WEXFORD
Irish airs
Rodney Milnes
There was an extra air of fantasy at this year's Wexford festival, what with locals and visitors togging up to go to the opera while not that many hours up the coast the bullets were flying. Who decides when the singing has to stop? Bomb scares, however, seem to have been limited to the rehearsal period, which shows a properly Irish scale of values.
The festival has always had a slightly slapdash air about it, and when it was still a comparatively modest affair in an unpretentious, unspoiled town, this was all rather endearing. But now that row upon row of late Georgian houses have been demolished to make way for car parks (not to mention the repellent extension to White's Hotel), now that even the once incomparable river front has its obligatory concrete bunker, now that bus loads of the blue-rinse brigade arrive from Shannon and the prices have risen accordingly, you tend to search for less friendly adjectives, especially for an administration that required a number of people to work night and day for up to a week to rebuild from scratch a botched set.
This manner of shamateurism, combined with audiences who when they are not fidgeting are deep in Guinness-induced slumber, means that the opera performances have somehow to reach an exceptionally high standard if the whole undertaking is not to end up merely as an annual outing for cultured drunks. This year they did.
In Bizet's Les Pdcheurs de perles, passages of sheer genius rub shoulders on the sort of rough corners excusable in the work of a twenty-three-year-old. Guy Barbier's admirably gutsy conducting minimised the latter, while Roger Butlin's sets achieved almost Noguchi-an simplicity and Jane Bond's unaggressively South Pacific costumes populated them tactfully. Michael Geliot's sympathies lie, perhaps, with operas where the cerebral content outweighs the cardiac, and whereas the hearty shower-room shoulder-slapping he devised for 'Au fond du temple,' one of opera's few love duets for gentlemen only, might have gone down well with Mr Forster's Maurice, I think Bizet deserves something less bathetic. Christiane EdaPierre (the odd girl out) and Marco Bakker (the jealous fisher-chief) were superb, and John Stewart hardly less so in the murderously difficult tenor role, though his gauche college boy amble is not wholly at home on the shores of Ceylon.
A chain of events which is still not quite clear led to my helping to construct part of the scenery for II re pastore (it was delivered to the theatre ninety minutes before curtain up), so perhaps I should not be writing about the performance, save to mention that the tent revealed in Act 2 was clearly the work of a master. But as my respected colleague on the Financial Times was said to be similarly employed, I'll add that Anne Pashley's singing of L'amer6, sar6 costante ' and her duet with Norma Burrowes that ended the first act were exquisitely done.
Puccini's La rondine, which falls plumb between the stools of opera and operetta, fared marginally less well. Produced with customary taste and sensitivity by Anthony Besch and similarly conducted bY Myer Fredman, it called out, I think, for an approach more of robust vulgarity. It also needs a big star, and though flame-haired June Card was undoubtedly the toast of White's lobby, she somehow didn't manage to carry this quality to the stage.
Despite these operatic splendours, mY own festival highlight was listening te Tong Il Han, the Korean pianist, playing Chopin's B flat minor sonata with a vigour to arouse even the post-prandial snoozers, followed by a stroll along the River Slaney, where the sharp clarity of the late afternoon light, the colouring and the cloud formations demonstrated once agfne that nature has it over art every time.
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