Arcana at the Opera – Balfe: The Rose of Castile @ Wexford Festival Opera

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Don Florio / Conor Cooper; Don Sallust / Jonah Halton; Don Pedro / Rory Musgrave; Queen Elvira of Leon / Eleri Gwilym

Only in Wexford could their compact version of Michael William Balfe’s The Rose of Castile (1857), presented as a ‘pocket opera’ in the National Opera House’s smaller Jerome Hynes Stage, carry the faintest air of disloyalty alongside it. Balfe spent part of his childhood in Wexford, before studying in London, Rome, and Paris, and his legacy was tended in Ireland long after his death in 1870: Joyce punned on The Rose of Castile in Ulysses, while ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’, the best-known aria from The Bohemian Girl (1843), received the honour of an Enya cover in 1991. Full productions of The Rose of Castile headlined the first Wexford Festival of Music and the Arts in 1951 (excerpts available on YouTube) and the fortieth anniversary of the Festival in 1991; it shows how far Balfe’s star has fallen – or how many other composers  Wexford has rehabilitated – for the seventy-fifth anniversary to demote The Rose of Castile to a seventy-minute reduction.

Manuel / Eamonn Walsh; Queen Elvira of Leon / Eleri Gwilym

It was probably the right decision. The Rose of Castile is competent if slightly bloodless late bel canto. At his best, Balfe can produce as gorgeous a lyric line as Bellini, and his coloratura writing is pacy, but his drinking songs and laughing choruses are easier to lose patience with. Music director Rebecca Warren kept a firm hand on the score on the Hynes Stage’s Victorian toned piano.

Music Director / Rebecca Warren; Donna Carmen / Erin Fflur

The plot is similarly Victorian: Spanish royals slumming it in disguise, plotting cousins, mistaken identities, and love and virtue triumphant in the end. To make sense of the reduced version, stage director Heather Hadrill introduced a hard-boiled gumshoe narrator (Peter McCamley, with a juicy New York accent) to recap the plot, which was updated from medieval Spain to the 1920s. Besides flapper dresses and Peaky Blinders headgear, designer Lisa Krügel produced a striking set on the small stage where gilded frames and oversized playing cards did duty for a nightclub and the royal palace.

Narrator / Peter Camley; Don Sallust / Jonah Halton; Don Florio / Conor Cooper; Don Pedro / Rory Musgrave

The cast all took their mission seriously. They were knowing rather than tongue-in-cheek, and had uniformly flawless diction. Especial praise for Eleri Gwilym, as Queen Elvira, who has a spectacular bel canto voice and flowing coloratura. Likewise, Irish tenor Eamonn Walsh as Manuel the muleteer (and maybe more) is also a very compelling bel cantist. ‘Twas rank and fame that tempted thee’, an aria that became a popular drawing room ballad (and also made it into Ulysses), stopped precisely short of being over-sentimental. Honourable mentions to Rory Musgrave as scheming Don Pedro, Conor Cooper and Jonah Halton as his accomplices, and Erin Fflur as Donna Carmen, Elvira’s maid of honour. A bright and well drilled ensemble did full justice to a Wexford stalwart.

The Rose of Castile runs as part of Wexford Festival Opera on 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31 October 2026

Published post no.3,053 – Tuesday 18 October 2026

New music – Hannah Peel: Underland Original Score (Rivertones)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the press release

Hannah Peel’s original score Underland, Robert Petit’s film based on the Robert Macfarlane book of the same name, is out on CD today via Rivertones, followed by a world premiere of the score next week, part of the Hannah Peel In Focus series at the Barbican on 23-24 October 2026.

Hannah Peel’s Underland draws a glorious and vivid electronic map of the ground below, and what comes buried beneath that ground. Melodies that feel like they’ve been lifted directly from the soil merge with rhythm tracks that could be insects burrowing caves through the undergrowth, and gorgeous ambient echoes intertwined with spectral voices… these elements in Hannah’s hands are the true sound of the underground.

The premiere performance of Underland has been adapted by Kieran Brunt and will be performed by contemporary vocal ensemble Shards. For this unique performance, the score combines choir and electronics with stunning imagery from the film, adapted for stage by the director, Robert Petit.

