INTERNATIONAL SALZBURG Opera is more important than politics in Austria, and the Salzburg Festival is no exception. The end of Gérard Mortier's ten-year reign may not have been quite the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in Salzburg it was perceived as a cataclysmic event. Mortier often had been at odds with the gourmets who wanted things to continue in the old, time-honored way: they wanted Mozart and Strauss (Salzburg's patron saints), gorgeous sets, sumptuous costumes and the biggest names in the musical world. Mortier gave them something quite different: a snapshot of contemporary artistic expression, including electronic, rock and folk music, and theater beyond the traditional Jedermann. In opera, he encouraged directors to "deconstruct" works, and to present them in a spectacularly new light, never mind the composer's intentions. Booing orgies became a trademark of the festival. Mortier pretended to enjoy them, but in truth he must have been deeply angered. The depth of his anger became obvious at his last opening night -- a Die Fledermaus full of punks and drug addicts, far away
from Johann Strauss's endearing bourgeois world. It was like serving pork at a seder -- indeed, it was a declaration of war at the end, not the beginning, of the ten-year struggle.
That struggle is over now, and Salzburg has a new artistic director. Peter Ruzicka is a versatile man: composer, conductor, music manager. For almost ten years (1988-1997), he ran the Hamburgische Staatsoper, and after that, as Hans Werner Henze's successor, he led the Munich Biennale for New Musical Theater. Although Ruzicka is going out of his way not to bad-mouth his predecessor (and vice-versa), he made clear that his tenure will have a very different, more traditional profile. Mozart and Richard Strauss will be restored to their thrones. Mozart's operas will be polished up so that his entire stage repertoire, twenty-two works in all, can be presented in 2006, the 250th anniversary of his birth. Within Strauss's output, the accent will be on his neglected late works. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, somewhat marginalized in the Mortier era, will return to the center of the solar system. "Zeitfluss" ("time-flow"), a series of performances of rock and folk music, was dealt with surgically and neatly removed. Talking about the role of directors, Ruzicka said at his first press conference: "The aesthetics of deconstruction has no future." The new management's program could not have been more explicit.
However, those who expected a return to the era of the blessed Herbert von Karajan were in for a surprise. When the curtain rose on the new Don Giovanni, it revealed not the Commendatore's garden but a huge underwear ad of five scantily clad young ladies. Later on, about twenty girls in underwear, called "Proserpina's sisters" in the program, roamed the stage, popping up and vanishing for no discernible reason. At the cemetery, they were replaced by a bunch of hags who grinned knowingly when the Commendatore accepted the Don's dinner invitation. At the finale, young again and wearing black bras and panties, they accompanied the stone guest -- who, by the way, appeared only in a video clip, giving the Don a menacing stare. What it all meant was anybody's guess. The program was full of dark allusions to fashion and death, quoting the usual suspects (Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, et al.). My neighbor and his wife surmised that director Martin Kusej wanted to remind us that Anna, Elvira and Zerlina were not the Don's only victims but had many predecessors. Beyond the fashion show, there was not much to look at on the constantly rotating, clinically white stage (set design by Martin Zehetgruber). Seville was nowhere to be seen, and the costumes could have been bought at any flea market in the world.
Vocally, things were much better: there was not one weak link in the cast. Anna Netrebko (Donna Anna), Melanie Diener (Donna Elvira), Magdalena Kozena (Zerlina), Thomas Hampson (Don Giovanni), Michael Schade (Don Ottavio), Ildebrando D'Arcangelo (Leporello) and Kurt Moll (Commendatore) were all brilliant, if sometimes short of breath due to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's slow tempos. During the overture and at some other moments, the conductor was his old self, driving the Vienna Philharmonic frantically, as if it were the Concentus Musicus, the "original instruments" band he founded a half-century ago. Most of the time, though, he opted for a very leisurely pace, giving one ample opportunity to digest every word of the recitatives, but killing the wit of the repartees. There was not much to laugh at in this Don Giovanni, the protagonist of which took his sweet time going to Hell.
Igor Stravinsky, not known for being effusive about conductors, remarked that the greatest experience he ever had in an opera house was a Don Giovanni in Prague, conducted by Alexander von Zemlinsky. When Zemlinsky died, in 1942, in Larchmont, NY, he was a destitute, forgotten man who did not even complete his last opera, Der König Kandaules, because he had given up hope of ever seeing it performed. One reason for the neglect was his fondness for heavy-handed librettos: unlike his coeval, Richard Strauss, he never found his Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Another reason was his stubborn refusal to follow musical trends: to the end of his life, he remained firmly anchored to the overripe Romanticism of fin-de-siècle Vienna. But in the past decade, interest in Zemlinsky has grown by leaps and bounds, and it seems that, after the Mahler boom and the discovery of Janácek's operas by the public at large, he no longer has to wait in the wings. Der König Kandaules was completed in 1996 by Antony Beaumont and first staged that year at the Hamburgische Staatsoper, director of which at the time was none other than Peter Ruzicka.
The story of King Kandaules and his friend, Gyges, is told in Plato's Republic. With the help of a magic ring -- like Siegfried's Tarnhelm, making its wearer invisible -- Gyges seduces the queen, kills the king and ascends the throne. In André Gide's version, on which Zemlinsky based his opera, Gyges is a fisherman whose brute strength impresses Kandaules, a degenerate weakling who doubts his own masculinity. Kandaules orders Gyges to sleep with Nyssia, the queen, in his place. When Nyssia discovers who gave her the best orgasm of her life, she has Gyges kill her husband and proclaims her new lover king. Gide embroidered the sordid story with endless philosophizing about happiness, friendship, riches and poverty. His message: if you're happy, don't let anybody know.
Musically, the production in the Kleines Festspielhaus was first-rate. Kent Nagano and his Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin milked the highly charged score to the last drop. The three protagonists -- Robert Brubaker (Kandaules), Wolfgang Schöne (Gyges) and Nina Stemme (Nyssia) -- were excellent, and Stemme, required by the libretto to perform nude during the love scene, revealed an impeccable body. The Achilles's heel was, as so often, the staging. Never mind the pornographic sets by Alfred Hrdlicka, Austria's most controversial sculptor. But director Christine Mielitz should have resisted the temptation to have large parts of the opera played in the aisles and, in the last act, to put the orchestra onstage. If her intention was to prove that the traditional set-up -- orchestra in the pit, singers onstage -- makes more sense, she succeeded gloriously.
Turandot is another work left unfinished by its composer. Last year, the Festival de Música de Canarias offered Luciano Berio $50,000 to write a new ending, replacing the familiar, critically disdained version by Franco Alfano. Berio's finale is quite different from Alfano's bombastic choral apotheosis, which mainly rehashes Calàf's hit, "Nessun dorma." Berio's Turandot ends pianissimo, after a long orchestral interlude that weaves together Puccini's disparate sketches. Sometimes this pastiche sounds like Wagner, sometimes like Puccini and quite often like Berio.
Salzburg's production -- the fourth, after concerts in Las Palmas and stagings in Los Angeles and Amsterdam -- was only partly successful. Gabriele Schnaut's Turandot fought valiantly against being drowned out by the orchestra. Johan Botha (Calàf) looked like Falstaff and sang like Florestan, not like a Puccini tenor, and Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, as Liù, wobbled even before her torture started. Valery Gergiev was energetic as usual, happier with fortissimo outbursts than with more intimate moments. David Pountney (director) and Johan Engels (sets) presented ancient China as a dark prison full of threatening machines, half Piranesi's Carceri, half Lang's Metropolis, visually quite stunning.
JÖRG VON UTHMANN
GLYNDEBOURNE Three new productions at the 2002 Glyndebourne Festival presented one of the world's most familiar operas alongside two rarities. Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (May 19) came first, staged by German director Christof Loy, making his British debut, and conducted by Ivor Bolton.
Other than (in one form or another) his version of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, none of Gluck's scores is regularly placed before the public. His first Parisian opera, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), suffers from an invidious comparison with his last, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), which is a kind of sequel to it and regarded by many Gluckians as his greatest achievement.
But in itself Iphigénie en Aulide is a masterpiece, taut in structure -- the traditional French ballets being cleverly integrated -- and, if lacking the more obvious melodic appeal of a French-influenced Mozartean opera seria such as Idomeneo, just as cogent as a music drama. Above all, the quality of Gluck's ideas is consistently high, and they draw one inexorably into a world of heightened emotion.
The situation is static, though viewed with an intense vision from different perspectives. Agamemnon's Greek fleet cannot
sail for the Trojan War unless he sacrifices his daughter Iphigénie to the goddess Diane. A political pragmatist, he is willing to oblige, to the consternation of his wife, Clitemnestre, and the fury of Iphigénie's lover, Achille. Iphigénie herself is ultimately prepared to be sacrificed, and it is only the last-minute, dea-ex-machina intervention of Diane herself that saves her.
Or should do, for in a perverse final gesture Loy had Agamemnon kill his daughter anyway, to the extraordinary strains of a revolutionary-sounding war chorus Gluck wrote for his 1774 original version and later dropped. (This departure from the text presumably precludes Loy's staging Iphigénie en Tauride in sequence for Glyndebourne, unless he intends to resurrect the heroine.)
It was otherwise a visually stylish (some might say style-obsessed) staging, its overall look switching back and forth between early-twenty-first-century chic and the fancier late-eighteenth-century equivalent -- the latter employed in particular for the divertissements and the goddess's nick-of-time salvation of Iphigénie. Herbert Murauer's pristine, no frills set was lit purposefully by Reinhard Traub, while -- whatever their vintage -- Bettina J. Walter's costumes were classically elegant.
None of this might have counted, however, had the musical performance been any less committed or polished than it was. Gerald Finley portrayed the conflicted Agamemnon with a prodigious variety of tone that was equalled by the passionate, moment-by-moment engagement of Katarina Karnéus's vehement Clitemnestre. Veronica Cangemi charted the emotional contours of Iphigénie's predicament with a delicate line, and Jonas Degerfeldt brought Achille's volatility alive in every note. Above all, the vital declamation of the text as a central ingredient of Gluck's conception was managed with range, subtlety and impact. Bolton's conducting responded positively to every change in the music's mood, and he spotlit the many colors of the score, which was impeccably played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Since period-instrument performers are moving ever forward into nineteenth-century repertoire, it was no surprise to find the same band in the pit for Glyndebourne's second rarity, Weber's Euryanthe (1823, heard July 18). Another work more admired by musicologists than by the general public -- if only because the latter rarely get the chance to see it -- it's often regarded with a certain skepticism even by supporters, on account of the improbabilities of its libretto, the work of the inexperienced Helmina von Chezy. It's one of those medieval plots in which a guiltless soprano heroine (Euryanthe) is reviled and rejected by her tenor betrothed (Adolar) on account of malicious yet essentially preposterous lies spread by another soprano (Eglantine) and a bass (Lysiart). Its dramatic climax involves a monstrous serpent that lunges at the estranged couple. Having dispatched it but still convinced of Euryanthe's faithlessness, Adolar leaves her to her own devices in a Gothic ravine. The truth will out, however, and the heroine is vindicated before the final curtain -- though in this production, characteristically, she seemed by then to have lost track of the plot.
A surprising amount of Euryanthe came through as viable in Richard Jones's staging, with designs by John Macfarlane, though they chickened out of the serpent: it became a giant version of Adolar himself, which raised laughter in the house. That the opera (kind of) works is a tribute to the imaginative vitality of Weber's enriched and dramatically motivated orchestral writing, and to his effective use of a simple pre-Wagnerian leitmotif technique. It was clearly a score that gave Wagner himself some ideas, though any practiced opera composer would have demanded major rewrites from his librettist before setting to work.
Jones's essential ploy was to present the opera as a journey, with the sets passing over the stage on a kind of conveyor belt. Certain visual elements recurred -- large and menacing spikes sticking out of wintry trees were a regular feature -- and the general vision was one of an ugly, grey and hostile world. This matched only parts of the opera. Weber and his librettist set up a trajectory that moves from light to darkness, then eventually back to light again, and the splendor of the chivalric ideal that is tested and found wanting in the piece was given no positive representation.
It was left to the principals to flesh out a limited dramatic picture. John Daszak sang Adolar with sizable tone that was neither very warm nor beautiful. What is ideally needed is what one might describe as a pre-Heldentenor timbre. Anne Schwanewilms, more solidly equipped as Euryanthe, sang many phrases with a strong, lyrically expressive line, as -- in an appropriately more baleful manner -- did Lauren Flanigan, making her Glyndebourne debut and bringing fierce energy and a troubled presence to the malign Eglantine. British bass-baritone Pavlo Hunka provided the weight and definition required for the dark-souled Lysiart, the Telramund to Flanigan's Ortrud.
