Organization

Wexford Festival Opera

Stage director

Orpha Phelan

Conductor

David Angus

Libretto

Michel Carré

Singer

Tenor

Pablo Bemsch

Noureddin

Set designer

Madeleine Boyd

Costume designer

Baritone

Ben McAteer

Baskir

Soprano

Niamh O'Sullivan

Mirza

Bass

Emyr Wyn Jones

Bakbara

Thomas D Hopkinson

Kaboul

Gabrielle Philiponet

Lalla-Roukh

Choreographer

Amy Share-Kissiov

French

Wexford

Ireland

O’Reilly Theatre

Lalla-Roukh David

Public

English

Approved

Born in Dublin to a mother who came from Wexford, Moore enjoyed immediate success with his Irish Melodies — the source of such famous songs as The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer — and his ‘Oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh increased that fame. Tapping into Romantic sensibilities and capitalising on the popularity of The Thousand and One Nights, it inspired several operas by composers as diverse as Gaspare Spontini and Anton Rubinstein, not to mention Charles Villiers Stanford’s first opera The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, heard at Wexford in 2019. Further indicating its wide appeal to composers, there is also Schumann’s great choral-orchestral work Paradies und die Peri.

Even in this company, David’s work stands out for its delicate evocation of Kashmir and Samarkand. It has been praised for its ‘dreamy atmosphere and aromatic orchestration’. The hard-to-please Héctor Berlioz was quick to admire Lalla Roukh and it was almost instantly recognised as the composer’s masterpiece.

Wexford audiences will know David from his somewhat heavier Herculanum, staged at the festival in 2016 and dating from four years before Lalla Roukh. He enjoyed an unusual career, beginning with his apprenticeship as a young boy in the cathedral choir at Aix-en-Provence. Most of his creative work was done in Paris, but when it came to musical exoticism he knew what he was talking — or, rather, writing — about. Having joined the radical religious sect of the Saint-Simonians, when it was disbanded by the government he travelled with a group of friends preaching its gospel in the Ottoman lands and going as far as Egypt. His remarkable ode-symphonie Le Désert was an early musical manifestation of this, but Lalla Roukhis a more mature example of his talent for evoking the picturesque.

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew