Golden Oldies

orchestral refinements in works such as Le Comte Ory had set a gold standard for French opera for years to come.

We hear that in David’s writing for the troubadour king, exquisitely sung by tenor Pablo Bemsch, and in the evening’s evident highlight, the duet for Princess Lalla and her companion Mirza. It’s gloriously sung by French soprano Gabrielle Philiponet and that gem of a young Irish mezzo Niamh O’Sullivan.

There’s an excellent Naxos recording of Lalla-Roukh, but this staging by Irish director Orpha Phelan, with witty fairy-tale designs by Madeleine Boyd, redoubled one’s pleasure in the piece.

The evening began back in Ireland with the narrator finding a copy of Moore’s poem in a wheelie bin outside the café Larry O’Rourke. That was a sly jest by Phelan at the expense of Lady Holland, Regency London’s most feared hostess. She told Moore, ‘I’ve not read your Larry O’Rourke. I don’t like Irish stories.’

There’s no accounting for the woeful neglect of Dvořák’s last opera, premièred in 1904, other than its being the wrong subject at the wrong time. The Armida story is one of those ‘dark, feminine’ narratives that’s also given us Odysseus and Calypso, Antony and Cleopatra, and a pair of temporarily bewitched Wagnerian heroes, Tannhäuser and Parsifal. Their operatic incarnations had long held Dvořák spellbound.

Did Dvořák hope he was creating a Czech Tannhäuser? Sadly, an exoticallytold tale of Christian steadfastness and feminine witchery no longer carried much clout in a post-Darwinian, protofeminist world. Yet, for all that, it’s a powerful score, strongly characterised and superbly orchestrated – as anyone will know who saw the Wexford staging or who owns the superbly documented Orfeo recording, made live in Prague under Gerd Albrecht’s direction in 1993.

One of the advantages of reviving rarely-seen operas is that stage directors are unlikely to try to reinvent them. The new Armida, a co-production with the Czech JK Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, was a no-fuss affair. It wisely allowed its videographer to conjure up crusader camps, magic gardens, vanishing castles and a particularly terrifying Harry Potter-style dragon.

Wexford has long been known for the excellence of its casting, thanks in part to its historic links with Italy and other centres of operatic excellence in mainland Europe.

Yet nowadays there’s also a rich crop of home-grown talent from the island of Ireland itself. Take Armida, where the title role was happily entrusted to Irish soprano Jennifer Davis. Her Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin has already won her golden opinions in London and Berlin.

It’s experiences such as this that explain why, 55 years on from Bernard Levin’s famous first visit, we’re all still returning home from Wexford groggy with joy.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON FLORENCE’S RENAISSANCE

It’s not Florence Welch’s fault – and I can’t blame her father, Nick Welch, a journalist I commissioned when I was at the Lady, or her uncle, Craig Brown, for this. Or her mother, the new ViceChancellor of Bristol University.

Every time I think of the barefoot superstar, my son’s primary-school teacher and her low-cut tops come to mind.

‘Mum, when Miss Simpson leans over,’ Ludo once whispered after school, ‘we can all see her lungs.’

You see, Florence + the Machine – back on a triumphant world tour and with a fifth album, Dance Fever – first found favour and a fervent fan base with her first album called, yes, Lungs.

Her second album, Ceremonials, charted at number one in the UK a decade ago. Her third album debuted at number one in the UK and the US. She was the first British female to headline Glastonbury.

We are here to celebrate, after a three-year hiatus, those famous pipes and drum – and lungs. Not bad for Florence Leontine Mary Welch, 36, a middle-class girl from Camberwell.

The People’s Pre-Raphaelite owns the 02 throughout, writhing, whirling, jumping, gambolling, running around and surfing the adoring crowd, twirling like a ballerina atop a cake, all the while belting out her songs nervelessly without any need to auto-tune her sumptuous, operatic oeuvre of art rock.

Three songs in, she stops. Our goddess stands tall in her bare feet, and addresses the crowd about her act.

‘Is it a cult, a pagan ritual, a haunted house gathering? It’s so much better to give into it!’

And then she orders us to put our ‘f***ing phones away’ and for at least two songs she has us and holds us there, in the moment, in real life and we have her too, and the elemental power of her presence is nothing short of majestic.

This forbearance lasts two songs, until the point she dives into the audience and allows her fans to touch her, touch her hair, sing with her, and this is one temptation too far, and the little phone screens light up again.

Her running around like a forest fire has left her with a cut to a foot, leaving blood on the all-white Narnia White Witch.

Two roadies come on to mop up it up, and soon Florence is back, bandaged up, in her frothing pink, bridal maxi dress which she waves and shakes and uses like a conductor’s baton to control not just the Machine but the entire rapt crowd.

Many are wearing poor – it has to be said – imitations of Florence’s southLondon, bohemian hippie chic: green velvet cloaks, black silk dresses, floral headdresses … and that’s just the men.

Unforgettable. All of it.