The new Anna Livia International Opera Festival, which opened at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on Friday, is a strange amalgam of innovation and retrogression.
The innovations are ones of repertoire and casting. The festival, the brainchild of Bernadette Greevy, is bringing to Dublin the sort of opera that is the bread-and-butter of the Wexford Festival. And it has the aspiration of offering major roles to young Irish singers, though the score in this regard was under 50 per cent this year.
The other side of the coin can be gauged from the decision to mount two rarely-heard operas with back-to-back opening nights while using the same conductor and director for both productions.
The opening night of Massenet's Herodiade, a treatment of Salome that predates Strauss's by over 20 years, showed the limitations of the approach quite keenly on the stage. The spartan and strangely static staging, directed and designed by Roberto Oswald, seemed a throwback to earlier decades of Dublin's operatic life, and was lit up only by the vivid costumes designed by Anibal Lapis for Bernadette Greevy in the title role.
Ms Greevy, who creates a commanding presence on the concert platform, doesn't manage the same achievement on the Gaiety stage. Her style of acting brings to mind the melodramatic exaggerations of the era of silent films, and her singing, though not without strength, too often substitutes effort for vibrancy.
The Belfast soprano Giselle Allen, rather grotesquely (and apparently uncomfortably) costumed, rises to the role of Salome with some thrilling, hefty climaxes, though mis-casting makes her situation one of real quandary: although the plot dictates otherwise, the inconsistent and sometimes coarse-toned John the Baptist of Paul Frey could surely be no real competition for the more fluently powerful Herod of Lucas de Jonge.
The greatest strength of this Herodiade is the orchestral playing under Franz-Paul Decker. Here the opulence and exoticism that were in the composer's mind are captured with consistency and vividness, reminding one why this particular opera still retains the attention of contemporary opera lovers.
