Catalani - Edmea (Wexford, 2021)

Alfredo Catalani - Edmea

Wexford Festival Opera, 2021

Francesco Cilluffo, Julia Burbach, Anne Sophie Duprels, Luciano Ganci, Leon Kim, Ivan Shcherbatykh, John Molloy, Conor Prendiville, Conall O'Neill

National Opera House, O'Reilly Theatre, Wexford - 19th October 2021

Like just about every other opera festival, Wexford Festival Opera didn't happen in the form of live performances last year but thankfully the attractive 2020 programme of rare Shakespeare related opera 'Shakespeare in the Heart' has been carried over to their 70th anniversary programme. The opening night opera Alfredo Catalani's Edmea only has a tenuous connection to Shakespeare - if any at all - with the notion that the original Dumas drama it is based on may have been inspired by Shakespeare. There's certainly an Ophelia quality to the lost drowned girl of Edmea, but it has more of A Midsummer Night's Dream quality in this production, even more so than Ambroise Thomas's opera of the name which was also included in the 2021 programme. At the very least Edmea suitably meets the festival's remit of unearthing deserving operatic gems that have been forgotten or never had the chance to reach a wider audience. Catalani's Edmea fit the opening night bill admirably.

Not that anyone would doubt the Wexford Festival Opera's choices - just because an opera is obscure and forgotten doesn't mean that it's not good (they've proven that point numerous times) - but there's not a lot of Alfredo Catalani heard nowadays to give even any real indication of the quality of his work. Like most Italian opera composers of the time, Catalani found himself overshadowed and somewhat neglected by his music publisher Ricordi putting much of their support to Puccini - whose success was of course richly merited- even though Catalani enjoyed the favour and support of Toscanini. His final and most successful opera, La Wally is pretty much all we have to go on, a work that certainly has its merits even if it is no longer fashionable and very rarely performed.

Fashions fade, as the saying goes, but style is eternal and Catalani was still in the process of developing his own style and voice when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 39. His work, like many of this time - it couldn't be ignored even if that reaction was negative - is influenced by Wagner, at least in terms of romanticism and the use of leitmotif, without sounding anything like Wagner. The question of whether Catalani might have presented an alternative to verismo, or whether he might still have been overshadowed by Puccini, whose progressive development was also tragically cut short, is one of those things that we will never know, but Italian opera never fully recovered from these losses or found new ground.

Edmea, first performed in 1886, marks the discovery of a popular direction for the composer that would culminate in La Wally in 1892, unquestionably the only work that Catalani is popularly known for in opera circles today. The story is adapted from the drama Les Danicheff by Alexandre Dumas fils, the author of La Dame aux Camélias which formed the basis for Verdi's La Traviata. It's a romantic drama that has something of the feel of a fairy tale, which  makes it sound frivolous, but fairy tales usually have dark origins and can point to deeper truths. You wouldn't think that you could say that about the melodramatic plot of Edmea, which is rather simplistic as a story, the kind of thing you would typically find in bel canto, but there is a slightly darker Verdi edge to the music and director Julia Burbach works to bring deeper qualities out of the work in the 2021 Wexford production.

The plot of Antonio Ghislalanzoni's libretto at least has some of the qualities of an early Verdi pot boiler. The orphan Edmea is in love with Oberto, the son of the family who raised her, but the Count of Leitmeritz is opposed to their union, seeing Edmea as more of a sister to Oberto. He arranges for Oberto to be sent away and for Edmea to be forced into a marriage with the house servant Ulmo. Ulmo is deeply conflicted by this turn of events, as he is madly in love with Edmea but knows that her heart lies with Oberto. Unable to tolerate the marriage she has been pushed into, Edmea throws herself into the river Elbe.

The romantic melodrama of Act I gives way to a more dreamlike fairytale quality in Act II, where we discover that Edmea has not drowned but has lost her mind. Ulmo has stood by her, pretending that he is her brother. The whole tone of the work has been transformed in the second Act - particularly in how it is presented in the Wexford production, opening with a tavern scene where court players and jesters surround them in boisterous but almost surreal scene with Edmea weaving in a daze around them. It has something of the feel of an extended mad scene; a mad scene one where we are all somewhat lost and caught up in Edmea's damaged mind.

