It’s grand to be back in Wexford and the Talbot is as welcoming as ever. The sea view is magnificent and, in the foreground, trains glide silently past a car park.
I’m usually baffled by thermostats in hotel rooms but the Talbot’s instructions are simple and sensible; “to make your room warmer, ensure your window is closed”. Actually their instructions then get more complicated but I can’t find the keypad, so that’s one less thing to worry about.
Forget about Lazy Sunday; after brekker it’s Bernstein at Whites Hotel. Seven singers, all drawn fron the Wexford Festival chorus, and a pianist celebrate Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday with a selection of his popular hits interspersed with less well-known numbers and readings from his letters. It’s a frenetic hour and a half showcasing LB’s virtuosity as composer and lyricist.
In the afternoon it’s a double bill of opera verismo: L’Oracolo by Franco Leoni and Mala Vita by Umberto Giordano. The former is a melodrama set in Chinatown in San Francisco. It premiered at Covent Garden in 1905 and was an international success. The Wexford production ramps up the melodrama. At the end the baddie is murdered as usual but his murderer, while singing a lovely number, carves his chest open, extracts the heart and flourishes the gory dripping organ. This is something I have never seen done before. It was so realistic I had white wine in the interval.
The music for Mala Vita was in the style of Mascagni and Puccini and every bit as good. Seeing it for he first time made it more compelling than seeing, say, Cav or Pag for the umpteenth time. Both operas had twists at the end not in accordance with the original versions, or indeed with the synopsis in the programme.
There is a fashion these days, of which I approve, to link operas in a double bill. The set on Sunday afternoon, with a little modification, served both operas. It is a three story brick building on a revolve so that every side is revealed. It seems extravagant but if it were plonked down in Mayfair it would be worth circa £10 million. We wondered afterwards why these two excellent pieces are never performed these days. Il bravo, which we saw on Saturday, has lots of problems, not least its large cast, but this pair are crowd pleasers and easy to stage.