Carlos Gomes (18361896), whose Fosca opened the Wexford Festival last night, is Brazil's best-known opera composer. He achieved considerable eminence in Italy, where he spent much of his life, and several of his works were premieered at La Scala.
Fosca is a tale of pirates set in and around Venice. The eponymous heroine loves and wants to hold on to the captive Venetian nobleman, Paolo, kidnapped by her brother Gajolo, leader of a band of pirates. She is aided by the treacherous Cambro and undone by her own vacillation in the face of the true love of Paolo's intended, Delia, and the honourable straight-dealing of her brother. She dies by the poison she had intended for her rival.
The work is seen by Gomes sympathisers as an anticipation of verismo, and was attacked in its time for putative Wagnerisms. On the evidence of Wexford's production, the truth lies elsewhere. Gomes may well have calculated to deliver a novel veristic drama, but what he achieves is so histrionically dislocated as to be risible. It's as if, jigsaw-like, he had taken little time-frames of moments that work in Verdi, and assembled them without reference to the coherence of the bigger picture he was creating.
With a mostly static and hammily-acted production by Giovanni Agostinucci, dramatically over-the-top conducting from Alexander Anissimov, and singers that swing readily to Gomes's extremes, there's little doing in Wexford to tame the composer's excesses, tigh ten the gaps in his musical logic, or shore up the breaches between his intentions and his achievements.
The singing errs on the side of forcefulness, giving the brooding soprano Elmira Veda scope to unleash the thrill of her high notes and the thrust of her lower range. The sweet' n'sour intonation of tenor Fernando del Valle limits his attraction to the listener as the object of her affections. Baritone Anatoly Lochak, a Wexford regular, was on this occasion a gravelly disappointment as Cambro, but the bass Tigran Martirossian made an imposing Gajolo and soprano Giuseppina Piunti an insistent yet compliant Delia.
The members of the NSO and the cast and chorus on stage were not the only performers to respond enthusiastically to the demands of Gomes's score. Around a dozen birds which found their way into the Theatre Royal provided an active extra vocal accompaniment likely to ensure this particular opening night a special place in the annals of the festival.
