Jules Massenet's "Sapho", which opened at the Wexford Festival on Saturday, has a plot that is intriguingly similar to that of Verdi's "La traviata". But there's no Dumas connection in Massenet's work. The later tale of a young man's ill-fated liaison with a woman of looser morals is taken, with much modification, from an autobiographical novel by Alphonse Daudet.
In "Sapho" it's not parental intervention which drives young Jean away from his beloved Fanny (nicknamed Sapho), but his discovery of her chequered past and long list of former lovers. Reconciliation is attempted, but her awareness of his lingering revulsion persuades her that they are better apart.
Massenet pictures Jean rather crudely, a rash black-and-white character who's made quite insufferable in the hectoring, pseudo-Italianate singing of US tenor Brandon Jovanovich. Sapho herself is drawn in greater depth, but there's always a sense of distance between Jovanovich's Jean and the Sapho of Italian soprano Giuseppina Piunti, who is actually at her most persuasive when driven to rage by the former friends whose indiscretion wrecks her hitherto idyllic relationship.
Piunti's wide-ranging approach encompasses delicacy as well as rage, but the soft singing of Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, as Jean's good-girl, orphaned cousin IrΦne, carried a tingle factor of quite a different order.
The closest the Wexford production comes to the effect of a love duet is actually a scene between Jean and his mother, Divonne, sung with fruity vibrato by the Polish mezzo soprano Agata Bienkowska.
Italian tenor Massimiliano Gagliardo is a paler presence as Jean's father, CΘsaire.
Director Fabio Sparvoli seems to have taken his cue from the view that "Sapho" is as close as Massenet ever got to verismo and he steers a course that's rather too sensationalist, lumbering the parents with unnecessary buffoonery in the process.
He may, of course, feel that Massenet himself has taken some similar short-cuts, not least in the way he repeatedly rounds scenes off with an implausibly abrupt change of musical direction.
Giorgio Ricchelli's quite spartan settings contrast with the richly evocative period costumes of Alexandra Torella.
The National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, under Jean-Luc Tingaud, injects the often restrained orchestral writing with flashes of bright colour. On the whole, however, one is left with the feeling that there's a potential in this earnest work that this production fails to unlock.
