Stellar performances all round as Wexford’s chorus grabs the glory
Umberto Giordano’s Mala Vita, an 1892 cautionary tale about a TB-stricken worker in New York’s Little Italy who promises to save a prostitute from a life of sin if he is cured of his illness, delivered festival lift off
After Wexford Festival Opera’s opening night of two full-blooded short operas of the verismo kind, an exceptional festival seemed a real possibility, but it never quite got there. I had feared that two ‘shorts’ could not deliver the combined thrust necessary for a successful festival lift-off, but I was wrong, and L’Oracolo and Mala Vita - especially the latter - elicited an audience reaction that bordered on the ecstatic.
Both operas were linked ...
