Inevitably, the 2005 Wexford Festival was tinged with sadness.
Just over a month ago, Jerome Hynes, the festival’s much-loved
chief executive, collapsed and died while welcoming this year’s
artists to rehearsals. He was only 45, but had been managing the
festival for 18 years. His welcoming presence, shaking the hands
of all patrons, long-standing and new, as they arrived for
performances will be sorely missed.
For Hynes, this was to have been an
important season: the last in the old Theatre Royal — a brand
new auditorium on the same site is scheduled for 2008 — and the
first under the artistic aegis of the American conductor David
Agler. Hynes would surely have rejoiced that the new regime he
had helped to put in place has got off to a winning start. From
the artistic point of view, this was the most successful Wexford
for more than a decade.
Agler’s fresh approach was evident even when
his first season was announced. He had intended to conduct
Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 American classic, Susannah, himself, but
after Hynes’s death, he relinquished that responsibility to
concentrate on the festival’s running. His other chosen operas,
Donizetti’s melodramma tragico, Maria di Rohan, and
Fauré’s unjustly neglected poème lyrique, Pénélope, are
both the work of master composers, yet seldom enough staged to
fit the Wexford bill of rarity. In their different ways, all
three were resounding hits.
Maria di Rohan, written in 1843, may not
be top-drawer Donizetti, but it is an effective and powerful
tangle of mismatched lovers, set against the background of
Cardinal Richelieu’s political machinations at the court of
France’s Louis XIII.
Charles Edwards directed and designed the
clever, striking sets, dominated in Act I by a huge portrait of
the unseen Cardinal and, in Acts II and III, by projections of a
large clock that mark the passing of the hours, in a drama that
takes place within a day. He was less successful at making
flesh-and-blood characters of the principals, but Eglise
Gutierrez (the smokey-toned titular heroine, Maria), Yeghishe
Manucharyan (her lover, Riccardo, Count of Chalais) and James
Westman (her husband, Enrico, Duke of Chevreuse — Richelieu’s
political prisoner) sang so lustily and excitingly that it hardy
mattered.
Fauré’s only opera, telling the story of
Ulysses’ return to his constant wife, has a ravishing score, his
gentle tribute to Wagner and the Debussy of Pelléas et Mélisande.
It certainly doesn’t deserve its neglect. Renaud Doucet devised
a somewhat pretentious but handsome-looking mise en scène in
modern dress (at curtain up, Pénélope and Ulysses are seen in a
contemporary kitchen diner, hardly on speaking terms, husband
slouched on a chair drinking a beer, his wife looking depressed
at the table). As an attempt to give contemporary “relevance” to
a problematic piece, it didn’t do too much harm, and musically
the performance was fine indeed, eloquently conducted by
Jean-Luc Tingaud, with thrilling singing from Nora Sourouzian
and Gerard Powers as the reunited husband and wife. Among the
servants and suitors Doreen Curran’s plush-toned Cléone and Paul
Carey Jones’s resonantly sung Eurymaque stood out: talented
young singers who will surely soon fulfil larger assignments.
The undoubted hit of the festival,
however, was Floyd’s piece of 1950s Americana — which made a far
greater impression on me here than it had at New York’s
Metropolitan Opera — with Renée Fleming and Samuel Ramey, no
less, in the leads.
John Fulljames staged Floyd’s
transplantation of the apocryphal tale of Susannah and the
Elders to the God-fearing Midwest at face value, depicting a
Peter Grimes-like heroine at odds with a religiously fanatical
community. Emily Pulley’s full-on, bright, dramatic soprano
tugged at the heartstrings as Susannah, wrongly accused of
immorality, who succumbs to the lust of the hypocritical
fire-and-brimstone preacher Olin Blitch (a powerful performance
from Stephen Kechulius) to save her reputation. The
Irish-American tenor Simon O’Neill, soon to sing Jenik in The
Bartered Bride and Siegmund in Die Walküre at Covent Garden,
revealed a promising heldentenor as her drunken brother, Sam,
who kills Blitch when she admits her dishonour. All the smaller
parts were well taken, and both orchestra and chorus gave their
all for the idiomatic and persuasive conductor, Christopher
Larkin.
Susannah may not be an imperishable
masterpiece, but it proved its worth at Wexford.
For once, the claustrophobia of the
Theatre Royal, whose notorious discomforts won’t, I suspect, be
missed when the new auditorium opens, played its part
magnificently here.
