NORTH AMERICA NEW YORK CITY The Metropolitan's revival of Ariadne auf Naxos (heard March 28) had the polished, energized quality of a festival performance. Most of the principals had donned these same spangled shoes repeatedly since the Elijah Moshinsky production, designed by Michael Yeargan, opened to raves ten years ago. And the experience told.
Conductor James Levine, certainly no newcomer to the production either, seemed more expansive than he has in some previous encounters with this music. While supporting the singers with all his accustomed care, he explored instrumental color and let the score's quieter moments unfurl gently without any impression of dawdlng.
In this same vein, Deborah Voigt in the title role now uses restrained dynamics in lyric passages to suggest more of the heroine's vulnerability. She seemed to enjoy the comic antics of Act I, while Ariadne's impassioned yearning for death at the climax of "Es gibt ein Reich" rang with the singer's trademark brilliance. Oddly, near the end of the opera, Voigt became inaudible for a few bars of Ariadne's lines ("Was hängt von mir in deinem Arm") with the trio of nymphs, but she recovered to bring the duet with Bacchus to a stirring close.
Natalie Dessay resumed the role of Zerbinetta with welcome freshness that quelled any worries about recent vocal trouble. Her incarnation of the volatile flirt (who claims to be faithful on a serial basis) managed to combine brilliance with an impression of complete ease and naturalness. Dessay turned the pyrotechnics of the long aria, "Grossmächtige Prinzessin," into a series of sly confidences interspersed with jokes at her own expense. Even the brash tone of the top notes seemed in character, as did her dazzling strings of spiky staccatos -- suggesting both laughter and pirouettes, sometimes literally accompanied by the latter. Her sensuous, acrobatic portrayal was well matched by baritone Nathan Gunn's strutting Harlekin, sung with fervor and rich timbre.
Another casting coup was Richard Margison in the treacherous role of Bacchus. Rarely do the character's insistent strains sound so effortless, so warm and spontaneous, as in his performance, and rarely in my hearing has this tenor shown such consistent force and persuasiveness. Susanne Mentzer, though not in top form, repeated her sympathetic portrait of the Composer, familiar from the premiere of this production; still, the part really wants a singer who can convey pleasure at the sound of her own voice. The strong supporting cast included Wolfgang Brendel (Music Master); Tony Stevenson as a truly virtuoso Dancing Master; and Joyce Guyer, Jossie Pérez and Alexandra Deshorties as the melismatic nymphs.
The sets and costumes looked fresh, though the vacant, futuristic Act II still seems unimaginative after the intricate intersecting architecture of the Act I set, which so effectively keeps the action swirling around on itself.
DAVID J. BAKER
The tradition of silent-film acting, perpetuated into the soundtrack era by Sergei Eisenstein, is still alive and well on the Russian stage, as the Met revival of Otello proved on March 10, when Vladimir Galouzine and Nikolai Putilin took over the roles of Otello and Iago, respectively, under the baton of Valery Gergiev. The result presumably was a partial facsimile of what one might find on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre today. Dramatically powerful, it offered less in the realm of vocal subtlety, but no one could accuse the principals of giving less than their all. Their unbuckled style seemed a little at odds with the stately production, designed a decade ago by Michael Yeargan, staged by Elijah Moshinsky, now in the hands of David Kneuss.
This Otello began explosively, with a storm scene propelled by Gergiev's impulsive, erratic beat, which sometimes left chorus and orchestra struggling to keep up. Galouzine's entrance lines, starting with "Esultate!," were scattershot in pitch and tonally ragged, but they showed a big-voiced, visceral power that informed much of the performance to come. Galouzine, a resourceful dramatic tenor on the Met stage in Russian roles, plausibly conceives Otello as a rough man of action, emotionally beyond his depth in a world of intrigue. To show frustration, Galouzine relied on abrupt gestures, restraining himself with difficulty, eventually dead-ending in physical violence and collapse. His raw, muscular singing conveyed threatening strength, with no emphasis on tonal beauty. Otello's more vulnerable inner nature, suggested in the Act I love duet, figured for little, but Galouzine did occasionally soften his tone, risking even an almost inaudible whisper at a couple of lines in Act III.
Putilin's Iago, likewise more soldier than courtier, blustered his way through the opening scene and began to show his dramatic talents in Act II, when he had to coax Otello into a suspicious rage in the short time given him by Verdi's score and Boito's libretto. Gergiev pressed the first three acts unusually fast, increasing the challenge. Putilin blurted out the "Credo" in an obvious way, saving his Machiavellian suavity for "Era la notte." In his acting, the baritone showed Iago sounding out the situation, applying pressure at the right moments. During the quartet, he was all attention, adjusting to Otello's every move. If in general the vocal quality was a bit coarse, this Iago was speaking the same language as Galouzine's Otello.
Replacing Barbara Frittoli, who was indisposed, Kallen Esperian caught Desdemona's fatal innocence during the duets with Otello in Acts II and III, floating her clear soprano with graceful plangency in the Act III ensemble. But there were recurrent traces of edgy pitch and pushed tone. The willow song and Ave Maria of the final scene, sensitively supported by Gergiev, offered the only truly moving moments of the evening, free of theatricality. At Desdemona's cry of "Ah! Emilia, addio!," where Verdi's dense orchestration of the preceding bars leaves it to the soprano to make the effect of a sudden outburst, Esperian let loose a generous flow of tone. She had a sympathetic attendant in Jane Bunnell's feisty Emilia. Anooshah Golesorkhi as Montano and Charles Edwin Taylor as the Herald made impressive Met debuts, singing with robust tone and acting with presence. Bernard Fitch played an appropriately vacillating Roderigo, with Raymond Very's Cassio as much a dandy as a captain, while Robert Lloyd filled out the cast as a dignified Lodovico.
JOHN W. FREEMAN
Ruth Ann Swenson brought her lustrous timbre and sovereign musicianship to the Met's latest revival of La Traviata (Feb. 25, in Franco Zeffirelli's overblown 1998 production). While one could fault her Violetta for the blithe rather than brittle quality of her exchanges in Act I, the lack of edge of her "Morrò!" in the duet with Germont, her delicate but unmistakably pristine tones in the final scene -- it seems more useful to focus on the strengths of Swenson's interpretation.
One can hardly imagine more gracefully articulated turns and staccatos in the brindisi and "Un dì, felice": no mere niceties, these, but an integral part of the music's expressive power. Swenson's "Dite alla giovine," spun in a lush, womanly mezza voce, cast a hush over the theater, and her "Amami, Alfredo," shorn of the sobs and veristic effects other singers use, was heartrending in its simplicity. The lacerating sadness that engulfed her reading of Germont's letter and the radiance that flooded
her tone as she recalled the "pio ministro" would have done any Violetta proud. The shortcomings of Swenson's portrayal, in fact, stemmed from her reluctance to risk imperfection. She picked her way through "Sempre libera" and attacked most notes above the staff very gingerly, when she might have done well to let it rip and chance a few inelegant phrases. As a whole, though, and on its own terms, Swenson's was an extremely accomplished portrayal, a worthy addition to anyone's gallery of Violettas, and one that continues to ripen and grow.
Bertrand de Billy delivered superlative conducting. He opened up some disfiguring cuts, giving New York audiences a rare chance to hear Alfredo and Germont's Act II cabalettas, and he infused the score with an uncloying lyricism and a feverish, headlong quality that evoked Violetta's tumultuous life, drawing lithe, spit-and-polish playing from the Met orchestra. There was so much to admire: the sighing string phrases in the prelude that resolved in tiny stabs of pain and returned, ever more whispery and desolate, in the last act; the stinging accompaniment of Violetta and Alfredo's confrontation at Flora's salon; the grim, imposing brass chords that punctuated the final ensemble (reminding us, as Massimo Mila observed, that Violetta dies the death of a hero). De Billy has been masterful in French repertory at the Met, but one hopes that this brilliant Traviata signals more wide-ranging assignments to come.
The rest of the cast was strong. Despite his sinewy, workmanlike timbre, Frank Lopardo remains one of today's most musical leading men, his phrasing buoyant and impetuous in "De' miei bollenti spiriti" and cuttingly brutal in the gambling scene. Debutant Lado Ataneli made a martial Germont, praising Violetta's "nobili sensi" in the same belligerent tones with which he burst in, and delivering a hectoring rather than seductive "Di provenza." A striking man, Ataneli has a taut, healthy sound with an easy top and first-rate legato, and in the right roles he should prove a valuable addition to the company. Edyta Kulczak stood out as a stylish, unusually accomplished Flora.
M. LIGNANA ROSENBERG
Director Scott Ellis and choreographer Susan Stroman, two of the American theater's busiest talents, returned to New York City Opera in March to spruce up their 1990 production of A Little Night Music (seen March 8 and 13), now illuminated by an impressively starry cast: Jeremy Irons, Juliet Stevenson and Claire Bloom led the list of theater veterans making their company debuts in this revival of Stephen Sondheim's bittersweet waltz-time intrigue. Ellis's clear, sure staging and Stroman's buoyant choreography couldn't disguise that this most intimate of musicals was a poor fit for the vast New York State Theater. When A Little Night Music opened on Broadway in 1973, its first berth was the Shubert Theatre, its cozy, elegant auditorium (cap. 1,521) an ideal venue for the romantic country-house machinations of Sondheim's turn-of-the-century Scandinavians. At the State Theater, in an effort to hit a back row planted more than 2,700 seats away from the Egerman parlor and the Armfeldt boudoir, Night Music's sophisticated, incomparably cocky charm was cruelly harshened.
The box-office credentials of NYCO's Night Music headliners were impressive, but the dearth of opera principals in an opera-company production of an American classic was puzzling -- especially since so few of the current Night Music stars found their assignments to be completely congenial. Jeremy Irons cut an unusually glamorous figure as the sex-starved, middle-class lawyer Fredrik Egerman, shrewd and funny in his Act I reunion with Desirée, sweet and gentlemanly in his Act II meeting with Countess Charlotte. Though a tendency to backphrase brought Irons to grief on two occasions in "Now," his eager sing-speak style was more effective in his solos than in ensemble; the tricky Act I trio ("Now/Later/Soon") lost most of its punch with only two of its participants (Danny Gurwin's Henrik and Kristin Huxhold's Anne, each rather shallow-sounding) actually singing. Juliet Stevenson, whose bold, businesslike comic attack might have been perfect for Countess Charlotte, was a square-shouldered, strong-jawed, lyric-baritone Desirée; Michele Pawk, whose friendly, fluffy charm might have made her an interesting Desirée, was a subdued, soft-centered Countess Charlotte. Claire Bloom's chilly Madame Armfeldt captured some of that aging courtesan's hauteur but none of her wit. Jessica Boevers, Ado Annie in the Stroman-choreographed Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, was the Egerman maid, Petra, sharp in her dialogue but shrill in her solo; Marc Kudisch, a specialist in baritone bombast on Broadway (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Beauty and the Beast, The Wild Party), was a clarion-toned, testosterone-rich Carl-Magnus. Anna Christy's adroit Mrs. Nordstrom was the standout of the chorus Quintet, all of whom looked too young and pretty to be singing the nostalgic "Remember?" New York City Opera's orchestra responded with alacrity to the practiced leadership of Paul Gemignani, who also led Night Music on Broadway and at NYCO in 1990. Broadway-style miking was used for all principals, rather than NYCO's usual sound-enhancement system.
F. PAUL DRISCOLL
New York City Opera's production of Mark Adamo's widely heralded Little Women (seen March 23) was problematic, offering sharper characterizations of the men than the women. The central role of Jo, ostensibly the most headstrong and charismatic of the four March sisters, was sung by the talented but miscast Jennifer Dudley. This attractive blond ingenue brought a lovely, understa
ted quality and a sweet, light mezzo to the part, but she conveyed none of Jo's impetuosity or proto-feminist fortitude. She did her best in the scene where Jo is at work on her writing, but she never really allowed herself (or us) to be swept away, physically or vocally, by the action of her stories. There was no steel when she taunted Meg for her lovey-dovey behavior around Mr. Brooke, and when Laurie proposed, we didn't hear Jo's conflicting emotions in her singing. Dudley's best dramatic moment was unsung -- while she listened to the letter in which Amy describes how loved she is by her new husband. Here, Dudley let us see Jo's devastation at having lost both her sister and her best friend. Caroline Worra's vibrant rendition of the letter contributed considerably.
Jennifer Rivera's Meg had more of the feistiness one wants from Jo (in fact, Dudley and Rivera might profitably have switched roles), but much of it was in her face and her gestures. Her big aria near the end of Act I ("Things change") displayed little variety of color, and the impressive floating in her upper range was more a technical achievement than an organic expression of emotion. Worra's Amy and Julianne Borg's Beth were more vividly etched characterizations, but their defining vocal moments occur only in Act II, a flaw in the writing that left these two fine performers struggling to catch up. Borg was nonetheless emotionally convincing and appealingly free of self-pity in Beth's death scene. But it took some effort to keep track of which sister was which. Among the women, only Emily Golden seized her Act I opportunities brazenly, with her take-no-prisoners portrayal of the domineering Aunt Cecilia March.
There was no such problem with the men: Chad Shelton as Laurie, Daniel Belcher as John Brooke and Charles Robert Stephens as Friedrich Bhaer all inhabited their roles distinctively, both vocally and physically, and were easy to understand. Even Jan Opalach, in the small role of Mr. Dashwood, a publisher, made an unmistakable impression in his few minutes onstage. Shelton, boyishly charming, was especially powerful in his moment of rejection by Jo, essentially eclipsing Dudley. Belcher was endearing in his old-fashioned wooing of Meg, then comically fervent as he burst through the door with a splendidly melismatic "I love you!" The musical highlight of the afternoon, however, belonged to Stephens, with his potent, deeply felt rendition of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land," one of the best of Adamo's set pieces. Also outstanding were the wedding vows of Dr. and Mrs. March (Jake Gardner and Gwendolyn Jones), which they recalled for the soon-to-be-married Meg and Brooke.
NYCO music director George Manahan led an assured, dextrous performance of this challenging piece, though Aunt Cecilia's grand minuet ("You, alone") could have used more lilt. This opera is not quite the seamless interweaving of spiky dodecaphony and soaring lyricism that many accounts (including the composer's own) would have you believe it is, but it does have an impressive number of genuinely memorable passages, and nearly all of these were given their due.
JOSHUA ROSENBLUM
BALTIMORE As part of a seventeen-day celebration of the St. Petersburg tricentennial that had virtually all of Baltimore's arts organizations in a Russian mode, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk made its first local appearance. Baltimore Opera's mature-audiences-only production, from Dresden State Opera, moved the action up to the 1930s and further underlined the work's history by inserting Stalin directly into the action: the Chief of Police was made up to look like the dictator. A sense of oppression pervaded Christoph Schubiger's sets, with their imposing industrial walls and shadowy spaces; in such an environment, the dark fate of Katerina Ismailova seemed both understandable and inevitable. Director Uwe Eric Laufenberg clearly viewe
d this antiheroine as the product of a hideously sexist and sex-driven world committed to domination, duty, conformity -- a world of fear.
In the title role, soprano Karen Huffstodt gave a commanding performance, as did her abundantly flowing hair. The voice wasn't always attractive or cooperative, especially in the upper reaches (heard Feb. 22), but it dug into the music with assurance and insight. She delivered her final lines with particular poignancy, and lighting designer Benjamin Pearcy illuminated her strikingly to isolate her and her pain. Above all, Huffstodt proved a convincing actress, generating plenty of heat where it counted. There was something tart (in several senses of that word) about this Katerina from the beginning, an earthy edge that pointed up the woman's volatility and vulnerability.
But for sheer earthiness it would be hard to beat Leonid Zakhozhaev, who threw himself fully into the role of the serial womanizer Sergei. The tenor spent nearly as much time out of his clothes as in them, giving the sex scenes an uncomfortable grittiness. His sturdy, vibrant singing made him doubly compelling. Vladimir Vaneev captured all of Boris's smarmy qualities; there was considerable authority in the bass-baritone's voice and phrasing. As Zinovy, tenor Garry Grice sounded underpowered but caught the character's wimpy side effectively. Although in raspy voice, Nikita Storojev made his presence keenly felt in the dual assignment of the Old Convict and Police Chief. Other firm contributions came from Pierre Lefebvre (Shabby Peasant), Tomas Tomasson (the Priest), Kathleen Stapleton (Aksinya, whose assault by workmen was very graphically portrayed) and Svetlana Furdui (Sonyetka). The chorus hit a new peak in blend, articulation and sheer firepower. The orchestra, too, operated on all cylinders, responding vividly to the equal parts sensitivity and momentum coming from Christian Badea, whose conducting understandably won the loudest cheers.
One could quibble here and there with Laufenberg's concept. The Stalin shtick, for example, resulted in a rather odd police-station scene, with Communists arresting a Socialist who doesn't believe in God. But the director's sense of theater made for a continuing stream of memorable images, from the subtle (Boris lightly teasing Katerina with the whip he had just used on Sergei; Katerina and Sergei, after Zinovy's murder, sitting on opposite sides of the bed, their relationship already fraying) to the striking (laborers turning seamlessly into policemen during a clever scene change; blinding lights effectively making the whole audience part of the searing final scene). Above all, the staging represented one of the biggest risks Baltimore Opera has yet taken -- and one of its most resounding successes.
TIM SMITH
DALLAS Dallas Opera ended its season triumphantly with Don Giovanni, designed by Carl Friedrich Oberle (originally for Houston Grand Opera), directed by Harry Silverstein and lit by Stephen Strawbridge. Rejecting unnecessary updating or cutely irrelevant concepts, the efficient, conventional staging never distracted from the drama inherent in Mozart's score. From the opening chords of the overture, Graeme Jenkins kept his mu
sicians under firm control. The brass and timpani sounded strong, not snarling; the strings were fluent and supportive. The orchestra maintained a stately balance between the music's menacing minor keys and its lighter, giocoso, major ones. Mozart's quicksilver turns and changes were observed, albeit in a Romantic instead of a rococo style. At moments (notably in "Finch'han dal vino," which proceeded at the pace of a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song), Jenkins tended to speed ahead of his singers, but for the most part, genuine collaboration prevailed.
Harmonious ensemble work was gratifying in the final sextet and especially in the finale of Act I. Adina Nitescu, a heroic Donna Anna with a gleaming top to her voice, filled the cavernous Music Hall in "Or sai chi l'onore." Her voice sounded better at forte than at piano, but she caught Donna Anna's steely resolve. As Elvira, Emily Magee had difficulties at the top and bottom of her voice (especially in "Ah, chi mi dice mai"), but negotiated her runs and fioritura dexterously. Rosemary Joshua, a winsome Zerlina, sang with luxurious, melting kittenishness.
