Wexford Opera Fest is hitting all the right notes

THE 62nd Wexford Festival Opera opens this evening and continues to Nov 3.

It features three main productions, which take place an alternate nights throughout the festival, as well as four ‘Shortwork’ adaptations and a host of Fringe activity. With 70% of target sales already met three months in advance, another successful year at the box office is already assured.

I took the opportunity to visit the festival in the final days of preparation to meet a handful of the hundreds of people involved. The stunning Wexford Opera House was a hive of activity, with a real sense of excitement at every turn. Around the town too, from taxi drivers to shopkeepers and café owners there is more a sense of pride and ownership in this festival locally than I’ve encountered at any in Ireland.

On arrival it seemed like I had arrived in Italy somehow, surrounded as I was by ‘Ciaos’ and glamorous ladies treating me to some of the finest humming imaginable in the corridors. I quickly realised, though, that singers and audience from all corners of the world descend on Wexford for the festival.

American tenor John Bellemer has made his third visit to perform here this year. He first performed in Wexford in 2008 and his recent credits include performing Gounot’s Faust in the recent Lincoln movie. “It’s an amazing festival. I find it incredible how international it is, with the singers, the production teams and musicians. There’s such a familial energy, really you look forward to the casts you’re going to be singing with. You know you’re going to be put together with a bunch of people who really care about the work and the music.”

Couldn’t he say the same about every opera festival? “Absolutely not. Going to Simon’s, the local pub, after rehearsals or performances, it’s just wonderful. The community really gathers around the productions. There are wonderful festivals to sing in but this one is special. Before I first sang here I’d known of the Wexford Festival for a very long time. It’s a place we want to wind up singing.”

There are so many facets to putting together opera, but one skill I’d never really considered was surtitling. Above the stage of every production is a digital screen displaying English translations of the words as they are sung. The lady behind the surtitles this year is Elizabeth Drwal, a singing teacher, musician and stage manager.

Her preparation includes translation and endless decisions about how to present the text. While the operas take place she will be offstage, following with the musical score and cueing the screen to show the words she has prepared at the perfect moment.

“You have to have a feel for the phrase length,” Drwal explains. “You’re constantly trying to phrase things so it’s sympathetic with the music as well as make sense, which is quite tricky. You also have a dialogue with the director. You’re adapting the language to fit the production which might be set in a completely different time to the original opera.”

Having overseen the setting up of a festival orchestra in 2006, and the building of the town’s opera house in 2008, festival director David Agler last year established the Wexford Festival Chorus. The 36-strong chorus of 2013 were all individually auditioned from hundreds of applications and what marks them out is that they are all soloists. I spoke to soprano Jennifer Davis from Dublin, who also plays the lead role in L’Elisir d’Amore, one of the Shortworks.

“It’s a very busy schedule, some chorus members are singing in each of the three operas,” she says. “It’s such a lovely group of people. Because we’re soloists in our own right we’ve all got a very strong work ethic to begin with. When we’re all singing together it’s a really great sound.”

Having had the opportunity to hear a dress rehearsal, the chorus’s singing was probably the most glorious sound I’ve ever heard. For the first five minutes I wasn’t able to appreciate Drwal’s as my eyes were swimming in tears.

Wexford is famed for its daring programming of little-known operas and the big story for buffs this year is Cristina, Regina di Svezia. The opera is by the virtually unknown Italian composer Jacopo Foroni who died at the age of 33 in 1858, and it forgotten for some 150 years until it was found by a musicologist in Sweden, where it was written. Cristina was performed in Sweden in 2007 and 2010, but interest is huge in this first international airing since it was rediscovered.

Conducting Cristina in Wexford will be Andrew Greenwood, who had heard of neither the opera nor the composer until he was engaged for the festival. “I’ve completely fallen in love with the music,” explains Greenwood. “You hear echoes of Donizetti but it looks toward middle-period Verdi. It’s interesting in almost every way. It’s got huge warmth of expression, wonderful melodies that Verdi would have been very proud of. It’s very well-constructed, even though the libretto isn’t desperately dramatic. The orchestration is excellent and there’s no duff music in it at all.”

The role of Cristina requires a tour de force from Australian soprano Helena Dix. Chorus member Jennifer Davis says of Dix in rehearsal, “I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve never known a cast in such awe, we spontaneously applaud her all the time.”

With a superb cast and such passion behind its return to the stage, the opera seems likely to be taken up by opera companies around the world. Wexford Festival Opera can take credit for bringing another gem back to life.

* www.wexfordopera.com