Mariusz Trelinski’s production hailed from Warsaw’s Polish National Opera, with unit set by Boris Kudlicka [‘v’ over the ‘c’] and costumes by Arkadius. Of scenery there was none; black walls, streaked with multicolored thin bands, surrounded a pit midstage. Up out of this black hole an open-sided coffin rose and fell. Into that hole toppled the murdered Commendatore in the opera’s opening scene Out of that hole emerged that Commendatore at the dénouement, quite a bit the worse for wear, not the majestic statue of Da Ponte’s script (and Mozart’s music) but a mouldered, ragged mess. A bevy of dancing trees momentarily eased the bleakness in the first-act finale. For the great Act Two sextet the walls became mirrors and the six singers became a thundering herd. For the second-act finale the Don had to make do without a dining table

To a kindly disposed observer, the evening added up to a display of clever but wilful stage tricks; surrounding stage action with mirror walls is as snazzy a showbiz effect as  ticket price can buy. The problem so often, and emphatically here, is the danger of ending up with a show that is merely about itself – and a show, furthermore, that insults the audience’s ability to be thrilled by the wonders in this greatest, most subtle of all classic operas. It seemed to insult as well the superior musical forces gathered for the occasion: the probing, exquisitely detailed performance led by Kent Nagano – appointed a few days before as the company’s first-ever Music Director – and a close-to-flawless young cast which, under respectful direction, might have made this Don Giovanni a Los Angeles milestone.

Erwin Schrott was the Giovanni, Uruguay-born, young (30), lithe and elegant in bearing and voice – a young Siepi, say. (Both he and the Ottavio, John Matz, are recent winners of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, lending luster to their own names and to the competition as well.) Rosendo Flores was the burly-voiced Leporello, agile in the footwork if not always in voice. The women – the fast-rising Andrea Rost as the fearsome Anna, Adina Nitescu as an Elvira with exactly the right frazzled edge to her outbursts, Anna Christy as the milkmaid-sweet Zerlina – formed an ensemble close to flawless; Fedor Kuznetsov, was the Commendatore and James Creswell (from the company’s resident-artist training program) was the sturdy Masetto,

So much talent, so ill-used! More Mozart is on the Los Angeles Opera’s agenda: a Figaro next season (again with Schrott) and a Così the season after, heading toward the Mozart 250^th-year celebration in 2006. Mozart remains indestructible; it would be better if people stopped trying.

The story is well-known: after Puccini’s death, Toscanini undertook to
bring the work to completion in properly competent hands. Puccini had
finished the opera in full score through the scene of Liù’s death midway
in Act III. The Puccini family’s choice of composer, with Toscanini’s
grudging acquiescence, fell upon Franco Alfano, still at the time not
much more than a musical nonentity. (His one success, the 1904
Risurrezione, displayed reasonable competence but little more.)
Alfano delivered his commission; Toscanini rejected it furiously and
ordered a rewrite. Toscanini conducted the 1926 premiere — postponed
for a year from the 1925 target date — but drew the line at performing
the Alfano ending. Despite his championing of numerous minor Italian
composers, in his complete repertory list as compiled in Harvey Sachs’s
eminently trustworthy biography, not a note of Alfano is mentioned.
Alfano did recast and somewhat tighten his completion — workmanlike if
workaday — shaving his original 377 measures down to 268. Whether he
accomplished this self-mutilation in time for the Metropolitan Opera
premiere, seven months after La Scala’s, is buried in the dust of
Thirty-ninth and Broadway. What we hear today, invariably, is Alfano II.
“Poor Alfano!,” says Phillips-Matz. “I don’t believe he or any of
Puccini’s contemporaries could have written a satisfactory finale to the opera.”
Alfano’s first version, clumsy as it may be overall, ends in a vivid
blaze, with peals of brassy triumph and the lovers joining in the final
music at top lung-power — the everybody-onstage sing-along version of
“Nessun dorma.” For the most part, Alfano I is the more tonsil-twisting
of the two versions; the tessitura lies higher, most notably at the end
when the lovers join in at the climax of the “Nessun dorma” reprise with
a pair of matched B-flats. (In Alfano II, the chorus goes it alone.)
Turandot’s aria, “Del primo pianto,” runs seventy-nine bars in Alfano I,
pared down to fifty-one in Alfano II. There is one recording of Alfano I
– now deleted but worth the search: Josephine Barstow and Lando
Bartolini on a Decca disc of operatic final scenes, conducted by John
Mauceri. In 1992, American conductor Steven Mercurio created his own
conflation of Alfano I and II for the Opera Company of Philadelphia and
led it, to considerable acclaim, with Alfano’s final brass positioned
high up all around Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.
“I did a considerable amount of tinkering with the stuff in Alfano I
to make it work better, then redivided the brass fanfares in the finale,”
Mercurio told Opera News soon after his Turandot triumphs. “I didn’t
recompose them — I redistributed them. I did this in Philadelphia, with
great success, and repeated it in Washington. And it just tore them out
of their seats every night.”

