MUSIC / Airs on a shoestring

THE Wexford Opera Festival is a missing-persons bureau. It exists to find the lost, the rare, the forgotten and composers such as Tchaikovsky do not, by and large, qualify. But next month is the centenary of Tchaikovsky's death, and Wexford's season opened on Thursday with the virtually unheard (outside Russia) Cherevichki - usually translated as The Tsarina's Slippers or The Golden Slippers but more properly, if more prosaically, means 'boots'. You can understand why the English nomenclature is inexact.

It's harder to understand why the piece is never done - it's an enchanting score, alive with melody and uncharacteristic fun. I can think of two half- explanations. It has a messy history, being a revision of an earlier opera, Vakula the Smith, that Tchaikovsky himself dismissed as too dense in detail and texture. And it was in competition with a second opera on the same subject, Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve, which, like Cherevichki, derives from a winter-fantasy folk tale by Gogol (amorous devils, trips to the moon and a flying visit to the court of Catherine the Great). Christmas Eve is better, fuller theatre; but Cherevichki is better music (a poignant soprano- mezzo duet in the last act bears comparison with almost anything in Tchaikovsky's vocal canon) and surprising music for a composer disinclined toward folkloristic nationalism, buoyant with Ukrainian dance tunes and a bright declamatory verve designed to handle boisterous Russian humour.

Boisterous was the word at Wexford, where the staging is noisy with gags about sausages as love gifts (graded by size) and people climbing into ovens. But sometimes the old jokes are the best, and Francesca Zambello's production is a masterly confection of old jokes, retold with a double-edged innocence that find the right tone: Gogolian absurdism, but softened by the magic fantasy of folklore into something more genial than Gogol's later, civic satires. It looks right too, with sets by Bruno Schwengl that sustain an amazing turnover of spectacle on glue and cardboard. Wexford has a tiny theatre and a comparable budget. Its designers have to make a virtue of economy, and Schwengl's way with snow, coarse-cut from sheets of paper and dispatched through open doors like malevolent confetti, was an object lesson in the Poor way to do it. Loudly, with a bow.

Apart from thrift, Wexford is famous for importing unknown foreign singers, and the Cherevichki cast is largely, gloriously, massively Russian, with a particularly attractive young Ukrainian soprano, Marina Levitt, and an outstanding lyric baritone, Anatoly Lochak. The chorus (home-grown) is strong and motivated. And the conductor, Alexander Anissimov (a regular at the Kirov), is impressive, despite some out-of-step ensembles. Altogether, this is one of the most joyously uplifting shows I've seen at Wexford. And if it isn't the hit of Ireland's opera season (of which, more next week) there'll be some eating of hats to do.

While Wexford cultivates repertoire, the Walton Foundation summer course cultivates singers, both British and Italian, to reflect the life of William Walton (b. Oldham, d. Ischia). This year's course project, Rossini's La Cenerentola, was playing last weekend at Clonter Opera Farm in Cheshire.

The Walton course is less about singing than about stagecraft: the small print of performance. That isn't chic these days, with its Pavlovian resonance of lessons in deportment, how to pour a cup of tea convincingly as you toss off top-register roulades. Directors are usually after more robust expressions of dramatic truth. But for young singers it's more useful to be prepared than to be liberated, and on the Walton course they are prepared with painstaking thoroughness by Colin Graham: the man who 20 years ago, was English opera, who brought the later Britten stage works to the stage, and established the theatrical focus of ENO as its Director of Production. Then ENO moved on, its culture changed, and Graham moved to America. He hasn't worked at the Coliseum for years; and it will be interesting to see if the new ENO regime, whose line on radical production may be softer, will invite him back.

Meanwhile here he is, teaching singers to care about detail. And the Cenerentola was a thorough piece of work, with fine-cut and intelligent performances, especially from two Italians, Mauro Utzeri (Dandini) and Umberto Chiummo (Alidoro), making significant hellos to British opera. Watching it, I thought there was something to be said for a return to conventional values in opera - if it could only be said without sounding like a floor speech at Blackpool.

Christa Ludwig is saying goodbye. She has said it in New York, Salzburg and Paris, and she said it at the Wigmore Hall in the first of two recitals that mark her retirement from singing. Goodbyes hardly get much longer. But it has been a long career - some 47 years since her debut, aged 18, as Orlovsky in Die Fledermaus - and a glorious one. I doubt if there has been a greater Mahler mezzo in modern times; and the genial synthesis of domesticity and glamour in her personality - the archetype of rich but sympathetic Munich housewives - has been ideal for Strauss. And Brahms. And Hugo Wolf.

But Thursday's recital was given over to Schubert's Die Winterreise, and it was equivocal: suitably chilled but without the potential to freeze the soul that the very greatest interpreters (including, I think, Birgitte Fassbaender) convey. Her tempi were free - especially in 'Der Lindenbaum' where she seemed to be saying: this song is not an anthem - but to the point of undermining the controlled intensity the cycle should be building. On the other hand, there was a wonderful, unforced musicianship at work here, supportively accompanied by the pianist Charles Spencer, and a voice that still delivers an enchanting purity of tone. Ms Ludwig can afford to stretch out her goodbyes. She's quitting on a high, with no sense, vocally, of time running against her; and no lover of the lieder repertory would want her to hurry.

Finally, a triumph of history over the history books: the British premiere of Berlioz's Messe Solonnelle at Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday (John Eliot Gardiner conducting his superb Orchestre Romantique et Revolutionnaire and Monteverdi Choir) after a century of Berlioz scholarship had written off the score as lost - burnt, in dissatisfaction, by the composer himself. In fact it had been given away and was discovered last year in a Belgian organ loft: a significant find in that, as Tuesday's performance proved, the Messe stands in relation to later scores such as the Requiem, Sinfonie Fantastique and Te Deum as a sketchbook where ideas were not only essayed but substantially developed. The discovery means that music classified as 'mature' Berlioz has to be reclassified as 'early', challenging long-held assumptions of stylistic analysis. And although its early format isn't always strong (the Messe is an uneven work; to hear it is to understand why Berlioz abandoned it), there is conviction in its promise. A score to be enjoyed with hindsight.