WFO, 31/10/2022

Deutscher : Cinderella

Wexford Festival Children's Chorus

Wexford Festival Ensemble

Andrew Synnott

Alma Deutscher didn't take things as far as Rossini for her take on Cinderella, there is a fairy involved (though not necessarily a fairy godmother), but there's no lost slipper, rather a lost song, a poem and its melody looking to be matched, as Cinderella, a thwarted composer, and Prince Theodore, a discouraged poet at heart, seek their match in each other.  There's a singing competition in which - shades of Wagner's Meistersinger, which Deutscher acknowledges by quoting the Masters' March to introduce the competition - Griselda, one of the stepsisters, has stolen Cinderella's composition, and sings it to a completely inappropriate text, and that sparks off the Prince's interest.  

Deutscher was a staggeringly youthful 10 years old when Cinderella - her second opera, although the first is a very brief affair - was first performed, in 2015.  She has revised it several times since then, including setting it for full symphony orchestra rather than the chamber ensemble originally envisaged.  It is that chamber orchestra that the Wexford Factory opted for here, however, which offered some lovely clarity of playing and textures, under the alert direction of Andrew Synnott.

Cinderella to my mind classifies as an opéra-comique, revised for modern days.  There's a fair bit of spoken dialogue, there's flat-out comedy, and plenty of good sentiments.  Musically, its roots are in 19th Century light opera or operetta, there's a bit of the Viennese in there, as well as a distinct hint of Sullivan.  The orchestra has a nice quality of opulence to it, a touch of Richard Strauss here and there, and the score is certainly very melodic.  She has a tendency to write somewhat twiddly vocal lines.  Sometimes, it works very well; when the stepsisters are trying to one-up each other before leaving for the ball, each sure of her superiority over the other, their vocal lines are filled with Rossinian roulades, which just makes them even more ridiculous.  There are a lot of other places, though, where there are turns and grace notes which are just fiddly and strike me as extraneous, and the vocal parts could be smoothed out without any loss of character.  That said, for a ten-to-fifteen year-old (the period of creation and revision of the opera), it's an astonishing piece of work, for she wrote the libretto too, which is sometimes a little twee, but other times genuinely touching.  

Produced by Wexford Factory, the festival's academy for young singers, the production was clean and simple, a little colourless in the costumes, but well-dressed.  Director Davide Gasparo made the most of the humour, but has given it a bittersweet conclusion, a final message of hope, but not necessarily of fulfilment, which creates another link back to the world of Viennese operetta, and Lehár in particular, whose speciality that was.  Megan O'Neill was an appealing, fresh-voiced Cinderella, with Richard Shaffrey as her Prince, a bit edgy in his first scene, but becoming warmer-toned later on.  Both Ami Hewitt (Stepmother) and Hannah O'Brien (Griselda) were a bit shrill; their characters lend themselves to that, but I still found it a little grating.  Deirdre Arratoon deployed a maternal near-contralto as the Fairy, calming and reassuring.  

The opera as a whole does not need an adult chorus - there are thirteen adult singers, most of whom double-up as chorus when required - but does call for a small junior chorus, much appreciated by the audience (which clearly held a good proportion of family members) despite some intonation issues.  There were intonation issues throughout, including in the orchestra, at times, but nothing so egregious as to be really disruptive.  The overall impression was sweet, charming and very agreeably tuneful.  The question is whether, as she grows older, Deutscher will be able (or want) to produce a dramatic work with some teeth to it.

[Next : 5th November]