The successes of the Wexford Festival are not just about the re-assessment of neglected opera. They are also about the discovery of new voices, which are often, years later, recalled in fond public memory without a single mention of the works in which they featured.
Il giuramento
The strength of the opening production of the 51st Wexford Festival on Thursday night was in the singing. There was, to be sure, an onstage pre-performance announcement about the health problems of the tenor, Manrico Tedeschi, one of those rare announcements which was actually followed by a performance in which the singer's discomfort was obvious.
But the triumphs in this production of Saverio Mercadante's Il giuramento (The Oath), a work first mounted in Milan in 1837, were in the female roles. Mercadante was set on a purifying reform of opera ("proper regard paid to the drama, orches- tration rich, but not so as to swamp the voices . . . not much bass drum, and a lot less brass band") which history has judged to have left his work rather too bland.
It's been Mercadante's lot to end up in the history books as a sort of dully, professionally respectable marking of time between the age of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti and the era of Verdi.
For much of the evening that made sense. The rather risible plot, based on the same Victor Hugo play as Ponchielli's later La Gioconda, was undermined by the style of director Joseph Rochlitz, who had his sing- ers flinging their arms and posturing in the unlikely but true tradition of B-movie emo- tional exaggeration and gestural excess.
Yet, in spite of this, Italian soprano Serena Farnocchia invested the role of Elaisa with depth and human compassion. As the victim of a convoluted plot, she used the skills of a singing actress to present Elaisa as a fully fleshed character in cardboard cut-out company.
Elaisa ultimately sacrifices her life by respecting the oath of the title for the benefit of rival Bianca, sung with presence and fibre by the Israeli mezzo soprano Hadar Halevy. However the ladies' major duet was marred on the opening night by problems of intonation.
As Manfredo, the man whose jealousy fuels the action, the Italian baritone Davide Damiani was hot and cold - his vibrato was often unsettling, but he scored when he went into unbuttoned, heroic mode.
Lucia Goj's intricately textured sets and Silvia Aymonino's seepily coloured costumes made for visual imagery of painterly effect in the dark compositions of Giuseppe di Iorio's lighting. The festival chorus made effective contributions and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus contributed some unusual ethnic touches (like horn solos with vibrato) under Paolo Arrivabeni, who made Mercadante seem a duller soul than the conductors of Wexford's previous Mercadante productions, Marco Guidarini and Maurizio Benini.
Michael Dervan
_________________________________________________________
Mirandolina
On Friday night, for just the third time in its history, the Wexford Festival resuscitated an opera that was actually younger than the festival itself. Mirando- lina, a comic opera after Goldoni's play La locandiera by the Czech composer Bohu- slav Martinu, was completed in 1954 and first staged in 1959, the year of his death. Wexford's other exhumations from the la- ter 20th century were by composers still liv- ing. Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men was seen in 1980, Nicholas Maw's The Rising of the Moon in 1990; both date from 1970.
The libretto that Martinu crafted out of Goldoni shows an alert sense of theatre and the two men responsible for the Wexford staging, director Paul Curran and designer Kevin Knight, made sure that no opportu- nity was lost in keeping the comedy sharp and quick moving. The mid-20th- century costumes had a picture-postcard perfection and the slapstick overlay was well thought out, with only the fussiness of Ortensia and Deianira taking things that bit too far.
The plot deals with the amatory wiles of the inn-keeper, Mirandolina, as she strings along three noble guests before settling for the humble Fabrizio. With a strong cast, headed by Italian soprano Daniela Bruera, strongly sung and pert, and the nicely judged staidness of Ripafratta, as portrayed by Italian baritone Enrico Mara- belli, it all sounds like a recipe for good fun.
The fly in the ointment, however, is Martinu's prattling music, full of gliding melody and trademark harmonic sidesteps, all nicely coloured and textured in Ric- cardo Frizza's handling of the score with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, but about as tasty as the dinner on a table at a waxworks. There are a few moments where the composer rises above this level - curiously, they are moments when the voices are silent - which serve only to highlight the well-crafted vacuity of most of the rest of the music.
Michael Dervan
The Wexford Festival continues until Sunday, November 3rd. Details and booking from 053-22144.