Richard Croft's Ottavio was in many ways the vocal triumph of the evening. He sang both his arias with a beautiful legato. "Dalla sua pace" maintained a slow, thoughtful pace. He compensated for the absence of ornamentation in the repeat with an even slower tempo and a softer tone. Croft's combination of vocal sweetness and strength endowed Ottavio with a depth of character usually missing from performances of this role. Oren Gradus (Masetto) and Sergei Koptchak (the Commendatore) gave more than creditable performances.
Raymond Aceto presented a fully imagined Leporello; he used his resonant bass to rich comic effect in the catalogue aria, and he maintained steadiness of tone and vocal control throughout the evening. At times, he outsang Rodney Gilfry, the Don. Handsome and athletic, Gilfry has all the physical qualifications for this role. But he was hampered by an unflattering costume and an even more unattractive wig. His light baritone often sounded muffled or covered. The serenade, which requires exquisitely sweet singing, was slightly underdone, but the equally seductive "La ci darem la mano" made one appreciate the temptation the Don is offering Zerlina. One hopes Gilfry will grow into a role whose complexity has eluded him thus far.
WILLARD SPIEGELMAN
PITTSBURGH Among Pittsburgh Opera's past six mainstage productions, five leading ladies canceled for reasons of illness or schedule conflicts. It was only a small surprise when Renate Behle withdrew from the title role of Elektra, just as rehearsals were to begin. The big surprise -- and a most pleasant one -- was the excellence of her replacement. Susan Marie Pierson, unknown here up to now, gave a vocally solid, many-sided depiction of the eponymous tragic heroine.
Pierson's voice is not the largest to take on this arduous role, but it is one of the more beautiful, and with John Mauceri using Strauss's own reduced orchestration (which is still pretty voluminous), the soprano had no trouble cutting through and projecting into the 2,885-seat Benedum Center and -- importantly -- coloring her sound in every phrase to the meaning of the words. Moreover, the voice seemed as hale at the end as in her entrance monologue (heard March 15).
The production, from Los Angeles Opera, with sets and costumes designed by John Bury, was effective in just about every aspect. The palace yard was littered with debris of a colossal statue of Agamemnon, which allowed stage director Thor Steingraber to place Elektra and Orest (Kristopher Irmiter) in a symbolically erotic pose inside a giant hand at a crucial point in the recognition scene. It also allowed for some extraneous clutter in the action and incidents in view that are meant to take place offstage. On the musical side, Mauceri was meticulous in phrasings, tempo and dynamics, though the Pittsburgh Opera Orchestra was pushed to its limits.
Reinhild Runkel, a formidable Klytämnestra, really sang the music -- as clear and comfortable in the low contralto register as in the high-flung passages -- and she delivered her words with terrifying venom. "Ich habe keine guten Nächte" evoked ghoulish nightmares, and her in-your-face madness made Elektra's denunciations seem almost rational. In contrast was the Chrysothemis of Margaret Jane Wray. With the biggest voice of anyone onstage -- bright in the middle and steely on top -- she treated the text monochromatically, dominating her scenes by sheer decibels. (Wray withdrew due to illness after the opening performance; she was replaced by Karen Huffstodt.)
Also not lacking in decibels was Irmiter's resonant, handsome Orest. The young baritone threw away the important moment of actual recognition ("Die Hunde auf dem Hof erkennen mich") but showed heldenbaritone potential elsewhere . The voice is all there, but not yet the phrasing and line. At age seventy-six, Ragnar Ulfung gave a splendid cameo as Aegisth, with lots of voice left, while as the Young Servant, fledgling Scott Wyatt's fresh, penetrating tenor marked him for future notice. The contingent of Maidservants, all but one from the Pittsburgh Opera Center, plus strong-voiced Anna Singer as the Overseer, provided a powerful opening scene.
ROBERT CROAN
SAN DIEGO Between January and March, San Diego Opera presented three works of special interest. Beethoven's Fidelio kicked off the season on January 25. Though in many ways ideal for the title role, Danish soprano Eva Johansson experienced some inconsistencies with regard to pitch. Not every phrase or top note was of ravishing beauty, and her denunciation of Don Pizarro ("Abscheulicher!") had some strangely underpowered moments. As Florestan, American tenor John Keyes made a strong start but ended up sounding like the last arrival in a marathon race. The mounting phrases of "Zur Freiheit ins himmlische Reich!" often put a listener on seat's edge: "Will he make it or not?" Keyes made it, but with much strain, and in later scenes the voice sounded increasingly tattered.
American baritone Greer Grimsley, one of the best operatic heavies around, relishes evil characters so much that his Don Pizarro was almost lovable, much like Bela Lugosi in his campy prime. German soprano Ute Selbig was charming and consistently delightful to hear as the clueless Marzelline. As her equally confused papa, German bass Reinhard Hagen sang with burnished cello tone. First-rate contributions came also from Swiss tenor Martin Zysset (Jaquino) and Ukrainian bass Pavel Daniluk (Don Fernando). The impeccably depressing prison designs were by John Gunter, while Michael Hampe contributed intelligent, clear stage direction. A single, mild disappointment was the slightly undersized sound of the San Diego Opera Orchestra, though Christof Perick, making his local debut, conducted energetically and with a fine sense of drama.
The only fire lighting SDO's Norma came from the rosy lights on the cyclorama during the opera's finale. Russian soprano Galina Gorchakova, singing the role for the first time, generated little dramatic excitement; nor did sparks fly during her interaction with any of her colleagues. On February 18, her "Casta diva" was marred by uncertainty, uneven phrasing and a poor joining of the registers. The cabaletta was better, but in general her handling of the recitative lacked dramatic conviction.
As the evening progressed, one could hear Gorchakova's many months of preparing this part. A great deal of her singing sounded carefully rehearsed and impressively accomplished. She did not ignore the score's easily missed subtleties. Large stretches were wond
erfully fluid, but the score's big pressure points betrayed her, sometimes egregiously. After her discovery of Pollione's treacherous behavior, the phrases of "Trema per te, fellon!" led her to two embarrassingly unstable top notes -- and elsewhere she didn't seem to give the requisite bite to any of her numerous wrathful pronouncements. She phrased some of her juiciest lines musically but without meaning.
As Adalgisa, mezzo-soprano Mariana Pentcheva sang stylishly and with good tone, blending well with Gorchakova in the sublime duets that give Norma much of its memorable character. Still, in these duos, which often bring down the house, the emotional temperature remained fairly cool. Surely nobody knew this better than conductor Richard Bonynge, who presided innumerable times when Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne created pandemonium with the same numbers.
As Pollione, American tenor Hugh Smith, though inconsistent stylistically, displayed a strong voice with some big top notes, while bass Daniluk made an authoritative Oroveso. The static stage direction was in the experienced, apparently jaded hands of John Copley. John Conklin created the unusually glitzy costumes and the handsome yet blandly efficient sets (seen at Seattle and the Met in previous seasons).
A co-commission/coproduction with Dallas Opera and L'Opéra de Montréal, Thérèse Raquin is a tense little opera by composer Tobias Picker and librettist Gene Scheer. This inspired, compact musical adaptation of Emile Zola's nasty novel about adultery, murder and terminal guilt in nineteenth-century Paris resembles film noir, with its heartless femme fatale and aura of amorality. It also contains distinctly Gothic elements, particularly the supernatural visitations of poor Camille after his death by drowning. But Zola's famous, largely phony "objective" eye is obliterated by the placement of the action on the opera stage, where Picker and Scheer humanize the characters more than they deserve.
The impressive cast (seen March 22) included American mezzo-soprano Kirstin Chávez as the seedy seductress Thérèse; British baritone Christopher Maltman as the amoral yet irresistibly sexy Laurent; legendary soprano Josephine Barstow as the unfortunate Madame Raquin; and Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz as Camille, the nerdy sacrificial lamb, who was spectacularly drowned in a highwire act in Act I, returning as a soppy spook in Act II. The Raquin family friends were excellent: tenor Peter Kazaras (Grivet), bass Kevin Langan (Michaud) and the ever-marvelous soprano Sheryl Woods (Suzanne).
Rarely has the San Diego Opera Orchestra sounded as wonderful as it did on opening night, with resident conductor Karen Keltner presiding.
Francesca Zambello's original production [see OPERA NEWS, March 2002] was here directed by Herbert Kellner. The superb sets and costumes were by Marie-Jeanne Lecca, with lighting by Mark McCullough.
DAVID GREGSON
INTERNATIONAL PARIS Perelà, Uomo di Fumo (Man of Smoke), commissioned by l'Opéra National de Paris and given its world premiere there this past winter, is the fourth opera by composer Pascal Dusapin (born 1955). The work is based on a metaphysical novel, Il Codice di Perelà, by Aldo Palazzeschi. Perelà arrives on earth in a puff of smoke; he knows nothing of his origin except the names of his three mothers: Pena, Rete and Lama. The chorus chants these names as a mantra as the opera opens. The populace celebrates Perelà's nebulous otherworldliness; he is led before the King and wooed by the loveless Marquise di Bellonda. At court, a parrot mysteriously repeats the word "God" in Perelà's presence. His fortunes change when the old valet Alloro commits suicide by fire, in a desperate attempt to emulate his hero's smoky origins. This leads to false accusations from a suddenly vengeful crowd. In his prison cell, Perelà offers an innocent summation of his life ("Leggiero, leggiero"), then removes his boots and evaporates into the clouds. In the final scene, a girl with a flute looks to the heavens and calls out plaintively for Perelà. This craving for an iconic leader and his ensuing betrayal has strong resonance for the Christian religious experience, and the text as a whole lends itself to detailed analysis.
Heard on March 13, Dusapin's score reflects Palazzeschi's mysticism in an avant-garde musical language that allows more lyricism than one finds in the work of his mentors, who include Varèse and Xenakis. The orchestration is colorful and appropriate, including the use of harpsichord for the Queen's music. This gave the scene a touch of seventeenth-century pastiche, echoed by Andrea Schmidt-Futterer's spectacular, Baroque-influenced costumes. Another musical parody in the ball scene, using bombastic brass instruments, brought the opera's first half to a rousing conclusion, helped by Peter Mussbach's sure-footed, convincingly nightmarish direction and Erich Wonder's undulating, hi-tech set. The surreal, timeless flow of the music created an atmosphere of heightened spirituality, particularly toward the opera's conclusion, and the work was greeted enthusiastically by a near-capacity Bastille audience. Dusapin's biggest mistake was to write the libretto in Italian. Although the specter of Debussy's prosody undoubtedly haunts contemporary French opera, an evasion of this problem, masquerading as respect for the source material, was no solution. The composer boasts that he used only Palazzeschi's original words in his libretto, and he even describes the scenes as "chapters." (Chapter 1's title, "L'Utérus Noir," displayed in bright lights, drew a nervous chuckle from the audience.) But his setting of the Italian language never sounded natural or expressive, and the curious Franco-Italian stresses were unacceptably clumsy.
The musical presentation was beyond reproach. Music director James Conlon conducted with exemplary clarity and obvious respect for the new opera, drawing fine playing from the orchestra and precision singing from Accentus, a chamber choir. In the title role, tenor John Graham-Hall had the difficult task of portraying a character whose enigmatic intellectual vacuity is an essential part of the drama. Paradoxically, he achieved this with his usual intelligence. Sitting disconsolately on his suitcase for long periods, he was suitably baffled and detached, and he sang with moving intensity, particularly in his final monologue. His love interest was Nora Gubisch's Marquise di Bellonda; she sang with growing authority and a sultry sexuality that bodes well for her forthcoming Carmen (Sept. 20, at the Stade de France). Chantal Perraud dispatched the stratospheric hysteria of Alloro's soprano daughter with ease, and Youngok Shin was an elegant, vocally refined Queen. Countertenor Dominique Visse provided more proof of his flamboyant theatricality and musical flexibility as a high-heeled, androgynous Archbishop, brandishing his crucifix with Rocky Horror-style exhibitionism. (The French anti-clerical tradition lives on into the twenty-first century.)
Good teamwork and support came from the ever-reliable Martine Mahé (the Old Woman), the imposing bass Gregory Reinhart (Pilone), Scott Wilde (sonorous and convincing as Alloro and the President of the Court) and Jaco Huijpen (a dark-voiced Minister). The smoke effects, potentially cliché, were technically well managed. The protagonist's final disappearance proved, as did the evening as a whole, that there can indeed be smoke without fire.
STEPHEN MUDGE
MUNICH After a controversial Siegfried, in which David Alden conceived the title character as a disoriented modern teenager, the Bavarian State Opera presented Alden's version of Götterdämmerung (March 9). In reducing the story to its most trivial common denominator, Alden removed every bit of the work's majesty. (Alden was chosen to replace Herbert Wernicke, who died while preparing Die Walküre.) He made a soap opera in comic-book form out of a work that is anything but superficial. Brünnhilde spent most of her time jotting notes, documenting events past and present for posterity. She was also a chain-smoker. The Norns, summoned out of Brünnhilde's memory, also smoked, as did Rhinemaidens and Gibichungs. Did this world end due to lung cancer? There was neither magic nor myth, and Wagner's text often was ignored. Siegfried, sent off looking like a country bumpkin in a suit, didn't "forget" Brünnhilde. Rather, our hero was given a glass of champagne and spent the next five hours drinking himself into a stupor. The sympathy one felt for the young Siegfried evaporated into alcoholic thin air.
The Gibichungs were portrayed as perpetually drunk Bavarians. The "live" Grane, mimed impressively by Johannes Benner, was the only character of intelligence onstage. (He even read the Financial Times!) Hagen carried a large painting depicting the seduction of his mother, a sordid scene played out in Hagen's dream; Alberich paid cash for his pleasure and emerged from the inside of a rat. Since rats outlived the catastrophe, there seemed to be some symbolism here. But no catastrophe was depicted, so the symbolic meaning seemed self-serving. Siegfried was stabbed in the chest (how about that for ignoring the text!), and Hagen shot himself in the head; there was no fire or water at the end. Brünnhilde burned a few pages of her book. That was the immolation. Then she slit her wrists. (As in many other German cities, Munich's cultural budget is being severely cut. The Bavarian State Opera is therefore likely be stuck with this lemon for years to come.)
Zubin Mehta concluded the cycle magnificently. No matter the nonsense onstage, the musical interpretation never lost its dignity, and Mehta elicited great intensity and lofty Romanticism from his superb orchestra. Matti Salminen was a towering Hagen, both physically and vocally. There was no blustering -- simply superior vocalism combined with dramatic believability. Gabriele Schnaut sacrificed the entire lower segment of her voice, probably in order to keep the top intact. That is to say, she didn't sing any low notes at all, and there are plenty of them in the part. Though the top rang out, the trade-off proved ultimately unsatisfying.
After singing a remarkable young Siegfried, tenor Stig Andersen struggled with the elder hero. Everything above the staff caused him significant problems. Franz-Josef Kapellmann was most effective as Alberich; young Finnish baritone Juha Uusitalo made an extremely good first impression as Gunther. Marjana Lipovsek was in grand form as Waltraute, in the production's only moving scene; Nancy Gustafson made one realize what a wonderful role Gutrune can be. Margarita De Arellano, Ann-Katrin Naidu and Hannah Esther Minutillo portrayed the sexiest Rhinemaidens in memory. Their scene, though totally out of dramatic context, was choreographed with much wit and was sung indescribably well.
JEFFREY A. LEIPSIC
AMSTERDAM In March, Netherlands Opera presented Macbeth, in a production by Luc Bondy created for the 1999 Edinburgh Festival. During the performance on March 22, Italian bass Andrea Silvestrelli, who had sung a solid Banco at earlier performances, suddenly lost his voice while singing "È morto assassinato il re Duncano," the words that introduce the Act I finale. Conductor Carlo Rizzi left the pit, returning with the announcement that the performance would proceed without Banco's aria, "unless you want me to sing it myself." There was no standby available, so poor Silvestrelli still had to show up three times to portray Banco's ghost. (At later performances, the role was taken Peter Rose.)
Clearly, the ensemble was affected by Silvestrelli's misfortune. Rizzi tried to recapture the right mood, but the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra sounded uneven, as well as thin in the strings. Rizzi, with changing tempos and an apparent desire for a very tight, "Toscaninian" approach, didn't always breathe with the singers. However, the roles of Macbeth and his Lady were cast strongly.
Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber revealed a strong, beautiful voice yet lacked the needed depth, and his acting suggested little evil or doubt, let alone tragic despair. He was completely overpowered by Carol Vaness, who triumphed in her first Lady Macbeth. Especially in her first aria, there was perhaps a wider vibrato than one would wish, but from the first moment, she displayed commanding authority, and for the most part she sang with a beauty and refinement not usually associated with this role. In elegant costumes, she played Lady Macbeth as a carefully scheming temptress rather than as a powerful evildoer.
Tenor Julian Gavin was a plangent Macduff. The Netherlands Opera Chorus delivered a most impressive performance, at times hair-raising, at others delicate in its colors and half-colors. Their excellence made one question the decision to use the original finale (from 1847). It was good to hear Macbeth's death scene (later deleted by the composer), but following Vaness's sleepwalking scene and Dobber's "Pietà, rispetto, amore," the ending as a whole seemed anticlimactic.
PAUL KORENHOF
NORTH AMERICA: Jane Glover conducts Britten for Chicago Opera Theater; Mark Lamos stages La Finta Giardiniera in Florida; Adams's El Niño bows at BAM; Met debutants Elena Kelessidi (Mimì) and Marcus Haddock (Faust); New York's Encompass New Opera Theater presents Henze, Harbison; Maria Guleghina is Washington's wartime Aida; Hoffmann is revived in Portland, OR; Atlanta's Brazilian-flavored Mozart; Opera Pacific's Salome; Bohème in Honolulu; Dayton's Aida inaugurates a new performing-arts center; Amy Burton is Mimì in Austin, TX; Indianapolis hears Werther. INTERNATIONAL: In Berlin, Zagrosek conducts Idomeneo for Deutsche Oper Berlin; Peter Konwitschny's Don Giovanni at Komische Oper. World premieres: Bartholomée's dipe sur la Route in Brussels; Terterian's Das Beben in Munich; Fransden's Enron-flavored i-k-o-n in Copenhagen; Cayabyab's Spolarium in Manila. In Hannover, Calixto Bieito directs Il Trovatore; in Madrid, Rousset conducts a da Ponte rarity; Barcelona's Liceu deals out Queen of Spades and a Catalan original; Tchaikovsky's The Enchantress in Lisbon, en route to St. Petersburg; in Vienna, Albert Herring at Neue Oper Wien, Cavalli's Apollo e Dafne at the Kammeroper; in Moscow, Grétry's Peter the Great at the Helikon, Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Queen and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress at the Bolshoi's New Theater; in Paris, eighteenth-century gems from Jacobs, Malgoire; Fidelio in Amsterdam; a Zemlinsky double bill in Brussels; Simon Boccanegra in Tel Aviv; Handel's Giustino in Karlsruhe. CONCERTS AND RECITALS: Karita Mattila's Vier Letzte Lieder; James Conlon commemorates victims of the Holocaust; Eos plays mini-Mahler; Susanne Mentzer at the 92nd St. Y; Nathan Berg, Susan Gritton in Lincoln Center recitals; New York Festival of Song in war and peace.