But the real heroes of the evening were the orchestra and its conductor, Mark Elder. Attuned to every facet of the score (which he gave in concert in London some years ago), he chose tempos with skill and presented a dynamic account with the fervor of a true believer. Euryanthe may never become a repertory staple, but when conducted as it was here, its weaknesses can be forgotten in deference to its outstanding merits.
Wonderfully conducted, too, was Carmen (July 25). Philippe Jordan included some discarded snippets from the discredited Fritz Oeser edition of Bizet's score that caused the composer's immaculate timing to falter once or twice, but Jordan could be forgiven, since he otherwise delivered it with such impetus and élan. The London Philharmonic Orchestra played magnificently for him.
Glyndebourne took something of a risk in entrusting the title role to Anne Sofie von Otter, an artist whom pre-performance pun
dits, in a classic instance of racial stereotyping, had decreed was too Nordic for the Gypsy. Well, she proved them wrong, with a performance of an earthy sexuality not often seen in Sussex (at least not at this address). Granted that on the first night some of her effects seemed a little studied, they were never less than intelligent and apposite. Only her tendency to under-sing some of the bigger numbers -- notably the habanera and the seguidilla -- seemed partially misjudged.
Her exciting partners were Texan tenor Marcus Haddock, a Don José with real metal in the voice, and French baritone Laurent Naouri, an Escamillo with heady vocal appeal and some serious swagger. The contained, almost Mozartean duet between Carmen and Escamillo in Act IV registered as a new kind of relationship in the opera -- one between equals. Lisa Milne's Micaela was vocally too much the soubrette but frequently a dramatic force to be reckoned with.
In his first Glyndebourne production, David McVicar directed a sleek, swiftly moving show, always focused on the dramatic matter in hand and chock-full of finely observed and credible detail. Sue Blane's superb costumes placed the period around the time of Carmen's creation (1875). Michael Vale's sets were both realistic and evocative of their emotional milieux.
GEORGE HALL
PESARO Unusually, the three fully-staged operas presented at this year's Rossini Opera Festival were all comic, including his two earliest attempts at a full-length dramma giocoso: L'Equivoco Stravagante (1811) and La Pietra del Paragone (1812). The former was a failure at its Bologna premiere (the composer was nineteen at the time) and retains only a limited appeal today. Rossini derived little inspiration from the often bawdy wordplay of Gaetano Gasbarri's libretto, and the librettist himself proved inept at dramatic plotting, despite the piquancy of the story line: Buralicchio, the vain but wealthy fiancé of Ernestina, is made to believe that she is in fact a eunuch in disguise, thus facilitating the suit of the poor but lovable Ermanno.
Unfortunately, rather than focusing on the work's period charm and verbal quirkiness, Emilio Sagi -- the Spanish director of the production at the Auditorium Pedrotti (seen Aug. 10) -- attempted a radical updating to the 1960s (or thereabouts), with sets and costumes reminiscent of the films of Pedro Almodóvar. In his reading of the opera, the narcissism of Buralicchio, the self-satisfaction of Gamberotto (Ernestina's father and a self-made man) and the willfulness of Ernestina herself became inflated to an extent that neither the libretto nor the music could sustain. The characters turned into comic-strip figures.
The cast, however, was generally excellent, with Bruno Praticò offering a tour de force of accomplished vocalism as Gamberotto and Spanish mezzo Silvia Tro Santafè making an irresistible impression as Ernestina, her voice agile and juicy, her phrasing spontaneous and musical. Fine too was tenor Antonino Siragusa as Ermanno, displaying an excellent mezza voce as well as full-voiced runs; the voice of bass-baritone Lorenzo Regazzo, as Buralicchio, lost focus on top. After a
n insipid overture (found in a Parisian copy of the score) that didn't even sound like Rossini, the Festival Orchestra offered generally sensitive, well-tuned playing under Donato Renzetti's leadership.
La Pietra del Paragone, which opened at the Palafestival on August 9, is a much more accomplished work, though no masterpiece. Pierluigi Pizzi set it in a Le Corbusier-style villa, with swimming pool, not inappropriate for this story of a young man and woman who test the genuineness of each other's love in a country house, amid caricatural hangers-on. The elegant furnishings (some of which belonged to the director-designer himself) and haute-couture casual wear kept the eye pleasantly engaged, yet despite the many felicitous touches -- including one duet sung over the telephone from different points in the garden, and another performed while simulating a tennis match over the heads of the orchestra players -- and fine acting from a youthful cast, Pizzi was unable to avoid a certain boredom, probably because characters such as the ridiculous poet Pacuvio (spiritedly performed by Bruno De Simone) and the unprincipled gazeteer Macrobio (strongly voiced by Pietro Spagnoli) inevitably lose credibility when removed from their very provincial early-nineteenth-century context.
As the female lead, Clarice, Romanian mezzo Carmen Oprisanu looked stylish and sang with elegance, but she lacked the charisma needed to dominate a large auditorium. (The Palafestival is a converted indoor sports stadium.) As her initially reluctant lover, Count Asdrubale, bass Marco Vinco (nephew and pupil of the bass Ivo Vinco) proved something of a revelation; he revealed a fine, mellow voice, expertly employed, with expressive phrasing and diction. There was much to savor, despite his rather dried-up tone, in Raul Giménez's portrayal of Giocondo, Asdrubale's loyal friend. Carlo Rizzi, leading the orchestra of Bologna's Teatro Comunale, offered secure but not particularly imaginative leadership.
The playing of the Festival Orchestra, led by Riccardo Frizza, in Il Turco in Italia (1814), staged in the recently renovated Teatro Rossini (heard Aug. 11), was less confident, but overall the performance proved highly enjoyable, thanks to the superb quality of the opera itself, a refined comedy of manners, and to the instinctive rightness of Guido De Monticelli's production. This Turco was inventive in interplay and strong on atmosphere, with period settings designed by Paolo Bregni, with great economy of means. (Fiorilla's apartment consisted simply of a large wardrobe and a chaise longue.)
Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov brought a suitably oversized voice and personality to the title role, and Patrizia Ciofi traced Fiorilla's progress from coquetry to penitence with considerable skill, though her voice is better suited to the high-lying florid music of the final aria, "Squallida veste, e bruna," than to the earlier cavatina and duets with Selim, which require a greater range of color in the middle register. Alessandro Corbelli offered a truly masterful portrayal of her long-suffering husband, Geronio, and Roberto De Candia, though a less spontaneous actor, displayed a fine baritone and telling diction as the poet Prosdocimo. There was also strong singing (slightly lacking in nuance) from American tenor Matthew Polenzani as Narciso, who was assigned an extra aria in Act I (composed for a Roman revival of the opera in 1815, as was an extra Act II aria for Geronio sung by Corbelli). Here, as in the other two operas, the Prague Chamber Orchestra made a notable contribution.
STEPHEN HASTINGS
ORANGE The appearance of opera's golden couple in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette confounded the skeptics who doubted that Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu would even show up, much less offer persuasive performances -- but the evening (July 27) at the Chorégies d'Orange was not without offstage drama. The Roman theater has never seemed fuller, and when Capulet (an authoritative if vocally elderly Alain Vernhes) presented his daughter, it has to be said that Gheorghiu looked fantastic. Her "Je veux vivre" summed up the qualities of the Romanian diva's singing. The voice sounded in sumptuous form, with its dark, nutty core and resplendent top, but the role sounds too light for her present vocal quality. This Juliette was neither virginal nor fluttery, but a darkly romantic, mature beauty determined to get her man, who no doubt has found a way of deciphering his wife's heavily accented French.
Alagna's Roméo bounded around the stage with all the required juvenile passion and sang with heartfelt, feverish intensity -- the sort of high-octane singing that open-air performances thrive on. It would be churlish indeed to complain of an occasional roughness of timbre and intonation, when the overall performance was so richly communicative and full-throated. On a level of excellence with the hero and heroine was René Pape's plangently sung, exceptionally phrased Frère Laure
nt. Near disaster struck when, toward the end of the first half, the sheer physicality of Alagna's performance led him to slip and tear an Achilles tendon. The intermission must have been a trial for the festival administrators, but in the end the tenor bravely agreed to continue with the performance. After being carried back onstage, Alagna tried desperately not to put weight on the affected heel.
Nicolas Joël's production benefited from a set of funereal marbles, which stood at vertiginous angles and looked splendid against the theater's great Roman wall. The director brought a customarily professional approach to chorus movement and straightforward story-telling; following Alagna's accident, the tenor and his wife spent the latter half of the opera clutched uncomfortably in each other's arms on Juliette's deathbed. This brought, as adversity often does, extra poignancy to their performances, and the opera ended in delirious applause for the stars. Alagna was carried on like a Roman emperor for his curtain call, and Gheorghiu dutifully fussed over him as they left the amphitheater for treatment.
This steamy, dramatic evening was presided over musically by Michel Plasson, whose first-rate pacing of the score was one of the main glories of the performance, along with excellent playing from the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and gutsy singing from the choruses of Avignon, Toulouse and Nice.
STEPHEN MUDGE
VIENNA Massenet's Don Quichotte, written for Feodor Chaliapin in 1910, two years before the composer's death, is pretty much a one-tune opera -- but a glorious tune it is: the Don's serenade, "Quand apparaissent les étoiles." Though burdened with a weak libretto, Don Quichotte can be enormously entertaining given three outstanding principal singers and a strong directorial concept. Vienna's KlangBogen Festival delivered the goods on all counts in Torsten Fischer's stunning production (seen July 30).
Fischer discarded the picture-book broken-down knight and replaced him with a circus Pierrot, a variation on the eternal fool. Sancho was a top-hatted, Chaplinesque fellow, Dulcinée an earthy sex goddess who descended from Quichotte's dreams on the precariously steep staircase that bisected Herbert Schäfer's simple, versatile white set. The director's main conceit was to add Cervantes himself to the proceedings. Tim Grobe, an actor portraying the author, appeared before the curtain to recite a passage from the novel as the music began; he remained onstage throughout the opera, directing the action like a ringmaster and distributing pages of text to other characters as if to prompt them.
The visual imagery was ingenious. Lighting designer Hartmut Litzinger made magical use of color and shadow, and Ute Lindenberg's clever costumes turned chorus members into white horses who surrounded Quichotte as he died in Sancho's arms. The knight tilted not at a windmill but at a ceiling fan, and when Dulcinée rejected Quichotte, Cervantes slowly ascended the stairs, dejectedly dropping pages as he went, eventually reappearing dressed as the knight-clown himself.
In the title role, David Pittsinger provided a flexible, orotund basso cantabile of unusual beauty and delicate coloration, but he lacked the charisma that has made such predecessors as Ruggiero Raimondi and José van Dam successful in this role. Making his Austrian stage debut as Sancho, Richard Bernstein stole Viennese hearts and virtually every scene in which he appeared. His dark, powerful sound and youthful charm were at their best in his Act II tirade, "Comment peut-on penser du bien de ces coquines?" Massenet assigned the most authentically Spanish music to Dulcinée, and the brilliant young Romanian mezzo Liliana Nikiteanu alluringly spun the difficult melismas of her Act I aria. In a florid Act IV seguidilla, she seductively danced barefoot, while Cervantes played her high heels like castanets.
Emmanuel Villaume led the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in a thrilling, idiomatic performance, rich with orchestral detail, sensitive to the onstage performers. The superb KlangBogen Festival Chorus performed lustily, soaring in the stirring Act IV finale.
LARRY L. LASH
MUNICH The unexpected death of Herbert Wernicke, engaged to stage and design Wagner's entire Ring cycle, put the Bavarian State Opera in a pickle. Wernicke died shortly after February's Das Rheingold, leaving only complete set designs and staging ideas for Die Walküre. Hans Peter Lehmann, respected director and former Wieland Wagner assistant, agreed at short notice to put Wernicke's ideas onstage in Walküre. David Alden will take over the rest (Siegfried in November, Götterdämmerung next February), trying to make a unified whole out of the cycle when it is given complete next May.
The curtain rose during the prelude for the Walküre premiere (June 30), and again one saw a mock-up of the Bayreuth auditorium onstage, as it had been for Rheingold. A visibly excited Wotan pulled the sword out of the floor (where it was left shortly before Fasolt's murder) and placed it in the middle of a convoluted, stage-covering ash tree. This misguided piece of stage business fit the "Wotan as moving force" concept, but it misused music that unquestionably describes Siegmund's flight, and it made utter nonsense out of Sieglinde's narrative. Having the Valkyries pile the dead heroes exactly where Wotan later put Brünnhilde to sleep was another dubious idea. There was hardly fire enough to protect her -- and when she wakes up, she'll be lying on a heap of decayed cadavers.
