so successfully made its own.
The opening night offered a vintage Wexford experience. The director Lee Blakeley and designer Joe Vanek created a fairy-tale world which struck magically sharp contrasts between the watery realm of the spirits and the human world on terra firma above. And not only the grotesquerie but also the shocking, gory explicitness of so many fairy tales - in this case the Hunter (Michael Redding) and Turnspit (Markéta Mátlová) chopping and disembowelling the day's catch - were not shirked.
The firm-voiced Rusalka of Czech soprano Helena Kaupová was, strangely, the one singer to find herself unduly challenged by the weight of the orchestra under Dmitri Jurowski. And there was something in the firmness of her delivery which made her character, around whom the whole work revolves, not quite sufficiently sympathetic.
By contrast, the hard and uppity Foreign Princess of Czech soprano Iveta Jiríková was suitably chilling, and the enraptured, perplexed Prince of US tenor Bryan Hymel was ardent and engaging. English bass Andrew Greenan was a well-grounded Vodník, Czech mezzo soprano Katerina Jalovcová a manipulatively penetrating Jezibaba, and Daphné Touchais, Lauren Curnow and Lina Markeby a vivaciously warbling trio of nymphs. There was also a stellar turn by David Greeves, who climbed and contorted himself on a dangling white sheet as an observant, engaged, but ever-silent Moon.
Rusalka is one of the composer's most glorious orchestral scores, and Jurowski luxuriated it its every detail, and secured a quality of orchestral response I've rarely heard at Wexford in nearly three decades of opera-going there. Michael Dervan
Wexford Festival Opera continues until Sunday, June 17th, 053-9122144, www.wexfordopera.com
Castleward Opera at Strangford, Co Down
Verdi - Un ballo in maschera.
Castleward may be offering four Saturday-night gala concerts this season instead of the more usual second opera, but the festival-in-miniature is rigorously maintaining standards.
Having staged Verdi's safely popular Rigoletto (first in 1992) and La traviata (in 2004), the festival has graduated to his more recherché but no less juicy Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball).
Loosely based on the assassination of Swedish king Gustav III in 1792, its plot originally had to be transposed to the politically anodyne but dramatically untenable setting of 17th-century Massachusetts. Director Tom Hawkes and designer David Craig have restored the action to Scandinavia but updated it to the 1930s - a credible enough period for everything bar the gallows scene (where graffiti of gibbets suffice).
Though something of a contrast to the hot-blooded music, the coolly efficient art deco sets and hat-and-coat costumes scarcely remind you that this is one of the world's smallest and most inaccessible opera stages.
Clad in military garb, the conspiratorial counts Horn and Ribbing are played with shifty derision by Pauls Putnins and Michael Brown. An infallible Susannah Self glories in the dark role of fortune teller Madame Arvidson, while the elfin Yvette Bonner is impeccably cast as the King's cheeky but trusted page Oscar.
As Anckarström, Loïc Guguen makes a mellow regicide, yet is satisfyingly smooth of voice. As King Gustavus, Ravil Atlas combines incisively noble tone with a certain regal aloofness. And as the love- stricken Amelia, Amanda Winfield sings with complete assurance yet straight from the heart.
Despite some caginess in the recitatives, conductor Brian MacKay draws together these strongly musical performances into some effective ensembles, and secures tidy playing from his pocket-sized orchestra.
For all the downscaling, then, there's little to diminish the intensity of the experience. Until June 24th, 048-92639545 Andrew Johnstone
Our Lady's Choral Society, RTÉ NSO/Ó Duinn at NCH, Dublin
Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius.
On the occasion of Elgar's 150th birthday, Our Lady's Choral Society joined forces with guest semichorus the Rheinland-Pfalz Youth Choir - a reminder that Gerontius won recognition as quickly among German as among native British audiences.
Notwithstanding the hubristic imperialism that saturates much of Elgar's music, the ardent Catholicism of his definitive Newman setting has profound appeal for Irish audiences, and OLCS has cultivated a special relationship with the work over many decades.
In this sesquicentennial performance, conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn ushered the music along with his customary instinctive regard for the composition as a whole, creating a framework of judicious tempos that accommodated emotionally impelled choral singing and freely expressive orchestral playing.
Sadly, the vocal soloists didn't all fully avail of the pliancy offered by this choral-orchestral cushion. Delivering a persistently epic line as the titular departed soul, tenor Justin Lavender matched the sinew, though not the flexibility, of the instrumental accompaniment.
Alto Ulrike Schneider's phrasing, too, tended towards the matter-of- fact, yet there were ample compensations in her pearly voice and impressive dynamic range - attributes that suggested the angelic in the awesome sense. Bass Ian Caddy represented the priest and the angel of the agony with characteristic warmness and a discreet (if worldly) fervour.
Against an often strident organ part, the contributions of the semichorus were polished in intention yet somewhat sketchy in outcome, with certain high notes wanting support. The main chorus, however, were consistently energised, well balanced and well blended, and seemed to be buoyed up by a joyful affinity with the music. Andrew Johnstone
Cathy Davey at Spirit Store, Dundalk
Irish singer Davey is one of those imponderable types - she arrived, ostensibly fully formed, as a songwriter in 2004 with her debut album Something Ilk. It's a fine calling card that features music thrumming with the sense of someone who knows what they're on about.
It was also, however, a record full of sombre undercurrents, the music occasionally in thrall to the serious lyrical content. Three years down the line Davey returns with a new set of songs, a new party dress, a new band and - or so it would seem - an entirely fresh mindset.
There was a time during the promotional duties for Something Ilk when Davey would virtually cower on stage - fright may have been a crude word for it but that's certainly what it seemed like. Taking cover under a spotlight, however, is hardly the most advisable course of action for any one who uses an artform to express themselves.
There was no such fragility on show in Dundalk; this is the final date of a brief Irish tour undertaken to road-test songs from Davey's forthcoming album. Bolstering the set with less than a handful of songs from her debut (including Old Man Rain and Save Button), the new material boldly marches from Sun Records rock'n'roll to semi-burlesque without so much as a by-your-leave. Flanked by a band that has more chops than a chain of butchers, the songs come alive in a way that new songs shouldn't - it's as if they've been playing them for years. Percussive fills - normally just background swishes and swirls - and postscripts to letters become part of the songs. Meanwhile, previewed material such as The Collector, No Heart Today, Mr Kill and Sing for Your Supper highlight Davey's growing confidence as a songwriter who can join the dots from A to Z, her voice a breezy blend of parched and passionate.
No encores, just a concise, coherent gig and a welcome return to the fray from one of Ireland's most interesting female musicians. Tony Clayton-Lea
