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Wexford Festival Opera (short works)
Dún Mhuire Hall
Poulenc - La Voix humaine
Poulenc's 1959 monodrama - accompanied by piano rather than orchestra for the Wexford festival's matinee programme of "short works" - is a largely autobiographical portrayal of depression and suffering, based on Jean Cocteau's play of 1930.
We hear Poulenc's protagonist ("more or less myself") in one side of a long, fractured, and emotionally topsy-turvy telephone conversation. The lone character, Elle, is unhinged and suicidal as she tries to prolong the final moments of a five-year relationship with a man who will marry his new love in the morning.
Poulenc was unambiguous about the exact kind of pain he wished to depict. He specified that the single role must be sung "by a young and elegant woman. This is not a play about an ageing woman abandoned by her lover".
American soprano Lauren Curnow fits the bill. The requisite youth and elegance are always discernible beneath her dishevelled, panic-stricken surface. It's a pity director Michael Moxham goes for overstatement, packing the opera's 40 short minutes with an excess of violent, aggravated action, as though he doesn't trust the expressive power of the music, the text and the voice. I would have thought a clear-cut case for less-is-more.
That said, Curnow still gets to you. She comfortably and passionately scales Poulenc's jagged, piercing lines, all the while sustaining her solitary and constantly shifting character with unbreakable concentration and credibility.
With more subtlety in the direction, she may well have left you wishing to offer a shoulder to cry on. Here, the engendered pathos remains less intimate, the kind more likely to prompt the recommending of a therapist and a good dating agency.
Sarah Bacon's spare, realistic bedroom set and music director Lisa Keller's edgy pianism nicely compliment Curnow's tour-de-force.
- Michael Dungan
Wexford Festival Opera (short works)
Dún Mhuire Hall
Donizetti - Rita
Director Roberto Recchia has been bringing his distinctive style to Wexford Festival Opera since 2000.
Sure-handed and imaginative in serious stories (his Opera Scenes productions of Madama Butterfly in 2001 and Menotti's The Medium in 2005), the lasting appeal he enjoys here is in fact due primarily to his infectious and irreverent humour with operas in a comic vein.
His hilarious Wexford matinee hits with The Marriage of Figaro (2000) and Rossini's Un viaggio a Reims (2004) no doubt helped convince Wexford to award him the direction of Donizetti's comedy Don Gregorio, one of just two main evening productions in the shortened 2006 festival.
For 2007 he returns to the festival's matinee programme, now devoted to complete short operas rather than full-length ones reduced. Such a work is Donizetti's one-act, one-hour Rita, composed in 1841, the year after La Fille du regiment, the year before Don Pasquale.
Recchia-watchers will understand his interest in this little gem.
The eponymous innkeeper controls her second husband, Beppe, by beating him. Her first husband, Gaspare, who had beaten her, died at sea. Or so they think, until he turns up hoping to carry out the paperwork necessary for him to re-marry. Beppe, realising that Rita's first marriage is still valid, sees his own escape route.
Recchia sketches his three characters in bright comic colours: Beppe, timorous and subservient; Gaspare pompous and domineering; and best of all
Rita, sweet and honest-to-goodness as she smilingly cuddles a furry woodland creature, mercurial and violent as she decapitates it and tosses it into the dinner-pot.
(While the feminine violence was all really very funny, it's worth noting how the audience shifted with tangible discomfort during the men's duet in which Gaspare cheerfully encourages Beppe to assert himself over his wife with the occasional beating.)
To music director Carmen Santoro's responsive piano accompaniment, the very fine cast of three - soprano Daphné Touchais, tenor Eric Shaw and baritone Paul Carey Jones - are all gamely equal to the demands of both Donizetti's pattering duets and trios and Recchia's energetic and mad-cap staging.
- Michael Dungan
Ariel Chamber Players
Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin
The Ariel Chamber Players are a piano trio with a difference. With a viola taking the place of the usual violin, there's a scarcity of repertoire to involve all three of them, and their programme duly included a solo and two duets.
It was to have begun with Stravinsky's Suite Italienne (a selection of movements from his ballet Pulcinella reworked for cello and piano with the help of the celebrated cellist Piatigorsky).
Instead, cellist Adele O'Dwyer and pianist Cullan Bryant opted for the similarly neo-classical but more rustic Suite française by Paul Bazelaire - a whistle-stop tour of the Auvergne, Alsace and the Rhône-Alpes.
O'Dwyer characterised the regional melodies in a generous and outgoing way, her manner ranging from the soothing to the rumbustious.
For good measure, Bryant added a further unscheduled item, Beethoven's Op 27 piano sonata. His dreamily romantic reading cast the imagined moonlight in sultry mists; the Allegretto was pensive, the Presto pulsating and feverish.
He was joined by viola player Shelly Tramposh for Enescu's Concert Piece, written in late romantic style before the composer's discovery of his native Romanian folk music.
This intricate item might have been written as a conservatory test-piece, or to show off some newly acquired instrument, and Tramposh revelled in its technicalities. While her intonation was not always convincing, her tone production had a distinctive complexity.
It was thanks to Brahms that the three musicians could play together, he having sanctioned the substitution of a viola for the clarinet part of his Trio Op 114.
The alternative version cannot avoid certain sacrifices of tonal colour and contrast. But it was interesting to hear this performance, which emphasised the music's lyricism rather than the fury that lurks below its surface.
- Andrew Johnstone
Metropolis, with live score by 3epkano
Meeting House Square, Dublin
The Diversions festival has returned to Temple Bar for the summer with its usual blend of free live performances and outdoor film screenings. In this case, it was both live performance and film screening in one. Fritz Lang's 1927 silent classic Metropolis was projected onto the screen on the Gallery of Photography, while instrumental group 3epkano played a live accompaniment on the stage of the children's cultural centre the Ark, to the left of the audience.
It was a fitting venue for screening Lang's masterpiece - with Santiago Calatrava's giant cantilevered theatre curtain arched dramatically over the band like a looming metal grin, the Ark's rear wall appeared to be an extension of the futuristic city on screen.
The Dublin ensemble 3epkano have a good track record with composing modern, minimalist scores for silent classics, having already tackled The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and provided a thrilling accompaniment for Dziga Vertov's experimental Man With a Movie Camera. This performance of Metropolis was an encore for them, having performed this score at the Dublin Film Festival in February.
The eight-member group provided a lush, sumptuous score to Lang's groundbreaking film. While cinemas are packed with computer-generated pirate armadas and intergalactic space stations, it would be reasonable to expect the 80-year-old effects to look embarrassingly dated. But it's no exaggeration to say that the soaring city, cavernous machine rooms and of course the Maschinenmensch are all more convincing than, say, the absurd digital animations of the recent Star Wars trilogy. The theme of a repressed proletariat struggling to maintain the lifestyle of a spoilt bourgeoisie is also more resonant than anything George Lucas has up with.
The score is often propulsive and emphatic, particularly in the set pieces involving the explosion in the machine city, the workers' revolt and most powerfully in the creation of the robotic Maria.
There are, however, longueurs, understandable perhaps in a two-hour film (how 3epkano must be glad they weren't scoring the 210-minute original version).
The set pieces aside, the music is not always as synchronised to the film's action as it could be, sometimes tempering the sense of excitement. Overall, though, the accompaniment is beautifully judged - let's hope for a few more encores.
- Davin O'Dwyer
