UK Edition
Review
A magnificently accomplished cast at Wexford - Medea and Risurrezione, review
Whatever one thinks of its excesses and eccentricities, Fiona Shaw’s way-out interpretation of Cherubini’s Medea holds the audience’s bemused attention and inspires a clutch of committed performances from one of the most vocally accomplished casts I have ever witnessed at Wexford.
Ruth Iniesta (Glauce), Raffaella Lupinacci (Neris), and Adam Lau (Creon) all give vivid, stylish readings of their arias, while Sergey Romanowsky is a buff yet sympathetic Jason with an elegant Italianate tenor. In the title role, the phenomenal Lise Davidsen unleashes a flood of magnificent sound: she needs to clarify her diction, but hers is truly a voice in a million, and it is one used with feeling and intelligence too. In the pit, Stephen Barlow supports them in a crisp and measured account of a fascinating yet stylistically broken-backed score. Following the French version, but singing it in Italian using inauthentic recitatives and snatches of spoken dialogue only adds to the awkwardness.
Shaw’s staging was largely detested. Set in a banal modern domestic context, it diminishes any sense of Medea’s supernatural powers and racial apartness, even if it forcibly reminds us that the marital bust-up described remains all too familiar today. There are some brilliant incidental ideas – the golden fleece in a Damien Hirst vitrine, for example – and also some batty ones that undermine rather than enhance the music’s neo-classical dignity. Scenes between Jason and Medea hit home, but the detail clutters and it doesn’t ultimately cohere.
Franco Alfano is doomed to be remembered for his crass completion of Puccini’s unfinished Turandot and perhaps the occasional revival of his rumbustious adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. But Wexford has this year dug deeper into his large catalogue of forgotten operas and exhumed his first big hit, dating from 1904 and based on Tolstoy’s final novel Resurrection.
The audience seemed to wallow in it, but I resisted. Although the drama is handled effectively enough, the musical text of Risurrezione is unalloyed sludge, turgid and torpid, glutinous in texture and garishly over-coloured.
Full marks to Anne Sophie Duprels, a marvellously resourceful singing actress who gives her all to the character of the seduced maiden turned whore, and Gerard Schneider as her penitent seducer. I can’t fault Rosetta Cucchi’s sensibly directed and attractively designed production. The conductor Francesco Cilluffo has my sympathy, but no amount of talent or effort could make me warm to such coarse harmonies and dreary melody.
Until Nov 5, in repertory with Margherita. Tickets: 00 353 912 2144; wexfordopera.com