Stealing the show at the festival

The weekend saw many openings at the Wexford Festival Opera, now based in its new opera house. Our critics give their verdicts

Wexford Opera House

Michael Dervan

Richard Rodney Bennett - The Mines of Sulphur

BACK IN 1965 when his second opera, The Mines of Sulphur, was premiered at Sadler's Wells in London, Richard Rodney Bennett, not yet 30, was one of the young hotshots of British music.

He was a contemporary of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, had already been to the melting pot of avant-garde serialism that was the Darmstadt summer school, and had spent two years in Paris studying under Pierre Boulez. The Academy Award nominations for his film scores and his public identification as a jazz pianist and cabaret performer were all still ahead of him.

The Mines of Sulphur is a gothic tale (libretto by Beverley Cross) set in "a decaying moorland manor house in England's West Country" in the late 18th century. It opens with the murder of the owner and finds the perpetrators (an odd threesome of a deserter, a gypsy girl and a tramp) hosting an unexpected visit by a travelling theatre troupe, who put on a play for the evening (The Mines of Sulphur) with subject matter which cuts too close to the bone.

The play is stopped, the two groups clash, and in the final horrific twist the murderous trio are left as victims.

The opera, written in a frequently softened, 12-tone expressionistic manner, had disappeared from view for decades when New York's Glimmerglass Opera revived it in an acclaimed 2004 production that was subsequently issued on CD. The Wexford festival is piggybacking on that success by mounting a new production, conducted by Glimmerglass's Stewart Robertson, directed by Michael Barker-Caven and designed by Joe Vanek, which brings The Mines of Sulphur back to Europe for the first time in decades.

What might have kept The Mines of Sulphur off the stage for so long? Well, the first act is a kind of non-event. On the opening night you could almost sense the nonplussed audience wondering, is that it?

The music, which has drawn comparisons with Berg, Britten and Henze, is crafted with skill. There are wonderful moments of tender, flutey beauty, sudden gashes that rip with unsettling violence, and searing climaxes with true-blue, 1960s' avant-garde credentials. But at the end of the act, murder notwithstanding, it's as if nothing has really happened save that the story has been set up.

Things improve thereafter. Bennett crafted the play-within-a-play with style and wit, and the Wexford production, with its consistently clear characterisation and aptly gloomy, cavernous set, doesn't miss a trick.

But when the crucial turning point is reached, Bennett somehow fails to potentiate the vocal lines, although the orchestra seems to make all the right moves.

The Wexford production is strongly cast, with John Packard doubling effectively as Braxton and the actors' manager Sherrin, Dorothy Byrne's Leda making the most of her comic opportunities, and Caroline Worra's Jenny carrying the burden of the denouement with all-out involvement. But even here, there was something in the music that remained rather chilling.

Wexford Opera House

Michael Dervan

Pedrotti - Tutti in maschera

ITALIAN OPERA has always been the dominant presence at the Wexford festival. But the work of Carlo Pedrotti (1817-93) has not featured there until this year, when artistic director David Agler chose to present the composer's best-known work Tutti in maschera (Everyone in disguise).

The work was first heard in Verona in 1856, just a few years after the premieres of Verdi's Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. Pedrotti's musical manner, however, is well removed from the Verdi of the 1850s. Although Pedrotti is the younger of the two by four years, Tutti in maschera harks back to the style of Donizetti and Rossini, although with a felicitous finish in orchestration that shows an awareness of later developments.

Wexford's Tutti in maschera is a co-production with three Italian theatres, in Savona, Piacenza and Rovigo, where director Rosetta Cucchi's take on the work, with designs updating it to "the immediate post-war period" by Federico Bianchi (sets) and Claudio Pernigotti (costumes) has already been seen.

There's hardly a sight gag in the book that Cucchi hasn't purloined to cram into her production. She fidgets and fusses with the main characters, the chorus and even the sets as if her ideal of movement might be a programmable clockwork mouse that never actually winds down.

She wants to keep the audience's eyes busy at all costs, even though at her rate of change the effects are bound to distract attention from both the music and the singing.

She somehow manages to mask one of the central appeals of the piece, that it's an opera about the world of opera which follows the fortunes of a group of singers after a disastrous performance. And in Wexford her success in distracting from the singing itself is truly unfortunate.

Pedrotti's music, admittedly, falls into the category of agreeably ephemeral. But it provides some fine platform moments for singers with the reach, flexibility and vivacity it demands. Sarah Coburn's Vittoria, a prima donna, infused every last flourish, every gloriously gripped high note with irrepressible spirit. And Laura Vlasak Nolen's Dorotea (another prima donna, married to a music teacher) was fully her match as a fruity mezzo rival.