That has already been hinted at in opening act as the line that this production is going to follow as a way of dealing with the operatic and theatrical mannerisms of the opera's drama. The stage in Act I shows Edmea's room split into two levels, the lower a dark inverse mirror the bright room above. Below, the female chorus in green dresses with red wigs act as the subconscious working of Edmea's mind, the young woman above wanting to enjoy life but knowing that trouble is brewing in her love for Oberto. In her madness Edmea transforms in Act II into the same red bobbed hair style of her subconscious, wearing a bright yellow dress, only returning to her familiar dress and room when matters are resolved (but still ambiguous) at the close of the opera.

The fantastical look and feel that Burbach strives for and achieves in Cécile Trémolières stunning set and costume designs works wonderfully to enhance the piece, with effective lighting probing further those dark corners of Edmea's mind. As ever with Wexford, if you are going to the trouble of unearthing a rare work, you want to do it justice and this is an ideal presentation of the work. It all works hand in hand with the music, the opera's ballet sequences - something characteristic of Catalani - similarly used to weave the spell. The reduced instrumentation on account of social distancing might also have helped prevent this slipping into whimsy, but it certainly didn't feel reduced. Francesco Cilluffo's vigorous conducting lent the work both the edge and romanticism it needed.

Act II brings a climactic resolution of its own as Edmea is reunited with Oberto and begins a path to regaining her mind, so you wonder where this is going to go in Act III. Then you remember that in the real world, Edmea is still married to Ulmo. The closing Act tidies that matter up in a dramatic but fairly conventional way with a tragic conclusion, one that at least is sympathetic not just to the heroine but also recognises that Ulmo isn't a villain. In some way he is the tragic pawn in this drama as much as Edmea. The music emphasises this, but it is also fairly conventional. Again the production design works to make this a little more interesting and follows through on the idea of exploring the mind of Edmea on two levels, with the sedate surface above and the emotional undercurrents beneath. It's not a wild idea but it does introduce an air of ambiguity about how much is real or the imagining of a young impressionable woman and it does prevent the opera slipping over into simply pure melodrama.

With Francesco Cilluffo conducting, there was never any chance of that. Again, not unlike how the festival's Artistic Director Rosetta Cucchi found a way to bring out the spiritual dimension of Alfano's Risurrezione in the revelatory 2017 Wexford Opera Festival production, the team here (again with Anne Sophie Duprels and Leon Kim) find a way to tap into the deeper nature of the subject that can be found in its music. Edmea too has all the vocal challenges of a typical Italian opera of this period, which means that it has conventional arias, love duets and a drinking scene in a tavern, but it also presents challenges for the emotional and vocal ranges. Anne Sophie Duprels was well cast to achieve that and bring something of the aforementioned human and spiritual character of Edmea. She was also impressive in her transformation to the dreamy Edmea of Act II who has lost her mind. Leon Kim was warmly received for a beautifully sung and sympathetic account of Ulmo. Luciano Ganci's warmly Italianate tenor worked well for Oberto and his Act II aria was one of the highlights of the evening.

The 22nd October performance of Catalani's Edmea will be streamed live from the Wexford Festival Opera on RTE and ARTE Concert.

Links: Wexford Festival Opera, RTE, ARTE Concert

Alfano - Risurrezione (Florence, 2020)

Franco Alfano - Risurrezione (Florence, 2020)

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 2020

Francesco Lanzillotta, Rosetta Cucchi, Anne Sophie Duprels, Matthew Vickers, Leon Kim, Francesca Di Sauro, Romina Tomasoni, Nadia Pirazzini, Ana Victoria Pitts, Barbara Marcacci, Filomena Pericoli, Nadia Sturlese

Dynamic, Blu-ray

Rosetta Cucchi's production of Franco Alfano's Risurrezione was something of a revelation for me when when I first saw it at the Wexford Festival Opera in 2017. Not only did it serve to give much better representation of a composer who is only really known by most for having completed the last Act of Turandot when Puccini died, but it helped illuminate better the idea of opera verismo. More than just being about realism and the misfortunes of ordinary people, it can also be seen in many of its best works (La Bohème, Cavalleria Rusticana) to elevate the lives and suffering of ordinary people to something of a spiritual level.