The rest of the production, however, was full of lovely touches. Wotan rejoiced in triumph like a small child at the end of Act I. Sieglinde touched, even smelled Siegmund's wolfskin blanket, bringing back long-forgotten memories of childhood. The tenderness of brother and sister as they fall in love, followed by the sexual frenzy in the Act I finale, was breathtaking and so reminiscent of Wieland Wagner that it was surely more Lehmann than Wernicke.
The musical side of the evening was memorable, as conductor Zubin Mehta brought intimacy to the score without sacrificing intensity. There was bombast, but it was restricted to the truly bombastic sequences. The gain in immediacy was never more evident than in the Todesverkündigung, where, sheared of monumentality, Siegmund and Brünnhilde engaged in a life-versus-death conversation. Mehta was helped by a brilliantly disposed orchestra and a very strong cast.
The role of Sieglinde lies relatively low, making it perfect for Waltraud Meier. Only occasionally, when the part rose above the staff, did the voice lose focus, but her rich upper-middle register, combined with her committed acting, rendered this weakness insignificant. Peter Seiffert offered a flawlessly sung, virile Siegmund. Sparks flew when these two were onstage together. The upper third of John Tomlinson's voice has become very raw, and it is painful to hear him squeeze out those notes and phrases. Still, he is a commanding presence as Wotan, and the part does not consist only of high notes. Gabriele Schnaut was in exceptional form as Brünnhilde, secure in pitch, unforced in all registers. Mihoko Fujimura made an impressive Bavarian State Opera debut as Fricka, showing a solid voice and admirable diction. Kurt Rydl was a blustery, dark-voiced Hunding, and the Valkyries were a mixed lot. With the exception of Schnaut, everyone onstage sang the text with admirable clarity.
JEFFREY A. LEIPSIC
MONTPELLIER The Festival de Radio France et Montpellier and its adventurous director, René Koering, have the knack of discovering forgotten masterpieces in the backwaters of musical history. This year's festival opened with Zoltán Kodály's Háry János (seen July 16), staged performances of which are indeed rare. Kodály's nationalistic music flows from a similar source to that of his Hungarian compatriot, friend and contemporary Béla Bartók, but without the tears, or for that matter the genius. While Bartók sought to create a new musical language influenced by Debussy and by Hungarian folk music, Kodály strove to make sociopolitical statements. Háry János is described by the composer as a "Daljaték," literally a game of songs, with a prologue, four adventures and an epilogue; the result is midway between a revue and a Singspiel.
Montpellier chose to perform the loosely structured, 135-minute work without intermission, which makes plenty of Kodály for one sitting, but perhaps this was a sensible move, as the work has no obvious climactic moments. Director Jean-Paul Scarpitta distributed the
dialogue between two characters (French translation by Florian Zeller; sung numbers were performed in Hungarian), but the piece might have been more persuasive without this theatrical arrangement. The title character, an enigmatic figure, recounts fabulous tall-tales: part exaggeration, part dream. Háry saves the Emperor's daughter, single-handedly defeats Napoleon, then refuses the hand of the Emperor's wife in favor of a village girl, Ilka. Rather than portraying these events outright, the music concentrates on a subconscious, nostalgic yearning for Hungary.
In a publicity coup, the festival engaged Gérard Depardieu to take Háry's spoken part. Staying resolutely behind his lectern for all but the final scene, Depardieu initially seemed reticent and script-bound, but in the scene where the hero rails against God, he produced that fascinating mix of violence and vulnerability that marks him as a great actor. As the other narrator, a student who questions Háry's credibility, Micha Lescot darted around Depardieu like a mischievous cat, though tight and mannered. Relishing the rich diversity of the scenes, Scarpitta saw the work as a circus, complete with jugglers and acrobats. His sets, produced in collaboration with Coralie Sanvoisin, made good use of the huge Corum Theater; a floor covering of earth evoked the essence of homeland. Georges Momboye choreographed the substantial dance element impressively, using athletic, modern movement and avoiding the folkloric option.
The singing cast was led by the firmly sung Háry of Vladimir Petrov and the excellent Nora Gubisch as an Ilka with enormous verve. Denia Mazzola-Gavazzeni raised the temperature of the evening with an urgently voiced, verismo-style Empress, and good support came from soprano Anne-Sophie Schmidt and tenor Vincent Le Texier, as well as the hardworking Montpellier Opera chorus. Friedeman Layer conducted the Orchestre National de Montpellier, which sounded far back in the deep pit; a sharper cutting edge in the brass and greater rhythmic dynamism would have raised the musical standard still higher.
STEPHEN MUDGE
NORTH AMERICA SANTA FE Reports from abroad -- from Salzburg in 2000 and from the Châtelet in Paris a year later -- did not exaggerate in the matter of Kaija Saariaho and her first-ever opera L'Amour de Loin. Extraordinary in its beauty, its emotional breadth and -- best of all -- its power to involve the observer's imagination, her work achieves all this with amazing sureness and simplicity. One of the triumvirate of composers now in their forties (the others are Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen) who have brought worldwide attention to the resurgence of Finnish composers as a major force on the new-music front, Saariaho has created in this work a most encouraging return to genuine operatic thinking in its most elevated sense. At a time when the operatic assembly line seems largely concerned with outfitting familiar movie scenarios with new musical soundtracks, here at last is a work that reinvests the lyric stage with the sense of myth and mystery depressingly absent in many recent ventures.
These reports, furthermore, had reached Santa Fe, whose enterprising opera company had co-commissioned the work and scheduled it for three performances as the gleaming beacon of its forty-fifth season this past summer. By some distance, this was the season's hot-ti
cket item, so much so that general director Richard Gaddes was obliged to invite a paying audience (at ten dollars a pop) to the final dress. As he did for the European performances, Peter Sellars devised the evocative, inventive staging to visuals by his usual "team": set by George Tsypin and, most important, lighting by James F. Ingalls. As in previous performances, Dawn Upshaw sang the music of Countess Clémence, a role she can now be said to own.
The means here are remarkably simple: three characters (plus a small choral ensemble), five connected scenes without intermission, lasting just over two hours. The text, by the Paris-based Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, draws upon the medieval account of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who learns of the Countess Clémence of Tripoli as the epitome of his ideal of purity of heart and body. A Pilgrim crisscrosses the Mediterranean to carry messages of love and wisdom between the "lovers from afar." Finally, and tragically, they must meet; Jaufré, on shipboard, falls ill and arrives in Tripoli in time to die in the arms of Clémence, who then screams out against the heaven-sent irony. "What didst thou seek to punish? That he called me 'Goddess'?" she rails. "Could it be that thou art jealous of the fragile happiness of men?"
The plotline evokes thoughts of Tristan; but the benevolent shadow overall is cast by Pelléas et Mélisande, in the fluid elegance of the vocal lines richly enveloped by a dark-hued orchestration in which soft glints shine through like audible gold. Saariaho's orchestra is subtly enhanced with an electronic undertone, wonderfully woven under Robert Spano's direction into a substance both tangible and audible. Sellars's staging seemed to capture that same quality. His stage, covered with water to perhaps ankle depth, bespoke both connecting sea and separating gulf; better yet, it merged with Ingalls's lighting to mirror in its ripple and shimmer the aching beauty of Saariaho's haunting score. From two towers, eerily lit from within, the lovers sang their discourse; between them, the Pilgrim plied a skeletal, even ghostly, small ship.
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley was the Jaufré, as he was in Paris; Finnish mezzo Monica Groop -- a memorable Mélisande some years back in Los Angeles -- was the Pilgrim. Dawn Upshaw has collaborated with Saariaho on previous vocal works, notably the song-cycle Le Château de l'Ame, recorded on Sony [60817]; there is a cherishable symbiosis between the edgy passion of the music's often jagged lines and the angelic softening of Upshaw's tone. Still, the final music of L'Amour de Loin, sardonic, challenging, seemingly mingling both sorrow and irony -- and delivered by Upshaw in a state of partial immersion on Sellars's stage -- became the most harrowing of all the lingering memories from this extraordinary night.
Two other operas were new to the company, and were handsomely dispatched. Edward Hastings's staging of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, starring Stephanie Blythe, had its hokey side: the Italians arrived in Algiers by airplane and departed in balloons; Robert Jones Hopkins's stage design was an enormous pop-up book. Timothy Nolen was the agreeably disagreeable Taddeo; William Burden's Lindoro tended toward the loud-and-louder, all under Yves Abel's energetic baton. But the Blythe spirit carried the show; imagine a Fricka (the role the mezzo/contralto sang in Seattle last summer) with the agility of a Cecilia Bartoli and the thrust of a Marilyn Horne; throw in a comic stage presence without a false move, and you're close to imagining Blythe's Isabella, her company debut.
Chas Rader-Shieber's staging of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, on the other hand, played it straight and enchanting, within a splendidly controlled classic framework on David Zinn's austere but serviceable set. Under Kenneth Montgomery's baton, the ensembles came across nicely balanced; so did the solo ensemble, including the orchestra's excellent clarinetists Todd Levy and James Moffitt, whom Mozart treated most generously in this opera. Kristine Jepson was the agile, moving Sesto, Joyce DiDonato an uncommonly delightful, diminutive Annio, Isabel Bayrakdarian the enchanting Servilia. As the regal couple, Titus and his Vitellia, Richard Croft and Alexandrina Pendatchanska were properly -- well, regal, and perhaps a bit loud.
Rodney Gilfry, the Eugene Onegin in the season's first performances of Tchaikovsky's opera, dropped out for artistic reasons; his place was taken by Scott Hendricks (seen July 30). Sondra Radvanovsky, who had begun the run of La Traviata, claimed vocal exhaustion, and was replaced for one performance (Aug. 2) by Patricia Racette, who starred in the production when it was unveiled in 1997, and who was also the Tatyana in this season's Onegin. The Traviata revival -- conducted by the company's founder, John Crosby -- was a replacement for the originally scheduled work, Die Liebe der Danae, which had been dropped during the cautious rethinking after 9/11. (That left the company without a Richard Strauss opera for the first time since 1977.)
The Onegin and Traviata were personal triumphs for Racette -- and, alas, not much else. Jonathan Miller's new staging of Onegin was designed around Isabella Bywater's revolving indoor-outdoor scenic unit that left some of the crucial action -- Onegin's snide behavior during the party scene, for example -- virtually invisible from out front. The mirrored walls worked better, suggesting dancers by the thousands. But Alan Gilbert's flaccid baton didn't do much to animate the onstage goings-on, and aside from Racette's all-aglow, ardent Tatyana and Kurt Streit's genuinely moving Lensky (accounting for one scene apiece out of a long evening), the evening did not rank among Santa Fe's triumphs.
Neither did the Traviata, despite the fragile beauty of Racette's Violetta and the robust eloquence of Mark Delavan's larger-than-life Papa Germont. Crosby's conducting was partially at fault -- not only for its commissions (loose tempos here, a brutal speedup there) but for its omissions. Don't most opera companies these days allow the Germonts, father and son, at least one stanza of their Act II cabalettas? Or their Violetta the second stanzas of her two big arias? Or the lovers at least the repeat in their "Parigi, o cara"? Don't most companies nowadays perform the so-called Acts II and III without a break? None of the above transpired at
Santa Fe.ALAN RICH
CONCERTS AND RECITALS HIGHLAND PARK, IL This past summer's Ravinia Festival (attended August 3-10) featured a Rachmaninoff retrospective and the many aspects of vocal performance, from master-class instruction to opera. (Vocal performance during the other twelve weeks of North America's oldest music festival offered pop, rock, jazz, folk and other varieties.) The Rachmaninoff survey included not only the popular piano music but also all of his chamber music and songs, plus the Chicago-area premiere (Aug. 10) of his seldom-heard one-act opera, Francesca da Rimini (1905). Christoph Eschenbach, Ravinia's music director, conducted a gutsy reading of the piece that reaffirmed the evidence of the score and a recent recording [DG 453452] that, although the opera lacks the invention and dramatic strength of The Miserly Knight (the companion piece Rachmaninoff wrote for the world premiere, in 1906), Francesca isn't nearly so weak as Richard Taruskin claims in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera.
