REVIEW: Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochkaat Wexford Opera House, part of Wexford Festival Opera
Wexford Opera House
Rimsky-Korsakov- Snegurochka
The waiting is over. Wexford's new opera house opened for business on Thursday with a production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden).It was the composer's third opera, and was first seen at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1882, when the cast included Fyodor Stravinsky, father of the composer Igor.
Rimsky described the piece as a "springtime tale" (it's based on a fairy tale by Ostrovsky) and it was his favourite among his works. The Snow Maiden of the title is the love child of Spring Beauty and Father Frost, and her very existence has upset the sun god Yarilo, resulting in short summers and long winters. The Snow Maiden gets her wish to live among humans, and when her chilliness (she has no capacity for love) is finally overcome, nature rights itself once again.
This new production, directed by John Fulljames and designed by Dick Bird, updates the prehistoric, mythological setting to an industrial wasteland, opening in a chilly forest of what could be taken for oil-refinery pipes and presenting the well-worn interior of a severely tilted ship instead of Tsar Berendey's court in Act II.
As an exercise in tongue-in-cheek inventiveness it scores highly. A chorus of dancing birds becomes a crowd of scantily-clad late-night revellers. The tsar makes his first appearance in his bath. Bottles are dispensed from a decrepit supermarket trolley.
The new auditorium is a world apart from the old one, and the assumption of the industrial pipes into the heavens and their immediate replacement with full-height girders is a striking instance of a scene-change that would have been unthinkable in the old Theatre Royal.
The new house has been winning plaudits for the quality of its sound, too. From my left-side seat towards the rear of the stalls, the acoustic would best be described as easy, bringing to mind Stravinsky's remark to the effect that good orchestration was when you didn't notice it. The drily clear Wexford acoustic has an agreeable transparency in which voices don't appear to have to strain, and when conductor Dmitri Jurowski lets the orchestra rip there is none of the overloading that used to afflict the old theatre.
The favourable impression of the acoustic can also, of course, be put down to the efforts of an almost uniformly strong cast. Irina Samoylova is not consistent in vocal appeal as the Snow Maiden, and sounded best in some of her quieter moments.
Katerina Jalovcová's shepherd Lel and Lina Tetruashvili's Kupava both combined directness of expression with richer lustre and allure, and although the male leads were all suitably ardent, it was the complex tenderness in the final benediction of Natela Nicoli's Spring Beauty that brought this work closest to a showstopping aria. The genuine showstopping was done by the team of dancers, a fact which may go some way to explain why posterity has never come to value this particular opera as highly as its author did.
• Wexford Festival Opera runs until Sunday, November 2nd.
