Wexford Festival Opera 2022: Opening weekend veers from the mundane to the magical

It would make for a great opera quiz question. Which French composer of grand opera wrote a work based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Italian that was first performed in London? It was Fromental Halévy (1799-1862), whose La Tempesta opened this year’s Wexford Festival Opera on Friday, and thereby extended the Irish connection with the work – the London premiere was conducted by Michael William Balfe, composer of The Bohemian Girl.

Saint-Saëns, who studied with Halévy from the age of 15 – around the time of La tempesta – wrote that his teacher “kept on writing operas and opéras-comiques which added nothing to his fame and which disappeared from the repertoire forever after a respectable number of performances”. And Hugh MacDonald’s entry on Halévy in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera curtly dismisses La tempesta as “uncomfortably bizarre”.

Wexford’s new production, a co-production with Teatro Coccia, Novara, is the festival’s first engagement with Halévy, and it offers what might best be described as a hot and cold experience.

The evening’s most consistent interest came from the pit, where conductor Francesco Cilluffo revelled in the resourcefulness of Halévy’s orchestration and his sense of his chromatic adventure. The vocal writing, sadly, is altogether more mundane. It has a kind of going through the motions type of efficiency, like a low-grade Hollywood drama where the plot churns along in predictable patterns.

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The singers who best transcended the music’s limitations were the imposingly dark-hued Georgian bass Giorgi Manoshvili as Calibano and Irish soprano Jade Phoenix as a light and graceful Ariele. Russian tenor Nikolay Zamlianskikh’s Prospero was vocally highly efficient but lacked any sense of light and shade.

Director Roberto Catalano’s concept of Shakespeare’s island as “the construction site of the nostalgia where the painful past can be healed, cementing the wounds which Prospero still carries with him”, combined with the limited colour palette of Emanuele Sinisi’s set and Ilaria Ariemme’s costumes, create a disappointing sense of distance and disengagement.

The contrast with the festival’s second opera, the 1862 opéra comique Lalla-Rookh by another Frenchman, Félicien David (1810-76), could hardly have been greater.

The story is about a king disguised as a minstrel (Nourreddin) checking out that his true love (Lalla-Roukh) loves him for himself and not for his status, with a fly-in-the-ointment minister (Baskir) is trying to protect the king’s interests while being ignorant of what’s really going on.

Irish director Orpha Phelan’s production dispensed with the spoken dialogue of the original and replaced it with a non-singing narrator, Lorcan Cranitch, a rubbish looting tramp and sometimes foul-mouthed seanchaí, who carts his belongings around in a supermarket trolley and whose storytelling and sideswipes in a specially-commissioned text by Timothy Knapman sometimes had the audience in stitches. What Thomas Moore, whose Lalla Rookh is the basis of the opera, would have made of it all is anybody’s guess.

David was a Saint-Simonian whose non-western interests long preceded his years as an opera composer – he spent two years in Cairo, and published a collection of Mélodies orientales. His music is light and sentimental, deft and straightforwardly tuneful.

Phelan is a storyteller with a gift for comedy, a director with a light touch whose eye for comedic detail extends well beyond main characters. Her work can be full of activity without ever seeming either fussy or too busy.

British designer Madeleine Boyd’s set and costumes were like a humorous take on children’s storybooks, a three-dimensional version of the kind of colourful illustrations you might find in a collection of fairy tales. And woven through everything was the magical choreography for seven dancers by Australia’s Amy Share-Kissiov. It was the sort of evening which led to people choosing favourites from the visual effects, including a large wheelie bin repurposed as a carriage, the prancing movements of human horses, a stream of soldiers emerging from a drum and their later slow-motion concertina-style collapse.

Happily the singing was of a character to match, with standout performances from high-flying French soprano Gabrielle Philiponet in the title role (including some delectable duetting with Irish mezzo-soprano Niamh O’Sullivan’s Mirza), Italian tenor Pablo Bemsch as the attractive love-interest Nourreddin, and Northern Irish baritone Ben McAteer imposingly officious as the unfortunate Baskir.

Conductor Steven White, who always kept things moving nicely, was that bit more persuasive when the music was showing rhythmic bounce than when it flowed more serenely.

We tend to think of Dvorak as a 19th-century composer. But Armida, his final opera, was a 20th-century creation, first produced in March 1904, the year before Strauss’s Salome would be unleashed on the world. It’s lumbered with a pretty terrible libretto – too much plodding, too little pace – and Dvorak’s death less than two months after the premiere removed any possibility of his revising the work.

The plot, after Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata about the love between a Christian warrior and a Saracen sorceress, has elements of triumphalism that probably appeal as little to audiences in 2022 as they did in 1904. But the music is tightly knit (though a bit knotty at times), the vocal writing encourages strongly-projected singing, and the first two acts are really quite gripping.

The work doesn’t quite sustain itself in the final two acts, and there are enough longueurs to explain its rarity on the stage – and that’s in spite of the fact that the Wexford production has been cut to make the work more viable.

The Wexford Armida has Irish soprano Jennifer Davis in the title role, in a commanding performances that’s vocally beautiful, finely nuanced, and breathtaking in its emotional reach. She is one of those singers who achieves an amazing presence without seeming to have any need to be assertive. She was surrounded by strong performances especially the powerful Ismen, her rival in magic, of the Ukrainian baritone Stanislav Kuflyuk and the ardent Rinald, her love interest, of Austrian-Australian tenor Gerard Schneider.

Hartmut Schörghofer’s production – he’s responsible for direction as well a set and costume designs – is a co-production with the JK Tyl Theatre and it takes a head-on approach to some of the magic requirements with powerful images projected on to the stage through video. Conductor Norbert Baxa drums up a storm in Dvorak’s sometimes too overblown score. In the end the evening’s abiding memory is of Davis’s great account of a very demanding role.

The opening weekend also saw two piano-accompanied pocket opera productions. The first was of Alberto Caruso’s The Master, with a libretto by Colm Tóibín after his own award-winning novel about Henry James.

The opera, with a cast of 17, is essentially a one-act two-hander for Henry James (the British tenor Thomas Birch) and the ghost of Constance Fennimore Willson (the British-born Bulgarian-Turkish mezzo-soprano Annabella Vesela Ellis), with a parade of cameos to fill out other roles and functions.

It’s a problematic piece, not because of the shoestring production (Conor Hanratty) or designs (Lisa Krugel), but because Caruso has so little to say as a composer. He did Trojan work as the pianist in this production, but his music is nondescript, and the enthusiastic young cast sang with a kind of scarcely relieved intensity that didn’t help.

The Master was staged in the National Opera Houses’s small Jerome Hynes Theatre. Alfred Cellier’s 1878 The Sceptre Knight was staged in the even smaller space of the attractively newly-renovated Wexford Arts Centre.

Cellier is a composer sometimes mentioned in the same breath as Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. But this production of The Sceptre Knight, directed by Sinéad O’Neill with designs by Lisa Krugel, and Gioele Muglialdo on an upright piano, would suggest the comparison is not warranted.

British bass Thomas Bennett was a sonorous Grand Duke and Jennifer Lee a doll-like Viola in a work that was so watery (it was padded out with snippets not by Cellier) that can only have pleased fans of high camp double entendre and Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts desperate to find a source for more of the same, no matter how feeble.

Wexford Festival Opera runs until Sunday, November 6th, wexfordopera.com