True, the libretto by Tchaikovsky's brother, Modest, is indeed a modest job. In a prologue, the ghost of Virgil leads Dante down to Hell's second circle, where merciless winds torment adulterers in general and Paolo and Francesca in particular. The lovers tell Dante their story, which occupies the opera's central scenes. Handsome Paolo had wooed Francesca as secret proxy for his crippled, ugly brother, Lanceotto. Francesca was thus deceived into marrying the wrong man, who is now violently jealous of Paolo. Slated to go off to war, Lanceotto sets a trap, leaving his wife in his brother's care. As they read about the similarly guilty Guinevere and Lancelot, Francesca submits to Paolo's ardent declarations; just then, Lanceotto bursts in and kills them. Back in Hell for a brief epilogue, a chorus of the damned echoes the lovers' agony as Dante faints from grief.
Rachmaninoff dressed this slim drama in semi-luxurious style. The love scene gives the soprano and tenor (both lirico-spinto) suitably melodic material without overtaxing their voices or unduly thrilling an audience. The composer's familiar gift for orchestral richness and color, however, keeps that same audience reasonably awake. The music for Lanceotto (written in vain for Chaliapin), Virgil and Dante is functional in its declamatory way, and the infernal choruses have the right atmosphere and a good deal of muscle, if not much originality.
As Francesca, Marina Mescheriakova exceeded markedly the level of what she's been reaching with her Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera. Here her vocal strength was more consistent, and she sang with personality. Vinson Cole's Paolo was a knight in shining tessitura, and Sergei Leiferkus boasted a forceful baritone and exuded nastiness as Lanceotto, without resorting to the singer's once-prevalent raspiness. Tenor Scott Ramsey as Dante and bass Robert Pomakov as Virgil seemed on the threshold of interesting careers. Lee Erickson's Milwaukee Symphony Chorus sang strongly through their we're-in-Hell masks, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Ravinia's perennial drawing card) played powerfully and beautifully under Eschenbach's fiery direction, but even more so in the curtain-raiser, which happened to be Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini Fantasy, not top-rank Tchaikovsky but, as things turned out, a vitally tough act for Rachmaninoff's opera to follow. The presentation of the opera was billed as a semi-staging by local director Michael Halberstam. But except for the prologue's choral entry down the aisles of Ravinia's acoustically Tanglewood-manqué pavilion, it was standard concert work. A tuxedoed Lanceotto snarled weaponless at the lovers, and they died of a unison high A-natural.
This local Rachmaninoff premiere notwithstanding, the week's -- and probably the summer's -- most powerful event was Schubert's tragic eighty-minute song-cycle, Die Winterreise, as sung by German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, with Eschenbach at the piano (Aug. 5, in the reasonably intimate Martin Theater). To a listener first caught up by Hans Hotter's despair in these songs, then enthralled by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his prime and newly transfixed by Quasthoff himself a few years ago, this summertime winter-journey seemed beyond compare. Here was the desolation of a rejected lover elevated to a heroic scale. Nature itself becomes the wanderer's enemy, familiar sites mocking his memories, wind and snow driving him onward. Quasthoff revved up his singing into towering rages of protest against fate and into emotionally violent admiration of such things as a flaming sunrise as a mirror-image of his psyche. He also captured uniquely the fragments of mental peace (toward the beautiful patterns on a frosted window), resigned despair (no room in a crowded graveyard), a fiercely godlike challenge to a possibly godless world (in the explosive song "Mut") and the nearly hypnotized seeking for "phantom suns." In the final song, Quasthoff's unwrinkled pianissimo and (during the last stanza) closing of eyes left no doubt, as some fine singers do, that the ancient hurdy-gurdy player along the road is indeed death.
Eschenbach matched the singer in song after song for sensitivity and tension, reminding us that his conducting career hasn't diminished his world-class pianism. I missed only the surprising but legitimate energy (not yet tested by ordeal) that Benjamin Britten brought to the first song when accompanying Peter Pears. Since the present performance was broadcast locally, not to issue a recording would be criminal.
Quasthoff assumed the role of a less tragic but still involving lovelorn wanderer when he sang Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), with Eschenbach conducting the Chicago Symphony (in the Pavilion, Aug. 9). Here everything seemed perfect -- technique at the service of vocal beauty and emotional truth. It was shrewd, revelatory programming to end the concert with Mahler's First Symphony, furnished as it is with a few themes from the Wayfarer songs. Eschenbach drew a brilliant performance from the virtuoso orchestra, restoring the brief, gentle "Blumine" movement (with especially lyrical trumpet work), music that most conductors omit because Mahler himself dropped it for not being "symphonic" enough. But it's a lovely piece to hear once in a while. As a pre-intermission encore, Quasthoff sang Jerome Kern's "Ol' Man River" intensely, without a trace of German accent, and right up there with memories of Paul Robeson and William Warfield.
Karita Mattila and Dmitri Hvorostovsky were to have shared a concert of opera excerpts (Aug. 5, with the Chicago Symphony and Eschenbach), but the soprano canceled due to illness; the baritone dominated a revised bill. Onegin's lecture to Tatyana and Yeletsky's declaration to Lisa emerged once again as prime Hvorostovsky material, and he found much to mine in a Verdi sequence that included Macbeth, Rigoletto and the Rodrigo of Don Carlos.
Mattila was sufficiently recovered on August 7 to sing her scheduled recital in the Martin Theater, with Martin Katz excelling, as usual, at the piano. She sang with her familiar command of style and mood, but with incomplete control of top notes (probable result of her illness) and a more annoying and surprising sloppiness about word-projection. There were four of Schubert's Italian songs, a dramatically delivered Sibelius group, and substandard readings of standards by Strauss, Duparc and Frederick Loewe. The week's nadir came with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair's singing the next night of Mahler's Wayfarer songs (in Schoenberg's clever ten-player arrangement). Aspirated hs proliferated like mosquitoes. Holzmair kept leaning forward, and his once-beautiful voice crusted over. Mahler's musicalization of ms and ns -- so well illuminated by Quasthoff, and by the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau of yore, for that matter -- went for nothing. Holzmair got astute support from Joseph Swensen conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as part of an otherwise Mozart-Schubert concert, but the singer seemed in urgent need of advice.
LEIGHTON KERNER
NEW YORK CITY When the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra went on strike last summer, Lincoln Center management cancelled twenty-one of thirty-one performances. What remained were performances by guest artists, primarily of works by composers other than Mozart, especially Handel, who had been the subject of a season-long retrospective at Lincoln Center ("Beyond the Messiah").
In a "pre-concert recital" (Aug. 11), singer Dominique Labelle, conductor Nicholas McGegan and London's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (festival debut) introduced Handel's "Gloria" to New York audiences; the same forces performed the work at its world premiere in Göttingen in 2001. Identified as Handel's only in 2000, "Gloria" appears to date from around 1707 (during the composer's youthful sojourn in Italy), but it bears many recognizably Handelian traits. Indeed, it's hard to believe anybody ever doubted this work's authorship, especially when one hears its graceful alternation between opposing moods and its elaborate coloratura, adroitly sung by Labelle in a creamy, flexible but emotionally detached soprano.
The concert proper was devoted to a performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea (1743), arranged by Mozart (1788) with expanded instrumentation but unmistakable respect for the original. McGegan conducted (from the fortepiano) as if this were the most passionate, exciting music since Puccini -- which it isn't. Act I is charming but drama-free, though Act II, in which the titular lovers face conflict, death and transfiguration, inspired genuinely stirring pages from the master's pen. Christine Brandes's Galatea is familiar to New York audiences: she took the role at City Opera in 2001, where (as here) she applied her alluring physical presence and appealing soprano to create a touching -- albeit urbane -- nymph. As her lover, English tenor John Mark Ainsley contributed golden tone and elegant phrasing; rumbling baritone Philip Cutlip was a bit hammy but great fun as Polyphemus. Young tenor Michael Slattery was a poised but small-voiced Damon.
Brandes, Labelle, Ainsley and Cutlip joined McGegan and his orchestra for performances of Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato later in the week (heard Aug. 15). One was grateful to have heard them so recently at Tully Hall and to have admired the crisp diction of each singer, because the notorious acoustics of Lincoln Center's State Theater turned every word to mush. Without much luck, McGegan tried to project the singers' voices into the house by positioning them at his side, in the orchestra pit. Somehow, they conveyed the proper feeling for Handel's blithe music, ably assisting the evening's real star, choreographer Mark Morris, whose troupe made its Mostly Mozart debut with these performances.
Rather than asking Morris to create a new work, Lincoln Center's vice-president for programming, Jane S. Moss, called on him to dust off L'Allegro, choreography he created for Brussels's Théâtre de la Monnaie in 1990. Given the circumstances, Morris's dances proved remarkably fresh. With considerable wit and invention, Morris uses the simplest movements (though sometimes in elaborate patterns) to convey visual equivalents of Handel's music and Milton's lyric evocations of the natural world as reflections of emotional states. Morris employed much bird imagery in the dances, as Handel does in the score. Occasionally, Morris also parodied contemporary perceptions of eighteenth-century life, with snooty aristocratic types parading about, thoroughly detached even from their own hunting party. His dancers appeared to enjoy every minute of the performance, and so did the audience.
The festival afforded listeners a valuable opportunity to compare McGegan's approach to Handel with that of another brilliant exponent, Paul McCreesh: McGegan is brash, exuberant, while McCreesh, leading his voice-and-period-instrument ensemble, the Gabrieli Consort and Players, provides less extrovert but no less impassioned musicianship. In a performance of Handel's oratorio Esther (heard Aug. 18 at Tully Hall), McCreesh brought a capacity audience to its feet with a roar and introduced Mostly Mozart audiences to a spectacular talent, English soprano Carolyn Sampson. Singing the title role, she revealed a glittering, pure-toned marvel of a voice. Even in an oratorio, Sampson is a born actress, actually listening in character to the words sung by her colleagues.
As Ahasuerus (Artaxerxes), tenor Paul Agnew joined Sampson for one of the score's highlights, a gracefully intertwining duet ("Who calls my parting soul?"). With somewhat husky tone, he created a most genial monarch. Baritone Roderick Williams proved an impressive Haman, offering credible menace and rich, burly sound. Taking minor roles, countertenor Daniel Taylor excelled in his final solo, "Let Israel songs of joy repeat."
WILLIAM V. MADISON
INTERNATIONAL: Hynninen bids farewell to Savonlinna, with Juha; KlangBogen continues, with Leoncavallo's La Bohème and von Böse's 63: Dream Palace; Bostridge's Rake progresses to Munich; Glyndebourne revivals include Jurowski debut, leading Albert Herring; Genaux sings Rinaldo in Montpellier; Meyerbeer's Huguenots in Martina Franca; Don Giovanni at Marquis de Sade's birthplace; Fanciulla in Buenos Aires; Weill's Johnny Johnson in Vienna. NORTH AMERICA: Adams's Ceiling/ Sky in Cleveland; Aylmer in Berkshire Opera's Turn of the Screw; Don Giovanni at Boston's Opera Aperta; New Hampshire's Opera North sings Onegin, Così; Ohio Light Opera unveils three rarities; San Francisco Opera Merola program's Merry Wives; Susannah at Walnut Creek, CA. STUDENT PERFORMANCE: Albert Herring at Music Academy of the West. CONCERTS AND RECITALS: Montpellier events include Offenbach's Rhinemaidens; cover-girl Caballé at Arles; Handel's Arianna at KlangBogen; Mostly Mozart performances by Hvorostovsky, Holzmair, Cooper and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. INTERNATIONAL
SAVONLINNA A new production of Aarre Merikanto's Juha was the high point of baritone Jorma Hynninen's final season as artistic director of the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Juha was a seminal work in establishing a tradition of Finnish opera, which has flowered impressively in recent years: Hynninen's ten years at Savonlinna saw seven commissions. Yet Juha was slow to win the recognition it deserves, even in Finland. When it was new (back in 1922), the Finnish Opera turned it down, on the grounds that its musical idiom was too radical. The twenty-nine-year-old Merikanto was offered the chance to make revisions to what was essentially his first opera, but he bristled at the idea and never wrote another one. It's as if Mussorgsky had given up opera after the rejection of his initial version of Boris Godunov.
Based on Juhani Aho's 1911 novel, known by every Finnish schoolchild, Juha has a well-crafted libretto by the famous Finnish soprano Aino Ackté. It stands in the tradition of "fur hat" operas set in the wilds of Finland, but it treats a timeless love triangle, involving a young wife who leaves her elderly husband for a young heartthrob and comes to regret it. The husband, Juha, desperately wants Marja back, and she allows him to believe she was forcefully abducted. Juha attacks and maims the young lover, Shemeikka, but when he learns that Marja went willingly, he throws himself into the rapids in despair.
