Dvorak's "Jakob∅n" ("The Jacobin"), the second opera in the Wexford Festival's 50th anniversary programme, continues with strength the theme of the redemptive power of music which was rather less plausibly dealt with in the opening work, Flotow's "Alessandro Stradella".
It is a simple song, cunningly set by Dvorak, which turns the plot around in the final act. Julie, returned with her husband, Bohus, to her Czech homeland from exile in Paris, touches the heart and melts the resolve of her father-in-law, Count VilΘm of Harasov, who had disinherited his son, believing him to be the revolutionary of the opera's title.
It is but one of many instances of music - in this case a song associated with the Count's late wife - directly affecting the opera's characters.
The production by Michael McCaffery, with designs by Paul Edwards, presents the returning couple as clear misfits, dressed in arty black, entering an idealised rural world where everyone's dress is lit with decorative floral patterns save for the nastily manipulative steward Filip, who's got up like some sort of fantastical, portly green wasp.
The set, with reflective, silvered panels on the floor and on one of the side walls, is designed to maximise the sense of activity and colour. And lighting designer Giuseppe di Torio sustains some atmospherically intimate warm glows as effectively as he does the saturated brightness which he conjures up for many of the larger scenes.
This is a production so skilfully engineered that everything falls neatly into place. This is also true of Dvorak's music, whether it's folksily light (the chorus and children's chorus are at all times a delight), probing into deeper feelings, or aiming for delicate pastiche, as in the schoolmaster/musician Benda's rehearsal of his own celebratory serenade.
And it's true of the singing, too.
As the burdened Bohus and Julie, Austrian baritone Markus Werba and Russian soprano Tatiana Monagorava are earnest and impassioned, the mostly downcast Monagarova sometimes seeming to delve into the depths of her being to stir with her singing.
The secondary love interest of Jiri and Terinka (the Bulgarian tenor and soprano Michal Lehotsky and Mariana Panova) are all freedom and vivacity, conquering the comic predatory advances of Italian bass Mirco Palazzi's bumbling, self-important Filip.
The audience favourites on Friday's opening night were the Ukrainian bass Valentin Pivovarov as the hardened, bitter Count, and the British tenor Alasdair Elliott in the gratifying role of Benda.
Alexandre Voloschuk conducted with sensitive perception, and the playing of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, though not always tidy, was expressively responsive within a general ambit of understatement.
