Emphatic singing as alienation abounds

Elena da Feltre - Mercadante The first great operatic success of Saverio Mercadante was Elisa e Claudio, premiered in 1821 when the composer was 26. That work in lighter vein was presented at the Wexford Festival in 1988, and this year Wexford has returned to Mercadante for one of his later operas, the tragic drama Elena da Feltre (1839).

This tale of a woman caught in a crossfire of love from two men (unfortunately, good friends) is set in violent and volatile 13th-century Italy. The overture, with some striking echoes of Rossini and Weber, makes a good impression. Here, as throughout the evening, conductor Maurizio Benini encouraged the members of the NSO to delineate the music's every nuance with supple, subtle shape and an unceasingly resourceful palette of responsive colouring. It's hard to imagine Mercadante's curiously delimited style being presented with more impressive point than this.

Sonja Frisell's production is spare. A sense of emptiness, indeed oppression, is intensified by Marouan Dib's sombre costumes and empty set with flying drawbridges and Vincenzo Raponi's murky lighting, which manages to be murky even when the back of the stage is saturated with light. Faces often remain in darkness.

Singers stand in shadow. Alienation abounds.

Much of the singing, however, seems to be taking a different cue, following a style that's repeatedly emphatic, as if Mercadante intended a minimum of contrast and a simple consistency of utterance. The hectoring Ubaldo of tenor Cesare Catani hardly wavers from this unsympathetic course, even in self-reflective monologue.

His one-time friend and rival in love Guido (the bass Nicola Ulivieri) is equally fullvoiced - at times the voices sound remarkably alike in timbre - but traverses a greater range of expressive emotion.

The most fully drawn character is Elena herself, with soprano Monica Colonna conveying her as a tightlywound woman with nobility of spirit, fierceness of resolve yet, overlying everything, an Ophelia-like distraction. In spite of some hardness of tone she was the singer who most seemed to sense the same sort of potential in the music as the conductor.