Talking about the source material, Peel says, “I had read Robert’s book back in 2019, and even included some words from it for my 2022 album ‘The Unfolding’. The chance to actually compose for the book’s film in return though: beautiful synchronicity!”
Going on to explain, “Scoring for these astronauts of the underworld, those sacred ancient cave systems, the mysteries of the universe’s secrets, exploring what would they actually sound like? Those haunting descents that remind us of our planet’s past and future, asking us to look deep into our ancestors’ stories and evaluate where we will go next, made it a profound film to work on. I used ancient Mayan Pod Trumpets and an iron age horn called a Carnyx mixed with baroque choir, string orchestra and synths to bring to life a score that had to combine mythology, technology and possibility.”

Hannah Peel In Focus is a two-day takeover at the Barbican, opening on Friday 23 October at Milton Court on 23 October with PIA – a brand-new live music and dance production for her 7-movement odyssey Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia (2020). The production was created with choreographer Katya Bourvis and creative producer Tala Lee-Turton, and will be shaped by the sound of a 17-piece brass band.

This will be followed on Saturday 24 October with the Underland premiere and a live performance by Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang of their recent album The Endless Dance (Real World Recordings), an album grounded in the strength of ancient concepts. This will be a rare chance to see the album performed, as it comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, the artists travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion that includes rice bowls and a jawbone.

Hannah Peel won Discovery of the Year at the World Soundtrack Awards last week with her score for Midwinter Break.

Underland is out today on CD via Rivertones

Published post no.3,052 – Monday 19 October 2026

Arcana at the Opera – Mascagni: Iris @ Wexford Festival Opera

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Leyla Gu and members of the chorus in Iris, by Pietro Mascagni, O’Reilly Theatre National Opera House Wexford

Rosetta Cucchi, Francesco Cilluffo, and a well-picked cast make the strongest possible case for an unsettling but still rewarding work.

Reviewed by Tom Hardwick Photos by Padraig Grant

Wexford Opera Festival began their seventy-fifth anniversary season with a convincing production of Pietro Mascagni’s 1898 Iris. Set in Japan, it springs from the same vein of late nineteenth century japonisme that produced both The Mikado and Madama Butterfly (and Luigi Illica wrote both Puccini’s and Mascagni’s libretti), but its plot makes it a much harder pill to swallow. The young Iris’s sunlit, bucolic life playing with her dolls and caring for her blind father is invaded by the rake Osaka and the procurer Kyoto (Illica may never have visited Japan, but he had certainly seen it on the map). Osaka is desperate to possess Iris, so Kyoto distracts her with a puppet show in which Osaka appears as the son of the Sun God and abducts her. They take her to Kyoto’s geisha house where Osaka, no longer divine, fails to seduce her. Iris begs to go home but he discards her. Kyoto puts Iris on show to passers-by in the red-light district: her father, who has traced her there, finds her and curses her. She throws herself into the sewers, where ragpickers strip her dying body. A sea of flowers raises her to the sun, where at last she finds peace.

Yu Shao, Meilir Jones, Joshua Baxter, dancers, chorus in Iris, by Pietro Mascagni, O’Reilly Theatre National Opera House Wexford

Iris is an unrelenting, unsparing story of a young woman’s exploitation by men which offers little uplift, and it is not difficult to see why it isn’t frequently performed. Rosetta Cucchi, Wexford’s artistic director, first came to Wexford in 1995 to work on the festival’s first production of Iris, and chose to direct her own version this year. Devoid of Orientalist distraction, the production sees the world through Iris’s eyes, made visible through Thomas Achitz’s striking video projections and Tiziano Santi’s spare but telling sets: kudos to both for creating a last act rubbish heap that managed to be both repellent and elegant.

Jolyon Loy, Yuchen Pan, Hannah Scully, dancers, chorus in Iris, by Pietro Mascagni, O’Reilly Theatre National Opera House Wexford

Leyla Gu, as Iris, kept her voice in check as the unspoiled girl of the first act, before unleashing her reserves in the second and third acts. Her second act ‘octopus aria’, describing a temple screen decorated with a scene of a young woman being smothered by an octopus (curious readers search for images of the original at their own risk), grew to an engrossing, queasy climax. Long-standing Wexford collaborator Joseph Calleja sang Osaka with conviction: ‘apri la tua finestra’, an extremely popular stand-alone aria during Mascagni’s lifetime, was almost irresistible. Younger baritone Jolyon Loy was a sinister leather jacketed Kyoto who moved from smooth to snarling. Wexford always takes care with smaller roles, and tenor Yu Shao shone as the beggar and ragpicker.