Today, the charge that the music is radical is difficult to credit, for Juha is on a par with contemporaneous operas from the continent that push tonality to the limit but don't break with it. Indeed, the opera may have been a casualty of backstage maneuvering by Ackté, who apparently was offended that Merikanto didn't write the role of Marja with her in mind. Having initially offered the libretto to Sibelius, she then took it to another composer, Leevi Madetoja, who modified it and set it more traditionally. Madetoja's opera has also been revived with success, though Merikanto's has gotten more attention since its belated stage premiere, in 1963, five years after the composer's death. During his lifetime, only a single act was performed, in a radio broadcast. The new production is Savonlinna's second.
Merikanto's music shows an arresting blend of influences. One hears suggestions of Scriabin, hints of Puccini at his most advanced and splashes of Debussy. With its continuous fabric, Juha functions like a Janácek opera and shows a similarly keen instinct for drama, although Merikanto was apparently unaware of Janácek's work. Sometimes Merikanto's way with the orchestra doesn't quite match his musical invention, and there are a few dry stretches, but, especially for a first opera, it is a compelling, often riveting work.
And it is a superb vehicle for Hynninen, who with his lean, Clint Eastwood looks and incisive vocalism brought the aging settler Juha to life with every utterance. Hynninen was touching early on, when, suspecting nothing, Juha is buoyed just by seeing his wife brighten during Shemeikka's unexpected visit. The rock-like strength of his singing unleashed all the power of the final scene. Mezzo Lilli Passikivi's dark tones captured Marja's prevailingly downcast spirits, though one wonders whether her music would allow more variety of moods. Jyrki Anttila's bright tenor conveyed Shemeikka's swagger, and Helena Juntunen was moving as Kaisa, the girl who witnesses Marja's apparent abduction.
The opera was strongly directed by Juha Hemánus, with lighting by Timo Alhanen. Mark Väisänen's serviceable single set, dominated by the facades of three wooden huts in a birch forest, couldn't suggest the contrast between Juha's quarters and Shemeikka's more affluent ones. Yet the change in venue was strikingly emphasized by a dreamlike, choreographed sequence in which girls provocatively clad in white flooded the stage, making it clear that Marja would be simply another of Shemeikka's flings. Conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who presided over Ondine's fine 1995 recording of Juha with Hynninen [ODE 872-2D], projected the dramatic urgency of the score.
One of Hynninen's accomplishments was the installation of a new roof last year in the festival's performing space in Olavinlinna Castle, as well as new, more comfortable seats -- improvements designed to facilitate performances of such ambitious works as Tristan und Isolde. Karen Stone's new production of Wagner's opera, in its Savonlinna premiere, favored minimal stage action and generally kept the lovers far apart. The enormous breadth of Savonlinna's stage might have been used convincingly for the long stretch of turbulent music accompanying Tristan's breathless arrival in Act II, but when he and Isolde began their duet most of the stage lay between them. Robert Israel's sets and costumes and Dawn Marie Wood's lighting failed to supply the kind of arresting stage picture that might have set Stone's static direction in persuasive relief. The ultra-simple sets consisted primarily of a few frame chairs placed in a large, shallow, rectangular sandbox; the end of the love duet brought a moment of excitement when one of the chairs burst into flames -- a bad omen for the lovers whose relationship, of course, thrives on darkness.
Renate Behle contributed an excellent Isolde, firmly declaimed and brightly sung. Hers is not a voice one revels in, but the intelligence of her singing easily compensates for any shortage of tonal opulence. Heikki Siukola was that rarest of Tristans, actually at his vocal best in Act III; by the time he reached his long scene of delirium (performed uncut), the intonation problems and lack of flexibility that earlier detracted from his otherwise strong singing had largely disappeared. Päivi Nisula's mezzo sometimes took on an acidic edge, but she was often compelling in projecting Brangäne's concern. Jukka Rasilainen offered a forthright, firmly sung Kurwenal, and Matti Salminen reprised his celebrated, grandly sonorous Marke. Conductor Leif Segerstam offered an honest, unfussy interpretation that neither leaned on climaxes nor overly indulged the score's more poignant moments.
In keeping with Savonlinna tradition, Hynninen passes the torch as artistic director to another singer, Raimo Sirkiä, known for his heroic tenor roles in Helsinki and elsewhere. Next year doesn't look especially adventurous, however, with new productions of Der Fliegende Holländer and Turandot.
GEORGE LOOMIS
VIENNA Leoncavallo's La Bohème is no less a great opera than Puccini's; it's just different. Although both are based on Henry Mürger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, Leoncavallo's focus is on Musette (mezzo), Marcello (tenor) and Schaunard; Mimì and Rodolfo (baritone) take a backseat, and Colline appears only in Act I. This is a hot-blooded bunch, whose rowdy hijinks, earthy passions, and grim desperation make Puccini's Bohemians look tame. For the party-themed Acts I and II, Leoncavallo writes sparkling, witty music, never contrived or cloying; the second half of the opera darkens considerably, and Act III is a brilliant, brutal, non-stop sequence of numbers, truly the work's core.
The KlangBogen Festival scored another hit with Guy Joosten's production at Theater an der Wien (Aug. 6), directed with just the right balance of whimsy and grit to make the characters truly engaging, endearing and, ultimately, heartbreaking. Jorge Jara dressed the attractive cast in thrift-shop shabby-chic, and set designer Johannes Leiacker struck the right tone for each act: a too-too trendy café; an airshaft overflowing with Musette's possessions (including a stuffed giraffe); a garret with a few broken chairs; and a stark, empty stage for the harrowing final act, in which the men huddled under a single blanket.
Mikhail Davidoff (Marcello) dominated the production vocally and physically. The ruggedly handsome Russian tenor has a huge voice, with a lovely Italianate bloom and a ringing top; he made one wonder why the Act II aria, in which Marcello asks Musette to live with him, hasn't become a concert staple. Easily his match, Katja Lytting limned Musette's progression from tattooed party-girl to starving pragmatist, highlighted by her letter aria and a soaring duet with Mimì. Urban Malmberg, as Schaunard (adorable in his Santa outfit), showed a warm baritone and winning presence in the opening aria (in which he introduces the rest of the cast, redolent of the lyricism of Pagliacci's prologue), and rose to heldenbariton glory leading the defiant chorus of party guests at the end of Act II. Juanita Lascarro's Mimì was no shy seamstress but an alluring extrovert who used her interesting, vibrato-laced timbre to keen effect; her death scene was chilling. As Rodolfo, Vittorio Vitelli was acerbic in his rejection of Mimì's return, gripping in the poet's realization that his life has been nothing but an empty illusion. Marco Guidarini drew a gorgeous, impassioned performance from the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Verismo fans owe KlangBogen Intendant Roland Geyer their thanks for airing this unjustly neglected work.
Hans-Jürgen von Bose's 63: Dream Palace, commissioned for the Second Munich Biennial in 1990, is a mesmerizing piece of music-theater, adapted by the composer from James Purdy's novel of the same name (1956). The composer wrote a libretto in English for the premiere and subsequently rewrote vocal lines to accommodate his own German translation, heard August 14, in performances at Vienna's Semper-Depot, in a coproduction by the KlangBogen Festival and Neue Oper Wien.
The story concerns recently orphaned, nineteen-year-old Fenton and his sickly eight-year-old brother, Claire, who run away from West Virginia to Chicago. A writer, Parkhearst Cratty, sees Fenton as inspiration for a new novel; he introduces the lad to his aging, rich patroness, Grainger, and her decadent, homosexual hangers-on: the pumped-up actor Hayden and the lascivious Bruno. Torn between his new life as a sexual plaything and the care of his religion-obsessed brother, Fenton strangles Claire, but at the opera's close, he appears oblivious to his crime.
Championed by the likes of Hans Werner Henze and Aribert Reimann, Bose possesses one of the most original voices in opera today. His words and music are dramatically taut and brimming with atmosphere. This largely atonal, complex score includes elements of jazz, rock, blues, country and gospel music, and it features a battery of sixty-eight percussion instruments (including spoons), banjo, electric guitar, accordion and pre-recorded elements on tape. The vocal writing is extremely difficult, featuring wild streams of coloratura from several characters, Sprechgesang and sudden leaps from lowest chest voice into high head tone. But this is no dry, academic exercise for connoisseurs of New Music. A trio for Fenton, Claire and the apparition of their dead mother is as gorgeous as anything written in the past fifty years. There is humor, too, as when a therapy group sings a patter quartet (suggestive of the smuggler's quintet in Carmen) extolling heterosexuality, while the deluded Parkhearst tries to justify his failing marriage.
Young Swedish tenor Erik Årman conquered Fenton's fiendish tessitura with his bright, focused instrument, and he proved dramatically credible. Peter Thunhart displayed a rich baritone as Parkhearst, whimpering to his wife and sleazily charming to Fenton. Double-cast, soprano Anna Maria Pammer was appropriately shrill as Parkhearst's wife and resplendent as the Mother. In high dudgeon as the monstrous Grainger, mezzo Ariane Arcoja made noises like a scat singer who'd forgotten what song she was performing. Countertenor Gerson Luiz Sales sailed through the strenuous role of Bruno, and bass Michael Wagner (Hayden) filled the theater with his ringing bass (and unearthly falsetto) in an aria based on text from Shakespeare's Othello. In a town overrun by professional choir boys, adult soprano Isabel Marxgut was cast as Claire; her costume was unconvincing, and she tended to oversing and overplay her role. Walter Kobéra led his top-notch Amadeus Ensemble in a thrilling, multi-faceted musical journey.
From the opening scene, director Mascha Pörzgen created an ambience rife with sexual tension, and she made stunning use of the cavernous, multi-tiered space (once the scene shop for Theater an der Wien). But the production ultimately failed when Fenton killed Bruno, rather than merely beating him up (as specified in the novel and the score), then addressed to him an aria clearly written to be delivered to Claire's dead body. It's one thing to reinterpret a classic, another to take such dramatic license with an unfamiliar, recent work.
Handel's Arianna in Creta is rarely performed and scantily documented: the composer produced this opera at the Haymarket in 1733-34, in competition with another opera (by Porpora, to the same libretto) at a rival theater. The plot concerns hostages who are to be sacrificed to the Minotaur; several of the intended victims are royalty and secretly in love with each other. A battle is won, the identity of a long-lost daughter is revealed, and love and peace prevail. A libretto (in Italian and German) included in the program booklet was made available only thirty minutes before the KlangBogen concert performance (July 8). It had not been corrected to reflect the many small cuts made throughout the opera (mostly in recitatives), and the print was too small to be read easily during the performance, but it did serve as a handy fan.
Many failed to return after the intermission, which came only after two hours and twelve minutes of performance. But if sitting through twenty-three arias (none of them particularly distinctive or memorable), two duets, one sextet and endless secco recitative is one's idea of heaven, this was the place to be.
Despite Arianna's star billing, the role of Teseo (Theseus), originally written for castrato, has the lion's share of this opera. Kristina Hammarström offered a pleasant, if rather bland, lightweight mezzo-soprano and sufficient technique (albeit without a properly produced trill) to articulate the many, many notes assigned to her. (One aria, containing a grand total of thirteen words, clocked in at nine minutes and had as many as eight measures of coloratura on a single syllable). It was often difficult to hear her over the orchestra of twenty Baroque instruments and two harpsichords. As Arianna, Sandrine Piau revealed a lovely, silvery soprano voice; she is capable of beautifully sculpted singing, but agility is not her forte. Her slow numbers were gorgeously rendered, but the more virtuoso requirements proved effortful (she, too, lacks a true trill) and verged on unpleasant.
Several supporting players provided more interest. Anne-Lise Sollied's lush, radiant lyric soprano made Alceste's arias the highlights of the evening. As Tauride, the villain, Ann Hallenberg brought fire and bite even to her recitatives; she spat out vocal venom, particularly in the big aria in which she competed with two horns (and won). As one of two female characters in this opera, a true contralto, Ewa Wolak, delivered the most fascinating performance. Her lowest notes, totally unforced and produced without sliding into chest voice, had a rich, dark, almost baritonal quality to them.
Christophe Rousset has assembled an excellent band, as their many recordings attest, and what a peppy bunch they are! With the singers restricted to a tiny playing area, Rousset and his players provided all the action, bobbing and weaving as if in some arcane ritual. The conductor (who also provided harpsichord accompaniment during the recitatives, and who appeared shirtless in his portrait for the program book) grunted, panted, snarled, yelled cues and loudly gasped for air, as if he were the one who had just sung three pages of sixty-fourth notes. Perhaps he was just trying to enliven this dry, academic exercise, clearly intended for connoisseurs only.