The latest solution to Turandot’s finale problem comes from what at
first view may seem an unlikely source but actually makes strong musical
sense. Luciano Berio has now tried his hand at a Turandot completion
worthy of the score and its creator. It seems an unusual project for
Berio, one-time avatar of Schoenbergian atonality and longtime kindred
spirit to Pierre Boulez. But we should remember that Berio is not only a
prolific opera composer in his own right but a passionate defender of
Italy’s musical heritage all the way back to Monteverdi. His new version
of Turandot has been sanctioned by the Puccini estate. After trial
concert-performance runs in the Canary Islands and Amsterdam, led by
Riccardo Chailly, it was staged last June by Los Angeles Opera under
Kent Nagano and, two months later, conducted by Valery Gergiev at the
Salzburg Festival, where it was received — if a broadcast tape can be
believed — with the mix of puzzlement and ecstasy attendant on any
major premiere of new and controversial musical substance.
Something else among Berio’s credentials stamps him as the proper agent
to bring Puccini’s near-masterpiece to a fitting conclusion: his prowess
as a highly skilled tamperer. The 1968 Sinfonia, his best-known work,
includes one movement in which a gathering of familiar repertory tunes
(Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy) moves in a stream-of-consciousness
progression while another part of the orchestra plays Mahler and a
chorus declaims activist graffiti. A recent score called Rendering
subjects a folio of Schubert’s deathbed sketches — for a symphony that
would have been No. 10 if completed — to a reworking that builds
handsome and flexible bridges between Schubertian Romanticism and
Berio’s own love of that language.
Berio’s “tampering” with Puccini’s expressed wishes and actual sketches
covers 307 bars, midway in length between Alfano I and II; the
performance under Gergiev ran a few seconds over fifteen minutes, almost
exactly the same length as the Callas recording (of Alfano II,
naturally). The Adami/Simoni text undergoes two cuts: about half of
Turandot’s “Del primo pianto” has gone, and so has the choral finale
with the “Nessun dorma” reprise.
What Berio has done, actually, is to recast the entire time-span of this
final scene, to the point where his own musical fabrications impart a
far more naturalistic flow to the events themselves. Small glints of
Puccini’s music speed the process; Calàf delivers his crucial kiss to
the music of his first response to Turandot in Act II (“Gli enigme sono
tre”). Rather than the echoes of “Tristano” that Puccini might have
evoked for the ensuing duet, there comes next what amounts to a small
tone-poem, nearly three minutes’ worth of purely orchestral music,
skidding through harmonies dense and disturbing, conveying wordlessly
what no ice-bound soprano need verbalize upon the tenor’s first kiss.
The harmonic density may raise hackles among purists; remember, however,
that Puccini’s own last years were spent largely in discovering the
musical world around him — Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire. There’s good reason to suspect that he might have
welcomed Berio’s tampering far more heartily than Alfano’s flattening.
“Turandot finirà pianissimo,” wrote Puccini to librettist Adami. “This
new Turandot,” said Berio to a radio interviewer, “will end exactly so.”
Prince Calàf (“il principe priapico,” says Berio — the “horny Prince”)
reveals his name — in a close rewrite of Alfano’s frantic crescendo on
a four-note figure — and Turandot drags him off to meet his fate.
“Amore!!!” they both sing on his-and-her B-flats (as in Alfano I), as
faint echoes of “Nessun dorma” percolate through the orchestra. But then
the music subsides; little by little, there is darkness, both visible
and audible. An audience, awaiting the customary “happily ever after”
choral outburst of the Turandot they’ve all known and loved, sits
stunned. You hear it on the tape: a long moment in which the silence is
further prolonged, then the cheers.
Does it work? As music drama created by Luciano Berio — composer of the
magnificent Un Re in Ascolto — it works quite well, a “rendering” of
thematic fragments by Puccini to stand beside his Schubert piece. The
diehards will surely have trouble with the new Turandot. There were dark
mutterings after the Kent Nagano-led Los Angeles performances last June,
brought on by the somber new ending and by Gian Carlo del Monaco’s murky
staging. (The finale looked as if it had been staged in someone’s
abandoned attic, and neither of the alternating pairs of leads was
anything to sing about, so the antagonists felt obliged to bellow at one
another over the abandoned corpse of hapless Liù.) Even Gergiev, who
delivered a stupendous performance at Salzburg, has confessed that he
will probably revert to Alfano II in future productions. As an example
of a great composer’s respect for a venerable colleague and countryman,
however, Puccini/Berio is definitely win/win.

ALAN RICH is music critic for LA Weekly and the author of several books
now out of print (including the Simon & Schuster Listener’s Guide to
Opera).

No abandoned orphan draws the tears and the frustrations as does Giacomo Puccini’s final work, left incomplete at the composer’s death  (after an unsuccessful attempt  at  throat surgery) in November, 1924 and rushed into completion by lesser hands soon afterward. True, the formidable Arturo Toscanini cut his performance short at the world premiere, at the point where the ailing Puccini himself had laid down his pen. Doing so, he had carried the most grandiose – arguably, the greatest – of all Puccini’s operas to a crisis point but no further, relinquishing the stage to two larger-than-life monsters (psychologically, I mean) facing each other with daggers drawn across an unbridgeable abyss,  but only 15 minutes away from a happy ending. The intended love/hate duet that would have transported  these monsters across that abyss and into each other’s arms was never composed, at least by Puccini. On his manuscript sketch, however, he penciled indisputable evidence of the importance he attached to this climactic duet: the  infinitely revealing words: “qui Tristano.”