If you are looking for an author in literature author who is capable of doing precisely that it's Count Leo Tolstoy. To be fair many of the classic Russian writers including Turgenev and particularly Chekhov achieve that in their writing, but no-one else lived their beliefs out quite the same way as Tolstoy. Repudiating even his greatest works and turning his back on the wealthy, dissolute lifestyle of being born into nobility, Tolstoy would choose to dedicate the rest of his life to not only celebrating the spiritual and morally pure existence of a life of hard work and poverty in his writing, but he would live his life according to those values as well.

Tolstoy documented his early life experiences in 'Childhood, Boyhood and Youth', and there's clearly also a semi-autobiographical element to the character of Prince Dmitri and his reckless womanising behaviour in his later work 'Resurrection'. A well-off noble, on a visit to his aunt's country house just before joining the army, Dimitri renews a childhood romance with Katyusha, one of the maids of the household who has now grown into an attractive woman. It's not so much a renewal of an innocent romance as much being aware that he has the power, position and authority to prey on the naivety of the young woman to seduce her.

In Act II we discover that Katyusha is pregnant from that fleeting encounter. Hearing that Dimitri is returning wounded from the front on his way home to St. Petersburg, she goes to the train station to see him and tell him of her predicament. Fearful, hoping he will understand, the bleakness of the conditions don't offer much comfort to Katyusha agonising outside in the cold winter, her fate hanging in the balance. Alfano's opera (not unlike Act III of La Bohème) cleverly interweaves a scene of drinking, gambling and a drunken dispute going on in the station, a scene that also alludes to other vices of the young Tolstoy. 

When Dimitri passes by without seeing her, a beautiful woman on his arm, Katyusha's fate is sealed; vagrancy, destitution, prostitution and a decline that sees her in Act III and IV unjustly condemned to 20 years imprisonment in Siberia. Dimitri however has recognised her, is repentant of his actions, has sought her out and wants to gain forgiveness by trying to save her. Katyusha's feelings about how that can be attained however are quite different and on a different level from Dimitri.

Musically, Alfano's score is wholeheartedly verismo in its range and dynamic, reminding one certainly of Puccini. The situations, the passing of the seasons, the joy of young love and foolishness turning to trials and pain of dealing with the harsh realities of life mirror scenes in La Bohème to an extent. The difference between them is that Puccini's subjects never let him achieve the same kind of of redemptive, soaring spiritual enlightenment that Alfano reaches for in Tolstoy's writing, failing to see - perhaps realistically - any other outcome for his troubled protagonists than death.

Risurrezione strives for a higher purpose, looking beyond death and material concerns towards a spiritual rebirth, and in that respect, Katyusha's journey is perhaps closer to Manon Lescaut in its trajectory and search for redemption for past sins. In the light of Risurrezione I wonder however whether it might be worth looking anew at this lesser and often unsatisfactorily staged Puccini to consider whether he wasn't striving towards a similar transcendental experience in that problematic final act, and whether the opera might be made to work with a staging as sympathetic to it as this one is to Alfano.

In staging Risurrezione it would be enough just to match the emotional content of the music and the drama to the weather conditions of each of the seasons that accompany and heighten the situations and experiences to an almost unbearable level of anguish. The shock of the verismo realism is powerful in its own right, and Rosetta Cucchi's direction doesn't flinch from showing the grim situations to the full. Much more tricky is allowing a sense of hope and meaning for such misery and suffering to take you through to the extraordinary finale of death and rebirth, but the director does that extraordinarily well. Using the image of a young girl seen out of the corner of Katyusha's eye to occasionally wander into each scene, it's a fine way to suggest a sense of the inner woman, the inner child and the necessity to rediscover the innocence of youth.

It's a fantastic idea that works well with the intent of the piece. How much you can hear of that in Alfano's music I'm not so sure, but there is repeated motif reflecting on a photograph of Katyusha taken when she was young in garden of Prince's aunt and the director expands on this to great effect. Conductor Francesco Lanzillotta certainly brings out the fullness of the emotional content of the score, but in order to feel the pain that deeply there must be some sense of human vulnerability there, as well as the human strength to rise out of it. That comes out in all its glory in the finale of the opera and the production's magnificent staging of it.

