Wexford Festival Opera review – Le Pré aux clercs: An entertainment of sweet conviction

National Opera House, Wexford

The numbers tell it all. Ferdinand Hérold’s Le Pré aux clercs, premièred at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in December 1832, had clocked up nearly 1,500 performances by the time of the composer’s centenary in 1891. Fading popularity has seen fewer than 200 added since then.

Wexford Festival Opera presented the composer’s Zampa, the work by which he is best known internationally, in a lively, camped-up production in 1993. This year, a co-production with the Opéra-Comique, brings to the festival Le Pré aux clercs, the work for which the composer seems most cherished in his native France.

Director and set designer Éric Ruf’s production, first seen in Paris last March, features period costumes by Renato Bianchi, a set based around autumnal trees, and traditional theatrical values.

The clear intent is not to get in the way of the charm and sentiment of a work that treats of multiple marriages (forced, mixed, secret, or not) in 16th-century France in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

There’s plenty of intrigue, a bit of swashbuckling, lots of celebratory-style choral singing, enjoyable ensembles, and moments when agile singers do the things that agile singers get to do.

The women in Wexford’s Le Pré aux clercs – Marie Lenormand’s Marguerite de Valois, Marie-Ève Munger’s Isabelle de Montal, and Magali Simard-Galdès’s Nicette – take to the ingratiating style and its sometimes insouciant vocal displays more readily than the men, among whom Eric Huchet’s Cantarelli balances the demands most successfully.

The chorus sings with lusty enthusiasm, and conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud gets some moments of delicate sparkle from the orchestra. This is an entertainment where sweetness dominates, more on the lines of spun sugar than chocolate dessert.

Showing at the the National Opera House until November 1st.