From around the world: Wexford. (International).

A pleasant, picturesque town on the Irish coast, Wexford attracts opera-lovers to its annual festival with works that bigger enterprises largely avoid. Last autumn's trio of rarities proved consistently worth-while. To open, there was Saverio Mercadante's Il Giuramento, an 1837 melodramma based by librettist Gaetano Rossi on Victor Hugo's Angelo, Tyran de Padoue, the same source from which Ponchielli drew La Gioconda.

Mercadante (1795-1870) is not often encountered on the modern stage, but his was a long, internationally successful career, with some sixty works produced between 1819 and 1866. Writing in 1838, Liszt described them as "the most seriously thought-out of the contemporary repertory." Older than Bellini and Donizetti, Mercadante was also the first of his generation of composers to articulate a program for the reform of Italian opera, and he carried it through in a sequence of scores that was widely admired. Il Giuramento evokes early Verdi, though Verdi's first opera did not appear for another two years.

In fact, there is much that is individual in Il Giuramente. Mercadante demonstrates a distinctive approach to harmony, orchestration and structure that at times borders on the idiosyncratic. But the basic formula is that of many more familiar Italian operas of the period, with complex emotional interactions leading to high-flown vocalism embedded here in an unusually interesting harmonic and orchestral setting. Rossi and Arrigo Boito (Ponchielli's librettist) may have set off from the same play, but their paths were quite different, so that one libretto seems to ghost the other rather than running parallel to it.

Tenor Manrico Tedeschi (Viscardo) was suffering from bronchitis (Oct. 17), necessitating some cuts, but he gave an adequate presentation of what remained of the role, one of the work's four protagonists. Serena Farnocchia sang Elaisa (Mercadante's equivalent to the self-sacrificing Gioconda), offering limpid tone and strong technique. One of the evening's highlights, indeed, was the Norma-like duet of reconciliation in which her soprano intertwined with the heady mezzo of Hadar Halevy, who sang Bianca, Elaisa's forgiven rival. Davide Damiani made less of an impression in the hefty baritone role of Manfredo, married to Bianca but longing for Elaisa.

A stronger production might have helped. In old-fashioned designs by Lucia Goj (sets) and Silvia Aymonino (costumes), the movement in Joseph Rochlitz's staging seemed forced and unnatural, with the chorus making unanimous gestures that quickly registered as artificial rather than purposeful. But conductor Paolo Arrivabeni showed a clear understanding of musical pace, and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus (which was in the pit for all three operas) played vigorously for him.

Next on the bill (Oct. 18) was another Italian opera--but one by a Czech composer, the prolific Bohuslav Martinu (1894-1959). Mirandolina (composed in 1953-4) is essentially an opera buffa, its source Goldoni's play La Locandiera, adapted by Martinu himself. The last of his fifteen operas to be given its premiere during his lifetime, it made its debut in Prague in 1959; two more were to reach the stage posthumously.

Martinu's eclecticism is sometimes held against him. Though never an adherent of serialism, he dabbled in most of the other "isms" of his time. The score of Mirandolina displays a brisk, busy neo-classicism, spiced with twentieth-century dance ...