Silent Night

Wexford Festival Opera

***

Kevin Puts's Pulitzer Prize-winning opera received its European premiere at the Wexford Festival last week. The opera is based on Christian Carion's 2005 film Joyeux Noël, which deals with the unofficial 2014 Christmas truce during the first World War.

Mark Campbell’s libretto compacts the essentials of the film neatly and effectively for the stage. The scenes can change with the pacing of a movie edit, and the composer dips into his lucky bag of musical styles, contemporary as well as historical, with the freewheeling enthusiasm of a Hollywood composer.

Puts also shows the film composer’s readiness to exploit music as a background, both as placid underlay to highlight the vocal lines (with a heavy reliance on the technique known as pedal points), and as effects, sometimes highly explosive, to make sure that the scenic presentation won’t fall short on impact.

The subject matter – the humanising effect of fraternisation in the midst of the carnage of a battlefield – is heart-rending. The plot involves Scottish, French and German troops (all singing in their native tongues) with an opera singer among the Germans and a visiting Danish soprano to help spark the singing and music-making that leads to the truce.

Director Tomer Zvulun and his set designer Erhard Rom place the action on three levels, sacrificing the claustrophobic dangers of the trenches in favour of the clear presentation of the different armies, and switching between them seamlessly.

The Wexford cast, headed by Chad Johnson's Sprink, Sinéad Mulhern's Anna Sørensen and Matthew Worth's Lieut Audebert, give forcefully impassioned performances. Sometimes the pressure is too great, as in Mulhern's Dona nobis pacem at the end of act one, which has a hard edge that rather contradicts the message.

The Wexford Festival Orchestra, under Michael Christie, complete with bagpipes and onstage string quartet, take everything in Puts's musical armoury in its stride. Runs Oct 30 and Nov 2