The story is well-known, give or take a vast array of contradicting retellings. Toscanini, who held Italy’s beloved Puccini in mingled adoration and contempt, visited the composer in the summer of 1924, heard him, at the piano, perform the opera as it then stood, which may (or may not) have included his own projection of the final scene. Toscanini liked what he heard, and agreed to conduct the premiere at La Scala scheduled for the following year. At Puccini’s death Toscanini undertook to bring the work to completion in properly competent hands.  Puccini had completed his final opera in full score through the scene of Liù’s death midway in Act III. From then on to the end there remained “a 36-page draft” (says Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama) or a pile of “23 scarcely legible sketches” (says Julian Budden in OperaGrove and in his splendid recent Puccini biography) or “13 pages of sketches, which take the final scene only to the crucial kiss” (writes Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times). His first choice to complete the work (says Budden) was Riccardo Zandonai; another considered possibility (says conductor John Mauceri) was the young Viennese firebrand Erich Korngold. Both were rejected  by the Puccini family as being already too illustrious. The choice, with Toscanini’s grudging acquiescence, fell upon Franco Alfano, still at the time not much more than a musical nonentity. (His one success, the 1904 Risurrezione, displayed a reasonable competence  if little more.)

Alfano delivered his commission; Toscanini rejected  it furiously, and ordered a rewrite. Toscanini conducted the 1926 premiere – postponed a year from the 1925 target date –  but drew the line at performing the Alfano score.. He conducted one single performance (says the estimable authority William Ashbrook) and then turned the work over to his assistant Ettore Panizza, or he conducted three performances (says Harold Rosenthal), or “several,” (writes Andrew Porter). Considering Toscanini’s lifelong antipathy toward music he considered inferior, plus his famous on-again off-again regard for Puccini, it seems inconceivable that he would, even once, wave his baton over what he considered Alfano’s botched job. Despite his championing of numerous other Italian composers of the – let’s say – minor leagues (Martucci, Catalani, that gang), in his complete repertory list as compiled in Harvey Sachs’ eminently trustworthy biography, not a note of Alfano occurs. Alfano did recast and somewhat tighten  his completion – workmanlike if workaday, shaving his original 377 measures down to 268. Whether he accomplished this self-mutilation in time for the Metropolitan Opera premiere – seven months after La Scala – is buried in the dust of 39^th and Broadway..  What we hear today, invariably, is Alfano 2.

Alfano’s first version, clumsy as it may be over all, ends in a Technicolor blaze, with peals of brassy triumph and the lovers joining in the final music at top lung-power – the everybody-on-stage sing-along version of “Nessun dorma,” the opera’s obvious hit tune, comparable to similar moments in La Bohème and Tosca. There is one recording – now deleted but worth the search: Josephine Barstow and Lando Bartolini on a Decca disc of operatic final scenes, conducted by Mauceri. In 1992 the American conductor Steven Mercurio created  his own conflation of Alfano 1 and 2 for the Philadelphia Opera and led it to considerable acclaim, with Alfano’s final brass spread high up around Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. Brilliant brass or no, it still makes for a sad contemplaton, that the 325 years of the grand Italian operatic tradition should come to its sputtering end in the merely competentd  hackwork of Franco Alfano. “Finita la poesia,” sings the crowd on the last completed page of Puccini’s manuscript, and they may have been right.

Or maybe not. The latest solution of Turandot’s finale problem comes from what might seem unlikely at first view, but which actually makes strong musical sense. Luciano Berio, one-time avatar of Schoenbergian atonality and longtime kindred spirit to Pierre Boulez, prolific opera composer in his own right and – more to the point – passionate defender of Italy’s musical heritage all the way back to Monteverdi and before, has now tried his hand at a Turandot completion worthy of the score and its creator. His new version has been sanctioned by the Puccini estate. After trial concert-performance runs in the Canary Islands and Amsterdam, led by Riccardo Chailley, it was staged last June by the Los Angeles Opera under Kent Nagano and, two months later, at the Salzburg Festival conducted by Valery Gergiev, received – if a broadcast tape can be believed – with the mix of puzzlement and ecstasy attendant   on any major premiere of new and controversial musical substance.

Something else among Berio’s  credentials stamps him as the proper agent to bring Puccini’s near-masterpiece to a fitting conclusion: his prowess as a highly skilled tamperer.

The 1968 Sinfonia, his best-known work, includes one movement in which a gathering of familiar repertory tunes (Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy, what-have-you) moves in a stream-of-consciousness progression while another part of the orchestra plays Mahler and a chorus declaims activist graffiti.  A recent score called Rendering subjects a folio of Schubert’s deathbed  sketches – for a symphony that would have been No. 10 if completed –  to a reworking that builds handsome and flexible bridges between Schubertian romanticism and Berio’s own love of that language.

Berio’s “tampering” with Puccini’s expressed wishes and actual sketches runs to 307 bars, midway in length between Alfano 1 and 2; the performance under Gergiev ran a few seconds over 15 minutes, almost exactly the same length as the recorded  Callas version (of Alfano 2, naturally). The Adami/Simoni text undergoes two cuts: about half of Turandot’s “Nel primo pianto” has gone,  and so has the choral finale with the “Nessun dorma” reprise.

