The Wexford Opera Festival is not Bayreuth, or Aix, or Glyndebourne, but it matters to the international audience that descends on it for three weeks every year between October and November. The crowds engulf this small town in the far south-east of Ireland (several churches, three hotels and a parade of shops alternately called Doyle or Murphy) like a smartly dressed invading army in black tie and long frocks (there's a dress code, every night). The narrow streets are choked with limousines. And Messrs Doyle and Murphy dress their windows to reflect the subject matter of the pieces playing. Bread and birthday cakes yield pride of place to cut-out images of villains, heroines and spectral figures of uncertain operatic origin.
In all these circumstances, it would be sufficiently surreal if what was played here was Boheme or Carmen: standard repertory. But Wexford would not waste its time on anything so unremarkable. Its raison d'etre is to reappraise obscure, forgotten operas that surface nowhere else because no major company would risk the box office. When did Covent Garden last stage Flotow's Alessandro Stradella, Dvorak's JakobIn, or Massenet's Sapho? Exactly. But these pieces make up the festival's 2001 season, which has been playing for the past few weeks - not wholly to the joy of critics, but to the undoubted pleasure of enthusiasts. It's a collector's fair: a place where dedicated opera-goers come to fill the gaps in their experience.
If this was a venue for Bohemes and Carmens, it's a fair bet nobody would come at all. There are no stars to pull the crowds - Wexford's singers, stage directors and conductors are as little known as the pieces they present - and the performance conditions are primitive. The stage is little more than a plinth, with no effective wings or fly-tower. The set has to be moved by hand and stored in what was once the backyard of the house next door. And the artists' facilities are best forgotten. This is not the kind of place you'd dare ask Jessye Norman (even if you could afford her).
But as the festival's president, Sir Anthony O'Reilly, likes to say, it punches above its weight. And this year the punch needed to count for more than usual: partly because it was the festival's 50th anniversary, but equally because there is an application in the air for £18m of public funds to provide better premises. Given that total spending on the arts in the Republic of Ireland amounts to £46m, this is an ambitious request.
On the whole, it has been a good year: certainly better than last, which grazed the limits of acceptability for opera that considers itself "international". For me, the hit was JakobIn, a piece that wavers between comedy and national romanticism in a story about exiles coming home (to old Bohemia) only to find themselves denounced as Jacobins - the then equivalent of exposure as Islamic terrorists. A radical director might have sprayed the stage with dubious-looking powder and men in beards.
Michael McCaffery's less invasive solution, however, was to play at theatre being theatre, with the exiled characters as lost souls acting out their fantasies of finding somewhere to call home and realising at the end that it was all a dream. At least I think that is what was going on. It wasn't clear, but it looked good (if slightly kitsch) and didn't harm the music - which is worthy of a better reputation than the piece enjoys.
The chorus (imported from eastern Europe) was vigorously in its element. So was the orchestra. That was as well, because this year the festival dispensed with its long-standing partner, the National Symphony from Dublin, and flew over the (cheaper) National Philharmonic of Belarus, a controversial move that went down badly in some patriotic quarters.
But if the Belarus musicians knew their way round Dvorak stylistically, they were in the dark with Massenet - and too profoundly to be rescued by the able, eloquent but ultimately overwhelmed young French conductor, Jean-Luc Tingaud. They were bulls in china shops. The damage count ran high. Which was a pity, because Sapho (Traviata by another name: Parisian tart-with-a-heart redeemed by love for young man from Provence) was otherwise a charmingly coquettish, catch-me-if-you-can affair of delicate, sweet-nothing melodies and refined, transparent orchestration. Not that much of it survived the Belorussians. With a nicely understated staging (by Fabio Sparvoli) and a young male lead, Brandon Jovanovich, who pushed the voice but made a strong all-round impression, it had some of the ingredients of a triumph. Just not quite enough to beat the band.
The Flotow was the weakest link this year, with Alessandro Stradella proving that neglected works are usually neglected for a reason. Musically banal, dramatically ambiguous, it played at Wexford as a shameless romp. It made me laugh; but so, unfortunately, did the singing, which was not good. And the orchestra, again, was struggling with the idiom. Still - I've seen it, done it, I can tick it off the list. If Wexford serves no other purpose, it provides at least that satisfaction.