LARRY L. LASH
MUNICH Following Die Walküre (see above), Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, presented in the Prinzregententheater, was the Munich Festival's second new production (seen July 24). Director Martin Duncan delved into Tom Rakewell's psychology, costuming Nick Shadow and Tom Rakewell identically, presenting them as two aspects of the same psyche. This was a melancholy Tom, conscious of his fall but lacking the strength of character to avert it. There was no doubt that Tom was in love with Anne, and this made their duet in Act II quite touching.
In general, Duncan succeeded in transforming allegorical caricatures into real people. Baba's advice to Anne in Act III, coming from the heart, gained the power to move. Duncan presented the story with humor, at the same time managing to make one care about the destiny of each main character. Jonathan Lunn's choreography deserves special mention. His choice of personnel was unusual, his five female dancers (representing changes of season) being of all sizes and shapes; this novel idea was met at first with amusement but rewarded at the final curtain with vociferous applause. The sets by Ultz were simple: mostly a single room representing the prison of Tom's mind, with few but appropriate props that, in the course of the piece, piled up in a corner like a life's refuse.
Tom was fidgety and nervous, with poor posture. With Ian Bostridge as Tom, this was a case of art imitating life, typecasting at its best. The tenor was in magnificent voice, sounding splendid in every scene although he should have paid more attention to diction. The rest of the cast certainly had done so. As Anne, Dorothea Röschmann's pronunciation was as clear as her understanding of the text. Her rich voice, perfect for the part, sounded stunning; her portrayal was blessed with an enviable inner conviction.
William Shimell was a marvellously tongue-in-cheek Nick Shadow. He brought to this devil the same vocal and dramatic intensity he brings to his justifiably famous Don Giovanni. Baba the Turk was seen here in a diaphanous robe that showed her entire body; the famous beard could be found between her legs. "She" was portrayed by countertenor Christopher Robson, in relatively good voice. The casting of a man in the role proved a matter of taste, leaving the audience evenly divided in its judgement. Lynton Black sang a believable Trulove, Anne Pellekoorne a less credible Mother Goose. Robert Tear made a cameo appearance as Sellem the Auctioneer. The chorus, under the leadership of Martin Zöbeley, dove headfirst into its task and did itself proud. Ivor Bolton conducted with passion and skill.
JEFFREY A. LEIPSIC
GLYNDEBOURNE Vladimir Jurowski, Glyndebourne's new music director, made his company debut in, of all things, a revival by Peter Hall of his 1985 Albert Herring (Aug. 10), one of the company's classic stagings. With LPO players again in the pit, Jurowski made an excellent impression with his carefully wrought but never showy interpretation. Among several unforgettable performances onstage, Christopher Maltman's cocksure Sid contrasted brilliantly with Alfred Boe's shy Albert. Susan Gritton's demure Miss Wordsworth and Robert Poulton's painfully accurate village vicar were equally memorable, while Felicity Lott proved that she had everything required for the terrifying Lady Billows except the crucial steely top register.
Káta Kabanová returned in the staging by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, whose Janácek productions have been among Glyndebourne's greatest successes in recent years. It proved intensely involving on July 19, though Orla Boylan's Káta seemed too healthy for this most delicate of heroines. Pär Lindskog sang with romantic abandon as Káta's lover Boris, while Chris Merritt's vocalism and character study as her feeble husband Tichon were impeccable. The LPO surpassed itself under the baton of Jirí Kout, whose reading was of the highest quality.
The festival's opener, a revival of Graham Vick's Don Giovanni (May 18), looked as confused and confusing as ever. Not even the headlong dash of conductor Louis Langrée, nor such quality performances as Wojtek Drabowicz's manic Giovanni, Jonathan Veira's laid-back Leporello or Bruce Ford's mellifluous Ottavio, could save it. D'Arcy Bleiker registered as a forceful Masetto, Sarah Fox as a winsome Zerlina. Véronique Gens's Elvira couldn't manage all her notes, but the cast, including Tatiana Monogarova's high-achieving Anna, deserved an infinitely more considered staging than this.
GEORGE HALL
MONTPELLIER The production of Handel's Rinaldo (1711) at the Festival de Radio France et de Montpellier seemed a gag carried too far (seen in the magnificent Opéra Comédie, July 31). Directors Nigel Lowery and Amir Hosseinpour adhered to the condescending modern European belief that Handel's opera seria will become a string of tedious arias unless enlivened. Set during the Crusades, Rinaldo lends itself to topical interpretations, and with Muslims and missiles, Lowery and Hosseinpour didn't miss a twenty-first-century joke. Not all were off-target. When the sorceress Armida disguised herself as Almirena, for instance, she used two sawed-off Mercedes limousines; the sorceress entered as one character and emerged as another. However when a giant, very yellow, fluffy bird abducted Almirena, the resulting audience merriment made it nigh impossible to establish the right atmosphere for Rinaldo's "Cara sposa," one of Handel's most touching arias of loss; many other directorial concepts were clichés. The virtuosity of the design and the dedication of the artists involved were never in question, but the directors' aggressive cynicism frequently undermined Handel's music. This opera is far from devoid of wit, but it is not a knockabout farce.
Musically, things were happier: René Jacob's pacing of the work was admirable, and the Freiburger Barock-orchester played well, albeit within the confines of that other modern Handel performance orthodoxy, the authentic Baroque orchestra. Just how far the phrasing and style have evolved in this repertoire was shown when Almirena (Miah Persson) launched into the show's hit aria, "Lascia ch'io pianga." Heavily decorated, yet with a reticence to commit any musical indulgence, this was a model of one school of contemporary Handel performance practice.
Vivica Genaux exploited her light, wonderfully even and flexible mezzo and revealed radiant stage presence as the stubble-cheeked, Christian freedom-fighter, Rinaldo. Her final Act II aria was a great piece of Handel singing, wide-ranging from her cavernous low register to a bright, ringing top. Persson has a sweet, crystalline timbre capable of floated sounds of ethereal beauty; she's a plucky stage performer of great personal beauty. Soprano Inga Kalna's Armida was a wonderful piece of operatic high camp. Throwing herself headlong into the music, she stole the show at several crucial moments and even managed to provide the evening's only genuine emotional moment in Act II, when Armida realizes she won't win Rinaldo's love. Countertenor Lawrence Zazzo's firmly sung portrait of a nervous Goffredo, on the verge of breakdown, was convincing, and twenty-three-year-old countertenor Christophe Dumaux sang beautifully as his brother Eustazio. James Rutherford's bass-baritone was ideally suited to Argante's tough music; his blustering performance nonetheless achieved moments of vocal virtuosity. In the small role of the Mago Cristiano, countertenor Dominique Visse was, as usual, superbly theatrical.
STEPHEN MUDGE
MARTINA FRANCA Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, which was once part of the standard repertoire in Italy, has only been staged here three times since the war. The most recent of these productions -- and the first ever in the original language -- was mounted at the Festival of the Valle d'Itria in Martina Franca in Puglia. The performance (seen on August 6 in the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale) was inevitably cut -- though less so than was often the case in the past (it finished well past one o'clock in the morning) -- and featured only one native French singer: baritone Jean Vendassi in the minor role of De Retz. The director, Arnaud Bernard, is also French, but this did not prevent him from setting the action in late-1930s Germany, presenting the Huguenots as Jews and the Catholics as Nazis (a daring decision in Southern Italy), and deriving some visual ideas from Visconti's 1969 film The Damned. (The present production was designed by Alessandro Camera, with costumes by Carla Ricotti.) Unfortunately, the links between this concept and the work's musical dramaturgy were too forced to prove theatrically effective, with frequent strident contrasts between what one saw onstage and what one was hearing in the score and libretto: not surprisingly, the most effective scene was an entirely invented dumb-show at the beginning of Act V, showing Jews being rounded up by the Gestapo. The rest of the production, although fairly well acted, seemed unoriginal and beside the point, arousing noisy protests at the end from an international audience.
Musically, the performance demonstrated that this opera makes a limited effect without singers of considerable charisma and accomplishment. Chinese tenor Warren Mok -- who had proved acceptable as Robert le Diable in the same venue two years earlier -- coped bravely with the high-lying phrases in the duet with Valentine in Act IV, but he was unable to deliver the rest of Raoul's music with anything like the necessary finesse or tonal effulgence. As Marcel, Korean bass Soon-Won Lee made little impression with his breathy production and weak lower register, and the humorous nature of the master-servant relationship was largely obscured by the production. Nevers (Marcin Bronikowski) and St. Bris (Luca Grassi) were adequately portrayed, though without the brilliance of tone and diction that the music cries out for.
The women were generally better. Sara Allegretta sang neatly as the page Urbain, Annalisa Raspagliosi brought Valentine alive (despite unbecoming costumes) with broad, intense phrasing and brilliant top notes, and Desirée Rancatore proved a sparklingly virtuoso Marguerite de Valois, rather lightweight but capable of exquisitely shaded passagework.
Renato Palumbo proved a solid and involved conductor, but the Orchestra Internazionale d'Italia clearly had not had enough rehearsals to do justice to the refinement of Meyerbeer's score (although there were some fine solo contributions), and the Bratislava Chamber Chorus was barely adequate.
STEPHEN HASTINGS
LACOSTE, FRANCE The château of Lacoste was the childhood home of the Marquis de Sade, and its austere towers and dungeons may well have inspired the young man's colorful sexual adventures. The ruined château has been purchased by Pierre Cardin, who alongside the celebrated music journalist Eve Ruggieri, has created the Espace La Costa, which this year saw its first festival. After a concert by June Anderson, the first full opera offering was Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose antihero has intriguing parallels with the château's original occupant. The audience gathered in the quarry below the great house, where dank, honey-colored stone caverns nestle into the hillside, with the ruins of the château towering above in medieval splendor. The scene was set for an infamous party of the late marquis, or perhaps one of the Don's festivities where Champagne and locals mix in a hedonistic celebration.
The show began poorly, with stage business during the overture. The first fifteen minutes of Don Giovanni are a perfect dramatic exposé; gilding the lily by staging the overture only weakens and confuses the power of the opening scene. However Bernard Broca's production soon settled down, and the story was decently told in traditional costumes, no hint of chains and whips, toward which some of our more sadomasochistic directors might have been tempted.
Broca made adventurous use of the space, with characters frequently singing from behind, above or to the side of the public, which was counterproductive only in the final scene. The Commendatore was placed behind the audience, which made Donna Elvira's final scream curiously redundant as she exited upstage, and it also meant that Giovanni could get nowhere near the dread chill of the statue's hand. Otherwise, the singers acted well in what obviously were not the easiest circumstances. François-Xavier Bilger conducted a workmanlike account of the score (July 21), but the amplification of the orchestra underlined occasional weaknesses of the Orchestre Lyrique de la Région Avignon-Provence, and for many of the audience, the orchestral sound was coming from speakers to the left or right, rather than from the makeshift pit.
Véronique Gens (Donna Elvira) dominated the performance. This formerly wispy, early-music soprano has completely transformed her vocal style, becoming a full-blooded Mozartean of considerable class. Her contributions to the ensembles were a constant joy, and she made comparatively light of the difficulties of "Mi tradì." Cécile Perrin, a soft-grained Donna Anna, overindulged in her delicate soft singing, and Veronica Cangemi, as a charming Zerlina, showed enormous vocal potential. Her Masetto was the personable but vocally under-projected Bernard Imbert; similarly under-projecting was Jérôme Correas (Leporello), whose exaggerated pointing of the text upset the vocal line, which lacked any bass quality. As the Commendatore, Gregory Reinhart's voice seemed as firm and resonant as the walls of the ancient quarry itself. Yann Beuron, who must be tired of being referred to as a promising young French tenor, used his attractive, grainy timbre to the full as Don Ottavio, but he didn't sound entirely confident. As the Don, Nicolas Cavallier displayed the right personal charisma and a certain brutal vocal force, but he lacks bel canto suavity for the role's lyrical moments.
The work was performed in a version that omitted the epilogue but gave a full quota of arias -- a not entirely logical decision. The cutting of any of the long string of Act II arias could be dramatically interesting, but this usually seems too great a musical sacrifice.