The opera begins and ends with the powerful, radiant Hymn to the Sun, probably the opera’s best-known piece, where the Wexford Chorus were well drilled by Andrew Synnott and sparely, effectively choreographed. Iris is conductor Francesco Cilluffo’s third Mascagni for Wexford, and he gave a lyrical account of the score. There is hard-won redemption of a sort in Iris’s final transfiguration from the gutter to the sky (taken literally, as Leyla Gu was hoisted up as the curtain fell). It’s a tribute to the director and cast that the journey never felt impossible, nor the destination a let-down.

Iris runs as part of Wexford Festival Opera on 15, 20, 23, 28 and 31 October 2026

Published post no.3,051 – Sunday 18 October 2026

Pulse Music – Steve Reich: Melodica (1966)

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by Ben Hogwood Photo credit Jeffrey Herman

Background

Reich’s short but dazzling group of pieces for tape signs off with Melodica. The composer lays out clear instructions in the score, an image of which appears in his Writings On Music compendium. He describes its genesis in typically concise fashion:

“Melodica is composed of one tape loop gradually going out of phase with itself, first in two voices and then in four. The original loop is of myself playing the four-note pattern on the melodica, a toy instrument. I dreamed the melodic pattern, woke up on May 22nd, 1966, and realized the piece with the melodica and tape loops in one day. Melodica was composed of musical pitches, as opposed to the speech fragments used in my two earlier tape pieces, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). It proved to be both a transition phase shifting process, and the last tape piece I ever made.”

Listen

Thoughts

For the first time, Reich’s music does away with speech, applying the development of phase patterns to pitched music played on an instrument. This is a simple, jerky four note motif played on the melodica – whose repetitions can be jarring to start with. The key moment is just before two minutes in, where the phase shifting becomes noticeable to the untrained ear, and the echo effects start off those now-familiar sensations where the ear starts to pick out fleeting movements between the parts.

As the parts double from two to four, the melodic shapes dance in the mind’s eye, the rhythms bouncing off the walls – a dazzling effect for something so apparently simple! Then, almost without warning, the music stops, like switching off a radio – but continues to reverberate in the listener’s ears long after the sounds have died.

A postcard of minimalism, Melodica is a critical stage in Reich’s development as the emphasis shifts to instrumental music.

Recordings

Melodica – to my surprise – does not appear anywhere in Reich’s recorded oeuvre, though as you see above is easily accessed on YouTube.

Also written / released in 1966 Marvin Gaye Moods of Marvin Gaye; Frank Sinatra Strangers in the Night; Ligeti Lux Aeterna

Next up: Piano Phase (1967)

Published post no.3,050– Saturday 17 October 2026

Switched On – Digitonal: The Night Album (Just Music)

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Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

A great deal of thought has gone into Andrew Dobson‘s return to the long playing format under the Digitonal alias, after an absence of six years. The Night Album, released close to midsummer’s day in the UK, takes the small hours as its inspiration.

Dobson decided this would be his first fully solo album, and in addition – conscious of the lurking presence of AI – decided he would play all the instruments himself. As he said, “The electronics became a provocation for me to respond to and the production process a way of pushing my own limits and shaping something intentional.”

Having moved from London to Suffolk, Dobson experiences a slower pace of life – and reflects that in the album, designed as a nine-part suite journeying through the night time.

What’s the music like?

There has always been a poise to Dobson’s best work, and here it runs right through the music of The Night Album. To that we can add a deeper emotion, for there are some exquisite moments here that reward attentive listening in particular.

The clarinet has always been involved in Digitonal’s best moments and so it proves again here, with the beautifully weighted For The Birds. The riff is a subtly nagging one, mellow and thoughtful, while the cool accompanying keyboard sets just the right, peaceful mood. Similar qualities are at work in The Night Sparrow, though here the textures twinkle in the higher register. Evening Song takes the weight off its feet with a deceptively easy keyboard, mulling over its possibilities, while the closing Moon Sequence is a dappled beauty, resting easily if thoughtfully.

Does it all work?

It does, and works in all areas where noise-free listening can be secured. While very pleasant in the background, foreground listening is the way to go.

Is it recommended?

Yes. Digitonal maintains his high quality musical output but this is a notable step forward, allowing people to find peace in the small hours when they have The Night Album for accompaniment. From experience, it’s just as good in the middle of the day!

For fans of…Bonobo, Quantic, Zero 7, Bibio

Listen / Buy

Published post no.3,049 – Friday 16 October 2026