Mon 07 Jul 2007The rumbles in the arts jungleThe Wexford Festival Opera is the latest Irish arts organisation
to find itself in the throes of a crisis, writes
Michael Dervan.The screeching peacocks weren't the only strange sounds to be
heard at this month's Wexford Festival Opera at Johnstown Castle.
There were frequent moans about Kurt Weill's Silverlake being an
overlong, boring play and not an opera. There were words of praise
for the playing of the Wexford Festival Orchestra in Dvorák's
Rusalka, the first full-size Irish orchestra to be heard
in the Wexford pit after years of variable collaboration with
Eastern Europeans in the Theatre Royal. And there were the dark
messages on the rumour mill, which was in full flight about the
future of chief executive, Michael Hunt.