What Berio has done, actually, has been to recast the entire time-span of this final scene, to the point where his own musical fabrications impart a far more naturalistic flow to the events themselves. Small glints of Puccini’s  music speed the process; Calaf delivers his crucial kiss to the music (“gli enigme sono tre”) of his first response to Turandot in Act II. Rather than the echoes of “Tristano” that Puccini might have evoked for the ensuing duet, there comes next what amounts to a small tone-poem,  nearly three minutes’ worth of purely orchestral music, skidding through harmonies dense and disturbing, dealing wordlessly what no ice-bound soprano need verbalize upon the tenor’s first kiss. The harmonic density may raise hackles among the oh-so-pure; remember, however, that Puccini’s own last years were largely spent in discovering the musical world around him – Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and, more remarkable, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.. There’s good reason to suspect that he might have welcomed Berio’s tampering far more heartily than Alfano’s flattening.

“Turandot finirà pianissimo”; wrote Puccini to librettist Adami. “This new Turandot,” said Berio to a radio interviewer, “will end exactly so.” Prince Calaf (“il principe priapico,” says Berio, the “horny Prince”) reveals his name – in a close rewrite of Alfano’s frantic crescendo on a four-note figure – and Turandot drags him off to meet his fate. “Amore!!!” sing they both on his-and-her B-flats (as in Alfano 1) as faint echoes of “Nessun dorma” percolate through the orchestra. But then the music subsides; little by little there is darkness both visible and audible. An audience, awaiting the customary “happily ever after” choral outburst of the Turandot they’ve all known and loved, sits stunned. You hear it on the tape: a long moment  in which the silence is further prolonged, then the cheers.

Does it work? As music drama created by Luciano Berio – composer of the magnicent Un Re in Ascolto revived not long ago in Chicago and eminently deserving – it works quite well, a “rendering” of thematic fragments by Puccini to stand beside his Schubert piece. Old habits die hard, however, and the paradox remains. Finally, there is a proper finale – not only to Puccini’s opera but also to the 325-year reign of Italy’s sovereign lyric art, and it’s headed for tough going.. The opera-going public – the crowds who throw tomatoes in Parma and the silent sufferers at the Met – are going to have trouble with the new Turandot; even Gergiev, who delivered a stupendous performance at Salzburg, by the way, has confessed that he will probably revert to Alfano 2 when circumstances so ordain. As an example of a great composer’s respect for a venerable colleague and countryman, however, Puccini/Berio is definitely win/win.

The story is well-known, give or take a vast array of contradictory  retellings. Toscanini, who held  Puccini in mingled adoration and contempt, visited the composer in the summer of 1924, heard  him, at the piano, perform the opera as it then stood, which may (or may not) have included his own projection of the final scene. Toscanini liked what he heard, and agreed to conduct the premiere  at La Scala scheduled for the following year. At Puccini’s death, Toscanini undertook to bring the work to completion in properly competent hands.  Puccini had completed his final opera in full score through the scene of Liù’s death midway in Act III. From then on to the end there  remained “a thirty-six-page draft” (says Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama) or a pile of “twenty-three scarcely legible sketches” (says Julian Budden in OperaGrove and in his splendid recent Puccini biography) or “thirteen pages of sketches, which take the final scene only to the  crucial kiss” (writes Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times). Toscanini’s  first choice to complete the work (claims Budden) was Riccardo Zandonai; another considered possibility (claims conductor John Mauceri) was the young Viennese firebrand Erich Korngold. Both were rejected  by the Puccini family as being already too illustrious. The choice, with Toscanini’s grudging acquiescence,  fell upon Franco Alfano, still at the time not much more than a musical nonentity. (His one success, the 1904 Risurrezione, displayed a reasonable competence  if little more.)

Alfano delivered his commission; Toscanini rejected  it furiously, and ordered a rewrite. Toscanini conducted the 1926 premiere – postponed a year from the 1925 target date –  but drew the line at performing the Alfano score.. He conducted one single performance  (says William Ashbrook) and then turned the work over to his assistant Ettore Panizza, or he conducted three performances (says Harold Rosenthal), or “several,” (writes Andrew Porter). Considering Toscanini’s lifelong antipathy toward music he considered inferior, plus his famous on-again off-again regard for Puccini, it seems inconceivable that he would, even once, wave his baton over what he considered Alfano’s botched job. Despite his championing of numerous minor Italian composers,  in his complete  repertory list as compiled in Harvey Sachs’ eminently trustworthy biography, not a note of Alfano occurs. Alfano did recast and somewhat tighten  his completion – workmanlike if workaday, shaving his original 377 measures down to 268. Whether he accomplished this self-mutilation in time for the Metropolitan Opera premiere , seven months after La Scala, is buried in the dust of Thirty-ninth and Broadway..  What we hear today, invariably, is Alfano 2.

Alfano’s first version, clumsy as it may be over all, ends in a Technicolor blaze, with peals of brassy triumph and the lovers joining in the final music at top lung-power – the everybody-on-stage sing-along version of “Nessun dorma.” For the most part, Alfano 1 is the more tonsil-twisting of the two versions; the tessitura lies higher, most notably at the end when the lovers join in at the end of the “Nessun dorma” reprise with a pair of matched B-flats. (In Alfano 2, the chorus goes it alone.) Turandot’s aria, “Dal primo pianto” runs 79 bars in Alfano 1, pared down to 51 in Alfano 2. There is one recording – now deleted but worth the search: Josephine Barstow and Lando Bartolini on a Decca disc of operatic final scenes, conducted by Mauceri. In 1992, American  conductor Steven Mercurio created  his own conflation of Alfano 1 and 2 for the Opera Company of Philadelphia and led it to considerable  acclaim, with Alfano’s final brass spread high up around Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. Brilliant brass or no, it still makes for a sad contemplation,  that  325 years of grand Italian opera tradition should come to its sputtering end in the merely competent  hackwork of Franco Alfano. “Finita la poesia,” sings the crowd on the last completed page of Puccini’s manuscript, and they may have been right.