The human element in opera is of course best expressed through the voice and although Katyusha is evidently a challenging central role to deal with emotionally as well as on a technical level Anne Sophie Duprels reprises her 2017 performance of the role at Wexford here to striking effect. Matthew Vickers is a little bit stiff by comparison, but Dimitri it must be said is a rather more difficult figure to relate to. Vickers nonetheless sings the role well enough to feel some sympathy for this character. Leon Kim sings the baritone role of Simonson, the prisoner who falls in love with Katyusha in Siberia, warmly and with feeling.

This world premiere video recording of Risurrezione, recorded in January 2020 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, is released on DVD and Blu-ray by Dynamic. Image and sound are marvellous on the Blu-ray capturing the tone of the work and its presentation well in Hi-Res Stereo LPCM and surround DTS HD-Master Audio mixes. The enclosed booklet contains a tracklist, a full detailed synopsis and an informative essay on Alfano's and an analysis of the opera. The booklet is in Italian and English. The Blu-ray is region-free, BD50, and offers subtitles in Italian, English, French, German, Korean and Japanese.

Links: Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Alfano - Risurrezione (Wexford, 2017)

Franco Alfano - Risurrezione

Wexford Festival Opera, 2017

Francesco Cilluffo, Rosetta Cucchi, Gerard Schneider, Anne Sophie Duprels, Charles Rice, Romina Tomasoni, Louise Innes

National Opera House, Wexford - 2 November 2017

Late in his life, Leo Tolstoy embraced a radical form of Christianity and would look back with disgust at the indulgence and sin of his former aristocratic upbringing. Adopting a more ascetic lifestyle he would also come to repudiate his greatest works, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, believing that art and literature had no purpose unless it was instructive. Some of his descriptions of his former life of dissolution can be found in the early semi-autobiographical work Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, and a more reflective and penitent side of his rebirth can be found in later works like The Kingdom of God is Within You, The Forged Coupon and Resurrection.

The idea of penitence and rebirth is evidently very much to the fore in Resurrection. It might seem primarily like an exercise in guilt, but Resurrection is not so much about wallowing in self-pity and self-abasement as much as reflecting on how one's actions affect others, and whether any real good can be brought about by repentance and a change of heart. Tolstoy reportedly wasn't impressed by the indulgence of Resurrection being adapted into an opera that caters to a well-off audience, but you can also see why Franco Alfano's Risurrezione didn't set the world alight and even now remains a neglected piece. It is a gloomy affair for the most part and Alfano's treatment of the work is as serious as it gets, but it is also beautiful and ultimately uplifting.

The opera is structured neatly into four parts that, since the story is instructive and not bogged down with distracting sidelines, are easily summarised. Prince Dmitri reflects Count Tolstoy's early life of indulgence of the aristocratic lifestyle, without a thought or care for the needs and feelings of others. In Act I he seduces the maid Katiusha on a fleeting visit to the family mansion and then disappears again, forgetting about her.  In Act II we discover that Katiusha is pregnant from this encounter and as a consequence she has been thrown out of the house and her life has fallen into ruin. She abandons an attempt to tell Dmitri about the situation when she discovers him with a prostitute.

Dmitri belatedly discovers Katiusha's fate, which has ended up with her becoming a prostitute and falsely imprisoned, and he tries to make up for what has happened in Act III, visiting the fallen woman in prison. He pleads that he knew nothing of what had happened, that he is still in love with her and that he can help get her released from the harsh prison environment so that they can marry, but Katiusha remains impervious to his entreaties and doesn't believe that he can really change his ways.

Alfano sets Risurrezione very much in the Italian verismo style of the day, which proves to be quite appropriate, at least for these first three acts. It's actually not unlike La Bohème, the meeting of Dmitri and Katiusha in Act I similar to that of Rodolfo and Mimi; on shaky ground from the start, the brief spark between them soon extinguished by the cruel reality of their circumstances. In Risurrezione, Act II and III also relate closely to the situation in Act III of La Bohème, where attempts to rekindle the spark seem even more unlikely; the couple despairing of the impossibility of their union. Surely death is also on the horizon in Risurrezione?

