Reviews

A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.

Pénélope

Wexford Festival Opera

For many modern-day music lovers, the idea of an opera by Gabriel Fauré probably still seems something of an oddity.

Pénélope, which opened its Wexford Festival run on Friday, is his only full-scale opera, and is something of a rarity in the opera house, even in the composer's native France.

Yet Fauré was in fact an experienced man of the theatre, and the orchestral suite he made from his incidental music for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande is regularly heard in the concert hall.

The challenges Pénélope presents are considerable.

The libretto, by René Fauchois, a treatment of the Homeric account of Penelope's plight with her suitors and the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, is wordy and arch, and needed even more pruning than the composer carried out on it.

Fauré conceived the music in post-Wagnerian style, writing without grandiloquence, and with a notably restrained and economical approach to the orchestra. Pénélope is a slow-burning work, noble and solemn, difficult to bring off, and challenging for audiences used to the conventions of more attention-grabbing styles.

Even the composer was aware of how his chosen fluidity of form could give rise to a feeling of stasis. He was so unhappy with the first production, in Monte Carlo in 1913 that he told his wife he felt as if he had produced "a work that is deadly boring, dull and lifeless".

The Wexford production, directed by Renaud Doucet and designed by André Barbe, has a surreal, dreamlike quality.

There's a tilted off-white kitchen at the back of the stage; the vocally firm Pénélope of Canadian mezzo soprano Nora Sourouzian and more ardent Ulysses of US tenor Gerard Powers are garbed to match.

The voyeuristic Eumée of French bass Vincent Pavesi and Euryclée of Italian mezzo soprano Lorena Scarlata Rizzo wear scarlet. The masked maids and chorus wear blue or khaki, the five suitors (no princes, but identities as diverse as guerrilla-fighter, mechanic, and businessman) are all clad in a soft shade of blue.

Jean-Luc Tingaud conducts with a restraint that seems to limit the expressive impact of much of the music but certainly allows for the few moments of orchestral weight to communicate stirringly.

The rarefied and ambitious rationale of the production (circulated in a printed note in advance of the performance) may not have been persuasive.

But the muted character of the presentation did leave a quietly attractive, almost hypnotic impression of Fauré's strange undertaking.

The Wexford Festival runs until November 6th, 053-22144.

Michael Dervan

Susannah

Wexford Festival Opera

Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, the most successful opera by the most performed American opera composer of the second half of the 20th century, came, as it were, out of nowhere.

Its composer, who wrote his own libretto, was a 28-year-old member of the piano faculty of Florida State University, and its February 1955 première took place in Tallahassee.

It was soon taken up by New York City Opera and won Floyd a New York Critics' Circle Award. It took rather longer, over four decades in fact, for the work to gain the recognition of the city's Metropolitan Opera, where it was first heard, with Renée Fleming in the title role, in 1999.

The opera, a retelling of the apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders transplanted to Bible Belt America in the 1930s, has remained by and large an American success. It has not been much taken up in Europe, though its first studio recording was made in Lyon in the early 1990s with American lead singers.

Floyd's technique as an opera composer is based on a kind of short circuitry to effective solutions. "The quickest way to establish locale," he has said, "is to create folk-like sounds. The music just propels us to a certain area of the country."

And in Susannah he takes the same, cliché after cliché, error-free routes to all his dramatic and emotional situations.

He's got his teeth into a serious theme - the abuse of individual liberty by a hidebound religious community. But he paints his characters with comic-book simplicity and often uses the orchestra for emphatic underlining of the obvious.

Ultimately, it's a tiresome sort of undertaking, which works about as narrowly and efficiently as, say, a socialist-realist opera by a skilled hack anxious to stay on the right side of Stalin by eliminating ambiguity and maximising palatability.

In the new Wexford Festival production, which opened on Saturday, everyone seems to have taken with zest to the narrow paths defined for them.

Emily Pulley may lack the sense of teenage youth the title role calls for, but she sings her heart out.

Simon O'Neill shows an impressive, laser-like penetrating tenor voice as her drunken brother Sam.

Stephen Kechulius struts authoritatively as the cleverly-named evangelist Olin Blitch, who steps over the line and forces himself on the communally-maligned Susannah, only to discover that she was in fact a virgin.

Glenn Alamilla is not quite convincing in his nervous forthrightness as the simpleton Little Bat McLean, whose family-enforced untruths are crucial to Blitch's actions, and Anna Burford's Mrs McLean strays into a region of wild exaggeration.

Conor Murphy's costumes work well, but his set has rather more steps than prove practical, and director John Fulljames's use of stars and stripes and revival-meeting straight-arm salutes seem like unnecessary graftings onto an otherwise effectively straightforward production.

Conductor Christopher Larkin matches the enthusiasm of the singing, but unleashes enough volume from the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra in the pit for the surtitles for this English-language performance to be a necessity rather than a luxury.

Michael Dervan