Or maybe not. The latest solution of Turandot’s finale problem comes from what might seem unlikely at first view, but which actually makes strong musical sense. Luciano Berio, has now tried his hand at a Turandot completion worthy of the score and its creator. It seem an unusual project  for Berio, one-time avatar of Schoenbergian atonality and longtime kindred spirit to Pierre Boulez, to take on. But we should remember  that Berio is not only a prolific opera composer in his own right but a  passionate defender of Italy’s musical heritage all the way back to Monteverdi and before, His new version of Turandot has been sanctioned by the Puccini estate. After trial concert-performance  runs in the Canary Islands and Amsterdam,   led by Riccardo Chailly, it was staged last June by Los Angeles Opera under Kent Nagano and, two months later, at the Salzburg Festival conducted by Valery Gergiev, received – if a broadcast tape can be believed – with the mix of puzzlement and ecstasy attendant   on any major premiere of new and controversial musical substance.

Something else among Berio’s  credentials stamps him as the proper agent to bring Puccini’s near-masterpiece to a fitting conclusion: his prowess as a highly skilled tamperer.

The 1968 Sinfonia, his best-known work, includes one movement  in which a gathering of familiar repertory tunes (Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy) moves in a stream-of-consciousness progression while another part of the orchestra plays Mahler and a chorus declaims activist graffiti.  A recent score called Rendering subjects a folio of Schubert’s deathbed  sketches – for a symphony that would have been No. 10 if completed –  to a reworking that builds handsome and flexible bridges between Schubertian romanticism and Berio’s own love of that language.

Berio’s “tampering” with Puccini’s expressed wishes and actual sketches runs to 307 bars, midway in length between Alfano 1 and 2; the performance under Gergiev ran a few seconds over fifteen minutes, almost exactly the same length as the recorded  Callas version (of Alfano 2, naturally). The Adami/Simoni text undergoes two cuts: about half of Turandot’s “Dal primo pianto” has gone,  and so has the choral finale with the “Nessun dorma” reprise.

What Berio has done, actually, has been to recast the entire time-span of this final scene, to the point where his own musical fabrications impart a far more naturalistic flow to the events themselves. Small glints of Puccini’s  music speed the process; Calàf delivers his crucial kiss to the music (“gli enigme sono tre”) of his first response to Turandot in Act II. Rather than the echoes of “Tristano” that Puccini might have evoked for the ensuing duet, there comes next what amounts to a small tone-poem,  nearly three minutes’ worth of purely orchestral music, skidding through harmonies dense and disturbing, dealing wordlessly what no ice-bound soprano need verbalize upon the tenor’s first kiss. The harmonic density may raise hackles among  purists; remember, however, that  Puccini’s own last years were largely spent in discovering the musical world around him – Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and, more remarkable, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.. There’s good reason to suspect that he might have welcomed Berio’s tampering far more heartily than Alfano’s flattening.

“Turandot finirà pianissimo”; wrote Puccini to librettist Adami. “This new Turandot,” said Berio to a radio interviewer, “will end exactly so.” Prince Calaf (“il principe priapico,” says Berio, the “horny Prince”) reveals his name – in a close rewrite of Alfano’s frantic crescendo on a four-note figure – and Turandot drags him off to meet his fate. “Amore!!!” sing they both on his-and-her B-flats (as in Alfano 1) as faint echoes of “Nessun dorma” percolate through the orchestra. But then the music subsides; little by little there is darkness both visible and audible. An audience, awaiting the customary “happily ever after” choral outburst of the Turandot they’ve all known and loved, sits stunned. You hear it on the tape: a long moment  in which the silence is further prolonged, then the cheers.

Does it work? As music drama created by Luciano Berio – composer of the magnificent Un Re in Ascolto revived not long ago in Chicago and eminently deserving – it works quite well, a “rendering” of thematic fragments by Puccini to stand beside his Schubert piece. The diehards will surely have trouble with the new Turandot. There were dark mutterings after the Kent Nagano-led Los Angeles performances last June – brought on by the somber new ending and by Giancarlo del Monaco’s  murky staging that obliged the antagonists  — neither alternating pair a vocal experience to sing about — to bellow at one another over the abandoned corpse of hapless Liù and to perpretate their final music in what looked like somebody’s abandoned attic.  But even  Gergiev, who delivered a stupendous performance at Salzburg, by the way, has confessed that he will probably revert to Alfano 2 when circumstances so ordain. As an example of a great composer’s respect for a venerable colleague and countryman, however, Puccini/Berio is definitely win/win.