Well yes and no, and that's the point of Tolstoy's work. Hard lessons have to be learned, there needs to be an acceptance of one's true self and true repentance and reparation. Dmitri tries to show this, but it is worthless without Katiusha's acceptance and forgiveness, which can also only come with an acceptance of her own true self. This is visually represented in Rosetta Cucchi's impressive Wexford production by a young girl seen briefly throughout, but to be fair it's hinted at in Alfano's score, which is not as relentlessly downbeat as it sounds, but alive to dynamic and emotional tone.

The focus is very much on Dmitri and Katiusha for most of Act I, much of Act II, the latter part of Act III and all of Act IV.  Considering the challenging nature of their characters' predicaments, that places a lot of pressure on Gerard Schneider and Anne Sophie Duprels, but both take their parts exceptionally well, remaining strong and consistently lyrical throughout. Alfano does however break the story down into memorable scenes with a greater variety of dramatic situation than might be expected, even if variation of the overall despairing tenor of the work up to the final scene is negligible.

That makes Risurrezione quite a challenging work also for a conductor trying to harness Alfano's verismo score towards the true character of Tolstoy's original work. Francesco Cilluffo however drew a magnificent performance out of the Wexford Festival orchestra that was entirely sympathetic to the sensibility of the work and the composer's treatment, holding to a consistent through-line while finding the right adjustments of volume and tempo to allow the score to hit all of its dramatic points. The Italianate orchestration might seem at odds with the spiritual Russian side of the work, but Cilluffo uses the verismo aspects of the score as another way of trying to find "truth", albeit in a very different way from Tolstoy.

The conclusion then in Act IV is worth waiting for, even though the treatment up to that point never drags or begs indulgence but is rather just earnest and purposeful. For the climactic moment of enlightenment Alfano has to abandon his verismo principles for a heavenly choir as an inner revelation dawns (literally) on both Dmitri and Katiusha and takes them to a spiritual awakening. It really does strike the perfect note of transcendental attainment that the work should be aiming to reach. The traditional operatic death that might be expected at the conclusion then is replaced by a metaphorical death, a letting go of the past and to ways that have held both Dmitri and Katiusha back from being open to their better nature, allowing them to be reborn, resurrected.

Links: Wexford Festival Opera

Dvořák - The Jacobin (Buxton Festival 2014 - Buxton)

Antonin Dvořák - The Jacobin

Buxton Festival, 2014

Stephen Barlow, Stephen Unwin, Andrew Greenan, Nicholas Lester, James McOran-Campbell, Anne Sophie Duprels, Nicholas Folwell, Matthew Newlin, Bonaventura Bottone, Anna Patalong, Martha McLorinan

Buxton Opera House - 24 July 2014

There are a lot of lost or forgotten operas and they usually aren't performed for a good reason, whether it's changing fashions and taste, or the fact that they often they just aren't very good. The wonderful thing about the Buxton Festival's revivals of neglected operas is that you not only get a chance to determine whether a rarely performed work has any merit, but you can be almost certain that if an obscure opera has been chosen to be produced at the festival, it's usually because it's worth it. Dvořák's The Jacobin is, on this showing, clearly an opera worth reviving.

Musically, at least. Anyone who has had the opportunity to hear The Jacobin before (it was performed in concert version at the Barbican a year or so ago), will certainly have noted the beauty and the richness of melody in Dvořák's writing. There's more to an opera than just music however, it has to work dramatically on the stage. While the merits and pacing of the plot here are rather more open to question than the qualities of the music, the success of such a work can often depend on the interpretation and direction. In both respects, The Jacobin is traditionally in good hands at the Buxton Festival.

Stephen Barlow and the Northern Chamber Orchestra clearly relished the opportunity to explore and give full expression to Dvořák's warm melodic writing for The Jacobin. It's not the most sophisticated music, but it's full of wonderfully simple but catchy tunes that are appropriate for the content and the context. In addition to some beautiful arias and some fine multi-layered ensemble singing, Dvořák uses folk music as a basis for the arrangements, particularly the choral pieces that give it a strong national character. The influence of Wagner is not so evident here as much as Bellini, if you can imagine Bellini writing national anthems, or perhaps think of a more melodic Wagnerian flow in a Massenet style.

