MUSIC / Blood feast: Michael Dervan on vampires, terrors and errors at this year's Wexford Festival

The three operas of this year's Wexford Festival constitute a sort of gory sandwich, with the gore on the outside rather than in the middle. Mascagni's Il Piccolo Marat which opened the festival, deals with the grotesque slaughter by mass drowning of between two and five thousand people during the French Revolution. Marschner's Der Vampyr treats of a vampire's attempt to secure, within a single day, three prenuptial brides as victims in order to postpone his own day of reckoning. The light filling is provided by the 18th-century English composer Stephen Storace, whose Gli equivoci boasts a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte after Shakespeare, though Da Ponte, it seems, absorbed The Comedy of Errors in a French translation rather than in Shakespeare's English.

The popular success is undoubtedly the Mascagni, greeted on its opening night with a typical Wexfordian roar. The composer said of the work: 'It has muscles of steel . . . it doesn't speak, it doesn't sing: it shouts, shouts and shouts again] . . . Don't look for melody, don't look for culture; in Marat there is nothing but blood]'

The Wexford production, directed by Stephen Medcalf, designed by Charles Edwards and conducted by Albert Rosen, looks and sounds as if everyone involved is determined to take the composer at his word.

There is not much of lasting musical interest in Il Piccolo Marat. What there is, however, is a Terminator 2-like instinct for thickly laid-on dramatic overstatement. And there are also abundant opportunities for highly charged, emotive vocalising. These were taken up with relish by the Wexford cast and chorus, notably by the American soprano Karen Notare as Mariella and the American baritone Richard Zeller as the Carpenter. Il Piccolo Marat is a big sing, with lots of heat coming from the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland in the pit.

Kenny MacLellan's minimalist setting for Der Vampyr - a large, movable, curving staircase - created problems that weren't fully resolved in Jean-Claude Auvray's static production. The simple approach, however, allied to the intelligent conducting of Guido Johannes Rumstadt, had the advantage of making a clearer case for the revival of Marshner's music than either of Wexford's earlier Marschner productions (Hans Heiling in 1983 and Der Templer und die Judin in 1990).

The main vocal interest was provided by two sopranos. Hamburg-born Daniela Bechly's Malvina had a plain, unmannered, touching quality, and contrived to be both vocally radiant and emotionally edgy. The Dublin soprano Frances Lucey showed a winning flexibility as the ill-fated Emmy and made the most of the opportunities presented by her vampire song in Act 2.

Storace's Comedy of Errors (the work was sung in Arthur Jacobs' English translation) promised rather more than it delivered. The problem lay not only with the music, which didn't hang together too convincingly, but also with the performers who, under the conductor Mark Shanahan, didn't seem able to achieve the necessary rhythmic discipline or sense of ensemble. Russell Craig's crazy- angled set, with its dolls'-house furniture, and costumes dominated by shades of pink and green, created an expectance of fun to come, and director Giles Havergal orchestrated some genuinely comic moments; but the music was poor enough to become more than mildly irritating.

The opening night of the Storace, last Friday, may have suffered from coming after an afternoon piano recital of rare insight by the young Italian pianist Enrico Pace. He played Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin with the sort of objective sympathy that makes the harmony glow with clarity and richness, like a photographic image brought into unexpectedly sharp focus. And in Liszt's B minor sonata, done with remarkably disciplined rubato and more than a few thought-provokingly unconventional turns, he distilled at the end a spell of extended silence that the audience could collectively hardly bear to breach.

Festival continues until 8 November. Box office: 010 353 53 22144.

Michael Dervan is music critic of the 'Irish Times'.