]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/11/turandot-and-its-not-s0-happy-endings/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/11/%e2%80%9clady-macbeth-of-mtsensk%e2%80%9d-at-the-la-opera/ http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/11/%e2%80%9clady-macbeth-of-mtsensk%e2%80%9d-at-the-la-opera/#comments Mon, 04 Nov 2002 21:19:22 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=1801 The hoodoos that have bedeviled Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk almost since its premiere, performed double duty in Los Angeles this past October. As with the seesawing fortunes of the composer himself, however,  the final notes were of triumph hard-won  and deserved.

Anticipation had run high for the announced third offering in the Los Angeles Opera’s 16^th season, Prokofiev’s War and Peace in the same lallapalooza  Kirov Opera production  that had run at the Met last season – underwritten, as at the Met, from the seemingly bottomless pockets of financier/opera buff Alberto Vilar. It was not to be, however. The Los Angeles Opera encountered a $600,000 shortfall in advance expenses, which Vilar declined to meet; the Shostakovich opera,  in a 2001 Kirov production reported as costing $1 million less than the Prokofiev, was substituted.  As principal donor, Vilar’s name was replaced on the program by “a group of devoted friends of Los Angeles Opera.” Okay so far?

Not quite, as fate would ordain. In early October word reached the company that George Tsypin’s Kirov sets, bound  by ship from St. Petersburg to the Port of Los Angeles,  were becalmed off the California coast by a labor lockout and would be diverted instead to Tokyo (where the company was later to perform). Ten days before the scheduled October 23 opening, the company’s carpenters and stage crew, armed with a duplicate  set of  Tsypin’s blueprints (with instructions in Russian) set out to rebuild  the massive farmhouse and the ingenious sliding walls of the Russian design. The sound of hammering resounded  through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as late as 5p.m. on October 23; two hours later, however, the curtain’s on-time rise was greeted by relieved cheers.

Irina Molostova’s  staging returned the opera to the 1860-ish setting of Nikolai Leskov’s original story; not for her the automobile, refrigerator and plastic trashbags of Graham Vick’s Met updating. Hapless Katerina and her nogoodnik  Sergei went about their monkeyshines in clear silhouette behind a crimson curtain, further blatantly silhouetted by the roars and guffaws of Valery Gergiev’s 96-member Kirov Orchestra. At the final curtain, the lament of the downtrodden prisoners merged memorably into  chill vapors overhead: a stunning multimedia moment..

The Los Angeles engagement – seven performances in as many days, October 23-29 – necessitated multiple casting: three Katerinas, four Sergeis, one night when two  singers shared the role of the comic Police Sergeant. There were no sensational vocal discoveries and nothing disgraceful; the sense over-all was of a series of substantial but typical Kirov nights in midseason, brightly lit by the spectacular work of Gergiev’s fabulous orchestra and the equally motivated 70-member chorus.  For the last two performances (October 28,29) conductor  Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s able son with a solid reputation on his own, took over the podium and upheld the family honor most eloquently.

Larissa Shevchenko was the robust Katerina on opening night; Larissa Gogolevskaya, visually more believable if given to shrillness, sang in two later performances. Vladimir Grishko’s Sergei, on October 23, was that of a substantial businessman home from the office; Oleg Balashov’s performance on the 27^th was pure sexual innuendo. Vladimir Vaneev’s Boris on opening night – the mean father-in-law who gets his comeuppance in a dish of poisoned mushrooms – projected a creature of infinite menace. Nikolai Gassiev, as the drunken peasant who finds the corpse in the cellar, stole the show – as drunken peasants in Russian operas always have, and always will. – ALAN RICH

The opera has fared reasonably well over the years, certainly beyond the expectations of those (this writer included) attending the helter-skelter 1983 premiere at the Paris Opéra. Productions in Berlin and Salzburg, and a DG recording under Kent Nagano’s sure baton, have eased its path. The opera is still hard to love, however. Over its vast time-scale  we are invited to observe, without much in the way of confirming incident – the healing of the Leper aside — the growth in spirit and wisdom of Assisi’s legendary saint, his rise above the lesser spirits among his co-believers,  his communion with Nature’s other creatures, most of all her birds. Birds, birds, birds: For something like forty-five minutes – one-half the length of Act Two –  the saintly Messiaen proclaims his own kinship with the saintly Francis in this matter of ornithological passion. One fidgets, vainly  waiting for the feathered, clattering, chattering hordes to get baked into a pie or, at least, to fly the coop.

There are few  surprises in Messiaen’s  orchestra here, except  for its sheer exuberance in the marshalling of his usual massed, apocalyptic brass, the urgent summonings of clattering mallet instruments,  and no fewer than three (three!) of his iconic noisemakers, the wailing, throbbing keyboards known as the Ondes Martenot, now doing service in Movieland (Mad Max, My Left Foot). Around and above all of this – and truly surprising – is the choral writing, the dense chording of semitones and microtones. In San Francisco’s extraordinary production, a congruence occurs between the deep and expansive choral texture and the visual effect of singers on a slow turntable seeming to  fill an entire world with their presence and their sound. Over-all it is texture, more than melody and harmony (which here – as elsewhere  in the Messiaen oeuvre – borders on the banal and, now and then, crosses the line) that earns the most admiring attention in this ecstatic yet sporadically off-putting score.