NORTH AMERICA
CHICAGO Chicago Opera Theater's gripping production reconfirmed Britten's The Turn of the Screw as one of the most compelling twentieth-century operas (seen March 26). From the first appearance of the "turning screw" theme, around which the score revolves, one was pulled into a world of increasing paranormal distortion. Arianna Zuckerman brought plenty of lyric tone to the Governess, some pressure in the timbre suggesting the hysteria central to the character; her otherwise attractive performance showed signs of opening-night jitters. Peter Quint's undulating melismas were tailored to the talents of Peter Pears, who set a standard for the role. British tenor Robin Leggate proved a worthy successor, with menacing stage presence and effective handling of the coloratura.
The boy Miles is a tough assignment for trebles, but Adam Benkendorf filled the big shoes admirably, with a performance of surprising dramatic conviction and vocal accomplishment. Flora was rewardingly cast with an adolescent instead of the frequently encountered adult soprano; Elizabeth Reiter rose to the challenge with impressive musical polish. The cast was completed by Kathleen Flynn's full, burnished mezzo as Mrs. Grose and a beautifully sung performance by soprano Kara Shay Thomson as Miss Jessel, Quint's supernatural partner in crime.
Designer Mark Wendland's decision to strip the stage down to its bare bones save for a few mobile set pieces proved quite effective, particularly in moments when Quint was spotted lurking in the darkened wings (as were some stage crew, over which more care should be taken). A sea of white lilies -- a nicely funereal image -- initially carpeted the stage, and under Kevin Adam's atmospheric lighting provided an eerie visual transition into the world of ghostly encounter, later disappearing for the darker proceedings of Act II. Though a more pointed physical distinction between earthbound and spectral characters might have heightened the tension, Diane Paulus's imaginative direction generally managed to suggest horror without slipping into kitsch.
The real star of the evening however was Britten's evocative score, dispatched under conductor Jane Glover's baton with rhythmic crispness and lyrical grace. The thirteen-piece chamber ensemble was given a much-deserved onstage bow. Housed in the intimate Athenaeum Theatre, this production demonstrated again Chicago Opera Theater's ability to provide a fulfilling alternative to the more expensive, starrier Lyric.
MARK THOMAS KETTERSON
FT. LAUDERDALE Mozart wrote nearly a dozen operas, to various stages of completion, before his first acknowledged masterpiece, Idomeneo. Its predecessors often are little more than a series of arias strung together by the flimsiest of librettos. He wrote La Finta Giardiniera (The Feigned Garden-Girl) at the ripe old age of eighteen, and it served as a useful apprenticeship for the glories to come. From a stock-comic genre characterized by farce and mistaken identity, it's hardly ever performed outside universities and major music centers. So Florida Grand Opera's production (seen Feb. 27 at Fort Lauderdale's Broward Center) was eagerly anticipated.
The main point of interest was director Mark Lamos's subversive concept, setting the work not in the estate garden that Mozart intended but in an asylum/spa. Lamos is notorious for stagings that shift the time and place in wild ways, as in his New York City Opera Tosca, set in Mussolini's reign. This was his third go with Giardiniera, following productions for Glimmerglass and Washington Opera. Next season, he'll bring his Glimmerglass production to City Opera. Florida Grand music director Stewart Robertson conducted the orchestra, which was on the small side (about twenty-five players), maintaining deft balance between stage and pit in the buoyant score. He played harpsichord for recitatives.
Because the opera is so unfamiliar, audience members probably came to it with more of an open mind than they would have for Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte. Faced with the confusing libretto (thought to be written by Giuseppe Petrosellini) about a seven-sided lovers' ménage, Lamos took the idea that love drives people crazy and ran with it. He was aided by Michael Yeargan's elegant unit set, a domed hall in a faded Victorian-era sanitarium, and the crisply etched lighting of Robert Wierzel. An uncredited costumer put the cast in white, except for the colorful garb they wore in the "all-spa musical" that depicted the stabbing by Count Belfiore of his lover, the Marchesa Violante, an event that takes place a year before the action of the opera.
Purists hate the kind of artistic liberties Lamos took with Mozart, but the performance held my interest longer than a conventional pastoral treatment probably would have. There were amusing bits of business, such as a woman's tying up her wayward fiancé with a garden hose; at one point, Sandra Piques Eddy, the mezzo in the pants role of Ramiro (described as "gender-challenged" in the cheeky English translation), tore off her blouse. When the fresh-faced cast, mostly members of the company's Young Artist Studio, sang the Act I ensemble finale while bound in straitjackets, it almost made sense.
But Lamos's over-the-top production failed the most important criteria a conceptual staging must meet: it did not clarify the relationships between characters, nor did it simplify a confused story in order to facilitate communication of the music to a modern-day audience. Well into the evening, I was still puzzling over who was who and what was going on. A key scene, when Violante, aka garden-girl Sandrina (Sarah Coburn), and Belfiore (Brian Anderson) go temporarily insane, made scant impression, their moment swept away by the big ensemble at the end of Act II.
Most egregiously, Lamos and Robertson added a nonspeaking role, the white-coated Head of Spa (David Graden), a therapist type who observed the neurotic goings-on and made notes; it was a tiresome conceit. They cut an hour of music from the score, shortening the running time to about two hours and forty minutes, including one intermission. As the ironic posturing wore on into Acts II and III and the story became hopelessly convoluted, even Mozart's music wasn't enough to keep the mind from wandering.
Youthful cast members threw themselves into the performance. Coburn was blissfully sublime at the top of her voice in Violante/Sandrina's floating arias (reminiscent of the Countess's in Le Nozze di Figaro), and she was a good actress. Tenor Brian Anderson sounded a bit monotonous and underpowered as the Count. Eddy was a brilliant cavalier, with dashing stage presence and bright, expressive singing, as in Ramiro's Act II aria, "Dolce d'amor compagna."
Cori Ellison's slangy translation got to be a bit much, forever calling attention to its clever self, starting with a lengthy prologue that established the madhouse premise and introduced the bewildering array of characters. "Confused?" the supertitles asked. "Just imagine being inside their heads."
La Finta Giardiniera was the first in Florida Grand's ambitious eight-year cycle of all of Mozart's completed operas. It was followed in the season by a more orthodox staging of Le Nozze di Figaro.
JOHN FLEMING
BROOKLYN The music of John Adams's Nativity oratorio El Niño has been familiar to New Yorkers on compact disc and video for a while [Nonesuch 79634 and Arthaus Musik DVD 100 221], and initial reaction that it represents a summary of his considerable compositional achievement has only deepened over time. The staging by Peter Sellars, however, had not been seen here until this spring, when Lincoln Center offered two performances, in association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as the beginning of an exhaustive Adams festival. Sellars has refined his work since the video was made during the original Paris run in 2000. The stage pictures and movement he has devised are typical of the intensely musical response he gives to both old and new scores. He cleanly articulates the large structure of the two-part work (generally incorporating bold two-armed gestures in the first half and tentative one-armed motions in the quieter second), while subtly highlighting the smaller moments with simple resting of hands on bodies. There is a visually spectacular flight for the angel Gabriel (danced by Michael Schumacher), who circles the stage at top speed as his arms rise almost imperceptibly. This pattern is soon taken over by the young girl who carries the Christmas Star amid the choristers; they in turn move from gestures performed in canon to a slow-motion reflection of the angel's flight, artfully mirroring the layers of Adams's score at this point.
In rethinking the staging, however, Sellars has stubbornly clung to the simultaneous showing of a clumsy film he has made, which runs during every movement of the score. The film, which is a stinking disaster, is an updated, Latin-tinged retelling of the same story. It's too similar to the events onstage to qualify as subtext, it is only somewhat coordinated with the staging, and it is deliberately cut in a quick, jerky fashion that makes it impossible to ignore. Running an amateur film during Adams's music is a pretty cheeky thing to do; running it while Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is singing amounts to spraying graffiti on the Washington Monument. Even a passionate devotee of Sellars's work, which in his Handel and Mozart productions holds up extremely well on video, can only be baffled by this misstep. Perhaps he was hoping to force our attention continually back onto the live singers, but here they were of such quality as to make the juxtaposition simply infuriating.
Sellars long has inspired Dawn Upshaw to her most vivid acting. Her Anunciation scene, in which she was attended by sympathetic but uncomprehending women (from the chorus), ranked as a career highlight. Hunt Lieberson's hands, face and voice were on a level of expression rarely encountered. Upstage, in shadow, she was more commanding than the giant movie screen. Willard White could seem only a more conventional actor in this company, but he and all the other singers rendered the supertitles superfluous. The intense involvement on the faces of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (well prepared by Grant Gershon) kept one's focus on the universal implications of the story. The countertenor voice has been a problem on recordings of this work, but heard live, the trio of Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cumming and Steven Rickards was notably mellifluous. Esa-Pekka Salonen's interpreation of the score is a little more vigorous, a little drier and less inclined to linger than Kent Nagano's. he's also much filthier in King Herod's music. Salonen, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, made clear the Mahlerian command of large spans that Adams found for this work. The quiet ending (hardly a finale) is glorious: a children's choir (here, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) sings a little poem about a palm tree, to guitar accompaniment, and one is rocked quietly into eternity.
WILLIAM R. BRAUN
NEW YORK CITY Tall, dark and handsome Texan tenor Marcus Haddock made his Met debut as Faust on March 21, singing with as much composure as he acted. His tone, if sometimes throaty, never turned cloudy. "Salut, demeure" rang out as clear as if it were "Oh, what a beautiful mornin'!," yet its midsection, suavely shaped, caught the poetry of the moment. If the reactions of Emily Pulley's Marguerite were to be believed, the sincerity of this Faust worked more persuasively than Méphistophélès's parlor tricks. Haddock never faltered in his dashing stage manner, despite some dramatically justifiable stridency during the prison scene.
Pulley's bright, perceptively shaded tone and sensitive, responsive acting made her a refreshing heroine, always playing the role rather than the star turn. As she registered Marguerite's changing moods, her rather slender soprano would open out invitingly on a word such as "Demain!" -- she'd see her lover again tomorrow. Together this attractive couple made the garden scene seem shorter than it really is, unfurling their lines with youthful, meaningful phrasing. James Morris, vocally more at ease than at the March 3 premiere, brought lusty panache to Méphistophélès, with full-bodied singing and lithe acting. Further vitality emanated from Mark Oswald's brash Valentin, Katarina Karnéus's impulsive Siébel and Catherine Cook's eager Marthe in this shipshape performance, under Bertrand de Billy.
JOHN W. FREEMAN
Editor's Note: Originally scheduled to sing only one performance, Pulley and Haddock went on to replace Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna for the final performances of the season, including the radio broadcast, after the stars returned to Europe following the outbreak of hostilities in the Persian Gulf.
The 1,125th Met performance of Puccini's La Bohème (Feb. 19) was not one of the great ones. The Mimì, in her company debut, was lyric soprano Elena Kelessidi, born in Kazakhstan of Greek parentage. Her wide international experience includes a Violetta I was happy to hear several years ago at Covent Garden. But her first Met Mimì was afflicted in the crucial Acts I and III by a chronic tremolo that spoiled a sound that was, in the other scenes, basically decent. She's an attractive actress, radiating natural charm in the Café Momus -- visually if not vocally. Even more disappointing was Ramón Vargas's anemic, squally Rodolfo, in the wake of his solid Rossini and Donizetti performances in recent seasons. Neither was Vassily Gerello's Marcello up to the sturdiness of his previous Met work
On the smaller, plus side of the evening were Ainhoa Arteta's Musetta, glamorous and lively as always but boasting a new vocal and histrionic warmth, and Richard Bernstein's seemingly effortless sonority and authority as Colline. Marcello Viotti conducted with just the right emphases on this score's various flavors, and he made sure that Franco Zeffirelli's big military parade in the Act II finale went with special pizzazz. One almost forgot about the non-soaring Mimì and Rodolfo.
LEIGHTON KERNER
Addressing a sense of millennial unease that's widely shared in New York these days, Encompass New Music Theatre presented Approaching Infinity. A double bill of Hans Werner Henze's The End of a World (from 1953, in its New York premiere) and John Harbison's A Full Moon in March (from 1977, first performed in 1983, from a text by W. B. Yeats), the program was framed by a song from In a Persian Garden, a cycle by Liza Lehmann (1862-1918). The two operas (seen March 27, near the end of a long run) explore themes of breakdown and the abuses of power, wealth and art, but musically, the three composers refuse to be fused.
Henze's score dabbles playfully in a variety of compositional styles and means of vocal production to produce a brittle satire of bourgeois dilettantes who enjoy a cocktail party -- while their island sinks. Harbison's score is also rich in experimentation, yet it's more formal, in every sense: his vocal lines are more sedate than Henze's leaps from Sprech-gesang to Sprechstimme to Gesang to falsetto and back. To tell of a Swineherd's courtship of a Turandot-like Queen, Harbison goes after the mythic, not the satiric. Lehmann's song -- a poem by Omar Khayyam, set in a pre-Vaughan Williams, English drawing-room manner -- was too slight to bind the other scores.
The musical disjunction was nowhere clearer than in the composers' opposing approaches to text. Henze's sentences are sometimes hard to follow, but individual words are always clear. Harbison's text-setting, by contrast, is often opaque. His reliance on more conventional vocal production does permit more "beautiful" singing, and plenty was in evidence from all four soloists in Full Moon. The broadest emotional truths remain always in view in this score, but more complex meanings go begging: it's a fairy tale. The assurance with which Harbison incorporated jazz in his score for The Great Gatsby could be heard in his confident appropriation of non-Western and non-traditional styles here; his prepared piano, played by Jon Holden, never sounded less than authoritative.
Encompass artistic director Nancy Rhodes staged the program, running just under ninety minutes, on a raked, circular platform; films and computer animation (by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White) were projected onto an enormous moon upstage. Dappled paint and mosaic-like surfaces gave texture to John C. Scheffler's attractive set designs; his costumes provided a witty panoply of period styles in Henze's opera and a timeless, vaguely Arabian Nights look in Harbison's.
Henze makes immense demands of his narrator, Herr Fallesleben (the name suggests a life of pitfalls), and Christopher Vettel responded with a suave, amiable performance. Countertenor Derek Lee Ragin was the luxury-cast Monsieur Dombrowska, Wilma H. Wever the blithe hostess, Brannon Hall-Garcia and Alison Davy the most prominent of her guests. Désirée Halac (possessed of a velvety mezzo) and Dominic Inferrera (a boy-band-cute baritone) portrayed Harbison's moon-crossed lovers, with strong singing to match their exceptional good looks. As the Attendants, Jean Marie Miller's evenly produced, soothing alto played nicely off of Pedro Porro's febrile tenor. Conductor Kenneth Hamrick displayed a real feel for the precision of Henze's score and the flow of Harbison's.
WILLIAM V. MADISON
The month-long "Sounds French" festival in New York concluded on March 27 at Florence Gould Hall with the American premiere of Pascal Dusapin's 1994 chamber opera To Be Sung. With a text adapted from Gertrude Stein's A Lyrical Opera Made by Two, this curiously haunting work abandons conventional notions of plot, character and even meaning. This sort of theatrical nihilism seems a bit retro today, in an era when the term "avant-garde" actually sounds quaint. What makes the piece much more than an experimental retread, however, is the indisputable skill its young composer shows in constructing his rigorous and uncompromising, but eminently listenable, sound world.
Performed by three sopranos, a narrator and seven instrumentalists, To Be Sung also included, in this production, the presence of the Dreamer (Hillary Spector), who was visible lying on a stretcher prior to the beginning of the show, and who stayed there for about two-thirds of it. This astute directorial addition (Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil shared the directing credit) contributed considerably to the evening's success. If the whole thing is understood as a dream, one can see the Narrator as the man in the Dreamer's life, the sopranos as a three-headed alter-ego for her, intoning fragmented observations while the Narrator vainly attempts to communicate with her supine form.
The vocal lines of the piece move sometimes in parallel motion and sometimes in elaborately interwoven phrases. Dusapin's skill in creating inventive combinations of the vocal and instrumental textures is often reminiscent of Berio or Ligeti, with a strange sort of lyricism emerging through unconventional means. The virtuosity and flexibility of the three sopranos (Sarah Leonard, Susan Narucki and Elizabeth Farnum) were dazzling, individually and collectively. The seven instrumentalists -- top-flight New York free-lancers -- were equally impressive. Conductor Yves Abel, music director of L'Opéra Français de New York, showed complete mastery of the difficult score and an instinctive feel for its unusual musical poetry.
As the Narrator, Philip Littell was perfect -- he intoned Stein's nonsense texts with complete nonchalance, as if they had clear meaning for him, and with just a glimmer of ironic detachment. For her part, Spector radiated genuine intensity when she finally opened her eyes and began to interact with Littell, a dramatic turning point in the piece. The composer probably would not approve of such a tradition-bound description, but chacun à son goût.
JOSHUA ROSENBLUM
WASHINGTON Due to a year-long renovation project at the Kennedy Center Opera House, the Washington Opera has moved to the place where Marian Anderson was once barred from singing (and Margaret Truman perhaps should have been). Good old, boxy Constitution Hall will never make an ideal venue for opera, but the company -- to the tune of at least $2.5 million -- has managed to turn it into a serviceable space. The orchestra plays behind a stage that now projects out into some of the original ground-level seating; extra TV monitors allow singers and conductor to maintain eye contact. Although provisions were in place to enhance the sound, amplification was not needed for Aida, the first production of this temporary exile (seen Feb. 24). Certain lines in that work, however, were amplified in one sense -- all the talk of war and a foe that would take up arms again if its threat were not met head-on couldn't help but register more strongly than usual in a theater located only a couple blocks from the White House.
