The new Wexford Opera House has certainly raised the profile of opera in Ireland. You cannot argue with a prize-winning building that is one of just four large purpose-built opera auditoriums in these islands, alongside Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre. Built with Irish taxpayers’ money, it would be a sick Irish joke to mothball the place within a year of its grand successful opening. Yet the Wexford Festival’s obsession with traditional dress-code (black tie, long frocks) adds to the feeling that opera belongs to a class with alien tastes. Meanwhile, even the Abbey Theatre — which scoffs the lion’s share of Irish performing-arts subsidy — has no permanent ensemble. Dublin’s appetite for theatre is not that great, and the Abbey, like our National Theatre, treats actors as casual temps the way dockowners used to treat dockers.
The Irish economy is in a tailspin, Wexford is plastered with estate agents’ signs. The aspirational restaurants of the past decade have migrated or collapsed. It feels like a 1930s-style depression, and could last years. The current Festival cut six of its main opera performances and started a week later than originally billed. Also given the chop are the cheap small-scale operas given by understudies and chorus members fringe-style at Dun Mhuire in the High Street. That slashed 1.2 million euros from costs, 200,000 of them orchestral fees for those extra performances. But gave no help for local morale.
The Irish Arts Council has been backing a plan by Randall Shannon to merge the Festival with Dublin’s two modest companies. (In the 1990s Shannon ran Opera Northern Ireland in Belfast extremely well, till Northern Ireland’s Arts Council pulled the plug.) Opera Theatre Company has built its reputation on Handel and small-scale touring work, while Opera Ireland has for years done two short seasons of three or four operas with semi-pro chorus and stars. Now, Shannon has suggested, just one Irish opera-providing institution would use the Wexford theatre as its base and create up to ten productions a year, mostly modest in scale, playing at any theatre that could afford them and provide an audience.
However, Fine Gael’s culture minister, Martin Cullen, is an optimistic opera buff who believes Ireland should have a National Opera beside the Abbey Theatre, both directly funded by his ministry. Masochistic talk on RTE predicts and relishes cuts in pensions and salaries. But European business leaders consulted about Dublin’s needs were unimpressed with its traditional performing arts. Estonia (pop. 1.25 million) has a national opera in Tallinn, so Ireland’s musically talented people deserve no less. Cullen accepts Wexford got its opera house because the Wexford Festival was the only Irish opera brand with clout abroad. Hence his proposal that the Festival go it alone, supported by the Irish Arts Council. If Cullen and Fine Gael make their National Opera a priority, the aim will be to build on Wexford’s success. It will take a lot of Irish luck.
Sadly, Wexford this year was not good — apart from a few voices. John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, premièred at the Met in 1991 and revised for this co-production with Opera Theatre of St Louis by James Robinson, concerns a feckless fantasy love affair between the ghosts of Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette, while other ghosts in the background perform fragments of The Guilty Mother, Beaumarchais’s third and final Figaro play. This pointless plot purports to be raising issues about the nature of history, and librettist William Hoffman has tacked on showy diversionary scenes which Robinson’s raucous, overacted staging fails to vivify. Corigliano’s crafty but heartless music can do filmy effects, but lacks substance. Maria Kanyova’s vocally agreeable Marie Antoinette was as insipid as a TV Dallas wife. George von Bergen’s strongly sung Beaumarchais struggled to seem real, and Christopher Feigum’s coarsely acted, self-conscious, far-too-young Figaro did not even struggle. The opera betrays both history and any conviction its composer thought he had about Beaumarchais’s genius and serious purpose.
Despite Chabrier’s agreeable music, Une Éducation Manquée, a risqué joke about a pair of virginal newly-weds and the husband’s inexperienced tutor, was unattractively sung — even Kishani Jayasinghe as the husband (a sweet mezzo trousers role) lacking vocal colour. Lorenzo Cutuli’s fine sets and costumes were heavily overwrought, while Roberto Recchia’s production underplayed the charm. Rossini’s Marriage Contract is a slight piece, though Vittorio Prato’s juvenile Canadian millionaire Slook was promising and Pervin Chakar as the marketable daughter sounded appealing. But Giovanni Bellavia as her father and vendor barked out his notes crudely. The main pleasure in both pieces was Christopher Franklin’s stylish relaxed conducting.
Thank God for Donizetti’s 1841 Maria Padilla — good music after the opening act, and supercharged by the gloriously colourful, starry and accomplished bel canto singing of Barbara Quintiliani in the long-suffering title role. She may be plumpish and not a great actress, but her sincerity was touching, and her voice often beautiful and individual. Ketevan Kemoklidze as her sister Ines was also good listening. The 14th-century love story concerns an incognito Castillian prince (later king) and the woman he secretly marries who, obscurely, cannot explain all to her Dad before he goes mad. Her beloved Don Pedro is a baritone and her vengeful old father a tenor, and Wexford’s personable artistic director David Agler — conducting with affection, style and urbanity — inexplicably let both Marco Caria and Adriano Graziani sing at wearsiome full throttle throughout. Marco Gandini’s neglectful staging, Mauro Tinti’s feeble designs and the rough, indisciplined Czech chorus were all below par. If Wexford survives it must recruit its own chorus, save money and give a chance to Irish and British singers.
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