“All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others,” wrote George Orwell. He might have said the same of critics. One decidedly more equal than others was Brian Kellow (1959–2018). The biographer of Sue Mengers, Ethel Merman, Pauline Kael, and the little-remembered Bennett sisters of Hollywood (not to be confused with Jane Austen’s bunch), Kellow was also, for decades, the features editor of the late, lamented Opera News. Thanks also in part, I think, to Ireland’s rainbows, the Wexford Festival was always a special favorite of his. To judge by the way he talked about Wexford and the way he wrote of Wexford in review after review, it was his idea of heaven. Its 74th edition could hardly fail to elicit more of the same. As always, the fare is unusual. Verdi’s Il Trovatore appears in its little-known French reboot as Le Trouvère. There’s also The Magic Fountain, by Frederick Delius, an English eccentric whose father sent him to manage a citrus grove in Florida hoping the responsibilities would cure him of composing. This did not work. Based on local lore about the Fountain of Youth, Delius’s opera was not to receive a full staging until 1997, more than a century after its completion. The last of Handel’s London operas, the mythological dramedy Deidamia, completes the lineup, staged and conducted by George Petrou, who has the Midas touch in both capacities. As in Brian’s day, the casts are not brand names, at least not yet, which was always part of the magic. That, and those rainbows. —Matthew Gurewitsch