Paolo Micciche, the director and guiding figure behind the concept, and a production team that included Antonio Mastromattei and Patrick Watkinson (projections) and Benedick Miller (lighting), created a staging that consisted essentially of gauzy curtains and panels that were constantly furled and unfurled as the action progressed. Artfully arranged imagery -- from the hieroglyphic to the pictorial to the abstract -- was projected onto those cloths. The sophisticated slide show helped disguise the fact that there really weren't any conventional sets to speak of, nor any hordes of extras to provide a truly triumphant triumphal march. (Instead, projected drawings of soldiers whirled about.) Egyptian kitsch got into the picture from time to time, and there were a few too many instant visual responses to text (when "waves of blood" were mentioned, you knew exactly what kind of projections were on the way), but the eye could never be bored. And some of the effects proved quite compelling, as when, at the end of the trial scene, a rush of visuals suggested the sudden, violent shutting of a tomb. Alberto Spiazzi's lush costumes filled out the production nicely. Some of his designs incorporated Luminex, a new fiber-optic textile making its U.S. debut. It proved intriguing, if not quite overwhelming. Dancers in one of the ballet sequences glowed prettily but suggested Las Vegas showgirls; more interestingly, a red rage literally emanated from the spurned Amneris.
Maria Guleghina, in the title role, had intermittent trouble with pitch and tonal support, but she mustered her resources for a vibrant last act, floating some gorgeous sounds to sustain extra-elongated phrases. Franco Farina, as Radamès, started gruffly but soon poured out virile tone; he filed it down in that last act to ravishing, poignant effect. Still, Marianne Cornetti (Amneris) and Mark Delavan (Amonasro) stole the show with their firm, plush voices and thoughtful, vivid styling. Theirs was Verdi singing at an exalted level. A generally solid supporting cast, chorus and orchestra added to the assets. Conductor Heinz Fricke could not always keep everyone together but never lost control of the opera's inner pulse as he fashioned a sensitive, knowing performance.
TIM SMITH
PORTLAND, OR Portland Opera's revival of Les Contes d'Hoffmann filled the stage with eye-popping elegance and smut. Walls leaned, windows tilted and blood-red curtains billowed in the breeze to form the backdrop for an evening of betrayal and debauchery. First seen in 1995, the production served this time as Robert Bailey's swan song to the company after twenty-one years as general director. It remains his best work as a stage director. Loy Arcenas's sets matched Claudia Stephens's leather-and-lace costumes -- Ascot hats, sleek designer suits, punk hairdos and bad beachwear.
Hoffmann is a concoction of fantasy, broad comedy and tragedy set in a surreal world of rogues, robots and prostitutes. Hoffmann himself (the excellent Michael Hayes) boasts a poet's list of ways to lose your heart: fool's love, carnal love, punch-drunk love and, in the end, noble love. He seeks what he can't have and ignores what he can but in the end discovers happiness right beside him in the form of his muse.
Bailey brought an inventive touch to each scene, but for all its dramatic possibilities, it was the singing that stood out on opening night (Feb. 8). Hayes sang Hoffmann, the loser poet, with ardor and confidence. Besides the length of the role, the notes lie high in the voice, yet he sang strongly and stylishly the entire evening. His manner was appropriately French -- graceful and supple -- and he looked the part of the Romantic poet, so that his scenes with Antonia and Giulietta were believable.
Pamela Armstrong was a delightful "Robot Girl" Olympia, jerking her arms and tottering around the stage while throwing off polished bravura. She switched to a warm, steady sound for the more womanly characters of Antonia and Giulietta, but her Olympia scene was the evening's high point. Buffy Baggott made a vivid Muse, moving swiftly at Hoffmann's side. She played both protector and prodder with urgency, filling her vocal lines with color and character. There was a wonderful gleam in her lower register, and yet she opened up generously for high notes. She excelled in the barcarole duet with Armstrong.
Franco Pomponi was less successful in the quartet of roles of Coppélius, Dappertutto, Dr. Miracle and Lindorf. His voice had metal to it, but he lacked power in his lower register. Also, he came across as bland and unthreatening where specific nastiness was needed. His unclear French diction was part of the problem. Joseph Rawley made a fine Spalanzani, Brendan Curran a memorably devious Schlemil. Howard Bender sang the four comic servants with wonderful physical humor. Just watching him shlepp around the stage in put-upon misery was amusing. Sonia Gariaeff made a big moment of her small role as Antonia's Mother.
The chorus, prepared by Mark Trawka, played significant roles: drunks, upscale party guests and low-life pleasure-seekers. They did excellent work despite some coordination problems with the orchestra. French conductor Mark Trautmann brought out much of the score's sensuousness and sophisticated delight in melody.
DAVID STABLER
ATLANTA It's encouraging to see that Atlanta Opera isn't afraid of trying offbeat concepts for some of its productions, instead of treating operas as stale museum pieces. It would be nice if those unconventional concepts consistently had some point to them. As irrelevant "creativity" goes, director Lorna Haywood's decision to place Die Zauberflöte in a Brazilian rain forest could be written off as harmlessly kooky in most respects, even if it shed absolutely no new light on Mozart's masterpiece. At the very least, it gave costume designer Richard St. Clair an opportunity to indulge in such flights of tropical fancy as dressing the Three Ladies in exotic Day-Glo avian plumage in the first act, trading that in for a "Britney Spears: Warrior Princess" look in the later scenes. The Queen of the Night performed her verbal acrobatics in a towering black-plumed headdress above a formal black gown sparkling with mirrors of various sizes. Tamino and the Three Boys sported traditional safari gear, while most of the other characters wore costumes more conventional for this opera. For all the eye candy, however, the English-language production (seen March 2) wound up seeming substantially less than the sum of its parts.
Unexpectedly, the main weakness seemed to come from the orchestra pit, with William Fred Scott leading a prosaic reading of this multicolored score. One number capably but routinely followed another, with straight-down-the-middle tempos and dynamics, everything pleasant and in tune but seldom inspired or engaging. Only the foolproof Act II duet for Papageno and Papagena really caught fire, building to the kind of irrepressible high spirits that were seldom in evidence for the rest of the afternoon. In these circumstances, the singers deserve special marks for succeeding as well as they did. With his dark-hued timbre, tenor Matthew Chellis's handsome Tamino made a more masculine impression than is often the case and sang with brio. He was ably partnered by the lovely Pamina of Kelly Kaduce, whose limpid voice and unmannered acting captured the character's innocence effectively. Jeff Morrissey's Papageno, clearly a graduate of the Charles Nelson Reilly school of birdcatching, backed up his comic acting with some serious vocalizing, while the daunting coloratura of the Queen's part held no terrors for Jeanine Thames, who brought an appropriately imperious attitude to the role as well. A very welcome bonus was Bradley Howard's Monostatos, acted with menace yet sung with an unaccustomed elegance for this part. As Sarastro, Kurt Link cut a compassionate and authoritative figure, his voice hitting secure but not very powerful low notes. Atlanta Opera's well-trained chorus, almost invariably a highlight, made some lovely sounds but otherwise seemed to have contracted the general air of disengaged torpor so prevalent in this production, which will scarcely be remembered as one of this company's finest hours.
JOHN R. CROOK
COSTA MESA, CA Another Ljuba Welitsch? Ideal voices for Salome are hard to come by, so Turid Karlsen may be just what lovers of Richard Strauss have been waiting for. The Norwegian soprano had not been heard in this country until her appearance as the predatory Princess of Judea with Opera Pacific (Feb. 25) in a glitzy, calculatedly decadent show coproduced with New York City Opera, where it was first seen last October.
Karlsen arrived in California a week in advance of her American debut, with the intention of mastering choreographer Sergio Trujillo's more-or-less campy ideas for the notorious dance of the seven veils, but either evil fate or divine providence spared her this exercise, for she was laid low by a bronchial virus and forbidden by her doctor to dance. Erin Basta was employed to provide the dance, complete with the full nudity that now seems de rigueur.
With its several references to Astaire and Rogers (Salome did a bit of ballroom partnering with some Versace-model types posing as Roman guards), the dance was a goofy treat, inappropriate but amusing. One wonders if Karlsen's doctor was, in fact, her own good judgment. Yet neither her figure nor her awkwardly kittenish stage movements suggested she would be an ideal candidate for the role's terpsichorean challenges, even with another choreographer.
Karlsen's splendid voice and musicianship are quite another matter. From beginning to end, the soprano provided exactly what Strauss wanted: a voice big enough to carry, yet still girlish, capable of spot-on high notes, supple phrases and superb dynamic control from one end of her range to the other, with dramatic skill to project the heroine's complex pathology.
Under conductor John DeMain, tempos dragged during the first thirty minutes, and the Opera Pacific Orchestra musicians sounded slightly overtaxed all evening long. However, the stage performances were all of a remarkably high order. Tenor Allan Glassman brought to Herodes an uncommon beauty of tone. He was partnered by a richly timbered but ever-so-campy Herodias, mezzo-soprano Milena Kitic, who vamped and cackled self-consciously while flourishing her long cigarette holder. Bass-baritone Christopher Robertson was a burly-looking, burly-sounding Jochanaan; his tanned, hulking presence, however, was unlike the ivory pillar Salome covets.
Director Ian Judge aimed for the bloodiest final scene possible, with gore splashing over the brim of the silver charger and Jochanaan's head serving for a bowling ball. Tim Goodchild may have intended to evoke an opulent fin-de-siècle salon, but in Orange County, the glass panes and fake golden palms suggested local shopping malls or hotel atriums.
DAVID GREGSON
HONOLULU Hawaii Opera Theatre's production of La Bohème, directed by Henry Akina, proved to be the season's finest, graced by a strong cast and fresh angles that added depth to the characters. His Mimì, for example, was more a modern girl than the traditional wilting flower. She lingered outside Rodolfo's door, waiting to catch him alone; she flirted shamelessly, providing cause for his jealous rage; and when they parted outside the inn in Act III, it was because Rodolfo found evidence of infidelities in her suitcase.
Juliana Rambaldi presented a gentle but lively Mimì, forthright through the forward placement of her voice and sympathetic through her graceful lyricism. Unfocused edges along her upper border occasionally intruded, but her core voice held sweetly clear. Jay Hunter Morris's blond, curly-haired Rodolfo seemed the youngest, most mercurial and naïve man onstage. His timbre (which some listeners found too intense), combined with his naturally high placement, gave a sense of increased anguish.
The secondary pair stole the show in this production. Alison England created a superb Musetta -- fiery, capricious, yet warm of heart and voice. England's vivacious acting, supple technique and rich timbre made for an electrifying "Quando m'en vo'." Quinn Kelsey, a moody but amiable Marcello, with his powerful, robust baritone, is developing into a fine performer by leaps and bounds, in acting as well as singing. He and England produced real heat and were more than believable as hot-tempered, passionate lovers. Most gratifyingly, the two pairs of lovers matched in vocal strength and timbre, which helped delineate their roles: Rambaldi and Morris were brighter-voiced and more idealistic, England and Kelsey warmer-toned and more earthy.
Supporting characters proved equally compelling: Wilbur Pauley (Colline) delivered a touching coat aria James Scott Sikon a warmly comical account of Schaunard's run-in with the parrot. As Benoit and Alcindoro, John Mount invited laughter. Jörg Pitschmann conducted with impeccable timing throughout but allowed the orchestra to drown out the singers frequently in Act I, despite the leads' amply large voices.
Coproduced with Opera Memphis, the production had a poetic touch, with vibrant costumes chosen by Helen Rodgers and a graceful set (designed by Peter Dean Beck) that transformed smoothly between acts. Throughout, HOT's La Bohème captured those Bohemian ideals of nostalgic beauty and lyricism. It's a shame Akina limits himself to directing only one production each year.
RUTH O. BINGHAM
DAYTON Forty-two-year-old Dayton Opera entered a new era with the company's move from antiquated Memorial Hall to the brand-new, state-of-the-art Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center (March 22). Lavishly designed by architect Cesar Pelli, the Center is also the new home for Dayton Ballet, Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, The Human Race Theatre Company and other, smaller arts organizations. The first of the Center's constituents to use the new facilities, Dayton Opera tested its new home to the limit, with a grandiose production of Aida. Stage facilities were in perfect working order, easily accommodating the complex production (from L'Opéra de Montréal). Audience sightlines and acoustics were outstanding. With an excellent balance between pit and stage, the sound makes a strong impact, immediate and warm, with clear spatial differentiation, linear phrases emerging cleanly articulated even in the most complex ensembles. The theater's only drawback is the highly visible orchestra pit, a distracting band of bright light between audience and stage.
Gina Lapinski's simple, sensible staging grouped choral masses like scenery and relied on the relationships of the principals, intelligently arranged, to provide the drama. Members of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company II could have used more of their colleagues to make a full effect in the strikingly athletic choreography by Debbie Blunden-Diggs. In the triumphal procession, supernumeries were joined by horses and riders from the Antioch Shrine Mounted Patrol.
Michele Capalbo's Aida started out problematically, with a mealy middle register separating a brightly piercing top and a powerful lower register that could challenge any Amneris. By Act II, she managed to integrate the voice for a solid musical performance, though she was a bit bland dramatically. As Amneris, Jill Grove, a vocal juggernaut, was staggering in her musical and dramatic impact. Scott Piper's Radamès, youthful warrior rather than seasoned veteran, provided the most beautiful singing of the evening: poetic, sensitive, imaginatively colored and textually nuanced, supremely musical. Lester Lynch's Amonasro provided rich, opulent sound and immense dignity. In the judment scene, David Michael gave a solid, unusually sympathetic performance, making one feel Ramfis's sense of betrayal by his protégé, Radamès. The chorus was not quite harmonically integrated, with too many individual voices prominent, though perhaps they are still getting used to the theater's acoustics. Leading this most satisfying show was conductor Charles Wendelken-Wilson. His noble, stately tempos, though slow, never lacked forward impulse or dramatic urgency.
CHARLES H. PARSONS
AUSTIN, TX At the end of Puccini's century-old La Bohème, an effusive, capacity audience at Bass Auditorium on the University of Texas campus rose as one to applaud the final production of Austin Lyric Opera's season. New life was evident in much of the production, showing artistic progress and promising an exciting future for the company.
ALO's production of Puccini's immortal work builds on the visual strength of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's impressive stage designs. The late Ponnelle, also acclaimed as a stage director, grasped the ambiance and the architecture of nineteenth-century Paris in his design -- responding to Puccini himself, ever theatrical, who made the setting such an integral part of his operas. Stage director Linda Brovsky provided detailed, innovative direction that delighted and held the eye throughout, most pointedly in the individual characterization of the chorus in Act II and the carefree high jinks of the garret fraternity in Acts I and IV.
Soprano Amy Burton offered an exquisitely realized portrayal of the fragile Mimì, at once passionate, naïve and vulnerable. She sang with a heart-warming legato; never was the voice pushed or strident in the climaxes. Her appearance, her graceful movement (in spite of a cumbersome dress, with an oversize bustle) and her genuine interaction with the other players were truly impressive.
Equal in artistry was baritone David Small, whose smooth voice, clear enunciation and dedication to communicating the text made him a totally believable Marcello. Especially memorable was the emotional warmth he brought to the duet with Mimì in Act III and to the Act IV duet with Rodolfo. Singing the poet, Marc Heller displayed tenorial squillo and a secure high voice. Missing in his performance were consistent musical accuracy, line and a reliable mezza voce.
One would prefer to hear Frances Ginsberg in other Puccini roles, such as Cio-Cio-San and Manon Lescaut. Her opulent voice filled the auditorium but was not ideal for Musetta. The indulgent, lethargic tempo of "Quando m'en vo" bore little resemblance to Puccini's scoring for this delicious confection. However, Ward Holmquist, conducting the excellent ALO Orchestra, drew ethereal lyricism from his forces for most of the evening and performed feats of baton magic on occasion, to rectify abrupt tempo changes from certain singers.
WILLIAM LEWIS
INDIANAPOLIS In a beautiful new production, Werther became the first Massenet work performed by Indianapolis Opera (March 14). Boyd Ostroff's set design was spare: only simple trees projected on veil-like hangings, before which solid, realistic pieces (furniture, the entrance to a church) set the scene. Seemingly magical lighting designs (also by Ostroff) transformed the stage, creating moods and colorful fantasy. However, that fantasy frequently was spoiled by Kay Walker Castaldo's over-staged production. Blocking was exceedingly busy, and scenes from Werther's life (mentioned but never portrayed in the opera) were acted out during the prelude and throughout the opera. Presented upstage, these scenes frequently distracted attention from the principal action. This was particularly annoying in Werther's death scene. During the orchestral interlude between the two scenes of Act III, Werther's coffin was carried onstage, followed by a weeping Charlotte and her neighbors -- several minutes before Werther died! The coffin was then transformed into a bed, and picturesque groups enacted more scenes from Werther's life while the singing Werther (Gran Wilson) lay dying downstage. Richard St. Clair's costume designs were handsome and of the correct period, but Werther's famed yellow waistcoat was not to be seen.
IO artistic director James Caraher conducted, opting for a lush, Romantic sound from the orchestra that worked well; the horns of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra made particularly lovely contributions. Despite good orchestral playing at the start, Acts I and II (performed without intermission) stubbornly refused to come to life. Singing was small-scale, self-contained, even tentative, never breaking free in the needed romantic outbursts.
In Act III, the performance suddenly sprang to life -- but then, so does Massenet's music. As Charlotte, Elizabeth Batton opened up her voice to reveal a large, luscious mezzo; she dropped her frozen facade and entered into the music's passion. Wilson, an experienced Werther, proved surprisingly bland, both vocally and dramatically. Robin Blitch-Wiper's bright, pert Sophie provided welcome contrast to all the Sturm und Drang. Don Davis's Albert was coldly calculating, with a sense of the character's self-righteousness. Mark Gilgallon played the Bailiff as a crusty charmer, earning high marks in his interactions with the IO children's chorus, who sang strongly.
CHARLES H. PARSONS
INTERNATIONAL
BERLIN There was a great deal to praise in Deutsche Oper Berlin's new Idomeneo. But the best news was Lothar Zagrosek's conducting -- nothing else was quite so startlingly good as what he drew from the orchestra. These musicians reserve their best for Strauss and Wagner under general music director Christian Thielemann; to hear them sounding like one of the better period-instrument ensembles was a shock. This Idomeneo saw Zagrosek as a Mozart interpreter to be measured against Charles Mackerras and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a musician who has arrived at a certain style of historically informed performance practice through his own thought and research, not through the modish aping of superficial stylistic gestures favored by so many of his peers. The result was all light and air, buoyant tempos and sudden stabs of joy. Players used vibrato sparingly, only for effect, and seemed to have learned overnight how to focus on the small moment. Textures were clear as glass, the dramatic flow engrossing.