The men in the various facets of their lives were less consistent, with Enrico Marabelli's Abdalà and Marco Filippo Romano's Gregorio not always finding quite the right groove, and Brad Cooper's Emilio straining and showing a nasality that was at times quite unpleasant.

The chorus, provided again this year by the Prague Chamber Choir, was often ragged in ensemble and rough in intonation, though the conductor, Leonardo Vordoni, drove the music with pace and colour.

Unfortunately, however, this was an evening where the production's best qualities - a few of the gags did come off well - were thoroughly swamped by the numbing profusion of second-rate ideas.

Even a tuneful romp deserves better than this.

Dun Mhuire Theatre

Andrew Johnstone

Puccini - Suor Angelica

BY THE time Puccini wrote Il trittico he had pared down his style to a point where vocal and orchestral colour were the primary musical elements.

In prospect, then, this performance of the trilogy's seldom-seen centrepiece Suor Angelica raised a qualm: could the already economical score meet the further austerity of accompaniment by piano alone?

Yet it does - thanks not just to the unobtrusively neat playing of pianist Andrea Grant, but moreover to the thoughtfulness and high quality of this Wexford ShortWorks production.

Sarah Bacon's designs treat the grey-brown convent setting with chic subtlety, while Roberto Recchia's direction keeps the activity harmonious and interesting. The missing orchestral fluidity is to a remarkable extent recompensed by Kevin Treacy's magical lighting.

With a cast consisting largely of the Prague-based singers who form the festival's opera chorus, the ensemble work under conductor Curt Pajer is strongly unified. The six principals are each making their Wexford solo debut.

Quite a chance has been taken on casting the relatively inexperienced Markéta Panska in the title role. The production often places her in a brightly lit relief from which the other characters are exempt.

The result is a studied portrayal of circumspection under siege, delivered with a vocal panache that didn't safely surmount all the topics on the opening afternoon.

Welcome contrasts of vocal timbre within the all-female line-up are provided by Judita Nagyová as the Monitress and Václava Housková as the Mistress of Novices, while the unaffected stage manner of Jana Kohútová as Sister Genovieffa is refreshing.

As the abbess, Rose-Ellen Nichols asserts her authority in caramel-rich tones. Unrivalled in formidableness, however, and quite properly so, is Elena Gabouri as the princess, whose stern ill tidings for the titular victim bring out the best in Panska's performance.

Dun Mhuire Theatre

Andrew Johnstone

Rossini - Il Signor Bruschino

WEXFORD'S SHORTWORKS production of the young Rossini's one-act farce Il Signor Bruschino slickly transposes the absurd comedy of identity fraud to a vivid and quite hilarious contemporary setting.

The vibrancy is kept up by Sarah Bacon's gaudy costumes and neoplasticism-inspired decor, Kevin Treacy's energetic lighting, and director Alberto Triola's unstoppable flow of pranks.

A tongue-in-cheek milieu of drug-funded affluence is evoked by ever-present splashes of lurid violet light, mobster outfits, and cash- filled suitcases (which, in the overture, ingeniously supply the bowed percussions of the absent orchestra).

Bruschino senior, the duped father, is given a broken foot, and much fun is had with his wheelchair. Dialogues are accompanied by gags with guns, lollipops or a soft toy snake, or backed with disco routines by maidservants in glitzy attire.

And, as if further counterpoints to the crazy plot were needed, the characters have frequent recourse to a TV that delivers apposite silent clips.

The eight cast members are to the manner born. Three of them - Andrea Zaupa (Gaudenzio), Eleonora Buratto (Sofia) and Marco Filippo Romano (Bruschino senior) - are young Italians new to Wexford.

Scarcely less at home in the idiom are Darren Abrahams (Florville), Jan Morávek (Filiberto) and Václava Housková (Marianna).

Karel Pajer (the police sergeant) and Christian Mendizabal (Bruschino junior) make the very most of their brief contributions.

At the opening performance Carmen Santoro's musical direction from the piano began loosely, and her keyboard realisations of the resourceful string textures were in places sketchy. As events onstage gathered pace, however, the ensemble tightened. So it was doubly frustrating that, with just nine minutes to go, a false fire alarm meant the theatre had to be evacuated for half an hour.

It was entirely in keeping with this brilliantly funny production that, on resumption, Zaupa pulled off an impromptu gag with the emergency exit sign.

• Wexford Festival Opera runs until Sunday, November 2nd