As a Czech national opera however, and as a comedy moreover, The Jacobin must also look to Smetana's The Bartered Bride. While it relies on many of the characteristics of the comic opera - arranged marriages to horrible old men that threatens the pure love of a young couple, dark family secrets that come to light when a long-lost family member returns - there's a feeling that The Jacobin almost tries to be too clever and risks trivialising or at least marginalising the simple mechanics of the plot for the sake of enriching it musically.

The actual plot is not the most sophisticated, operating on two main situations - one dramatic and one comic. The dramatic plotline involves the return of Bohuš with his new wife Julie back to his Bohemian hometown, where rumours have been spread of him becoming a Jacobin revolutionary during his stay in Paris. This rumour suits his brother Adolf, who stands to gain the inheritance of his father, Count Harasova, in the absence of his disinherited brother. Fully aware of the danger, Adolf ensures that his steward Filip has the stranger with false papers arrested. The comic plotline involves Terinka, the daughter of the music teacher Benda, being forced into a marriage with steward, when she is in love with Jiří. As the leading voices in Benda's choir, they use the occasion of singing rehearsals for a celebration for the Count to find a way of being together and thwarting Filip.

The choral practice takes up rather more of the opera than you might think relevant to the plot, and it seems a little indulgent on the part of the composer - Dvořák that is, as much as on the part of Benda who has pretensions to be the new Mozart. While this does give Dvořák the opportunity of writing serenades and anthemic choral pieces and blending those into the simple folk melodies and dramatic situations, it's not entirely gratuitous. Music does indeed play an important role in The Jacobin. The major resolutions are brought about not so much by revelations about identity as character. Julie's recollection (in a beautiful rendition by Anne Sophie Duprels) of nostalgic folk songs she has learned from her husband, ensure his release on the principle that they can't be bad people if they love the music of our country this much. In many ways, the music also saves Jiří and Terinka, who are indispensable to the music master.

As such, the quality of the singing is by no means a small matter in this opera, and this is a not a consideration neglected in Buxton productions either. There's a recognition that it's in the supposedly secondary characters where the real charm of The Jacobin lies and in this respect, the casting of Benda, Filip, Jiří and Terinka is perfect. Between them there's plenty of enthusiasm, bluster and good-humoured conflict. The singing is just delightful, as much in individual voices as in the blending of them (the English translation moreover working superbly in bringing together all those interweaving voices expressing conflicting sentiments. The staging, updated to a 1930s setting, was deceptively simple but worked remarkably well, Stephen Unwin focussing on the direction and interaction of the diverse characters, making them work well with one another. The Northern Chamber Orchestra were on outstanding form, showing a real feel for the drive and melody of the work, bringing it all together and showing just how wonderfully entertaining The Jacobin can be.

Saint-Saëns - La Princesse Jaune & Gounod - La Colombe

Camille Saint-Saëns - La Princesse Jaune
Charles Gounod - La Colombe

Buxton Festival, 2013

Stephen Barlow, Francis Matthews, Anne Sophie Duprels, Ryan MacPherson, Gillian Keith, Emma Carrington, Ryan MacPherson, Jonathan Best

Buxton Opera House - 5 July 2013

The choice of works for this year's Festival Double Bill feature at Buxton were perhaps not the most challenging or adventurous works (there is however another pairing of Sciarrino's Luci mie Traditici and Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King if you're looking for something rather bolder), but as well as reviving two undeservedly obscure works that one would rarely ever have the opportunity to see elsewhere, the pairing here of two opéra-comique works by Camille Sant-Saëns and Charles Gounod proved to be perfectly complementary, highly entertaining and maybe even a little thought provoking.

Considered on their own merits it has to be said that neither of the two short works are ever likely to enter standard repertory or ever be considered alongside such grand and great works by the composers of Samson et Dalila and Faust, but the intentions and the audiences for both Saint-Saëns' La Princesse Jaune and Gounod's La Colombe are very different.  Composed for the Opéra-Comique in Paris, both works are musically and dramatically typical examples of the comic operetta, with no greater ambitions than to provide a bit of light entertainment.  If the musical approach differs between the two composers - one interesting element that is highlighted by their being performed together like this - one thing that they have in common is that they are very much of their time.