Charles Workman cut a fine figure in the title role, anxious and self-absorbed, looking and acting like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. At moments, his voice seemed to cut free, flying up to clear-timbred top notes; at others, he produced a touchingly pure, Peter Pears-style tone. But he seemed to think too much, often clouding his sound with a tense, tight vibrato, stumbling over fast passage-work, pinching his middle register. Perhaps it was opening-night nerves. Michaela Kaune made a delectable Ilia, with a big, warm, flexible voice and a musical intelligence that made every phrase tingle. As Idamante, Francesca Provvisionato was accurate, dashing but slightly dull; Krassimira Stoyanova's Elettra was more engaging; she was robbed of her final grand aria.
This was a very lean Idomeneo indeed, performed in a trimmed-down version of the Vienna score. It could have taken fewer cuts. Hans Neuenfels's production was one of his most legible yet, astonishingly mild in his approach to Mozart's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't use of opera seria form. Neuenfels and his designer, Reinhard von der Thannen, followed the score quite literally, weaving in and out of a stylized faux-Baroque, dropping in wryly contemporary touches at unexpected moments. Ilia was haunted by the ghosts of her dead family; Elettra was the archetypal wandering Jew, hunched in a shapeless black coat and dragging her possessions on a cart behind her.
As Neuenfels sees it, this is Mozart's Götterdämmerung, a tale of gods who thirst for blood and men who learn to do away with them. Alongside Poseidon one saw Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha on this Mount Olympus, silently demanding vengeance and ultimately losing their constituency. Only after the final chords died away did Neuenfels serve up his trump card: Idomeneo, blood-spattered, staggered onstage bearing the bloody heads of the four slaughtered gods. The audience booed obediently, but their hearts weren't in it. Does the wholesale massacre of those we accuse of tyranny actually solve any of humanity's problems in the long run? Neuenfels remains, as ever, a sublimely pessimistic social critic.
Peter Konwitschny asked a lot of his cast in his new Don Giovanni for the Komische Oper Berlin. There was a great deal of stripping and simulated sex, unscripted lesbian gropes, role-swapping and interpolated dialogue. Dietrich Henschel tackled the title role with a lithe, light timbre and rippled implausible quantities of muscle once he removed most of his clothes. Bettina Jensen's Donna Anna glowed with passionate conviction and displayed an appealing liquid warmth. Finnur Bjarnason moved from sky-blue blandness to growling fury as Ottavio; Florian Plock was uncomplicated and direct as Masetto. Jens Larsen's Leporello was charmless but effective, Sinéad Mulhern as sweet and winning a Zerlina as Anne Bolstad's Elvira was unfocused and miscast.
At moments, particularly in duets and ensembles, the singing quite made up for the rest of the evening's indignities. If the piece sounded odd sung in German, at least the text gained a clarity and immediacy that had the audience laughing at the words. Bettina Bartz and Werner Hintze furnished a new translation that -- though well below da Ponte's standards -- was at least amusing, full of cheeky anachronisms and cheap laughs.
Konwitschny's thesis is solid enough. His handiwork is often superb, his stock of ideas rich and sometimes profound. But too often he lapses into a kind of explicit didacticism that becomes merely tedious. Already during the overture, one saw first the child Mozart being punished by his father for a wild outburst, then Giovanni and Anna in an exhaustive range of kama-sutra couplings. The Commendatore -- here a domineering father figure to the Don to echo papa Leopold's oppression of little Wolfgang -- was accidentally murdered with an umbrella.
In a drab world of gray-suited conformists, Don Giovanni held messianic allure. Clad in skin-tight white trousers and lavish orange kimono, he broke the rules and gave in to all his appetites. Men and women fell under his sway, with increasingly orgiastic enthusiasm. It couldn't last. After the huge swinger party at the end of Act I, everyone but Giovanni donned a suit and tie, and the hunt was on. Soon, the handguns came out. Giovanni killed Masetto, Leporello killed Elvira, Anna did in Ottavio. The music stopped completely. Ottavio got up from the floor to declaim, in exaggeratedly dramatic tones and battling a storm of audiences boos, a letter from Mozart to his father on the subject of death. Eventually, he finished his aria, but Elvira took over, singing his part in the ensuing duet with Donna Anna. The Commendatore came to dinner well ahead of schedule, and the descent to Hell involved Giovanni's being forced into a suit and castrated. Once even he was driven to conformity, there was no more room for Mozartean creativity, and the music ground to a halt several bars before the end.
As an attempt, it was too bold -- Konwitschny clearly saw himself as the title figure. Mozart drew the short straw, not helped by the Komische's young chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, whose IKEA-style conducting was cheaply assembled to resemble Harnoncourt vaguely in gesture but without any detail or substance.
SHIRLEY APTHORP
BRUSSELS Under general director Bernard Foccroulle, the Théâtre de la Monnaie has focused increased attention on new operas. The most recent, Oedipe sur la Route (Oedipus on the Road), by Belgian composer Pierre Bartholomée, with a libretto by Henry Bauchau (after his novel), was given its premiere on March 7. As recounted here, the travails of blind Oedipus and his daughter Antigone, following their departure from Thebes, owe little to Sophocles. Bauchau's Oedipe, a broken man, develops a second sight that enables him to fight and even to sculpt. This is an opera without a real story or dramatic development, primarily concerned with Oedipe's struggle to turn from self-destructive remorse to helping others, as he cares for outcasts and plague victims.
Bartholomée has created a skillful, melodious score that, like the libretto, lacks dramatic drive. On the whole, musical illustration takes the upper hand. Characters have little chance to develop three-dimensionally when most of their motivations are comprehensible only when announced; their psychology is told, not shown (or felt), through no fault of the singers. In the title role, the incomparable José van Dam proved himself vocally on the same high level as always, his voice betraying not the slightest trace of his long career, and he remains a compelling dramatic presence. French tenor Jean-Francis Monvoisin offered eruptive force and tender dedication as Clios, the opera's most fully characterized role, a Greek equivalent of King Lear's Kent. Swiss mezzo-soprano Hanna Schaer contributed a rewarding portrayal of Diotime, a mysterious semi-goddess. As Antigone, Italian soprano Valentina Valente was called upon primarily to radiate great warmth, though it seems the only quality she does not possess. Conductor Daniele Callegari led an impressive, almost immaculate delivery of the score, but some of the most impressive moments came from Philippe Sireuil's staging. Against Vincent Lemaire's sober set designs, Sireuil made Oedipe a series of beautiful, emotionally powerful images.
In recent years, Eine Florentinische Tragödie and Der Zwerg, Zemlinsky's one-act operas, have been paired, like Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci -- and rightfully so. Both stories (by Oscar Wilde) deal with a clash between appearance and reality. In Brussels's relatively small Théâtre de la Monnaie (in a co-production with Berlin's Komische Oper), director Andreas Homoki opted for a completely different approach to each work. The sultry Tragödie concerns a merchant who finds his wife with a noble lover; Homoki set the work in the twentieth century, with huge walls of cardboard boxes. That left little space for acting, probably in an attempt to reflect the rising pressure that ultimately leads to the Merchant's (baritone James Johnson, in a strong performance) strangling of the nobleman (tenor Pär Lindskog). With her youthful looks and bright voice, mezzo-soprano Randi Stene made a credibly tempting Wife, but Homoki sidestepped the surprising final moment, when the libretto calls for the Husband and Wife, in an eruption of passion following the murder, to fall into each others arms. Instead, Homoki left the couple merely looking at each other, seeing new possibilities in their relationship.
In complete contrast, designer Wolfgang Gussmann used bright colors for Der Zwerg. Homoki chose to show the Infanta (convincingly sung and acted by soprano Claudia Barainsky) on her thirteenth birthday, rather than her eighteenth, as the libretto prescribes; Gussmann gave the Infanta a gigantic box of toys, her birthday presents, outsize even next to adult characters such as Don Esteban (marvelously played by bairtone Peter Sidhom). The most exciting present was a jack-in-the-box with a clown's face -- the Dwarf of the title. Remarkably, tenor Douglas Nasrawi dominated the performance without being able to move, making impressive use of his slender voice and an extensive range of facial expression. Representing the Dwarf as a jack-in-the-box, rather than a deformed, deluded man, diminished the opera's tragic aspect. The result was excellent theater, but the production's ability to move the audience must be attributed to Nasrawi's performance and the intimacy of the space. Musically the production was still more rewarding, with excellent singing from the cast and orchestral playing of the highest order, under conductor Markus Stenz.
PAUL KORENHOF
MUNICH Armenian composer Avet Terterian (1929-94) composed Das Beben (The Earthquake) in 1984; it's based on Kleist's novella The Earthquake in Chile. Terterian and co-librettist Gerta Stecher wrote a text distilled to no more than several hundred words. In 1647, a young girl, nobly born, falls in love with her tutor. For this "crime," she is condemned to death and placed in a monastery; he is jailed. A terrible earthquake allows both to escape. Miraculously, they find each other. Seeking eternal union in the only church that hasn't been leveled, they are recognized, and the young girl is stoned to death.
The opera, commissioned for Halle, never reached the stage in 1984. The Theater am Gärtnerplatz, at the urging of assistant music director Ekkehard Klemm, presented the work's belated world premiere on March 16. To realize the composer's desire to bridge the gap between stage and audience, director Claus Guth removed the orchestra pit and all seats downstairs. He placed the huge instrumental ensemble around a set that consisted of four white platforms. At first separated, the platforms later joined to form a symbolic cross. The all-important chorus was scattered around the different levels of the theater.
Terterian's orchestral writing consists mainly of sustained notes or chords punctuated occasionally by percussive blasts; Orff-like rhythmic repetition characterizes the choral sections. He gives the principal soloists, She and He, singable, modern vocal lines and an almost Puccinian love duet at their reunion. Das Beben is, however, an opera in slow motion, floating in time and space. This is not to imply that there is no intensity. The carefully sculpted score builds effectively to its several climaxes -- but it takes a long time to do so, and two hours of music for two pages of text can be fatiguing. One must transport oneself into a musical world where even great emotional upheaval occurs excruciatingly slowly.
That is not easily accomplished. Yet Guth staged the work brilliantly, inventing slow-motion movement and gestures for chorus and soloists. Using modern costumes (designed by Christian Schmidt) and simple means, he held one's attention even during lengthy stretches of musical motionlessness. The Gärtnerplatz not only assumed an enormous, nearly impossible challenge but carried it off with conviction and quality. Klemm's ability to hold the work together was awe-inspiring. The cast featured a pristine-voiced Ruth Ingeborg Ohlmann as She and the equally effective tenor Wolfgang Schwaninger as He. Dancer Paul Lorengar, in an oversized mask, mimed an ominous presence throughout.
JEFFREY A. LEIPSIC
COPENHAGEN New, full-length Danish operas are far from common fare. Poul Ruders's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale, presented at Royal Danish Opera three years ago, was the first significant premiere in almost a quarter-century: a self-confident all-stops-pulled full-length work. The international success of Ruders's opera inspired RDO's new administrators, director Kasper Holten and conductor Michael Schønwandt, to commission composer John Frandsen and librettist Sanne Bjerg to write another new work. i-k-o-n™ was the result, and it opened to mixed reviews and a somewhat cool audience reception in March.
Frandsen and Berg's opus is about ethics and narcissism in Big Business. Alex Bloch is the managing director of a Danish manufacturing firm established by his venerable father-in-law. The bottom line doesn't look good, and Bloch tells his accountant to cook the books. He's waiting for Jack, a filthy-rich American investor, to back the company's carefully planned theme park, where people are meant to go and live, assuming whatever identity they please. But the police are suspicious, so is Jack, and Bloch's brother-in-law, a charismatic painter named Vincent, proves to be a liability. Not everything in the plot makes much sense from a financial perspective (rather less than a thriller such as The Boiler Room), but the text does evolve from the everyday life of a company -- board meetings, accounting and the like -- coupled with dark symbolism in the ending. As melodrama and as pure theater, i-k-o-n™ proved well-nigh unbeatable, especially as produced by maverick theater-director Peter Langdal. If only new operas were more often given such care!
Though he has quite a bit of experience as the author of chamber operas, Frandsen didn't seem an obvious choice to follow Ruders: he's a die-hard avant-gardist, never very accessible. With i-k-o-n™, though, Frandsen has come up with a persuasive score that is suave, even lush. He borrows scoring techniques from Puccini and pays homage with a quotation from "Vissi d'arte," sung by Bloch's wife, an opera diva. Hints of La Fanciulla del West and Madama Butterfly lurk in the wings, as well, but the score never deteriorates into an opera quiz. Frandsen exploits the hand-clapping, hip-shaking qualities of a Broadway show, but those are the mere trappings of a drama that delves into the innermost recesses of modern human experience. The characters may seem like symbols rather than people, but in their interaction, one perceives profound truths about modern life.
Obviously, it didn't hurt that the singers were superb actors. As Bloch, bass-baritone Johan Reuter cut a magnificent, Citizen Kane-like figure, larger than life and fascinating in his vanity and charm. In great voice, John Lundgren was the swaggering American billionaire, sharing some of the score's most beautiful music with Djina Mai-Mai, as the American's exotic, enigmatic wife. Young opera student Michael Lindberg brought staggering vocal and physical presence to the troubled young painter. As the scrupulous accountant, Gert Henning-Jensen suffered from the score's high tessitura (which sometimes threatened to undo each of the singers), but he pulled through; as always, he proved himself a committed performer.
MICHAEL BO
MANILA Filipino artist Juan Luna's painting Spoliarium won a gold medal in the 1884 Exposition in Madrid; it depicts dead gladiators mourned by their families. The painting has lent its title to Fides Cuyugan-Asensio and Ryan Cayabyab's opera about Luna.
Before Spoliarium: Juan Luna reached the stage of Manila's Cultural Center of the Philippines for five performances (Feb. 21-23), hardly anyone knew the violent details of the painter's personal life. He shot his wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, and mother-in-law to death in front of his son, a crime that today would have landed him on death row. But in the late 1800s, the French courts acquitted Luna for his "crime of passion by virtue of his wife's infidelity" (unproven to this day). Asensio, long a leading diva, fashioned a libretto juxtaposing Luna's artistic successes with scenes of worsening domestic violence. The result is a strong opera in seven scenes divided into three acts that vividly portray the thin line between genius and madness.
In Ryan Cayabyab, Asensio chose a gifted composer who has won international awards in classical and pop competitions. She hoped to bridge the gap between longtime operagoers and young audiences steeped in MTV and electronic music. Their collaboration -- written in English to accommodate a wider audience -- proved as shocking as entertaining, its musical landscape of jagged rhythms and occasional squeaking violins (most effective in Luna's mad scene) relieved by several poignant arias.
Cayabyab calls his music "classico-popular," a mix of serious music styles and pop techniques. However, Spolarium, his first opera, is more contemporary-classical than popular, recalling works by Leonard Bernstein. His music for Luna is intense, many passages in a high tessitura. Robert Sena's small but ringing tenor showed no signs of strain on opening night, as he superbly tackled the physically, emotionally and vocally demanding role of an obsessive-compulsive. His violent scenes with Margarita Gomez-Yulo's Paz were heart-rending. In that role, Gomez Yulo (a winner of the 1994 Rosa Ponselle Voice Competition) revealed a splendid soprano -- until she hit her high notes. The fault lay not in her technique but in the sound system, which could not process Gomez's voluminous tone. Indeed, the big flaw in this otherwise successful production was the use of body mikes -- necessary, we were told by representatives of the theater, who say the once-acclaimed acoustics of CCP's main stage have deteriorated. Happily, the sixty-member San Miguel Philharmonic Orchestra was not amplified and magnificently filled the house with Cayabyab's music.
Alexander Cortez's staging used a giant, framed canvas, designed by Gino Gonzalez, on which Spoliarium and other paintings by Luna were projected, to support the action onstage. The canvas also became a starting and ending point for many scenes. Characters sprang from it to play scenes, then returned to it. For instance, the opera began with Luna revealed in an opening in the canvas, while the chorus, its shadows projected on canvas, sang a Te Deum to "the artist of the universe, creator of all." It was a splendid production.
MARICHELLE LUTZ
HANNOVER Calixto Bieito's reputation as the enfant terrible of European opera direction is rapidly degenerating. Though his Don Giovanni for ENO scandalized most British viewers, his Un Ballo in Maschera made up for it with clever political posturing. His latest effort, Il Trovatore for Hannover State Opera, is so full of blood and gore that there's no room left for the music. Driven to Clockwork Orange-style excesses in a nauseating bid to cause scandal, Bieito seems to have forgotten that Verdi's opera was written to be heard as well as to be seen.
Even those who closed their eyes to block out the repeated images of rape, bashing, victimization, incest, necrophilia, torture and murder (Bieito can fit at least three atrocities into any given aria) would not have registered much of Verdi's score in Hannover. Mikhel Küston tried to create a lush, curvaceous orchestral sound and to keep tempos moving along, but too often he interpolated ugly unscored pauses or accents to follow the director's onstage gestures. Leandra Overmann gave a remarkable performance as Azucena, adding a range of improvised screams, shouts and cackles to her part, ornamenting her final aria with flurries of deranged laughter. Hers was a committed, earthy account, full of grunts and barks and screeches, but it wasn't really singing. As Manrico, Ki-Chun Park showed signs of an attractively plangent, Italianate tenor, but the sound remained narrow and reigned in as he dashed around Ariane Isabell Unfried and Rifail Ajdarpasic's steel-girder railway-yard set. Hannu Niemelä's di Luna sounded muffled and woolly, Francesca Scaini's sultry Leonora resorted too often to interpretative clichés, and only Hans-Peter Scheidegger, as Ferrando, combined brutish vitality with a genuinely musical view of the part. The choristers, overacting as though their lives depended on it, were seldom together, no doubt because Bieito never allowed them all to see the conductor at the same time. By letting them whoop and howl, kick tin buckets, stamp and pummel their way through all of their entrances, he also ensured that not much of what they sang was audible anyway.