José van Dam had pretty much owned the title role since the 1983 premiere; ownership has now passed, in glory, to Willard White. Aside from that title role, that of an attendant Angel — set forth by Laura Aikin with irresistible, athletic charm – and some stupendous vocal athletics for Chris Merritt as the Leper, Saint François is not a singer’s paradise. Its strengths derive mostly from the tight interweave  of its complex  linearity. It fell to Donald Runnicles, the company’s music director and the most significant holdover from the previous administration, to bind this all together in a performance taut  and rapturous that could, at least, simulate the effect of forward motion as the music itself remains existentially still.

Nicolas Brieger’s production began with silent film: Assisi’s great St. Francis Basilica brutally damaged by the recent earthquake. St. Francis’ story, as he told it, unfolded in both the distant past and only yesterday.  Hans-Dieter Schaal’s stage built on the recent horror; pieces of ruined crosses lay everywhere, extending menacingly out toward the audience, with Francis’ rude cave abutting a modern three-story office building. Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s costumes were also of no time and every time; the more earthly of the Franciscan brothers toted bookkeeping ledgers  and sported modern-day fedoras  above their priestly robes. Under Alexander Koppelmann’s  lighting a soft grey luminosity covered everything,  and the colors that pierced through – a gorgeous blue streak that resolved into the Angel (complete with sunglasses) of Francis’ dreaming – created their own astonishment.

This is San Francisco’s first season actually planned from  Pamela Rosenberg’s new leadership, Of the new productions on her agenda, Saint François has, naturally, gotten the most notice; the production team  includes colleagues from her German years.  “Animating Opera” is the title Rosenberg has concocted for the repertory for the first years of her regime, already announced through 2006. Under that rubric individual operas are further clumped and titled; the brochure reads like a college course catalog. Whether Saint François is, as the brochure reads, a “Seminal Work of Modern Times” is, however,  arguable; it seems more like a particularly  interesting dead end. Rosenberg’s plan, fancy titles and all, is the work of a creative general director willing to integrate serious musical thinking into the entertainment  value of the product.  Yet a question lingers: is the stature of “seminality” adequate justification for a work’s survival in the repertory? Perhaps time will tell, but the five-plus slow-moving hours of Saint François d’Assise constitute a potent argument to the contrary.

Otherwise, San Francisco’s first month offered a revival (from 1993) of David Hockney’s dazzling designs for Turandot, their blatant firecracker-redness a violent contrast to St. Francis’ prevailing  grays. Jane Eaglen was the Turandot, Patricia Racette the Liù, both predictably splendid; Alfred Reiter and Jon Villars, both in adequate but unremarkable San Francisco debuts, were the wandering father and amorous son. Runnicles’ conducting, this one time, seemed weary – understandable, perhaps, sandwiched in between the dress rehearsal and première of the Messiaen. From the Chicago Lyric came John Cox’s attractive Ariadne auf Naxos production, beautifully shaped under newcomer Jun Märkl’s baton, and lit by Deborah Voigt’s two-edged command as the imperious Prima Donna and the tragedy-drenched Ariadne and by the stratospheric luminosity of Laura Claycomb’s Zerbinetta.  – ALAN RICH

This year’s novelty – for a company that has after all  brought forth an Elektra set on the Malibu shore and a Tales of Hoffmann among East-Village druggies – was to locate this Jenufa exactly as specified in the libretto (and clearly defined in the rich folk accents of Janacek’s music). With Darcy Scanlin’s remarkable set – two farm buildings lying on their sides, with smoke-belching chimneys facing outward – the audience was obliged, in Isabel Milenski’s resourceful staging, to consider the action from two perspectives simultaneously.

In between, the indoor-outdoor performing space was further framed by sporadic faces at the farmhouse windows; the result was a kind of constant visible nervousness that accorded nicely with the twitches, the percussive outbursts, in Janacek’s wonderful score. Stage director Isabel Milenski, by the way, is the daughter of founder and general director Michael; this was her second production for the company. Whispers of nepotism, a common cross-current in Southern California operatic circles, can this time be stilled by the high intelligence of her work.

Lisa Willson was the Jenufa, in a performance especially remarkable for her naturalness as a country girl in love but in trouble. Daniel Cafiero was the Steva, who had gotten her into the trouble; Roy Cornelius Smith was the loving Laca, who marries her anyway. All three impressive young singers were new to Long Beach; Milenski’s efficient spy system had spotted them all at the Sarasota Opera. Katherine Ciesinski sang the stepmother Kostelnicka, and Kathryn Day, the Grandmother Buryja; both are company veterans. All shared an approach rare in big-time opera but ingrained at Long Beach: a convincing sincerity that made it actually look as if they were listening and singing to one another, not just to the seats out front.

Out front also was the splendid pit orchestra – sometimes overpowering if truth be told, but remarkably well-balanced in the way Southern California freelancers uniquely seem to manage even on a shoestring rehearsal schedule. Andreas Mitisek conducted, his fifth time out with the company. Another acquisition from Milenski’s spy network, Mitisek leads his own Vienna Opera Theater along ideals similar to those at Long Beach.

Brian Gantner’s English translation was employed, eloquent insofar as it could be heard above the torrents from the pit. Supertitles are, to Michael Milenski, a dirty word. “Why should you glue your attention on every single word ticker-taping across above the stage,” he says, “when your real response should be what the music is doing with and to those words? That, after all, is what opera is about…or should be.” He may have a point, and the work of his own company bears him out.

