Reviews: Wexford Festival Opera

The Wexford Festival opened with an opera set in Spain but written by a German, and followed it up with the first actual Spanish opera to feature in the festival's 52-year history.

Enrique Granados's María del Carmen, which premiered in Madrid in 1898, is set in the parched province of Murcia. Its plot finds two men who have fought over water joined in a later struggle over a woman.

Granados is remembered today primarily as a composer of miniatures for his own instrument, the piano. Both María del Carmen (never before seen outside Spain) and his best known opera Goyescas, which premiered in New York in 1916) have been criticised for their lack of dramatic action, and there's a fitfulness in the conception of María del Carmen which must be hard to overcome in the best of circumstances. The circumstances in Wexford, sadly, were not the best. The composer's often atmospheric orchestral writing was not well handled by the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus under Max Bragado-Darman.

Director Sergio Vela did little to provide fluidity or plausibility onstage, though the cracked earth set he co-designed with Cristiana Aureggi certainly got home the message that water was likely to be an issue for the local inhabitants. The attempted coup-de-théatre for the lovers' escape in the final act -a wooden wall flew up, a black curtain fell, admitting bright light - seemed to summarise the evening's gaucheness.

Most of the singing seemed awkwardly adjusted to the composer's style. Of the central lovers, neither the María of Diana Veronese nor the Pencho of Jesús Suaste came across at all sympathetically. As the injured rival, Javier, Dante Alcalá was rather more persuasive, and Silvia Vazquez made the most of her overtly songful moments as María's friend Fuensanta. Overall, however, this production seemed to do its creator no favours at all.- Michael Dervan

Schwanda the Bagpiper

Jaromir Weinberger's Svanda Dudák, better known under its English title, Schwanda the Bagpiper, is the only one of this year's three Wexford Festival operas to have retained currency to this day.

The opera, to a libretto by Milós Karés based on an Czech folk tale, was premiered in Prague in 1927, and, at the suggestion of Max Brod, taken up by the publisher, Universal Edition. The opera was ultimately translated into 20 languages and had achieved some 4,000 performances by 1990. Most of them, however, were clocked up before the second World War, and the composer, who was 31 at the time of Schwanda's premiere, never managed to repeat his success, and committed suicide in 1967.Weinberger's fecundity does, it has to be said, lead to a certain long-windedness, but in Schwanda he was dramatically astute, and the pacey new Wexford production, directed by Damiano Michieletto, designed by Robin Rawstorne and lit by Nick Malbon, is full of images and colouring that would fit effectively into a children's picture book. The three scenes of Schwanda's first act run for a full 90 minutes, but such was the energy of the production that the time simply flew.

Ivan Choupenitch's handling of the extremely demanding role of Babinsky is at once commanding and stridently over-the-top. Matjaz Robavs's Schwanda is, by contrast, notable for his easy lyricism, and Tatiana Monogarova's Dorotka, whether in ecstasy or anguish, has a flowing, bird-like exuberance.

Larisa Kostyuk is the fruity-voiced queen, and Alexander Teliga doubles effectively as the magician and the devil, whose fate it is to lose at cards to a superior cheat, Babinsky.

The Czech singers of the chorus are on home territory and respond with affection as well as their more familiar force, and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, though not always tidy in detail, is in the best form it's found at this year's festival. In short, if you want to know which work is the hit of the festival, this is it. - Michael Dervan