It does speak for Bieito's powers of persuasion that his cast moved with dedicated, well-drilled intent around the stage, evidently believing completely in what they were doing. That was no mean feat, given that most of what they were doing would have been better placed in a work that gave a clinical account of war crimes or a piece of illegal, hard-core pornography. As Azucena, having been raped by the entire male chorus, smeared herself and her cell with excrement, Bieito hit a point lower than many would have believed possible, even after the opening scenes of gang violence and immolation. It was gratuitously perverse, hard to watch and harder to hear, unmusical and ultimately pointless. Bieito thinks he is teaching us that Il Trovatore is a violent opera. In fact he merely proves that he has failed to see the love, passion and truth in the score. Il Trovatore is opera about people, not theater about death.
SHIRLEY APTHORP
MADRID Valencia-born Vicente Martín y Soler used to appear as a footnote to the libretto of Don Giovanni as the composer of Una Cosa Rara, a fragment of which is played during the Don's last supper. Like other late-eighteenth-century Viennese composers, Martín y Soler now receiving a surprising yet fully merited revival. Christophe Rousset, founder and conductor of the exquisite chamber orchestra Les Talens Lyriques, personally resuscitated Martín y Soler's La Capricciosa Corretta, o La Scuola dei Maritati (The Capricious Woman Corrected, or The School for Newlyweds[??]), composed for London's King's Teatre in 1795 and buried for almost two centuries. The libretto is by Lorenzo da Ponte.
The "capricciosa" in question is Ciprigna, a beautiful, spoiled, domineering young woman married to rich, old, boring Bonario. They live with Bonario's teenage son and daughter and two servants, all of whom suffer her tyrannical ways. Ciprigna entertains a ridiculous admirer, but when she falls in love with her daughter-in-law's boyfriend and starts squandering the family fortune on him, the others decide to teach her a lesson. Instructed by Fiuta, a Figaro-like servant, Bonario puts his wife in her place, and all sing happily a final stretta reminiscent of the finale of Così Fan Tutte.
Though there are similarities between this plot and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Rousset convincingly contends that the action and characters come straight from commedia dell'arte and are closer to the material da Ponte exploited in Così. However, in La Capricciosa Corretta, one hears echoes of the young Haydn or adolescent Mozart; Martín y Soler writes bubbly, effective, uplifting music, yet one vaguely feels one has heard it before. As for the libretto, one would assume its author had never read the subtleties and felicities of da Ponte's masterpieces, much less written them; one suspects that the incandescent genius of Mozart alone transformed this competent scribbler into a creator of his own stature.
At Madrid's Teatro de la Zarzuela, Rousset's ensemble gave this funny, well-crafted material a wonderful spin. They played with clarity and fast tempos, which grew exciting in the two act-finales. Soprano Marguerite Krull, who sings regularly with Rousset, managed to create a believable character in the caricaturish Ciprigna, making the tyrannical young woman as adorable as she is annoying. Though her unsatisfied wifely yearning for love was as desperate as those of Countess Almaviva, Káta Kabanová or Sieglinde, her "taming" was less humane than that dispensed by Don Alfonso in Così.
The singing wasn't consistently top-notch, but the cast played with enthusiasm, serving up a very idiomatic, convincing fast-paced comedy. The best were Josep Miquel Ramón, as Fiuta, displaying comic talents and a sonorous baritone; Enrique Baquerizo, playing the pathetic husband with impecable humor; and Katia Veletaz, a sweet, light-voiced daughter. Director Rita de Letteriis and set designer Philippe Miesch made the production as simple as possible, keeping the focus on the singers and the orchestra.
ROBERTO HERRSCHER
BARCELONA Barcelona's opera-lovers felt a bit like Gherman when confronted with this season's performances of The Queen of Spades at the Gran Teatre del Liceu: when the time came, the promised ace simply wasn't in the cards. The figurative ace was Plácido Domingo, eagerly anticipated in a role he's championed around the world; moreover, the tenor hadn't appeared at the Liceu in a staged production for thirteen years. However, he fell ill. (He also was prevented from appearing in Paris in January.) Though the singers who remained weren't bad -- including a handful of queens -- they couldn't replace the winning card.
As the Countess, grande dame Elena Obraztsova conveyed mystery, menace and dreamy nostalgia with unsurpassed dramatic force and artistry; and her current voice and figure suit the role well. Norwegian soprano Solveig Kringelborn, with a small but ingratiating, even sound, also shone as Lisa; Russian mezzo Marina Domaschenko, as Polina, lit up her scene with her distinctive, warm, golden tone.
As Gherman, Romanian-Israeli tenor Gabriel Sadé gave an impassioned performance, but his dramatic skills proved limited, and his voice sounded strained and pushed to the limit in almost every scene. Markus Eiche delivered a constrained, emotional Prince Yeletsky; Nikolai Putilin, though sounding past his prime, proved a convincing, idiomatic Tomsky.
In the pit, Kirill Petrenko kept the proceedings moving forward and his forces together, offering correct accompaniment to the singers. The Liceu orchestra managed to change its weight and sound to play the "Mozart" music in Act II, and in the scene of Gherman and the Countess they were most effective.
As to the production, director Gilbert Deflo and set and costume designer William Orlandi restored their production (from 1991-92), which looked cozily starched and old-fashioned then and even more so now. Scene changes were clever and theatrically effective, and the desolate shore where Gherman and Lisa met for the last time had a poetic quality, but on the whole, the sets and blocking catered to the most traditional tastes. The production concept hearkened back to the time when painted backgrounds stayed the same and excitement came from star singers. Here the star singer didn't show up, and nothing in the performance could make up for his absence.
Catalonia (with the Basque country) is the region in Spain with the strongest sense of its own nationhood and has developed a strong bond to opera as an instrument of collective pride and identity. The music of Wagner played an important role in the process by which the Catalan intellectual elite constructed, from the 1870s to the 1920s, a glorious past on which to build their claim to nationhood. It is thus not surprising that the composers of Barcelona would look past Spain to the Wagnerian model of mythology and leitmotifs for inspiration in their own operas.
Felip Pedrell's Los Pirineus (The Pyrenees, from 1890) is the most ambitious attempt to give Catalans a mythic depiction of their common origins, character and virtues, symbolized by the mountain range. The opera, based on Víctor Balaguer's epic poem (from 1879), tells of Count Foix, his battles with the French in 1218, his capture and murder, and the final victory of his countrymen against French invaders in 1285. Historical characters (such as Foix, his wife and Admiral Roger de Llùria) appear alongside troubadours out of Tannhäuser. The action is guided and interpreted by a symbolic character, Raig de Lluna (Moonbeam), a Moorish girl who represents the Catalan spirit. Pedrell called Los Pirineus a trilogy; its three acts (with prologue) total about the length of Tristan und Isolde. It saw only nine performances at the Liceu in 1901, in Italian (I Pirinei).
Following last year's successful rediscovery of another Catalan opera, Vicenç Cujàs's La Fattuchiera [see OPERA NEWS On Line, February 2002], Liceu artistic director Joan Matabosc programmed a few unstaged performances of Los Pirineus this year; this time, the Liceu gave the work in its original, deliberately archaic Catalan. The music has fine moments, moving choruses and a few well-crafted arias, but its merits seem insufficient to bring it wide acceptance. Edmon Colomer, a Catalan conductor who has combined traditional European opera repertoire with championing his native land's music, led the Liceu forces with brio and a particular sensitivity for lyrical, introspective passages. The choir expressed its collective sympathy for this music. Twenty roles were shared by eleven singers, mostly locals.
One of two notable exceptions was American baritone Philip Cutlip, who sang two of the longest parts: de Lluria and the troubadour Bernart Sicart de Marjèvols. Cutlip's authoritative, expressive voice seems ideally suited for twentieth-century repertoire, but his characters' long narrative recitatives proved monotonous, more reminiscent of Strauss than of Wagner. German mezzo Stella Doufexis successfully navigated Catalan diction, using her rich, expressive tone and dramatic intensity to mark Raig de Lluna's development from adolescence in Act I to extreme old age in the final tragedy.
Tenor Vicente Ombuena was effective and powerful in the middle range as Foix; bass Stefano Palatchi sounded cavernous and mean as a Papal Envoy; soprano Elisabete Matos sang the difficult role of Countess Foix with intelligence and Wagnerian stamina. However, the star of the night was soprano Ofelia Sala, who achieved success in La Fattuchiera. Sala's almost miraculous sweetness and legato in the opera's most beautiful moment, Act III's "The Song of the Star," provoked the strongest, most spontaneous applause. Her heartfelt performance was a reward to the half of the audience that stayed to the end of a long night of national affirmation.
ROBERTO HERRSCHER
LISBON As the eighth of Tchaikovsky's ten completed operas, The Enchantress has long been eyed keenly by aficionados of the composer, who have hoped for a staging at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg ever since the company gave a London concert performance in 1998. The opera finally will be seen at the Mariinsky (the place of its 1887 premiere) in June, in a coproduction with Lisbon's Teatro Nacional de São Carlos. But the São Carlos claimed attention for itself by giving the first run of performances (seen March 1). As expected, the opera was often rewarding musically, and it gives further evidence of Tchaikovsky's theatrical sense. It's his longest opera, but it moves fluently, thanks to his structural planning. A series of four duets anchors the two internal acts and provides for telling confrontations among the main characters in various permutations. But Tchaikovsky set for himself a difficult task that called for nothing less than the creation of a female protagonist who would, as he put it, illustrate Goethe's words from Faust: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" (The eternal feminine draws us on). The title character, a young, widowed innkeeper nicknamed Kuma, has sometimes been compared (generally to her disadvantage) to Carmen, though she seems closer to Minnie in La Fanciulla del West. She manages to destroy the Kurlyatev family: Prince Nikita becomes infatuated with her, incurring the wrath of his wife, Princess Evpraksiya. But Kuma's own sights are on their son Yuri.
Like the letter scene in Eugene Onegin and the scene in the Countess's boudoir in The Queen of Spades, a single scene in The Enchantress attracted Tchaikovsky to the subject. Yuri, siding with his mother, goes to Kuma intending to kill her but is gradually persuaded to abandon violence and return her love. Kuma makes her case resourcefully, yet the scene, at least as performed in Lisbon, lacks an erotic charge. And the grim events at the opera's close move too quickly for their impact to sink in: the princess poisons Kuma, Yuri is killed by the Prince, and the Prince goes mad. David Pountney's production, with sets by Robert Innes-Hopkins, moved the action from the fifteenth century called for by Ippolit Shpazhinsky's libretto to an indeterminate eighteenth or nineteenth century that, interestingly, embraced not only Tchaikovsky's lifetime but also the periods of Onegin and Queen of Spades. There was no sign of Kuma's rustic inn; instead, the action took place in the Kurlyatev's elegant, book-lined dining room, which decayed as the opera progressed. The stage picture was often arresting, but Pountney added a heavy psychological dimension -- with extra characters and much mysterious behavior -- that was difficult to make sense of.
The cast featured Mariinsky singers in all the principal roles, though the conductor was not Valery Gergiev (scheduled for St. Petersburg) but the São Carlos's chief conductor, Zoltan Pesko. He responded keenly to the flow of the drama, and the São Carlos orchestra rose to the challenge. However, there were signs of a more deeply lyrical current running through the score than was brought to the fore. Following a life-threatening entrance on a daybed lowered from the top of the stage, Olga Sergeyeva demonstrated a sure command of the title role's vocal requirements, offering tone that was steady and often gleaming, but she looked too matronly in the heavy fabrics of Tatiana Noginova's costumes. Her arresting singing in the scene with Yuri would have counted for more with a stronger partner than tenor Vladimir Grishko. But Olga Savova's assertive singing as the Princess confirmed her as one of the Mariinsky's leading mezzos. Alexander Morozov sang effectively in two roles, and Viktor Chernomortsev's richly resonant baritone ably expressed the Prince's passions and frustrations.
GEORGE LOOMIS
VIENNA Albert Herring, Britten's delicious spoof of Victorian manners, may seem so quintessentially English that its gentle parodies would be lost on audiences outside the United Kingdom. But in Fritz Schröder's German translation, not a word was lost on those lucky enough to get a ticket to Neue Oper Wien's superb production, given only four performances (seen Feb. 26). Conjuring an early breath of spring, the opera was given in a white-paper box, in which simple, colorful objects -- crates of vegetables in the Herrings' shop, some banners for the May King ceremony -- caught and delighted the eye, subtly lit in pastels by Norbert Chmel. The cast was costumed in proper Victorian attire by designer Christof Cremer, but with a fanciful, satiric edge: hoopskirts and frock coats were constructed from a sheer white fabric that allowed the characters' brightly-colored underwear to show through, giving the appearance of so many emperors sporting new clothes. Director Leonard Prinsloo admirably adhered to the settings and directions set forth in Eric Crozier's libretto, and he utilized tightly synchronized dance movement in the work's intricate ensembles. The advantages of a small theater were carefully tapped, and every sneer, stutter and raised eyebrow resonated throughout the audience.
Precision, quicksilver timing and a secure, even vocal blend were hallmarks of the opera's many ensembles, and the young cast performed as if born to the music. Particularly effective were the chaotic May King scene in Act II and the mourning nonet in Act III, but each cast member had the opportunity to shine. Contralto Sulie Girardi was a pragmatic Florence Pike, part Mistress Quickly, part Alice on The Brady Bunch, totally delectable in her catalogue of the unspeakable sins of potential May Queens. As Lady Billows, Anna Ryan was vain, imperious and appropriately squally. Monica Theiss-Eröd was captivating in Miss Wordsworth's dizzying nightingale coloratura. Sid and Nancy, played by Marco Di Sapia and Bea Robein, were a strutting peacock and a bossy flirt, entwining a seductive baritone and lovely light-mezzo in their impassioned duet. As the upholders of the village morals, Noriyuki Sawabu was a fey, smarmy Mr. Upfold, Dieter Kschwendt-Michel a daffy Mr. Gedge, Michael Wagner an orotund Superintendent Budd. Ina Gasciarino played Mrs. Herring as a harpy, spewing crocodile tears when she believed Albert to have met an untimely end. Isabel Marxgut, Petra Halper and Susanne Sommerer were wonderfully silly as the brats Emmie, Cis and Harry.
The most benign of Britten's malcontent loner protagonists, Albert is a sweet daydreamer who remains mostly outside the general comedy. Sung with Mozartean grace, a gorgeous palette of timbres, and sensitive phrasing and dynamics, Alexander Kaimbacher made an adorable fool of the eponymous hero. Fresh-voiced and mercurial, his tenor rang out with Albert's newfound confidence when denouncing small-town hypocrisy.
The splendid Amadeus Ensemble flittered, bubbled, guffawed, tingled, squawked and shimmered through Britten's eccentric score, under the buoyant leadership of Neue Oper Wien's musical and artistic director, Walter Kobéra. While consistently offering high musical values, the company frequently has suffered from overzealous, high-concept Regietheater stagings. This charming, good-humored Albert Herring would be the envy of many a larger company.
Unlikely as it may seem, the musical city of Vienna has not embraced the trend of reviving long-neglected baroque operas in period style. One of the town's more adventuresome small companies, the Vienna Kammeroper, has adopted the practice of performing one seventeenth-century opera per season, and it achieved mixed results in its attempt to make Piero Francesco Cavalli's Gli Amori d'Apollo e di Dafne (seen March 18) palatable to a public weaned on Beethoven, Bruckner and Brahms.
The opera consists of long stretches of secco recitative punctuated by the occasional sustained lyric outburst or ensemble. The score was written in 1640, before the inception of the vocal techniques -- trills, portamentos, and appoggiaturas -- that remain the tricks of the trade for singers today; the chief form of embellishment in Cavalli's day was the stileconcitato, a repeated staccato attack on a single note. The incorporation of vibrato and chest voice also lay in the future.
There are easier tasks than selling out a 300-seat theater for seventeen performances of such arcane fare, and the company resorted to promoting the opera as "The Dynasty of Greek Mythology" (alluding to the 1980s soap opera) and including a "Who's Who of Olympus" in the program. The tongue-in-cheek production featured a clever set by Otto Sujan, a Peter Arno-esque parody of the telescoping flats of painted clouds often seen in Baroque engravings, here used to frame projections of Magritte paintings. The gods sported togas and Mylar baseball caps, and Pan was clad in a fuzzy black bathroom rug. Director Paul Flieder painted the convoluted tale of infidelity and deception in broad, cartoon strokes: a pumped-up Jupiter, tired of producing his own lightning bolts, handed cardboard and scissors to an audience member to complete the task; Apollo, a preening fop in a white Panama hat, paused to sunbathe; when required to transform into a tree, Daphne slumped inside a pyramid that bore a single, huge, golden leaf. With silly music-hall dance sequences and camp laid on with a trowel, the production sometimes resembled an amateur drag show. Moments of true charm relied strictly on the strength and charisma of the attractive young cast.
All four leads proved worthwhile, experts in Baroque technique. As Daphne, gorgeous Johanna Wölfl employed her soaring, creamy soprano with ravishing, pure tone. When freed of the production's rigamarole, mellifluous countertenor Alexander Plust plaintively avowed Apollo's love for Daphne with delicate, rich details, highlighted by sensitive dynamic shading. Superb Albanian tenor Dritan Luca brought burnished vocal gold to the role of Kephalos. As Amore, Marelize Gerber tripped lightly over her ethereal, high-lying ornamentation. The opera's twenty-four roles were distributed among eleven singers; three ensemble members stood out for beauty of tone and technical security: bass Sokolin Assllanaj, baritone Boris Grappe and soprano Inna Jeskova. Singing the opera in German may have helped the audience follow the action, but it proved ungainly ("ach" replaced Italianate sighs of "ah" and "o") and undermined the flow of Cavalli's vocal line. Under the baton of Baroque specialist Bernhard Klebel, fourteen members of the Kammeroper Orchestra were outfitted with period instruments for the occasion, including two harpsichords, lute, chitarrone and a tiny chamber-organ for the lengthy recitative passages, bringing a resonant authenticity to the score. With such splendid, committed musical forces at hand, the staging seemed unnecessarily gimmicky.
LARRY L. LASH
MOSCOW The French Embassy in Moscow came up with a charming way for the Helikon Opera to honor St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary by suggesting and, with funding from Total/Fina/Elf, helping to implement a production of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's opéra comique from 1790, Pierre le Grand. Its protagonist is the tsar who built the city, and the opera's date, though far removed from 1703, still falls comfortably within the century we associate with St. Petersburg, which, after all, wasn't built in a day or even a year.
