Amendments Made to Wexford Festival Opera

The 69th Wexford Festival Opera will run from Sunday, 11 October - Sunday, 18 October. Audiences are invited to experience the magic at home as the festival goes online for this year only. Ahead of the festival commencing some amendments to the programme have been made following recent Government restrictions under its Level 3 Resilience and National Recovery plan.

Irish soprano Claudia Boyle and Sicilian tenor Pietro Adaini will now join the Wexford Festival Orchestra and conductor Francesco Cilluffo to deliver the closing night concert, replacing the American soprano Lisette Oropesa, who is now regrettably unable to travel.

Both Claudia Boyle and Pietro Adaini will also sing alongside Tara Erraught and John Molloy in Petite messe solennelle by Rossini, which opens the Festival next Sunday. Both concerts will be free-to-view online on rte.ie/culture and will also be broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm. Petite messe solennelle will also be live-streamed by the Strasbourg based European Culture Channel ARTE as part of its Opera Season 2020-2021, a pan-European digital opera season offered in partnership with some of the most renowned opera institutions of Europe. The production also forms part of the cultural partnership between ARTE and RTÉ established to promote Irish arts and culture across Europe.

Community Pop-up events due to take place in various shops and businesses in Wexford town, will still go ahead, though they will be performed behind closed doors with no public in attendance and will be available to watch exclusively through the Festival's Facebook page. www.facebook.com/wexfordfestivalopera

Wexford Festival Opera took the decision last June to stage the events without a public audience and to make them available free-to-view online to audiences in anticipation of possible interruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Responding to the latest restrictions, Artistic Director Rosetta Cucchi said, "Once again Wexford has had to reimagine itself because this is the world we live in these days. An artist must always be creative and innovative and be ready to change at any given moment. I am looking forward to finally being able to bring the Festival to the people."