Wexford Festival Opera

Wexford Festival Opera offers enough music to satisfy a ravenous culture vulture. Over the bank holiday weekend there were, in addition to the main operas, three daytime concerts and all three opera scenes.

This year's choices for the opera scenes at the Wexford Festival were Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Verdi's La Traviata. As usual, roles were taken by singers from the main operas, plus a few others, mostly from Britain and Ireland. Of the latter, two made an especially strong impression - Welsh-born Stewart Kempster, who was a dignified, expressive Porgy, and Ireland's Fiona Murphy, who showed natural ability as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro.

The most compelling performances were from Alison Buchanan as Bess, and Ermonela Jaho as Violetta in La Traviata. Buchanan's voice had the intensity and variety to persuade, and her disciplined movement made standing still seem a spectacle. But for affecting identification with the character, Jaho would take some beating in any context.

Trimmed-down opera of this kind needs precise focus, especially in a venue like White's Hotel Barn. With the stage projecting partly into the seating area, gesture and action need to be precise in scale and purpose in trimmed-down opera, particularly with the stage project into the seating area. Figaro and Porgy were quite good in that respect, but the best of the scenes was La Traviata, and not just because of its principal singers. The movement of the performers and the frequent symbolic actions complemented the inner and outer lives of the characters, and fitted the music.

The "Moscow-Paris Return" vocal recital of 15 songs embodied the long and close relationship between the cultures of Russia and France. They included Ippolitov-Ivanov's settings of Larin's Russian poems after Verlaine, Prokofiev's French-language settings of Bal'mont, and Stravinsky's Op. 9 settings of Verlaine. The Russian and Moldovan singers were Lada Biriucov and Katia Trebeleva (sopranos), Igor Tarassov (baritone) and Andrei Antonov (bass), and the able pianist was Vladimir Slobodian. Everything was well-scaled for White's Barn, and the Russian songs especially had that authenticity which comes when the music is in the performer's blood.

The festival's principal conductor, Daniele Callegari, conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, at Rowe Street Church which brimmed with energy but had little depth. By contrast, every detail of Barber's evergreen Adagio for Strings was lovingly sculpted, the tone was warm, and the phrasing ample.

The high point of the weekend was the rare opportunity to hear Stravinsky's Les noces which, in another neat piece of programming, was paired with Durufle's Requiem. Although the differing styles and abilities of the combined choirs - Wexford Festival Chorus and Wexford Festival Singers - were sometimes evident, the Requiem received an assured performance, with Andrew Johnstone ever-reliable in the demanding organ part.

The resonance of Rowe Street Church caused some problems of balance in the Stravinsky, and conductor David Agler's high-intensity approach did not allow the music time to breathe. Yet, with a strong line-up of instrumentalists and soloists, this performance caught the music's elemental energy.

The festival runs until November 5th. To book phone 053-22144