Among the events reviewed today are Ma P'tite Paris and the The Medium from the Wexford Festival Opera.
The Medium Wexford Festival Opera ShortWorks:
The Wexford Festival's new artistic director David Agler had been very quick to find a place for composers from his native US in the festival programme. After Carlisle Floyd's Susannah came a ShortWorks production of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium at Dún Mhuire.
Menotti is an altogether better-known figure than Floyd, and also the finer composer of the two by far. He's a musical magpie, well versed in the musical idioms of the first half of the 20th century, and with a sure sense of theatre.
There could hardly be a better way to highlight the distinction between the two men's music than the juxtaposition of their works, even with Menotti at the disadvantage of a piano-accompanied presentation.
Menotti's Madame Flora is a swindling medium who can't handle her own medicine when she feels the unexpected and inexplicable touch of a hand during a seance.
In her drunken response she ends up shooting dead her mute assistant, Toby, believing him to be a ghost.
Flora, certainly as portrayed by Frances McCafferty in Roberto Recchia's new production with designs by David Craig, is a character of some depth rather than the sort of cardboard cutout that Floyd seems to specialise in.
Recchia's generally reverential treatment of the opera doesn't quite master the relationship between Flora's daughter Monica (the lively Sinéad Campbell) and Toby (the dancer Paul Doyle).
Nicola Stonehouse and Paul Reeves as Mr and Mrs Gobineau and Anna Burford as Mrs Nolan play the three duped clients with varying degrees of nervously anxious eagerness. And music director John Shea at the piano makes a good fist of his difficult task.
• The Wexford Festival runs until Sun, Nov 6
Michael Dervan
Ma P'tite Paris Wexford Festival Opera:
Rosetta Cucchi, long-time director and pianist for Wexford Festival's Sunday morning song-recital, always puts atmosphere at a premium.
This year she evokes Paris: a park bench, a lamp-post, chic wardrobe, and flickering black-and-white images from classic French cinema.
Cucchi's selection of songs - Jacques Dutronc, Vincent Scotto, Jacques Brel, Poulenc, Satie et al - are like an organic outgrowth of the scene.
These concerts present the festival with a dilemma every year, however. On the one hand, they are theatrical events, against the backdrop of a festival devoted to opera, and they depend much on the kind of scene-setting that is normally easiest to create with the lights off.
But on the other hand they are song recitals, and - to my mind anyway - there's no getting around the fact that the audience needs texts and/or translations, whether in the printed programme (with sufficient light to read them) or by some other means (surtitles, for instance).
As of this year's festival, the dilemma has yet to be resolved.
It meant that the thing looked and - as usual, given the quality of the singing and Cucchi's playing - sounded well. And in fairness, the singers were skilled, as usual, in isolating the essence of a song and conveying it.
But as admirable and subtle an artistic achievement as that is, an audience wants more. The composer went to the trouble of setting several lines or verses, and the singer to memorise them. There is detail there that listeners want.
Meanwhile, the event continues to be an enjoyable one. All three singers looked the part: young and vivacious, convincing in their interactions with each other, both serious and comic. The clear-voiced richness of French bass Vincent Pavesi was an ideal foil to the sweetness of Swiss soprano Marina Lodygensky and the darker but no-less sweet tone of Italian mezzo-soprano Lorena Scarlata Rizzo.
Ma P'tite Paris is repeated in the Dún Mhuire Hall, Wexford, next Sunday
Michael Dungan
