Wexford Festival Opera

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Wexford Festival Opera featured on Lyric FM

The Wexford Festival of Music and the Arts opened on November 1st 1951, 59 years later it is well known internationally as Wexford Festival Opera. In the run-up to its 60th anniversary next year, broadcaster and long time friend of Wexford Festival, Ian Fox presents a series of six programmes on RTÉ Lyric FM documenting the story of this remarkable festival that is known around the world for its top quality productions and listed now as one of the top 3 festivals in the world for opera lovers, according to Frommer’s Travel Guide.

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The series commences on Saturday September 11th at 7pm, and the last programme immediately precedes the opening of the Festival on October 16th, broadcast live from Wexford Opera House at 8 pm on RTÉ Lyric FM. Each one-hour programme recalls a decade of the Festival’s history with interviews and many extracts from the operas themselves.

In the first programme, founding director Dr Tom Walsh recalls how the Festival was created. Extracts from the opening night in 1951 will include Sir Compton Mackenzie, Erskine Childers and Murray Dickie. The RTÉ Archive will also provide arias from operas staged that decade, with Nicola Monti, Aldo Protti, Janet Baker and others. 

The series will include extracts from some 50 operas recorded live at the Festival, with such voices as Mirella Freni, Veronica Dunne, Bernadette Greevy, Jill Gomez, Sergei Leiferkus, Ugo Benelli,  Leslie Garrett, Bruce Ford,  Ann Murray, Josef Calleja and many others.

‘Wexford at 60’ – RTÉ Lyric FM Saturdays 7pm on RTÉ Lyric FM Sept 11th to October 16th http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/

IAN FOX
Ian Fox celebrated his 40th year in broadcasting in 2009. Over the decades he has written and presented many music programmes, quiz shows, talks and documentaries.  His highly regarded “50 Years of Music in Dublin”, broadcast last year, will be repeated later this Autumn.

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