STEPHEN MUDGE
BUENOS AIRES The inclusion of La Fanciulla del West in a schedule as refined and selective as that of Teatro Colón this season seemed strange. Puccini's "Wild West" opera is his weakest: only a vigorous, colorful production with exceptional voices can stir much interest in it. The production on view at the Colón (seen July 30) did not deliver those necessary ingredients, but it did serve to introduce Argentine audiences to an excellent singer, Olga Romanko. Far from being another powerful Russian soprano in the Italian repertory, beautiful-voiced but unidiomatic, Romanko offered a voluminous, rich, warm voice, Italianate in color and inflection, as well as a real feeling for Puccini style. In addition, she is a beautiful woman and a convincing actress, able to make Minnie's character credible -- no small accomplishment. She promises to be an excellent Tosca, and major international houses would do well to take note of her.
As Johnson, Daniel Muñoz, replacing an indisposed Luis Lima, sang solidly, if without brilliance, and gave a sober interpretation. Luis Gaeta approached the part of Rance, which demands a heavier, more voluminous voice than his, with efficient professionalism and sense of character. The Colón's previous attempts at this opera have always featured interesting cameos among the large, picturesque ensemble of miners; this time, only Billy (the always valuable Omar Brandán) and Wowkle (Marta Cullères) stood out. Mario Perusso used to be a Puccinian conductor of skill and warm expression, but lately, as on this occasion, he has appeared rather indifferent, too relaxed and only engaged in the epic moments in Act III.
This new production, directed by Marcelo Lombardero (with sad, opaque sets by Tito Egurza), was generally realistic and traditional, with a few unsuccessful attempts at stylization. The garret in which Minnie hides Johnson cannot be symbolically skeletal and roofless if it's being used as a shelter in a snowstorm (realistically depicted); Johnson remained entirely visible while supposedly hidden. In a verismo opera, such staging choices are serious failures. In Act III, for which Puccini prescribes a lush California forest of sequoias, the director opted for a sinister camp dominated by a gallows, from which dangled a corpse that remained in place until the moment Johnson was to be executed. Lately, directors at the Colón have seemed eager to betray the composers' and librettists' intentions: over the years, they have provided a number of unappealing changes of scene, but I can't remember anything so lurid as this. Lombardero also hoped to give the production a cinematic look, using a transparent tulle curtain, on which he projected opening credits at the beginning of the opera and, at the end, the classic words "The End." The effect was merely silly.
EDUARDO ARNOSI
VIENNA Somewhere along the way, the creative team behind Neue Oper Wien's production of Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson (seen July 17) mistook the gentle satire of Paul Green's text for a caustic Brechtian parable. The heavy-handed results do no favors to anyone on either side of the footlights, let alone the work's creators. This antiwar play (the war in question being World War I) was Weill's first foray into the world of the American musical, written for the Group Theatre in 1936. Rather than heap unnecessary "meaning" onto it (a Broadway revival in 1971, with allusions to the Vietnam War, closed after one night), it is best served by a group of dedicated, young performers who can bring conviction to Green's simple text and the more than twenty musical numbers provided by Weill (as witnessed by the York Theatre Company's glorious semi-staged performances in October 2000 in New York City). Instead of trusting the piece as it stands, the producers cut and arranged musical numbers and altered the text considerably. (German translations were by Hilde Berger and Richard Weihe). The cast has been instructed to bark, snarl and scream both music and spoken text, banging the audience over the head with the message that "war is bad." The needless, graphic violence of the staging sadly contradicted the morals and words of the work's eponymous, well-meaning-if-misguided pacifist.
Dieter Kschwendt-Michel has everything the title role calls for: boyish good looks, a genial, goofy stage presence and a pleasing, light-lyric baritone. Overcoming considerable directorial miscalculations, he made "Johnny's Song" the only moving part of this seemingly endless lead-balloon of an evening, otherwise devoid of charm or subtlety. Kerstin Gandler, the pretty, young, silvery-voiced Minny Belle, made one wish she had more solos than "Oh Heart Of Love" and "Farewell, Goodbye." Doing triple duty, mezzo Yasmine Piruz gave strong musical accounts of "Aggie's Song," "The Song of the Goddess" and particularly "Mon Ami, My Friend" (which for some reason was sung by a diseuse entertaining the troops, not by the French nurse prescribed in the script).
As Private Harwood, the West-Pointer, and Dr. Mahodan, Peter Thunhart used his solid baritone winningly in "Oh the Rio Grande" but missed the irony of both "The West-Pointer Song" (by emphasizing its cruelty) and "The Psychiatry Song" (by underplaying the doctor's own psychoses). Marco di Sapia found nothing suave or seductive in "Captain Valentine's Song." The ensemble of twelve coped valiantly against the many odds stacked against them (even if many of the military inductees seemed a bit beyond the legal age of recruitment).
A dangerously raked platform in the middle of the stage necessitated relegating the play's many intimate scenes to a cramped playing area to its right, and the orchestra to its left. Walter Kobéra led the Amadeus Ensemble Wien in a blasé, lackluster performance of Weill's pastiche of musical styles and parodies, acoustically marred by the placement of the band far upstage and partially behind some scenery.
For no discernible reason, director Dieter Berner chose to set the action in a nauseatingly accurate depiction of the wreckage of the World Trade Center. What happened on September 11, 2001 is unspeakable. This directorial concept, accordingly, deserves no comment.
LARRY L. LASH
NORTH AMERICA
CLEVELAND Lyric Opera Cleveland ended its first season at the Drury Theatre of The Cleveland Playhouse with the second U.S. production of John Adams's I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (seen July 31). Although not well received in its first U.S. production, in 1995 (directed by Peter Sellars and given in Berkeley and at the Serious Fun! Festival in New York), a subsequent European tour, as well as a Canadian production, met with better critical response. In its twenty-ninth season of presenting innovative repertoire (or standard repertoire in innovative ways), LOC energetically made its best case for this flawed work.
The libretto of Ceiling/Sky, by acclaimed poet June Jordan, was inspired by the Northridge, CA earthquake of 1994, and it focuses on seven racially and ethnically diverse characters: David, a philandering preacher; Leila, David's latest conquest; Dewain, in trouble with the law but struggling to better himself; Consuelo, an illegal immigrant and the mother of Dewain's child; Rick, an Asian-American lawyer; Mike, a white policeman; and Tiffany, a TV reporter involved with Mike, then with Rick. During the course of the piece, each confronts a defining personal issue, grapples with it and moves on. The earthquake, at the beginning of Act II, metaphorically shakes the foundations of the characters' lives and provides the catalyst for the changes they face.
Despite its promising concept, Ceiling/Sky is a confusing exercise. It has been described variously by Adams and Jordan as an "earthquake/romance," a "polyphonic love story in the style of a Shakespeare comedy" and a "song play" (but not an opera or a musical), but no clear musical approach ever presents itself. The typical Adams "sound" is a constant underlying element, but his forays into popular idioms such as jazz, gospel and rock seem inauthentic and forced. Jordan tackles weighty issues, such as racial stereotypes, sexual identity and political oppression, but the libretto is often stilted and clumsy, especially in the episodic, overly long (ninety minutes) Act I, in which the action would be unclear to anyone who had not read a synopsis. Act II is half as long and more cohesive musically and dramatically. As a result, the interrelationships of the characters become much clearer.
The linchpin of LOC's production was the authoritative, energetic leadership of conductor Mary Chun, whose long experience with Ceiling/Sky includes its European and Canadian premieres. Director Jonathon Field's staging alternated between symbolic and realistic elements and tended to emphasize the work's introspective nature. The effectively minimal scenic design by Don McBride included one multi-functioning, mobile set piece and a number of chairs. Masked members of the company's apprentice program acted as both stagehands and supernumeraries.
Adams's vocal writing presented a challenge for the young singers, one to which the female members of the cast rose more successfully. Sopranos Kimberly Jones (Leila) and Rebecca Ocampo (Consuelo) were both vocally and dramatically convincing, especially in their respective solo songs. The highlight of the evening was provided by powerhouse baritone Brian Johnson (Dewain) in his Act II "Song of Liberation." Despite amplification of the singers, the balance was frequently off between the stage and the seven-person, mostly electronic instrumental ensemble.
DAVID BOWER
GREAT BARRINGTON & TANGLEWOOD, MA The Berkshire region offers a full range of cultural offerings in the summer, and fully staged opera received a boost this year with the opening of Berkshire Opera's handsome home theater in Great Barrington. The company's valiant, itinerant history of eighteen years (largely Mozart and eighteenth-century works, but with Britten and contemporary works also featured) found a welcome culmination in the deployment of the 700-seat Mahaiwe Theater, a charming, easily accessible former vaudeville and movie house dating from 1905.
As internal technical renovations to the pit and backstage facilities still continue, company directors Linda Jackson and Joel Revzen programmed Britten's The Turn of the Screw, with its miraculous scoring for thirteen-piece chamber orchestra and relatively simple scenic requirements. Watching the excellent musicians perform at stalls level added to the fascination of Ron Daniels's splendid production; under Revzen's propulsive yet text-sensitive leadership (heard Aug. 9), each of the players flourished in key moments. Only the otherwise deft pianist flagged a bit in Miles's tricky little mini-concerto.
Daniels and his designers utilized the Mahaiwe stage very effectively. Carl Halvorson's Prologue (a begloved, Henry James-like first-nighter) held forth from the front-left stage box; Halvorson's Quint initially materialized from the same place. His tricky appearance at the window (one of Riccardo Hernández's several well-chosen set units and props) proved ideally chilling. The first appearance of Miss Jessel (Elizabeth Shammash, striking in one of Marina Draghici's wonderfully ornate costumes) could have held more mystery, however: in full light, she seemed too corporeal, too soon. Scott Zielinski lit the theater's bare brick back wall and imaginatively deployed side-curtain projections with atmospheric skill and exactness.
Jennifer Aylmer delivered one of the greatest Governesses since that of Helen Donath, whose lovely, sunny sound and sensitivity to dynamics and phrasing the attractive young soprano brought to mind. A fine actress, Aylmer projected the character's shyness and increasing obsessive agitation with excellent diction and pinpoint physical skill.
Halvorson's diction also proved exemplary, though in places (such as the chilling repeated utterances of "What does she know?" and "Take it!") deeper shades of meaning could be plumbed. The tenor commands a muscular, substantial sound, so his melismatic flights were even more impressive for their accuracy and heady lightness. Mary Ann McCormick made Mrs. Grose very sympathetic, her warm, capacious mezzo easily encompassing the part's wide range. She sometimes colored her lines with odd, occluded vowels, as if affecting a foreign accent.
Shammash moved well and declaimed with intelligence and passion; her mezzo has an interesting color in the middle but consistently turned harsh at full volume. Ilana Davidson enacted a sensitive, credible Flora, evoking the terrors and joys of an Edwardian girlhood; her pure, delicate soprano served her music ideally. Dramatically very effective as Miles, Trevor Kaplan-Newman phrased well; if his projection proved variable (in the last of five performances), he contributed much to the ensemble's success. Berkshire Opera can face the future with pride in its new home's initial offering.
Up the road, Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed offered no full-scale opera on the order of last season's Salome with Deborah Voigt, but (as ever) prominent vocalists played a role in the programming. A thrilling, much overdue Boston Symphony debut found Karita Mattila in virtually peak form (August 10). The Finnish soprano, with her genuine "star-quality" personal and vocal glamour, and with the true visceral impact of her luminous sound, is probably best experienced in "Ah, perfido!" in live performance. (Her middling account of the aria on her recent recording with Colin Davis [Elektra/Asylum 42141] suggests the same.) Seen live, she gave an extraordinarily intense reading to the text, psychologically realistic in a contemporary manner: a full-blooded rejected lover out of late Sondheim. She poured forth gorgeous arcs of creamy half-voice in the actual aria. The tone lost quality on the very lowest notes, and occasionally high forte attacks were not square on the note. The (awkwardly set) fiorature with descending chromatic scale were here capably negotiated rather than triumphantly conquered, but the total performance was sufficiently compelling and expressive to outweigh the slight technical imperfections. Mattila (in a second eye-catching gown) proved ideally matched with Sibelius's short, Kalevala-based tone poem, Luonnotar; it's hard to imagine another current soprano performing it better. Mattila didn't take the teal's third cry of "Ei" ("No!") pianissimo, as specified, but she negotiated the tricky intervals with bravura. With her golden radiance of voice and depth of feeling, she gave a highly involved and highly involving performance. Conductor Osmo Vänskä also made an invigorating BSO debutant; the orchestra was appreciative and compliant.
