Opera at the seaside
This year's obscurity rating at Wexford is down, as Tom Sutcliffe reports It does seem bizarre, considering the dismal state of opera in Ireland, where Dublin's usual diet of mainstream operas staged by Opera Ireland has been temporarily axed, and where Belfast's quite ambitious opera company was wound up in 1999, that the money in the Republic should be paying for an imported chorus and orchestra to perform operas that don't matter much to a tiny audience in a small seaside town,
If I were to describe the Wexford Festival operas this year as deceptively obscure, it's not just a legpull. The point of Wexford, after all, is works with no previous convictions. In 22 visits totalling 66 operas I have only not been a virgin in five
instances Busoni's Turandot, Maw's Rising of the Moon, Wagner's Liebesverbot, Rimsky's May Night, and Dvorak's Jakobin. I have seen again elsewhere at least 14 operas I first saw staged at Wexford — some of them often and (particularly those by Handel) with relish.
But how much longer, now Ireland is a keen player in the EU, can the Irish go on without the kind of real opera company which even a small German town expects? Erfurt with only 198,000 inhabitants in what used to be East Germany has just spent 60 million euros on a new operahouse and workshops, as well as forking out 10 million euros annually for the company. Wexford is subsidised quite generously by the Irish taxpayer, and has of course long been supported by Guinness. But the Irish Republic doesn't even spend 2.5 million euros on opera. You could call Wexford delightfully Irish: if I were an Irish opera-lover living in the capital I'd be hopping mad — and very depressed.
Nevertheless, in 2003 the obscurity rating at Wexford is definitely down — which may be good. Jaromir Weinberger's Svanda the Bagpiper, the most popular offering with audiences this year, was staged by Welsh National Opera in the late 1950s in English, and has been translated into over 20 languages since its 1927 premiere. It is runner-up to The Bartered Bride as the most popular Czech opera ever, having had at least 4,000 performances, and up to 20 years ago it was a repertoire piece in Austria. Mahler's melodious and delightful completion of Weber's Die Drei Pintos is also not that rare, and is recorded — though it tends to be overlooked, with its somewhat strained comic flavour. For those desiring obscurity, next year's programme, the last of ten seasons planned by Luigi Ferrari, will be Olympic standard. Wexford 2004 will bring Foerster's Eva (1899), Braunfels's Prinzessin Brarnbilla (based on a Hoffmann story) premiered in 1909, and Bellini's Adelson e Salvini, set in Ireland and his graduation work — to be given in the unperformed revised version of 1828 with all-Italian recitative replacing spoken dialogue, some of which originally was in Neapolitan dialect.
This year only Maria del Carmen by Enrique Granados, drowned in 1916 when his ship from Liverpool to Dieppe was torpedoed by a submarine in the Channel, is deeply unknown, so much so that it is wrongly described both in Grove and in the Penguin Opera Guide as a zarzuela. Actually, premiered in 1898, it's more like a Spanish Jenufa — its near-contemporary — and I found it the most rewarding and enjoyable of the three candidates. Evidently it was originally criticised for being too Wagnerian, which it doesn't seem today. Wexford's mercenary band from Belarus contains some decent players but they were all seriously at sea with Granados's sophisticated Latin warmth and rhythmic energy — though the musicologist and conductor Max BragadoDarman, who published the critical edition of the piece, did his best to inject some sort of authentic flair.
It's a peasant tale from south-eastern Spain (Murcia) about rivals for Maria's hand, one rich, one poor, who have had a fight over water rights in which the wealthy lad, Javier, heir to a fortune, has been seriously wounded. Maria is nursing Javier, who like Tristan falls for his nurse. But she loves Pencho who has gone to Oran to escape justice. In the end Javier, learning that he is dying, helps Pencho who has returned to face the music to flee again, but this time with Maria. The score is full of local colour and drama, and Granados brings a whole gallery of characters to life. But what's most impressive about the piece is the way it articulates a sense of the robust Spanish honour that motivates Pencho — a local hero without pretensions or conceit. Jesus Suaste was very impressive in this sturdy baritone role, suggesting both a social context and subtle emotional depths. Tenor Dante Alcala, as the wound ed Javier, acted and sang extremely well, too, and Gianfranco Montresor as his father and David Curry as the doctor (another useful attractive tenor, and a Canadian) both shone as well There was charm, too, in Larisa Kostyuk's Concepcion, though Diana Veronese in the title-role was heavy-handed and vibrant when switching her soupy emotional registers.
The staging was the most minimal of a pretty primitive bunch this year. Director Sergio Vela seemed to have only two modes, slow and static — though he tried to add interest with a pretty flamenco dancer. The costumes were authentic Murcian (I guess) though I couldn't understand why one character was criticising another wearing 'such old-fashioned clothes' when they all seemed to be dressed exactly the same, unless he was referring to a blanket flung over a shoulder. All the men wore matching sandals and long flimsy white cotton shorts. There was a parched mud floor with a navel-like hole at the centre — the disputed drinking water. The mainly Czech chorus generally lounged about. Were they acting hot — or just uninterested?
Svanda the Bagpiper was conducted with great panache by Julian Reynolds, a Londoner whose entire career has been abroad. The Minsk players seemed to relish this idiom. The sentimental, colourful, rather banal staging by the young Italian, Damiano Michieletto, improved markedly when the story moved to Hell in the second act — where Svanda, a nicely persuasive performance by Matjaz Robavs, has consigned himself by telling a whopper. Alexander Teliga also warmed up when he switched in the later act from threatening Magician to laconic Devil. But Weinberger's extensive music needs more theatrical and imaginative texture in the narrative. Michieletto interferes too little with a drama that often seems to be getting slightly lost, though Robin Rawstorne's clean-edged designs were effective. Tatiana Monogarova was touchingly impassioned as Svanda's beloved Dorota. Ivan Choupenich was vocally unfocused as the cheating, manipulative and lecherous Babinsky.
Mahler's Die Drei Pintos has very appealing music but is a complicated story about an unwanted arranged marriage and a number of impostors (P.G. Wodehouse stuff, if somebody had had the wit to try that sort of approach). The muddle of course ends up benefiting the young lovers. It needed a much less flaccid and more convincing staging — though Kevin Knight's dangerously precipitous sets for Polish director Michal Znaniecki looked striking. This was one of those opera productions with lots of pretending and mugging, and barely any truthful emotion. Some of the German was not up to snuff in this international job lot of a cast, either. Robert Holzer as the wealthy father had a
lovely rich bass, and Gunnar GudbjOrnsson as the interfering Don Gaston had the right kind of tenor ring. But the only singer who managed to make much impression as a character was the Swiss mezzo Sophie Marilley as Laura, the heiress Clarissa's maid.
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