Wexford's unlikely triumph

La fiamma - Respighi

La fiamma, with a string of performances in the wake of its 1934 premiere and a commercial recording issued in the mid-1980s, is the most widely travelled of the operas at this year's Wexford Festival. Respighi, best-known for the lavish orchestration of his trilogy of Roman tone poems (he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov), is hardly a name to be immediately associated with a venue as tiny as Wexford's Theatre Royal. But Wexford thrives on the triumph of the unlikely, and conductor Enrique Mazzola secured vivid playing from the National Symphony Orchestra, with intensity that was equally impressive at either end of the dynamic spectrum. Intensity, burdened, felt, but not quite comprehended, was the hallmark of Elmira Magomedova's Silvana in this tale of witchcraft in seventh century Byzantine Ravenna.

The unfortunate Silvana, inheritor of dark powers (married to an older man she does not love, she casts a spell of passion on her stepson), is envisaged by director Franco Ripa di Meana as swimming against a dark tide of perturbation.

Magomedova, a soprano with fruity mezzo vibrancy, easy amplitude, and a strange, melismatic fluidity, has a thrilling, dramatic delivery at climaxes.

She captures with absolute conviction the somnambulistic, disturbed (mentally deranged?) path the director lays out for her. As Donello, the object of Silvana's affections (or perhaps her minder - she spends a lot of time in some sort of medical chair), the tenor Juri Alexeev conveys in equal measure the ardency and revulsion he feels.

Anatoly Lochak successfully communicates the distance and exclusion of the exarch, Basilio, to whom Silvana is married. Among the main characters, only the shrill Daniela Barcellona as Eudossia (an interfering, mother-in-law figure), disappoints.

Edoardo Sanchi's mosaic-walled set, aquamarine at the front, with a surface of gold occasionally revealed at the back, is among the most elaborate I've seen in Wexford. Along with its Byzantine flavour it also carries overtones of public bath and prison - the latter through a metal walkway reached by a spiral staircase which slides on and off the stage more than once too often. As in the festival's other two operas, it is lit with startling unpredictability by Vincenzo Raponi.

Respighi is like a child in a toy shop when it comes to laying his hands on other men's good ideas, and strains of both Monteverdi and Richard Strauss are clearly to be heard.

The music stops and goes a lot and manages to fudge some of its best build-ups, most notably at the end of Act II. But for all its faults, when it's working it comes off with winning directness.