Catalani – Edmea (Duprels, Shcherbatykh, Wexford Festival, Cilluffo) (320kbps /mp3)

Catalani – Edmea (Duprels, Shcherbatykh, Wexford Festival, Cilluffo) (320kbps /mp3)

All over the world, year in, year out, opera houses put on a handful of operas from the standard repertory. For 70 years, however, Wexford Festival Opera has bucked that trend and the unlikely setting of a small town on Ireland's southeast coast has become the destination for opera lovers who want to see the operas no one else will stage and to be the first to hear singers on the threshold of international careers.

Among this season's rarities is Alfredo Catalani's Edmea. Overshadowed by his greatest hit La Wally, Edmea was Catalani's penultimate opera, based on an Alexandre Dumas play and premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 1886. It has many of the customary elements of the genre: a vulnerable orphan (Edmea), a love triangle, mistaken identity, forced marriage, madness, a castle and suicide (one attempted; one successful). But it does have a happy ending of sorts, when Edmea is able to marry her true love Oberto after her unwanted husband Ulmo shoots himself.


Recorded last month and presented by Sean Rafferty.


Edmea.......Anne Sophie Duprels (soprano)
Il Conte di Leitmeritz.......Ivan Shcherbatykh (baritone)
Oberto.......Luciano Ganci (tenor)
Il Barone di Waldek.......John Molloy (bass)
Ulmo.......Leon Kim (baritone)
Fritz......Conor Prendiville (tenor)

Chorus and Orchestra of Wexford Festival
Francesco Cilluffo (conductor)

Image: © Clive Barda

Broadcast: 6 November 2021, BBC Radio 3