Buxton however very cleverly linked the two works together by playing to their somewhat La Bohème character, both works taking place in neighbouring apartments of a dilapidated building in a rather shabby quarter of Paris.  La Princesse Jaune (The Yellow Princess), although originally set in Holland, here takes place in the bohemian garret of two artists.  One of them, Kornélis is obsessed with the image of a Japanese woman (dressed in a yellow kimono here to make the racial implications of the title less problematic) that he is compelled to endlessly paint.  He is so obsessed with the painted lady that he doesn't notice that his cousin Léna - who rather scandalously seems to share the apartment with him - is in love with him.  Under the influence of who knows what drug or concoction, Kornélis however starts to believe that Léna is his Princess come to life and only eventually comes to the realisation of his love for "the real thing".

La Princesse Jaune a little bit repetitive in its elaboration of this simple and absurd situation through a series of duets and solo pieces for two singers, but it's beautifully composed and structured nonetheless.  It's partly a satire on the obsession with all things Oriental during the period when it was written (1872) and Sant-Saëns even introduces pastiche pentatonic scale Japanese themes into the music, but he also defines the romantic flights of fancy of Kornélis with his poetic musings on love and beauty with the rather more down-to-earth immediate concerns of Léna.  One can't live on poetry even though it burns very nicely as we've seen in La Bohème, and like Rodolfo and Mimi the man and the woman have very different ideals on the subject of love.  In a way however, as light and entertaining as it is, La Princess Jaune nonetheless explores questions of illusion and reality in the transformative power of art and love to enrich our rather more mundane lives.

Different ideals on the question of love and the necessity nonetheless of putting food on the table are also to the fore in Gounod's La Colombe (The Dove).  This is a very different side of Gounod from the familiar grand scale compositions - even if Faust was itself also originally written for the Opéra-Comique with sections of spoken dialogue.  La Colombe on the other hand is very much an operetta in its subject matter as well as in its light musical numbers.  Performed in English here at Buxton, it's similarity to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan or with an Oscar Wilde comic farce are even more evident.

The question of a romantic ideal here can be symbolised within the figure of the dove (which fortuitously rhymes with love in English).  Horace keeps it as a memory of his love for the Countess, and even names it Sylvia after her. He's still faithful to the memory of the love they once shared even though she mistreated him, spent all his money and then abandoned him, leaving him penniless.  Horace and his servant Mazet now eke out a miserable existence in an unsavoury district of Paris, housed just below a couple of disreputable artists on the floor above, one of whom has an obsession with all things Japanese (Anne Sophie Duprels' Léna making a cameo appearance during the overture here).

Musically, La Colombe doesn't appear to offer the same riches that can be found in the Sant-Saëns work that preceded it, but here in its two-act 1866 version, it's similarly well-constructed and has a rather more entertaining variety in the series of mishaps of its plot when Sylvia turns up looking to purchase the dove.  She has no romantic notions associated with the dove, but rather just wants it as another social fashion to compete with the parrot owned by her rival, the Countess Amalia.  Keen to show the depths of his devotion to his former lover but unable to provide her with a suitable meal, Horace, unaware of the nature of her visit, orders Mazet and Maître Jean (Sylvia's manservant) to serve up the only fresh and edible food in the house - the dove.

On their own merit then neither work is of any great depth, but as usual they way that they are brought together is intriguing and, in many ways, they each enhance the other and bring out common elements that might not otherwise be noticed.  In order to do that however, the performances have to be strong and consistent and that's one of Buxton's strong points.  Every element is in perfect accord with the other, the whole thing thoughtfully considered and presented in an ingenious stage design by Lez Brotherston that allows this cross-pollination to occur.  The musical interpretation under Stephen Barlow was absolutely marvellous, both works delivered with verve and character and sung magnificently by a very strong cast.

Undoubtedly however, the key to the success of bring these rather old-fashioned works to life lies with the direction of Francis Matthews.  Every movement and gesture, every line of dialogue and tone of delivery in the singing was used to bring out the full richness of the comic potential of the works and even finding unexpected depths by linking common themes between them.  Great works they are perhaps not, but this year's Festival Double Bill was a richly entertaining concoction and a showcase for the kind of talent that is a hallmark of the Buxton Festival.