Pierre le Grand, however, is more concerned with the building of ships than of cities. It's one of those freewheeling fantasy treatments (Lortzing and Meyerbeer wrote others) of the young Peter the Great's incognito adventures in the West while learning the shipbuilder's craft. He also courts his second wife, Catherine, here a modest girl of sweet virtue. The libretto is by J. N. Bouilly, also responsible (subject to a German reworking) for that of Fidelio. Like Fidelio, Pierre has a leisurely beginning, introducing the household of the master carpenter Georges, where Peter and his minister Lefort are lodgers. Perhaps the liveliest moment of Act I at the Helikon came when the conductor, Sergei Stadler, also a noted violinist, took up his instrument and interpolated part of a Grétry concerto. Pierre never does go on to sizzle dramatically like Fidelio, but it was impressive as a pleasantly sentimental piece, with tuneful music, often of beguiling simplicity. A lot of it is vaguely Mozartean, but here and there are instances of declamation that hint at Grétry as the grandpère of Offenbach.
Pierre (seen on January 29) left one eager for more Grétry, but whether his unassuming brand of comedy can speak to a modern audience was left unresolved by the Helikan. Director Dmitri Bertman obviously thought not, for he turned the opera's one scene of pathos into mock tragedy. Catherine is abandoned at the altar by Peter after he is abruptly summoned back to Moscow to quell a revolt. To reflect her despair, Grétry gives her the most intensely expressive music of the opera. But for Bertman it was apparently just prima-donna ranting, for he kept Peter onstage to watch it as if he were just another spectator. In fact, the whole production treated the characters -- especially Catherine -- in an oddly spacey manner, as if they weren't real people. The clever set (by Igor Nezhny and Tatyana Tulubyeva) featured a three-masted ship, but the most inventive touch came when Peter returned in all his glory atop a wire horse -- a takeoff on the famous Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg. It set the tone for the spirited vaudeville finale in which Catherine compares Peter (flatteringly) to Louis XVI. No wonder Pierre didn't remain in the repertory for long.
The Helikon came up with a real find in twenty-year old lyric tenor Maxim Mironov, who looked just like the young Peter in paintings and brought off splendidly the demanding aria with which Grétry establishes through musical means Peter's royal status. The talented soprano Yelena Voznesenskaya sang exquisitely as Catherine. Dmitry Ovchinnikov's robust bass worked well in Georges's music, but the fuzzy intonation of another bass, Nikolai Galin, counted against him as Lefort. The orchestra needed a lighter, more nuanced touch. Previously, Pierre le Grand is believed to have been staged in modern times only once, in Compiègne, in 2001.
The Bolshoi Theater had said that its new subsidiary theater would be a place for the kind of innovative production style it otherwise tends to shun, although at times it looked as if we'd never have a chance to find out. Plans for the theater were formulated back in the early 1990s, but construction lurched forward in fits and starts for years because of delays in funding by the federal government. And when the New Stage (as it is known) finally opened in November 2002, it hardly looked like a place for theatrical innovation. Ultraconservative in design, with crystal chandeliers, carved brackets, gilded wall lights and parquet floors, the 900-seat house even has a royal box. One understood why Valery Gergiev has had to fight so hard to give a modern look to the Mariinsky's projected second theater in St. Petersburg (an issue still unresolved), if this is what the bureaucrats come up with when left to their own devices. Still, the lavish appointments do make for congenial operagoing, and the theater's intimacy counts strongly in its favor, though the stage is so wide and the orchestra pit so large that one has the feeling of a bigger house.
True to its word, the Bolshoi chose young Russian directors with reputations for unorthodoxy for the New Stage's initial two opera productions, though in the event only one was at all daring. Dmitry Belov was engaged for the inaugural production on November 29, Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegourochka (The Snow Maiden), but my guess is that the Bolshoi management took one look at his Rigoletto (in a production from the city of Saratov seen in Moscow last year) and laid down ground rules: the image of Rigoletto as a transvestite cabaret singer didn't sit well with everyone. Deprived of his ability to shock, Belov unfortunately seems to have had little to fall back on. The discursive Snegourochka needs a sympathetic director's help, but Belov never found the poignant heart of this story, about a supernatural creature who risks her life to live among mortals. Alyona Pikova's sets, dominated by stone blocks (or were they ice?), succeeded in evoking a far-off time but not much fantasy. Yelena Bryleva's bright soprano lacks the requisite purity of tone that the title role calls for, but her way with the music was often touching. Irina Dolzhenko sang with melismatic flair as the shepherd Lel, who deserts the Snow Maiden for Kupova (the excellent Yelena Zelenskaya). Tenor Mikhail Gubsky brought an appealing lyricism to King Berendey, and baritone Andrey Grigoriev sang heartily as Misgir, the merchant whom the Snow Maiden learns to love. The Bolshoi's principal guest conductor, Nikolay Alexeyev, observing Rimsky's own cuts plus a few others, brought out the score's orchestral colors nicely.
Much better was The Rake's Progress (seen on February 27), a work that the Bolshoi probably wouldn't have considered before the advent of the New Stage. Despite Stravinsky's Russian origin, this "neo-classical" opera, with its copious references to Western composers, is far removed from the Russian opera tradition and has scarcely been touched by Russia's major opera houses. Regardless of where it's given, the self-consciousness of its fixation on the operatic past weighs heavily, yet Dmitri Chernyakov's staging managed to keep the emotional core alive with a protagonist who gains self-knowledge. For once, one wasn't left wondering what, if any, "progress" he'd made. In a sign that Tom rejected the false world offered by Nick Shadow, the graveyard scene, like the opening in Truelove's garden, occupied the entire stage, whereas the surreal London scenes had been played in claustrophobic boxes -- perhaps a nod to Hogarth's rectangular engravings -- with the sides serving as frames. And the final scene in Bedlam found Tom and the other inmates in a setting much like Truelove's garden, as if Tom had returned to where he ought to be; the sense of closure made Anne's lullaby especially poignant. On the other hand, the London scenes had plenty of zip, especially the one in which Nick induces Tom to marry Baba the Turk; this was played before a studio audience as if it were a sequence on a grotesque television game-show.
The one blemish was the execrable English diction from just about everyone in the cast, strong though it was otherwise. Yelena Voznesenskaya was a radiant Anne, with a voice of lovely tonal resonance and enough body to energize the more dramatic moments, such as the "cabaletta" in which she vows to go to Tom in London. Also excellent was Vitaly Panfilov, whose bright, flexible lyric tenor never lost its freshness in the demanding role of Tom. Sergei Moskalov was a lithe Shadow, Alexander Korotny a rich-voiced Truelove, Tatyana Gorbunova a hugely domineering Baba in voice and manner. Alexander Titov, long affiliated with the Mariinsky Theater, conducted a performance that had clarity and incisiveness. All in all, a fine achievement for the Bolshoi and one that ought to stir interest in Chernyakov's production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which the Mariinsky will take to New York in July.
GEORGE LOOMIS
PARIS The opening night of Florian Leopold Gassmann's Opera Seria (March 26) at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées brought a welcome breath of spring sunshine to the French capital. This coproduction with the Schwetzingen Festival and the Berlin Staatsoper reunited the team of conductor René Jacobs and director Jean-Louis Martinoty, who already have scored successes here with Cesti's Argia and Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.
In this work (from 1769), Gassmann parodies the eponymous genre, which played a prominent part in his own output. His librettist, the celebrated Ranieri de' Calzabigi, was responsible also for Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, reforming works that placed greater emphasis on natural dramatic expression and abandoned some of the formal rigors of opera seria, such as long, dramatic recitatives and extended chains of highly decorated arias. Gassmann's musical language lies somewhere between those of Pergolesi and Mozart, and while never less than competent, his invention doesn't rival that of his pupil, Salieri. When the stage action flags or the musical parody palls, there isn't much musical substance to fall back on. The composer seems to mock his own empty musical rhetoric, which shines brightest in the concerted finales, which point to Mozart's extended ensembles.
Initially, Martinoty tried too hard to hold the audience's interest with extraneous comic business, and Hans Schavernoch's backstage set looked too cluttered, but Act I is used above all to introduce the characters, amusingly named for their characteristics, in the style of a Restoration comedy. The worldly-wise impresario, Fallito (an outstanding performance by smooth-voiced baritone Pietro Spagnoli), is producing a new opera and must deal with the soaring aspirations of composer and librettist, Sospiro and Delirio (confidently sung by Jeremy Ovenden and Klaus Häger). The fun really begins when the three principal female singers enter into this already chaotic situation, accompanied by their stage-mothers (in drag), a vain primo uomo and a dancing master (with his universally despised troupe).
The rhythm of the show found its true hilarious pace in Act II, in which the opera is rehearsed. Composer and librettist come to blows over the eternal debate of music versus poetry. Gassmann's music also becomes more pointedly satirical, the highlight being the diva Porporina's aria about leaping whales and tuna, complete with suitably fishy Baroque gestures and absurd bouncing musical figures. Janet Williams displayed an easy, high coloratura voice, and a wonderful sense of fun. The "mature" prima donna Stonatrilla's suicide aria is also an irresistible piece of comedy, complete with bassoon obbligato; Alexandrina Pendatchanska sang with strength and authority, from the comic exaggeration of her expressive chest register to her ringing high notes. The third rampaging soprano was Miah Persson, delightfully lyrical as Smorfiosa, a hypochondriac who triumphantly overcomes her imagined physical limitations to shine brighter than her colleagues; this portrait rang painfully true. Greek tenor Mario Zeffiri gave a glorious performance as the castrato Ritornello, who entered with his own lapdog. He dealt with the high-lying music with disconcerting ease and beauty, while relishing every moment of Calzabigi's witty mockery of the inappropriate rapport between text and music in his aria.
The climax of the evening, however, was the Act III presentation of the opera itself (based on Hasse's Solimano). Here Schavernoch provided a vertiginous piece of Egyptian hokum, looking not unlike a set for a touring Aida. Handcuffed, Smorfiosa was obliged to grope her way through incessantly marching extras, while Ritornello tried desperately to edge his way into the limelight. The musical satire was rich, pointed and irresistibly funny. Hecklers were planted in the audience, shouting abuse to bring the curtain down on this disastrous "performance." It was left to the three mothers, who had spent most of the evening knitting and silently egging on their girls, to apportion blame. All three countertenors relished their roles: the roundly supportive Caverna (Stephen Wallace), the wonderfully stately Bragherona (Curtis Rayam)and the wacky granny, Befana, straight out of The Beverly Hillbillies (Dominique Visse). The news that the impresario has run off with the till inspires a final indictment of opera managements, a cause around which all can unite. There was a predictably triumphant reception for all concerned, especially for the energetic baton of René Jacobs, to whom we owe this rediscovery, and the Concerto Köln, who played superbly, fully enjoying their occasional contributions to the stage action.
It will be a while before audiences take any opera quite as seria as Handel intended, but just a few nights later (March 29), Jean-Claude Malgoire conducted a fine concert performance of Agrippina at the Champs-Elysées. The opera, written when Handel was just twenty-five, is an early masterpiece, reveling in the intrigue beloved by the public in Venice, where the work was first performed, in 1709. The cumulative effect of the arias and dramatic truth of the work shows that the parodied form of opera seria could still be forceful in the hands of a genius. Leading the cast was Véronique Gens as the manipulative Agrippina. This artist seems to gain in stature with each appearance; on this occasion, her golden tone and well-pointed recitatives were the highlight of the evening. By lively contrast, the light, flexible-voiced Donata D'Annunzio Lombardi was Poppea. Malgoire cast three countertenors: Philippe Jaroussky as a virtuoso Nerone, sounding quite at ease in an almost soprano register; Thierry Gregoire (Ottone), who produced a warmer, more mezzo-like tone; and Fabrice Di Falco, projecting well as Narciso. Nigel Smith sang Claudio with force and style, but the role really demands more bass quality than his baritone naturally possesses. The cast was completed by Bernard Deletre, somewhat parsimonious of tone as Pallante, and Alain Buet as an efficient Lesbo. This company is currently touring France with a staged version of this opera, and though the full staging wasn't used at the Champs-Elysées (presumably for technical reasons), the orchestra was placed in the pit, and the singers moved freely, obviously benefiting from their stage experience.
Positioned at the center of his orchestra, Malgoire conducted with the same gentle bonhomie that has characterized his work for the past thirty-five years. His affectionate, well-paced reading of the score conveys a naïve sense of adventure, but the players of the Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy suffered in comparison with Jacobs's Concerto Köln. The string sections in particular produced a parched, neutral sound, where one longed for a more dramatic charge. However the near-capacity audience seemed enchanted by the whole evening, and the cast encored the final ensemble.
The Russian season at the Châtelet continued with concert performances of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta (March 30), using the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. After the performances by Gergiev and the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, it was interesting to hear the more specifically Russian sound of the second orchestra's woodwind and brass, and the classic pacing of magisterial maestro Yuri Temirkanov. If the composer's short last opera lacks the immediate melodic appeal of Eugene Onegin or the Wagnerian breadth of The Queen of Spades, its nine scenes rise to an exciting climax, which would have been easier to achieve without inserting an intermission after just forty minutes of music. Attached to the French setting of the work, based on the play La Fille du Roi René by Danish writer Henryck Herz, Tchaikovsky preferred to call the work Iolanda, which he considered nearer to the blind heroine's name in the original French: Iolande. In this role, Marina Mescheriakova was never disappointing, but she lacked the last degree of vocal radiance. Replacing an indisposed Vladimir Ognovenko, Sergei Alexashkin as her father, King René, sang with vast waves of bass tone, which earned him a big ovation after his aria. Gegam Grigorian sang Count Vaudémont, whose poetic outpourings have such a determining effect on the drama. His dramatic tenor rang out sturdily at the top of his range, and though the lower part of his voice sounded a little worn, his phrasing was exemplary. Sergei Leiferkus was confident and precise in his elaborate vocal line as the knowledgeable doctor, Ibn-Hakia, while Dmitri Hvorostovsky was luxury-cast as Robert, Duke of Burgundy, singing with resonant physicality and a suitably aristocratic line. The stylish Radio France chorus sounded authentically Russian.
STEPHEN MUDGE
AMSTERDAM Fidelio has always been a cornerstone in the repertories of Dutch opera-companies, especially since the beloved soprano Gré Brouwenstijn started singing the role of Leonore to international acclaim, many years ago. Heard February 19, Nederlandse Opera's new Leonore, Charlotte Margiono, possesses an instrument better suited to Mozart than to Wagner, but her career has developed along the lines of Brouwenstijn's, especially in German repertory. However, it was only by chance that the Dutch public heard her as Leonore. She was called in quite late in the rehearsal process, when Inga Nielsen broke her leg during a visit to Hamburg, but Margiono took over with astonishing commitment. With warm timbre, strong lyrical lines and the right measure of anger in Act I and joy in the closing scenes, she completely dominated a performance that on the whole was too emotionally distant to be convincing.
A rock of self-confidence, Ruth Ziesak offered well-focused singing as Marzelline; Alan Held portrayed an icy Don Pizarro, a merciless, briefcase-toting civil servant. Günter von Kannen contributed an adequate Rocco, but Torsten Kerl, who sang his first Florestan, sounded more concerned about the drama than about stylish delivery of Beethoven's score, given a cool, symphonic reading by conductor Edo de Waart. De Waart's problems in coordinating the singers and orchestra may have had to do with Robert Carsen's staging, in Radu and Miruna Boruzescu's spacious set, using the huge stage of the Muziektheater to its full extent, surrounding it with enormous grey walls that disappeared into the flies, where a great deal of the singing was lost. Obviously, de Waart had difficulty hearing his soloists. (The voices could be heard more easily, though distantly, in the auditorium.)
Carsen took no risks with the dialogue, making ample use of microphones and sometimes engineering the soundscape. Some dialogue came from the stage, but "inner thoughts" were broadcast from the back of the theater, and Pizarro's orders were blasted as if he were addressing a whole army. This sonic concept seemed over the top, and it weakened the structure of Act I, in which Beethoven himself had trouble creating a unified drama. Usually a musical highlight, the prisoners' chorus lost some impact because it was sung from backstage, leaving the scene to thirty supernumeraries costumed to look like concentration-camp prisoners. The reason for this didn't become clear until the beginning of the last scene, when Carsen asked the entire chorus to enter the stage from all sides, including the doors in the auditorium. Dressed as United Nations forces, with blue berets, they were accompanied by TV crews and photographers covering Don Fernando's "liberation" of the wretched prisoners. Here Carsen dispensed a heavy-handed message: the prisoners remained prisoners, and the real focus was on the attention-grabbing politicians, even at the expense of Beethoven's music. The result was a kind of political theater that seemed outdated, artificial and annoying, despite the eternal relevance of the original work.
PAUL KORENHOF
TEL AVIV New Israeli Opera has spread the Verdi centenary well into the 2003 season: the Israeli premiere of Simon Boccanegra (seen March 15) soon will be followed by Nabucco and Aida. The production of Boccanegra (originally created for Welsh National Opera) was a truly great achievement, one of those rare events when an opera emerges as a superb "total art work." Director David Pountney (who directed the excellent NIO productions of Rigoletto and Lucia) offered a most convincing interpretation of Verdi's melancholy masterpiece, creating a constant tension despite the drama's generally slow pace. In harmonious collaboration with set designer Ralph Koltai, costume designer Sue Wilmington and lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin, Pountney established a subtle balance between an overall realistic production and outstanding symbolic, even surreal gestures. In the council-chamber scene, the patrizi walked on stilts, covered by their long, red gowns, so that they towered above the plebei. The minimalistic set consisted of two enormous, movable walls that created different spaces for each scene; within the scenes, the imaginative lighting transformed them, making them appear to be cracked bronze gates or French windows. In the final scene, the walls were used to illustrate the production's symbolic concept, as they slowly closed on the dying Simon, as if to crush him; this dispensed with the awkward need to have Boccanegra actually collapse onstage. The only infelicitous symbol occurred at the opening of Amelia's entrance aria in Act I, when a figure of the dead mother, on a stretcher, hovered high above Amelia's head, flying upward when Amelia began to sing.
NIO's international cast was magnificent. In the title role, baritone Antonio Salvadori offered a powerful portrayal, with a warm, expressive voice. Paata Borchuladze was a perfect Fiesco, with his dark, rich basso profondo and imposing stage presence. He and Salvadori brought the performance to a heart-breaking climax in the two elderly men's final, tragic duet. Fiorella Burato was an excellent Amelia, her fresh, glowing soprano hovering beautifully over the dark tinta of the ensembles, complemented by a wonderful stage personality. However, she lacked volume in her lowest register and occasionally was covered by the orchestra. Vicente Ombuena excelled as Gabriele Adorno, with a resonant, genuinely bel canto tenor. Vladimir Braun depicted the villain Paolo with a powerful, dramatic bass and fine acting. (Pountney made subtle reference to Iago when Paolo produced Amelia's handkerchief in his scene with Adorno.) The many duets and ensembles were well prepared, with excellent intonation and balance.
