{TABLE} Village Tales .................. Bartok Diary of One Who Disappeared ... Janacek {/TABLE} SUNDAY afternoon's Wexford Festival presentation of "Village Scenes" was by any account a strange occasion. The musical offerings were interesting, Bartok's Village Tales, a set of folk arrangements from the 1920s, and Janicek's song cycle, The Diary of One Who Disappeared, a piece not often found in concert programmes, as it calls for no less than five singers.

The performances were in English, though such were the distortions of Italian contralto Cinzia de Mola's English that this was hard to credit. Vowels were transformed, essential consonants sometimes disappeared and only the occasional word could be successfully decrypted (my companion got through the entire first song of the Bartok without realising that the language was English). The severity of the linguistic deficiency was a pity, as the singer seemed to have a good grasp of the character of both pieces.

Although English translations of the texts of both works were provided in the programmes, the lights of White's Barn were dimmed, and the Janacek, in which the brunt of the singing fell to the perfectly lucid tenor Aled Hall (with de Mola as the gypsy girl), was offered in a production by Peter McMahon.

I'm not sure that, for instance, planting the singer between the handles of a rusty plough, as McMahon chose to do in the seventh song, adds anything to Janacek's music. The music itself was shortchanged, through no fault of the pianist John Shea, by the tuning problems with the piano, and, in spite of some fine moments from Hall, this potentially rewarding programme fell rather flat.