{TABLE} L'Etoile du Nord.............. Meyerbeer {/TABLE} GIACOMO MEYERBEER his best remembered for a handful of long-neglected grand operas which were hugely successful for much of the 19th century. He was a German (born in Berlin as Jakob Beer), but the scene of his greatest triumphs was Paris and his name is intimately linked to the grandiosity and spectacle which gratified the French operatic taste of the time. Such large-scale repertoire is obviously closed to the Wexford Festival, whose first foray into the composer's work is through the opera comique, L'Etoile du Nord.
The trouble with Meyerbeer seems to have been that he knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how to get it. He wanted success and he achieved it by pandering to his singers and to his public. His compositional skill was considerable the felicities of orchestration alone in L'Etoile testify to this but it could become effectively squandered in his all-too-successful because all-too-limited quest for immediate effects. L'Etoile is at best a clockwork entertainment, fascinating for its fecund stock of musical resources, irritating and ultimately tedious for its failure to concern itself meaningfully with anything beyond issues of momentary gratification.
The pleasures and the pains are evident in the overture. The tunefulness is direct, the instrumentation fresh (there's even the coup of an off-stage band), the construction hotchpotch.
Denis Krief's production (he has responsibility for direction, design and lighting) is gaggy and inventive, with much of the stage movement timed to good comic effect in rhythm with the music. The outcome, though, is lampoonish. The invitation seems almost to be top laugh at the piece rather than with it.
There's a lot to admire in the singing and would be a lot to enjoy if only the music weren't so vapid. I particularly liked the easy lyricism of Darina Takova's Prascovita, and, after, a rather too pressured start, Elizabeth Futral's Catherine proved a charming vocal pirouettist.
Vladimir Ognev was rather more variable as a boozy, wenching Peter the Great, and Aled Hall clowned with exceptional nimbleness as his sidekick, Danilowitz. Among the smaller roles, the George of Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez scored strongly in his amusingly interjected, repeated high notes at the end of Act I (the later re-working with the sluttish Natalia and Ekimona of Agnete Munk Rasmussen and Patrizia Cigna didn't come off at all as well).
The festival chorus appeared to enjoy the evening's romp and sang with character, and the conductor, Wladimir Jurowski, secured some first-rate playing from the NSO. He didn't always keep a tight rein on ensemble between stage and pit, but apart from that his handling of the score lacked nothing in colour or vitality.