The NIO chorus, especially the men, again offered outstanding work. David Giménez elicited a splendid, cohesive performance from the orchestra, bringing out Verdi's great instrumental gestures, such as the bass clarinet solo in the council-chamber scene, and maintaining the tension of tempos throughout the memorable evening.
JEHOASH HIRSHBERG
KARLSRUHE Opening the twenty-sixth Handel Festival on February 21, Karlsruhe scored its biggest hit so far with Handel's Giustino (from 1773), keeping the delighted audience chuckling for more than three hours. With an anonymous libretto, this dramma per musica revealed Handel at his lightest -- some may even say the Lloyd Webber of his day -- spectacular, jolly and melodious. Under the galvanizing baton of Michael Hofstetter, the orchestra was seated on a platform above Peer Boysen's arena-like set. Boysen also took charge of the direction and the outrageous, colorful costumes, and the show rolled along like a comic strip, at least as entertaining as Harry Kupfer's famous Komische Oper production during the '80s and much more so than the Göttingen Handel Festival staging of 1994.
The opera tells of Giustino, a humble farmer, informed by the goddess Fortuna that he must become a hero. He proceeds to Constantinople, where Emperor Anastasio's wife, Arianna, has been abducted by the tyrant Vitaliano. Along the way, Giustino saves the emperor's sister, Leocasta, from a wild bear, falls in love with her and rescues Arianna from by a sea-monster. However, Anastasio becomes uneasy and throws Giustino in prison, where he is almost slain by Vitaliano. Suddenly, his dead father appears, revealing that Giustino and Vitaliano are really brothers. They expose the power-hungry chamberlain Amanzio; Anastasio and Arianna are reunited; Giustino is made vice-emperor, pledged to Leocasta; and the chorus (not just the soloists banding together for a finale) heralds a new Golden Age. Though the libretto proceeds haphazardly, the numbers of Handel's score are like a string of pearls, with colorfully orchestrated accompagnato recitatives and marvelous solo instrumental passages in the ritornellos and sinfonias.
In Karlsruhe, these gems emerged freshly polished, with some of the da capo sections of the arias so richly ornamented that the cadenzas assumed the dimensions of a monologue. On the other side, Hofstetter allowed the singers wonderfully contemplative pauses. Generally, he aims for quick, sparkling tempos, keeping the textures light and transparent; his crisp, neat phrases often ended quite abruptly.
Kai Wessel played Giustino as a likable chap, with a raffish twinkle in his eye. His high, slender countertenor is fabulously expressive and swift, relishing his coloraturas and offering cadenzas of staggering lung-power. The voice of Robert Crowe, a male soprano, took some getting used to, but the bellowing and yelping fit Anastasio's temperamental character. Kirsten Blase, a radiant, graceful soprano, spun silky, lacework cantilenas and delving deep into Arianna's suffering. Janja Vuletic was a mouthwatering Leocasta, with a fresh, soubrettish soprano voice.
Bernard Berchtold lent virile, trumpeting tenor tone to Vitaliano; Charles Maxwell delivered a brillant account of Amanzio's alto pyrotechnics. As Fortuna, the instigator and guiding spirit of the proceedings, Andrea Chudak was given a voluminous appearance; she has a voice to match. Bass Peter Lobert brought bronzed tone to the role of Giustino's father. Marcus Brenk took the non-singing roles of the bear (dressed as a sumo wrestler) and the sea-monster, the most amusing creature in Handel's eccentric utopia.
HORST KOEGLER
CONCERTS & RECITALS NEW YORK CITY The March 23 concert at Avery Fisher Hall by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic featured twentieth-century music from Ravel (Ma Mère l'Oye and La Valse) to Lutoslawski (the heroically lyric Symphony No. 4), with Strauss's beloved Vier Letzte Lieder closing the first half of the bill with a wallop, courtesy of LAP's glamorous guest soloist, Karita Mattila. In refulgent voice, Mattila re-affirmed her status as one of the world's great Strauss sopranos, soaring into the third line of "Fruhling" ("von deinem Bäumen und blauen Lüften") like a wild bird, her voice shimmering above the LAP's immaculately disciplined strings, and she took the downward-spiralling close of "September" ("Langsam tut er die grossen Müdgewordenen Augen zu") with poignant grace. Salonen's leadership, luminous and tender in "Beim Schlafengehen," boldly generous in "Im Abendrot," was a model of clarity throughout the concert.
F. PAUL DRISCOLL
Conductor James Conlon, already well-known for championing the works of Alexander Zemlinsky, has turned his attention to a near-contemporary of Zemlinsky's, Viktor Ullmann, who died at Auschwitz, in 1944. Conlon conducted Ullmann's opera, Der Kaiser der Atlantis, written in the concentration camp at Terezín (Teresienstadt), at the Cincinnati May Festival two years ago, and on March 23, Conlon led a student performance of the opera, launching "Recovering a Musical Heritage," his mini-festival of works by Ullmann and other victims of the Holocaust.
On March 24, Conlon was joined by the Hawthorne String Quartet, Juilliard students and soprano Amy Burton for a concert that featured vocal works by Zemlinsky (who died in exile in 1942) and Ullmann, as well as chamber works by Hans Krása (who died at Auschwitz in 1944) and Ullmann. The venue was a stifling chapel at St. Bartholomew's Church, under the aegis of the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation (of which Hawthorne violist Mark Ludwig is director), the church's "Great Music" program and its Center for Religious Inquiry; all the performers donated their services, though it wasn't specified for whose benefit.
Burton and Conlon led off with the New York premiere of Zemlinsky's "Maiblumen blühten uberall" (May-flowers were blooming everywhere), a setting of two verses of a poem by Richard Gerstl. Zemlinsky intended the song as a companion piece to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. Both works are inspired by Gerstl's affair with Mathilde Zemlinsky Schoenberg, Zemlinsky's sister and Schoenberg's wife. According to Conlon's pre-performance remarks, the final verses of "Maiblumen" were so tragic that Zemlinsky couldn't bring himself to set them; the verses he did set proved heavy enough, though Burton sang with taste and restraint.
Ullmann's Six Songs for Soprano and Orchestra (from 1937, performed in an orchestration by Geert van Keulen from 1994) sets texts by Albert Steffen; the songs simultaneously depict the natural and spiritual realms, reflecting Steffen's lyrics, but Ullmann never quite gets a handle on the poet's quirky style. For example, Ullmann treats the fifth song, "Wie ist die Nacht," as a fairly conventional love song from a bereaved young man, but the text is otherworldly: the departed lover becomes a celestial object, whom the speaker sees moving "from star to star." More successful was the whimsical "Dreierlei Schutzgeister" (three types of tutelary spirits), representative of Steffen's penchant for lists and categorization but scored with an infectious, ironic lilt and a waltz in the final verse.
Burton's clear, bright soprano consistently found the emotional truth of each song, and despite a schoolgirl accent, her grasp of textual nuance could hardly be better. Keulen's orchestration of the Ullmann songs occasionally bounced off the chapel walls, but she didn't let that faze her. Though Conlon's approach to Zemlinsky, as heard on recordings, sometimes strikes this listener as heavy-handed, his vigorous command kept preciousness at bay in "Maiblumen" and the Ullmann songs. The Hawthorne Quartet reveled in Krása's string quartet (from 1921), with its lively foxtrot that predates Kurt Weill's similar use of dance figures; Ullmann's quartet (from 1943, written at Terezín) was understandably anxious, even when marked "tranquillo sempre."
The evening was not a sentimental lament for what might have been but a clear-eyed assessment of what was. Most of these compositions were good enough to be considered on their own terms, too good to be treated merely as curiosities or as sacred objects. Yet how good were they? Musical New Yorkers wound up arguing thorny philosophical questions in the weeks that followed Conlon's series. Do dire circumstances improve the intrinsic worth of a composition? Can one consider this music apart from its original context? Is "Holocaust music" a necessary distinction or an affront to the individual accomplishment of the composer?
Conlon's retrospective concluded with a purely instrumental concert on March 26. A friend observed that Hitler would have been infuriated to know that Ullmann's music was being played in the venues for the three concerts (Central Synagogue, St. Bartholomew's Church and Carnegie Hall, respectively). That's one more reason to commend Conlon and his colleagues.
Nothing if not ambitious, Jonathan Sheffer's Eos Orchestra presented two programs, "In Mahler's Shadow," at New York's Ethical Culture Society in March. All of the works presented were performed in transcriptions credited to Arnold Schoenberg or his students; most transcriptions were reductions, putting them within the reach of Eos's small forces. On March 22, the program featured Busoni's "Berceuse élégiaque," Debussy's L'Après-midi d'un Faune and a staging (by Christopher Alden) of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The performance came into focus only in the final minutes of Mahler's cycle, suggesting that everyone involved would have benefited from concentrating on a single program. (The first program, on March 20, featured a staging of Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, among several instrumental works; that concert was not reviewed by OPERA NEWS.) Sheffer was delivering an over-emphatic reading of Schoenberg's un-lush transcription, until baritone Andrew Schroeder intoned the aching lines of "Der Abschied." Then Sheffer located the poignancy and sensuality of Mahler's music. At last, it became clear that Schroeder's character was not merely hung over or ill but dying, and that the character portrayed by tenor Michael Hendrick had come not merely to visit but in an increasingly desperate attempt to comfort his friend.
Indeed, right until the end, Alden's staging seemed a gross distraction from the musical performance. On a set designed by Marsha Ginsberg, Alden presented yet another of his squalid, contemporary, nearly anonymous bedrooms, peopled by singers in polyester or underwear. (Here, Hendrick wore Sans-a-belts, Schroeder pajamas; costumes also were designed by Ginsberg.) The settings were realistic, but the behavior wasn't: both Hendrick and Schroeder spent a great deal of time mashing their own faces against a wall, and Hendrick threw a bedsheet over himself for the duration of one lied. Alden has been here, done this an awful lot in recent New York seasons. However opaque it sometimes was to the audience, Alden's direction did seem to make sense to the singers: Hendrick was even moved to tears during Schroeder's singing of "Von der Schönheit."
Hendrick's résumé, ranging from Tamino to Parsifal, fits the vocal bill for the difficult tenor part of Das Lied, but he lacks the bright peal that would provide an ideal contrast with Schroeder, in the lower-voice part. Schroeder brought warm, burly tone and real tenderness to an impressive interpretation. In the understated eloquence of the concluding sections of "Der Abschied," the capable Eos ensemble seized a rare opportunity. Schoenberg's transcriptions don't always convey the original composers' desired effects: his use of harmonium, ostensibly meant to fill out the orchestra, defeats transparency (ostensibly one compensation of a reduced score) and sounds as if an electrical appliance had been left running. Throughout the evening, notably in the prelude to L'Après-midi d'un Faune but also in each of her contributions to Das Lied, Katherine Fink's flute-playing was exemplary.
Nathan Berg had stiff competition on the night of his New York recital debut (March 17): President Bush delivered his "final ultimatum" to Saddam Hussein in a televised speech that evening, the first night of Purim, and attendance at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater was affected. The Canadian bass-baritone performed a program of four song-cycles in as many languages, followed by two encores, the traditional songs "Danny Boy" (in observance of St. Patrick's Day) and "Deep River." Roger Admiral was accompanist, on piano.
Berg has substantial stage experience, including local appearances as Mozart's Figaro and Leporello at New York City Opera, where he displayed good presence and a firm if un-showy grasp of those characters. He didn't bring his theatrical gifts to bear in this recital, however, though several songs -- notably Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death and Ibert's Chansons de Don Quichotte -- not only permit but demand a high degree of characterization. Mussorgsky calls on the singer to impersonate not only Death (in several guises) but a couple of his victims, and Ibert's songs are written for Quixote, surely one of the most vivid personalities ever created. (There's also a song for Sancho, which Berg did not perform.) Berg possesses a virile, seemingly bottomless instrument, sometimes uncomfortable on high notes; the arabesques in Ibert's songs showed off his easy flexibility, and his diction in English, German, French and Russian is crisp and fluent. He's got abundant resources, yet he did little to vary the sounds of his cast of characters, never gestured or registered more than subtle changes in facial expression. He did appear emotionally connected to his material, but these connections often were too subtle to be appreciated by many in his audience, even in such an intimate space. This was a nice guy singing pretty music -- period.
His accompanist gave him little assistance, banging away vigorously in the program's first half and keeping the piano's lid wide open throughout the evening. In such circumstances, Berg probably couldn't have gotten away with much dynamic nuance. Mahler's Rückert-lieder lacked their lush, glorious sinuousness and therefore failed to make their proper impact. For the second half, Admiral played more gently, but Berg concluded the program with an anti-climax: Ralph Vaughan-Williams's Songs of Travel, to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was the longest cycle of the evening and the least interesting musically.
At the end of a run as the Composer in the Met's dazzling Ariadne auf Naxos, mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer joined members of the New York Philharmonic for a chamber concert at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y (April 6). The vocal selections, Brahms lieder in the first half and chansons by Chausson and Ravel in the second, were well-served by Mentzer's innate elegance and natural dignity -- the same qualities that make her Composer the noblest character in the Ariadne prologue. And the singer found a like-minded ensemble among the instrumentalists, led by Ann Schein on piano. Schein performed heroic work in every number on the program, including two impressive solos: Ravel's Sonatine and Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse, as notable for their detailed delicacy as for their muscular strength.
The most unusual selections on Mentzer's program, Ravel's Chansons Madécasses (Songs about Madagascar) brought forth a broad palette of emotional colors, from sexual ecstasy ("Nahandove") to anxiety and menace ("Aoua!", launched with stentorian cries) to tender irony ("Il est doux"). The lyrics, written without the slightest condescension by a French colonist (Evariste Désiré de Forges Parny, 1753-1814), are far ahead of their time in their mimicry of (and respect for) the native perspective; Gauguin would have done well to read them before going to Tahiti.
The Brahms lieder were only slightly less captivating. In her repeated cries of "Stillet die Wipfel! Es schlummert mein Kind" (Silence the treetops! My child is sleeping), Mentzer glided seamlessly from beaming warmth to high seriousness, until there was little doubt she meant Jesus (in "Geistliches Wiegenlied," Spiritual Lullaby). Schein and violist Cynthia Phelps matched their playing to Mentzer's shimmering voice in "Gestillte Sehnsucht" (Satisfied Desire), the three women seeming to breathe as one. They were joined by Michelle Kim and Marc Ginsberg on violins and Eric Bartlett on cello for Chausson's Chanson Perpetuelle, an exquisitely restrained, emotionally pure performance that brought the afternoon to its conclusion.
WILLIAM V. MADISON
Up against the booking negligence of one diva and the indisposition of another, New York Festival of Song founders Steven Blier and Michael Barrett resourcefully turned their "Fatal Divas" concert (March 12 at Hunter's Kaye Playhouse) toward a thematic program addressing the preoccupations of many. The resulting "Songs of Peace and War," enlisting many talented musicians from NYFOS's distinguished orbit, proved a stylistically and linguistically diverse, emotionally satisfying exploration.
Accompanied by Blier and Barrett's skilled pianism and well-considered commentary, a succession of singers came forward (in Blier's words) "to look at things people sing to give themselves courage in difficult times and to reflect on the human cost of war."
Highlights were many, though one wanted to hear more from Dana Hanchard, a highly expressive and individual vocalist. The elegant Adriana Zabala's complicated mezzo timbre caught the quiet passion of de Falla's prayer of a mother that her son not be made a soldier. Sari Gruber brought charm and a fresh soprano to (somewhat less fresh) Eisler and Bernstein songs. Christine Antenbring showed herself a gamine and accomplished Weill singer, though no one matches Teresa Stratas in the shouts of "Shell! Shell Shell!" in "Das Lied von den Petroleum-Inseln." The dynamic control of Anton Belov's soulful, compact bass was impressive in Rachmaninoff's "Harvest of Sorrow." Blier and cellist Tanya Tomkins gave a ravishingly direct reading of Grieg's evergreen "Våren."
Surely the time has come when the self-congratulatory romantic narrative of the government-shuttered 1937 premiere of The Cradle Will Rock must face up to the show's poverty of musical inspiration and crude sloganeering. No fault of the likable, sonorous Joseph Kaiser and Jeffrey Picón, but Cradle's "Freedom of the Press" duet emerged the evening's principal dud; however, as expertly delivered by William Sharp, two other Blitzstein numbers ("Displaced" and "Emily") showed considerable verbal and harmonic sensitivity. Sharp's remarkable artistry also gave moving utterance to Mahler's "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" and Jacques Prévert's haunting 1947 "Barbara." This valuable baritone's sculpted yet utterly natural phrasing makes him a worthy model for young American singers.
Darius de Haas's Broadway dazzle worked like a charm in Randy Newman's painfully amusing "Political Science." His breathy tremolo delivery was less suited to Jean Ritchie's folk-style "Now is the cool of the day," where Hanchard and Kaiser's purer vocalism shone and the whole gifted company brought a thought-provoking and timely evening of song to a contemplative and moving close.
DAVID SHENGOLD
Photo credits © Beatriz Schiller 2003 (Ariadne cast); © Johan Elbers 2003 (Dessay and Voigt); © Johan Elbers 2003 (Traviata), © Carol Rosegg 2003 (Night Music); © Carol Rosegg 2003 (Dudley, Rivera); © Stan Barouh 2003 (Lady Macbeth), George Landis/courtesy of The Dallas Opera (Don Giovanni); Suellen Fitzsimmons/courtesy Pittsburgh Opera (Elektra); © Ken Howard 2003 (Norma); © Eric Mahoudeau 2003 (Perelà); 74: © Wilfried Hösl/Bayerische Staatsoper; 75: © Marco Borggreve 2003
OPERA NEWS, June 2003 Copyright © 2003 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.Ariadne cast inhabits Yeargan's
intricate set, opposite;
Festival atmosphere: Dessay and VoigtLopardo, Swenson in Met Traviata Send in the stars: Irons, Stevenson in City Opera's Night Music Sister act: Dudley, Rivera Huffstodt, Zakhozhaev in Baltimore "All the physical qualifications": Gilfry, Dallas's Giovanni Pierson, Pittsburgh's "vocally solid, many-sided" Elektra Pentcheva, Gorchakova in SDO Norma Strike up the band: Dusapin's mystical Perelà, in Paris "Soap opera in comic-book form": Alden's Götterdämmerung in Munich Experienced stars and
expansive conducting marked
the Met's sparkling Ariadne revival.Vaness's "scheming temptress" works her wiles on Dobber's Thane