Two nights later, a semi-staged Trouble in Tahiti formed the second half of a Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concert in Seiji Ozawa Hall. Bernstein's enjoyable, musically skillful if somewhat facile, dated seven-scene portrait of a suburban marriage merits revival, but it is probably best served by the kind of simple staging that Mark Astafan devised here, performed by Tanglewood's Vocal Fellows. An IKEA-style kitchen table and a cell phone were a mistake; the essence of the "suburbia" Bernstein depicted -- indeed even the term "suburbia" -- is inextricably linked to its period (1952) and has but patchy resonance in the era of gated communities and Young Urban Professionals.
Erin Elizabeth Smith (Dinah) brought to bear an impassioned delivery, a powerful tragic face and a powerful rich mezzo, impressive for pinpoint accuracy of pitch and attack. One would like to hear her take on Berlioz's Marie (L'Enfance du Christ) and Anna (Les Troyens) en route to his full-voiced heroines. Her "What a movie!" proved highly entertaining; if the aria didn't seem a constituent part of Dinah's character, the fault was the creator's and not the performer's.
Robert Stafford looked aptly macho as the neglectful egotist Sam but had variable success projecting the words and adapting his bass-baritone (impressively produced in quiet passages) to the sometimes cruelly high line. Valerie MacCarthy, Daniel Hoy and Eric Shaw dispensed charm and smooth harmonies as the commenting doo-wop trio, convincingly channeling a style as alien to today's students as the Floradora Quartet would have been to the original cast. Conductor Federico Cortese moved among Bernstein's idioms with ease, and the student orchestra played terrifically, especially the jazz-savvy brass section.
DAVID SHENGOLD
BOSTON Don Giovanni (seen Aug. 1 at the Tsai Performance Center) was the third Mozart work out of the four productions by Opera Aperta since this, billed as Boston's summer opera company, was founded in 1999. (The exception was last summer's Il Barbiere di Siviglia.) So far, Opera Aperta seems to like sticking with the familiar. Two Aperta stalwarts, stage director Drew Minter [a contributor to OPERA NEWS] and conductor Craig Smith (leading his talented Emmanuel Music ensemble), again proved their compatibility. Another Aperta veteran, Sarah Sullivan, designed the very basic set -- consisting mainly of three rather blandly painted house-fronts, on moveable walls. Felicia McNeill's costumes didn't adhere to any one period: few came from the same era, and others combined elements of several.
The cast was a bit fresher than the design team. In the title role, young baritone Nikolas Nackley made a rather weak entrance, but by Act II he had gained a bit more confidence, both vocally and dramatically. Overall though, his Don was not much of a force to be reckoned with. The unequivocal show-stealer was baritone David Kravitz as Leporello. A natural crowd-pleaser, Kravitz sang with resonance and fluency, and he acted with an ease and expressiveness that far outshone the rest. With wonderful facial expressions that complimented an even more expressive instrument, soprano Sarah Pelletier was a vibrant, robust Donna Elvira. Jodi Frisbee, as Donna Anna, showed off an impressive coloratura technique, only occasionally approaching shrillness. Her powerful sound was particularly effective during her oaths of vengeance, but at times, her stage movements -- very stiff and deliberate -- felt distractingly severe. In her shadow, newcomer Charles Blandy (Ottavio) had no real presence, his tenor sometimes barely registering. As Zerlina, mezzo-soprano Krista Rivers was seductive and energetic, and baritone Aaron Englebreth's Masetto was consistently strong. As the Commendatore, baritone Tae-Gap Yang brought an appropriately ominous, hearty tone to end a long show.
Though the onstage performance seemed at times to yawn along, the musical performance was always fluid and mastered with notable skill. Smith is clearly a maestro with a magic wand.
JULIE MULLANY
LEBANON, NH Opera North assembled fine productions of Eugene Onegin and Così Fan Tutte at the Lebanon Opera House last August, reflecting the company's customary attention to detail and preparation, though these virtues ran a parallel course with a variety of odd artistic choices and awkward vestiges of community theater. Very much in the plus column was this season's orchestra. It would be difficult to find a better orchestral sound anywhere on the summer circuit. Not only did the musicians play beautifully as an ensemble, individual players gave unusual distinction to their solo lines.
Of the two productions, Onegin (seen Aug. 20) was arguably the more successful. Louis Burkot, the company's artistic director, conducted a committed if unduly careful reading of the score. Burkot appears to be more a meticulous musician than a technical conductor. To his credit, he remembered that Tchaikovsky was a symphonic composer; the opera's symphonic elements were prominently featured, including the orchestra's role as narrator or commentator.
It was refreshing to see a young cast perform this opera. The world premiere (1879) was performed by students of the Moscow Conservatory, and age-appropriate casting gives an obvious boost to credibility, especially in the opera's early scenes. Credibility ceased to be a factor, however, as the cast seemed to sleepwalk through much of the evening.
Stage director Ron Luchsinger ignored one of this work's most critical elements: operatic realism. The dramatic success of Onegin depends on an accumulation of realistic details of attitude and behavior, not to mention the externalization of the characters' inner lives. This production treated the characters as types and the story as ritual, fighting the opera's true energy and spirit. The performers were successful to the degree that they were able to move beyond the style that apparently had been imposed.
Michael Chioldi was a fine-looking Onegin. His healthy baritone penetrated the space easily, and he found passion in his moments of self-denouncement. As Tatyana, Andrea Trebnik looked lovely, presented a confident stage presence and seemed vocally underpowered for the role. German Villar brought a fine lyric tenor and monochromatic characterization to the proceedings, his Lensky coming to life only with the famous aria in Act II.
Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Batton (Olga) was vocally solid and appropriately frivolous. Mezzo-soprano Leslie Mutchler, a member of Opera North's young artists program, gave an outstanding account of the old servant, Filipyevna. Strong production values included cohesive, minimalist stage settings by Yoshinori Tanokura, appropriate, well-coordinated costumes by Thom J. Peterson and superb atmospheric lighting by David Gelhar.
Under the guidance of the same creative team, Così Fan Tutte (seen Aug. 21) was an ill-conceived, inconsistent amalgam of styles and intentions. Perhaps in an attempt at "universality," the period of the production was impossible to discern. Naples was depicted on backdrops as a small village, suggesting an early period, while costuming had the principal men as preppy Edwardians and the principal women in lovely, early-nineteenth-century dresses. Somewhat Italian-looking sailors were in evidence, playing billiards at the "men's club" of the opening scene and pushing a small boat that might have come from a Viking production of The Pirates of Penzance.
Musical expectations raised by a stimulating performance of the overture were quickly dashed. Act I was rushed to the point of breathlessness, reducing it to the level of undifferentiated vaudeville; the resulting tediousness caused this act to seem longer than its eighty-five-minute running time. Act II proceeded at a more comprehensible pace. However, the inclusion of unnecessary arias for Dorabella and Ferrando, the injudicious inclusion of "Per pietà" for Fiordiligi and the absence of intelligent recitative cuts, led to soporific consequences.
A uniformly strong cast coped well with the production. Marie-Adele McArthur performed admirably as Fiordiligi, both vocally and dramatically. Her "Come scoglio" succeeded as well as can be expected from a young singer, though the low tessitura of "Per pietà" extended beyond her vocal maturity at this time. Valerie Komar proved an attractive, spirited Dorabella, though she tended to disappear vocally in the ensembles. Faith Esham, a company favorite, brought the right perky quality to Despina, and she dealt commendably with oddball disguises, including what appeared to be a Quaker Gabby Hays as the "doctor."
To the degree permitted by the musical approach and staging, Eric Fennell, Keith Phares and Kenneth Shaw were committed and convincing as Ferrando, Guglielmo and Alfonso. One bit of business had Guglielmo presenting Ferrando with a hero sandwich after the tenor performed "Un aura amorosa," one of the most elegant arias in the repertoire, its elegance further compromised by a too-fast tempo. That said, the production was not without good ideas. At the moment of Dorabella's submission to her "Albanian" suitor, Vesuvius (depicted on a backdrop) "erupted" with several puffs of smoke. (The bit was repeated for Fiordiligi with less effect.) A mid-stage drop allowed scene changes to proceed without pauses, but these did little more than mitigate the apparent lack of confidence in the piece. Among the lapses in taste, a number of people were given "funny" walks; these included the "wounded" soldiers (portrayed by area residents) who limped across the stage as Ferrando and Guglielmo return from "battle."
DONALD WESTWOOD
WOOSTER, OH On its schedule last summer, Ohio Light Opera introduced three engaging works new to its repertoire. Autumn Maneuvers, Emmerich Kálmán's first full-scale operetta (1908), is musically strong but undermined by a diffuse, weak libretto. A new performing edition by OLO artistic director Steven A. Daigle provided a jolly, singable English translation while tightening up loose ends (seen Aug. 7). Associate music director Steven Byess took full advantage of the extensive overture, urging his orchestra to an expansive, full-bodied performance, then continuing to offer strong orchestral support throughout the performance. In an inspired bit of casting, tall, willowy mezzo Lauren Pastorek (as Treska) was paired with petite soprano Lauren Beatty in the travesty role of Pvt. Marosi. Both sang and danced charmingly. As in so many Kálmán operettas, there's a serious undercurrent, here represented by as second pair of lovers. Soprano Jacquelyn Lengfelder (Baroness Risa) was the epitome of elegance, regal in bearing, movingly luminous in voice; baritone Wade Woodward, as her lover, Lt. Lörenthy, gave a melancholy, poetic and vocally commanding performance. The comic role of Wallerstein seems gratuitous and intrusive, at times reaching an embarrassing level of hyper-silliness. Tenor Nathan Arnett tackled the role head-on, playing Wallerstein wildly to the hilt and singing strongly. Sensible, sensitive staging by Daigle and rambunctious choreography by Carol Hageman filled Kirk Domer's warmly romantic, autumnal settings.
Victor Herbert's Sweethearts (Aug. 10) isn't strong on plot, either, but it's worthwhile for its delightful music. Taking her fourth Herbert role at OLO, soprano Suzanne Woods offered golden tone and stylish sensibility as Sylvia, a princess in hiding. Robin Bricker (Liane) proved vocally small-scale but pert and lively. Cassidy King looked and sounded every bit the romantic hero, his young baritone voice used with discretion, his stage deportment convincing. Ben Smith (Slingsby), Derek Parks (Van Tromp) and Patrick Howle (Caniche) were a vocally well-matched comic trio, singing with surprising precision even while dancing in wooden shoes. Smith also offered a show-stopping rendition of an "aria," served up with intelligence and meticulous singing. A hefty mezzo voice and forceful characterization allowed Alta Boover (Dame Paula) to dominate the stage each time she appeared. As Mikelovitz, a role with a great deal of spoken dialogue, Jonathan Stinson proved an adroit comedian, but one wanted to hear more singing from this fine baritone. Tenor John Pickle made Lt. Karl a firm-voiced, comic lothario. OLO music director J. Lynn Thompson conducted a light, lively performance.
Das Dreimäderlhaus (literally, "house of three girls") was billed as Blossom Time, though this was not Sigmund Romberg's perennial favorite but Heinrich Berté's adaptation of music by Franz Schubert, a fictionalized account of Schubert's life with a score pieced together from his more obscure works. Despite the inclusion of several authentic Schubert lieder, without any revisions by Berté, Dreimäderlhaus was a pretty affair, but dull, dull, dull. There was little variation in tempo, dynamics or emotion, and within the OLO season, this operetta was an andante in a series of scherzos that couldn't compete. Conductor Byess did all he could for the work, favoring mellow tones from the orchestra and carefully pacing the music to lend as much urgency as possible. John Pickle (Schubert) and tenor Brian Woods (Baron Schober) gave engaging performances, with telling characterizations; Julie Wright, Suzanne Woods and Pastorek sang and danced most ingratiatingly as the three Tschöll sisters. Robin Bricker portrayed the nasty, sassy Signora Grisi (an opera diva, of course); Patrick Howle brought a fresh, graceful baritone voice and attractive stage presence to the romantic role of Ferdinand Binder. David Wallen made a significant contribution as the dignified Saddler, and Ben Smith lent his polished timing to this work's ditsy comic role. Richard Traubner designed the realistic, pretty period settings; Daigle directed with lively intelligence.
CHARLES H. PARSONS
KENTFIELD, CA Passing through a College of Marin Theater lobby adorned with photos of such San Francisco Opera Merola Opera alumni as Thomas Hampson, Ruth Ann Swenson, Sylvia McNair, Ann Panagulias, Susan Graham and Anna Netrebko, an enthusiastic audience laughed its way through a sparkling August 11 matinee of Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor. Featuring Donald Pippin's sterling English translation, Mark Morash's effervescent conducting, Anna Wronsky's droll modern costumes and Polly Robbins's simple but delightfully employed set, the production was directed by David Edwards and choreograp