FROM AROUND THE WORLD: WEXFORD.(Review)

The forty-ninth annual season of Wexford Festival Opera offered the company's customary mix of seldom-heard works. Often, the festival seems to score two hits and a miss, which was the case again this year. There was little disagreement about what the miss was: Riccardo Zandonai's Conchita (seen Nov. 2), which had its premiere in 1911. Although there are several good reasons Conchita has languished in obscurity for decades, the press's scorching treatment of it was a little much. Wexford, after all, is a place where opera-lovers go to experience the unusual, and it should be taken for granted that there will be a few lumps of coal among the neglected gems.

Nonetheless, Conchita is a mighty peculiar opera. The title character is a bad-tempered employee of a cigar factory in Seville, who gets her kicks by mentally torturing Don Mateo, the poor sap of an aristocrat who has fallen hopelessly in love with her. If this reminds you of another, more famous opera, right you are. There are further parallels: Conchita even gives a flower to Don Mateo, and there's a pain-in-the-neck mother lurking in the background. The problem is that the libretto by Maurice Vaucaire and Carlo Zangarini, after a novel by Pierre Louys, La Femme et le Pantin, is structured as a series of love-you-love-you-not tableaux and never goes much of anywhere. And some of the places it does go are awfully strange, none more so than the ending, in which Conchita finally realizes just how much Don Mateo loves her only after he beats the daylights out of her. It's up to Zandonai's score to save the day, and there is one good tenor aria, "Verra l'ora beata," that some of our leading artists might want to include for variety on their next recital CDs. There are hints of just about everything in the score -- verismo, Wagner, even a bit of Debussy -- and the orchestrations are richly textured and often quite beautiful.

Corrado d'Elia's direction did everything possible to make a cohesive whole out of the scattered fragments, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland played superbly under Marcello Rota, who brought out every ounce of color and passion in the score while maintaining a good balance with the singers. As Conchita, Monica di Siena had an arresting stage presence but a rather reedy voice that was difficult to warm to; given the limitations of the libretto, it's not her fault that she failed to make Conchita a convincing repentant at the end. As Mateo, Renzo Zulian pushed like crazy throughout and seemed unable to support anything quieter than mezzo-forte. When he sang softly, his tone became fuzzy and unfocused, particularly on held notes. Agnieszka Zwierko, a gifted Polish mezzo, registered strongly as Conchita's mother.

The jewel-in-the-crown award for the 2000 festival went to Tchaikovsky's Orleanskaya Deva (Maid of Orleans). There was little to admire about the opera's physical presentation: Massimo Gasparon's cheap-looking costumes might not pass muster in a P.T.A. talent show, and the stage direction (also by Gasparon) was virtually nonexistent. (The choristers never looked at one another and hardly seemed to react to anything around them, while the Angels were too busy looking at the conductor to get their message across to Joan convincingly.) But Gasparon was working at a disadvantage, since the stage of the Theater Royal is much too tiny for a work on this scale. Again, the ...