(Photo: Padraig Grant) The Wexford Factory Academy is a program offering young singers the opportunity to take part in workshops, masterclasses and performances in the weeks leading up to and during the festival. The highlight of the program is a fully staged production on the festival’s main stage, in which all the roles are performed by the Factory singers. The {…}
(Photo: Padraig Grant) Interest in Frederick Delius’ operas has never been particularly high; even his best-known opera, “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” receives only the occasional performance. Wexford Festival Opera‘s decision to stage a production of “The Magic Fountain,” his second of six operas, written between 1893 and 1895, was therefore a welcome, if not a surprising, choice for the {…}
(Photo: Patricio Cassinoni) History has not been kind to Charles Villiers Stanford’s reputation as an opera composer. During his lifetime he wrote nine complete operas, which, apart from his comic opera “Seamus O’Brien,” was met with limited success. Today, they are rarely performed, and none have found their way into the mainstream repertoire. In 2019, the Wexford Festival Opera produced {…}
(Photo: Padraig Grant) To mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, the Wexford Festival Opera commissioned William Niall Morris to create a short work celebrating the composer’s life and music. The result was a short piece, lasting about an hour, entitled “Puccini: Man of the Theatre,” which essentially amounted to a selection of his greatest hits linked {…}
(Photo: Padraig Grant) The second of Wexford Festival’s pocket operas, Opera Beag, was a presentation of Donizetti’s opéra-comique “La Fille du régiment.” Operating on a low-budget and using only piano accompaniment, director Heather Hadrill was under no illusions of the difficulties involved. In her program notes, she stated “The challenge of pocket operas is to give as full a sense {…}