(Photo credit: Derek Speirs) For the first time, Wexford Festival Opera is inviting audience members to vote for the opera they would like to be performed at the upcoming 75th anniversary Festival. Artistic Director Rosetta Cucchi has announced that the public can vote between Rossini’s “L’equivoco stravagante,” which was last staged at Wexford Festival Opera in 1968; Paisiello’s “Il barbiere {…}
(Credit: AJ Coots) Wexford Festival Opera has named Suzanne Nance to the position of Executive Director. Nance, who was recently stepped down from her position at All Classical Radio after 10 years with the company, will take up her new role in January 2026, taking over for Interim Executive Direcor Loughlin Deegan. “I am deeply honoured to join Wexford Festival {…}
(Photo: Armati Bacciardi) Over the next few months, OperaWire will be reviewing a number of productions at a variety of festivals across the globe. One name that keeps cropping up, at least in Europe, is that of Rosetta Cucchi. Blessed with a never-ending supply of energy and ideas, she always has one project on the go with others in the {…}
The Board of Wexford Festival Trust has announced Randall Shannon’s term as Executive Director of Wexford Festival Opera will end when his contract finishes on Feb. 14, 2025. The Chair of the Board Paul Cleary announced the news and extended his gratitude to Shannon for his commitment to the festival over the past four years. During his four years with {…}
(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: Pádraig Grant) In 1907, J.M. Synge’s play “The Playboy of the Western World” caused rioting when it premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. It was not so much the portrayal of its central character, Christy Mahon, who turns up in a Mayo town, claiming to be on the run for killing his father, but the reaction of the local women, {…}
(Photo: Patricio Cassinoni) At his best, Donizetti is a master of the comic opera, with works such as “Don Pasquale” and “L’Elisir d’Amore” still playing to packed houses almost 200 years after their premieres. Others, however, are less well-known; his 1831 one-act farce, “Le Convenienze ed Inconvenienze Teatrali,” being a case in point. Few people will have heard of it, {…}
(Photo: Pádraig Grant) Each year the Wexford Factory, the festival’s young artist program, produces an opera for the main stage, allowing its participants to gain experience in major roles as well as providing them with the opportunity to play smaller roles in the company’s headline productions. In previous year’s, the Factory’s productions have included successful performances of operas such as {…}
(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) Set just off the waterfront in Wexford town centre is The Grain Store, an old, restored warehouse, which last year hosted the festival’s first community opera. It is a project that enables the local population to engage directly with the festival by creating and presenting its own production with the help of workshops that take place throughout {…}
(Photo: Patricio Cassinoni) The Wexford Festival Opera is well-known for its commitment to exploring neglected and unearthing forgotten works written by both well-known and lesser-known composers. Although it has met with considerable success in this endeavor, inevitably there have been one or two failures along the way; after all, many such operas are not performed for very good reasons! Two {…}