Virginia

Wexford Festival Opera

Put Mercadante's Virginiain a chronology of opera and the result will seem rather strange. It was first produced in Naples in April 1866.

Wagner's Tristan und Isoldehad been premièred the year before, and Verdi's Don Carlos would be heard for the first time a year later.

Virginiais actually from another, altogether simpler seeming musical world. It had lain on the shelf for more than 15 years, a victim of censorship, and, even when new, it would hardly have been considered ground-breaking. By the mid-1860s it was something of a coelocanth, showered with praise and interest on its first appearance (Mercadante, then old and blind, was a venerable figure), but all too quickly forgotten and neglected.

Ireland now curiously holds a special place in the history of the work, which seems to have disappeared from the stage in 1901. It was performed in concert on the last night of the 1976 Belfast Festival, with Janet Price in the title role.

The plot concerns the tensions between patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome, and the specific plight of Virginia, a plebeian in love with another plebeian (Icilio) but desired with unstoppable lust by the patrician Appio, a man who was responsible for outlawing unions across the class divide.

Kevin Newbury, the director of the Wexford production, sets out to have the best of two worlds. He leaves the opening of the opera in ancient Rome and then, with Allen Moyer’s tall, black-marbled set still in the background, shifts into a 21st-century rethinking with mafiosi imposing themselves on honourable, devoutly religious underdogs.

It may sound far-fetched, but it actually worked quite smoothly. That it did was due in no small part to the fabulous emotional projection of US soprano Angela Meade’s vocally athletic Virginia.

Meade’s performance was of the kind that made it seem as if the part might have been written for her, a feisty character whose behaviour somehow remains nobly contained, the sometimes florid vocal writing not seeming to contain anything that was redundant.

She was ably matched by the object of her desire, the consistently ardent, agreeably excitable, thrillingly sure Icilio of Portuguese tenor, Bruno Ribeiro.

It was no harm that the bullying Appio of Sicilian tenor Ivan Magrì didn’t have quite the same vocal appeal. His lascivious power-plays were implemented with stentorian gravity by the Italian bass Gianluca Buratto as his henchman, Marco.

As Virginia’s father, the soldier Virginio, Canadian baritone Hugh Russell came across a little too greyly, though it is Virginio who gives the plot its climax, killing his own daughter rather than see her subjected to dishonour, and thereby instigating a public outcry against Appio.

Mercadante’s music is at its best genuinely stirring, though usually more resourceful than subtle. At other times it functions as a kind of musical pulp fiction, piling up the cliches, and seeming heedless of the wearing effects of anti-climax – shattering build-ups that lead only to a kind of whimper.

Venezuelan conductor Carlos Izcaray took the music at face-value, dealing out its thrills and spills with the same care and commitment as its passages of effective pathos.