Muted medley falls short of operatic madness

WHEN IS a Wexford Festival Opera Shortworks show not a show about short works? When it's called Mad for Opera. And when is a Mad for Operaprogramme not really about mad scenes from opera? When it's a Wexford Festival Opera Shortworks show.

The advance publicity suggested audiences were in for a selection of mad scenes on Saturday afternoon. But what was offered instead was an extended operatic medley that had long fizzled out before it came to the mad scenes from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoorand Anna Bolena.

There was a running joke about someone never getting to sing their favourite showpiece, some hare-brained stuff about a singer who would only walk on cushions. Far too many of the gags indulged in by director Rosetta Cucchi (the cast were presented as the inmates of a mental institution) were of the kind that needed excising even before they got a rehearsal try-out.

The team of singers (Daria Masiero, Zuzana Markova, Edgardo Rocha, Lucia Cirillo, Alessandro Luongo, Alessandro Spina and Stephen Jeffery) went through their paces nimbly, but the inanity of the whole was suffocating.

Silent-movie-style video inter-titles were a feature of Mad for Opera, and the movies played a role in Sunday's Shortworks double bill, when Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti(a tale of an alienated couple where the quasi-resolution hinges on a movie that gives the piece its name) was coupled with Gian Carlo Menotti's The Telephone, a witty treatment of a ménage à trois, where the always demanding phone (from the days when they were still tethered by cords) impedes the making of a marriage proposal, until the man gets wise and does the necessary by telephone.

Both pieces are not so much operas in the European sense, as offshoots of American musical theatre, with a strong dash of mid-century pop in the Bernstein. The Menotti might seem ripe for updating to the mobile phone era, but director Michael Shell opted for a period approach, and kept the same flavour in the Bernstein, too, finding lots of excuses for physical swirl of Broadway dances. It was actually the lightest moments in the Bernstein which worked best, and these were provided by the crooning of the vocal trio which functions as a chorus.

Saturday morning brought a chamber music concert – three Schubert songs, Der Tod und das Mädchen,Trockne Blumen, and Die Forelle,with related sets of variations, all performed by members of this year's company and orchestra. It was a homely kind of affair, a far cry from the days when anyone from a great pianist like Rosalyn Tureck, or singers like Gérard Souzay, Sena Jurinac and Frederica von Stade, and complete cycles of the Beethoven string quartets and violin sonatas were part of the festival's regular fare.

It was current artistic director David Agler’s predecessor, Luigi Ferrari, who killed off the festival’s strand of chamber music and instrumental recitals. Agler spoke before the Schubert programme, and expressed surprise at the full house. Here’s hoping he’ll take that turnout as an encouragement to do more and better in the same vein.

Festival continues until November 5