Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture. There was a brief fantasy moment when a previous culture minister talked about creating an Irish national company in Dublin, and the Arts Council of Ireland said it would provide over €5 million for the artform. But dream on. Instead, Opera Ireland has been wound up and Opera Theatre Company reduced to a shadow.
Wexford is the wrong place to have built Ireland’s only opera house. But this unusual festival devoted to operas that never flew and probably never will is an established international fixture that this year attracted fewer critics from Britain than from the world’s opera factory, Germany. And there is much to celebrate.
David Agler, the festival’s American artistic director (whose tenure will likely be extended next year till 2017), has at last brought back a locally engaged chorus — instead of buying in the choral services from Prague — and has also pulled together a mostly Irish freelance festival orchestra: Agler is a conductor. These two decisions make total sense in a country where there are very few jobs for musicians, and at Wexford where taxpayers’ money has been and is crucial. How many Irish businesses have spare cash for sponsorship of things artistic? Even in the US, where taxpayers have long subsidised the generosity of the rich with tax kickbacks, opera — if any survives — may in future follow the German example of substantial public funding as with pre-university education, many museums, libraries, the US Post. What matters is the performers and skilled backstage people you employ to provide the product. You don’t subsidise just to lower ticket prices for a privileged few, but to sustain high-level theatrical and musical skills and competences and nurture an audience.
If Wexford is all Ireland’s opera, Agler may need to steer closer to the mainstream — as he appears to be doing in 2012 with Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui and Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet — and away from operatic terra incognita. The most interesting item this year was the Polish composer Roman Statkowski’s 1906 opera Maria, a piece with acres of discursive orchestral preludes that lacked theatrical focus but conveyed powerful conviction and individuality. It sounded like a Magimix combo of Wagner’s Die Walküre and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.
But it gave us superb singing from the towering young tenor Rafal Bartminski as Maria’s downmarket husband Waclaw, from Adam Kruszewski as Maria’s Dad, the District Governor, here presented as a sort of elderly Lech Walesa figure, from Krzysztof Szumanski as the Count Palatine (aka the wicked national Communist party leader), and from Daria Masiero in the title role (she gets murdered by the party boss because he wants his son to marry somebody more appropriate dynastically — the updated staging does not quite convince). Director Michael Gieleta having turned it into a national saga about Solidarnosc in the late 1980s, cast and chorus delivered with ferocious passion this co-production with Krakow. In the end, Waclaw shoots himself rather than his dad, leaving the bereaved red Count Palatine to the judgment of God. Very Polish. Conductor Tomasz Tokarczyk gave it his all. The expressive gestures and acting style were very like old-style communist theatre.
Ambroise Thomas and Statkowski were both respected teachers. Thomas’s Hamlet and Mignon were hits and still surface. Wexford 2011 opened with Thomas’s La Cour de Célimène, a deliciously satirical cross between Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Offenbach, which brings us a totally cynical Countess and her 14 equally amoral suitors (the chorus of 12 showed what high standards Wexford can now achieve). Charming skilful music, but of the principals only Nathalie Paulin as the mezzo Baronne sang decent French. Paul Edwards’s designs were out of Danny La Rue, and Stephen Barlow’s staging was so preening and self-absorbed that its jokes wore thin.
The third opera, Gianni di Parigi, a bubbly and vocally challenging Donizetti about an incognito royal romance, was borrowed from the Italian Valle d’Itria festival. Federico Grazzini’s unambitious but endearing staging, though stylishly conducted by Giacomo Sagripanti, allowed the chorus and enthusiastic young Irish extras a bit too much freedom. The big problem was that the ‘stars’, Czech soprano Zuzana Markova and Uraguyan tenor Edgardo Rocha as Princess of Navarre and Prince of France, lacked the elegance and security their duet and fireworks opportunities demanded. Only the Irish soprano Fiona Murphy, in the small role of the hotel manager’s daughter Lorezza, added a touch of genuine vocal freshness and beauty.
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