ALAN RICH

]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/06/long-beach-opera-review/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/06/los-angeles-opera-review/ http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/06/los-angeles-opera-review/#comments Fri, 14 Jun 2002 21:14:52 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=1794 Given the geographic proximity of the Los Angeles Music Center to the region’s other major cultural industry, you’d expect a close working relationship between the Los Angeles Opera and the surviving shards of the film industry. You’d be wrong, however; in the company’s seventeen years of operation, memories only of Herbert Ross’ spunky La Bohème and Bruce Beresford’s lurid, Hollywood-ized Rigoletto celebrate what should be an ongoing performing-arts entente.

At season’s end the ranks were memorably joined by William Friedkin (of The Exorcist and The French Connection acclaim) in a oddly-coupled odd couple of one-act operas: Bartók’s moody, mysterious Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s deliriously wise Gianni Schicchi. Odd though the coupling may seem, Friedkin and designer Gottfried Pilz even reached out to proclaim both works cut from the same cloth. Both, after all, had had their premieres in 1918; both include – the Bartók at the start, the Puccini at the close – a spoken exhortation meant to be delivered in the language of the audience.

Samuel Ramey sang both title roles, vividly and with great intelligence; Kent Nagano conducted both operas in like virtue. Ths stage sets, too, were of a piece, cleverly so. A chandelier in the Bartók, collapsed on the ground with arms outstretched like a tarantula about to strike, gleamed in its proper place during the Puccini. A spiral staircase, a seeming passage between heaven and hell in the Bartók, became a handsome frame for Dante’s Florence later on (with the Signoria tower still  abuilding on the skyline, a pardonable anachronism to the modern dress onstage).  One of the ghosts of Bluebeard’s wives – airborne, uninhabited nighties actually – stayed on after intermission to fly once again as the departing spirit of old Buoso Donati breathing his last.

Mixture though it was, it proved one of the company’s best evenings, stirring, provocative and delightful. Bartók’s phantoms were mostly handled by Paul Pyant’s brilliant lighting designs – a dazzling wash of blood-red and gold, a chilling whiteness as Judith looked upon a lake of tears, an almost palpable blackness at the end as Judith walks to her doom and – a nice Friedkin touch – Bluebeard returns to the scene with yet another wife. Life, as well as death, goes on. A thread of sorrow, or perhaps regret, lent added color to Ramey’s lines; as the doomed Judith Denyce Graves mingled her usually mellow tones with a rather tentative delivery of the Hungarian text.

Visual anachronisms aside, the Gianni Schicchi was a wonderful amalgam of Italian roughhouse comedy (think Big Deal on Madonna St.) and loving wisdom – the latter most of all in Ramey’s richly comic subtlety. Danielle de Niese sang to her “Babbino” most prettily; as her suitor Rinuccio Rolando Villazon contributed a fine array of acrobatics both physical and vocal; the Zita was, of all people, the veteran Rosalind Elias, well into her second half-century in opera and sounding very well indeed.

Sharing the company’s final weeks was its first-ever stab at Turandot – a premiere, in fact, in more ways than one. Dissatisfaction with the opera’s final moments – fashioned by Franco Alfano, at Arturo Toscanini’s urging, after Puccini’s death – have dogged the work since its 1926 premiere. Solutions over the years have ranged from  grimly accepting Alfano as better than nothing, a pious obeisance to Puccini by ending where he had at the death of Liù, and various dodges in between.

Now, however, a rescue has been attempted by a more considerable force, the formidable, innovative composer Luciano Berio, whose new completion of Turandot received its first U.S. staging at these performances. In Berio’s estimate, based on certain inconsistencies in Puccini’s own notes as he struggled against terminal throat cancer to complete the score, Alfano’s ultimate error was to impose a kind of all-purpose grand-operatic cheesiness on both Puccini’s designs and those of his librettists, ending with the opera’s hit tune – the bit out of “Nessun dorma,” need you ask – blown up to Radio City-sized proportions.

While respecting the outlines of the Giuseppe Adami/Renato Simoni text, Berio has elected to lead the opera toward a subtler conclusion. Over a complex orchestral exegesis that includes brief memories of music previously heard, but moves them toward a complex orchestral summing-up comparable in place and purpose to the final interlude in Berg’s Wozzeck, the icy Princess melts and the Prince waxes warmer.  The music deepens in tone; Calaf’s ultimate revelation of his real name becomes, for Turandot, a moment of epiphany full of wonderment. The opera ends, for once in Puccini – and, perhaps, as an envoi to the composer dead too soon – somberly, quietly, with the choral exultations off in the distance.

It could work; it didn’t in Los Angeles through no fault of Berio’s. Gian-Carlo del Monaco’s direction (of a work in which his father had once held the stage), was a thing of darkness and slithering choruses. Just the look of the final scene – in a murky palace chamber that could have been someone’s attic –was enough to compromise the new music. In the two sets of principals only the Liù – Hei-Kyung Hong at first, then Svetla Vassileva – showed any reaction to the beauty of the role. Neither pair  of combatting lovers – Audrey Stottler and Franco Farina, Nina Warren and Ian de Nolfo – rose notably above the old-timey lurch’n’clutch yell’em down manner, seemingly unaware of the brave efforts of Kent Nagano’s out-shouted orchestra off in the distance.

Under the circumstances, judgment of Berio’s contribution to the stature of Turandot, an effort the world surely needs, should be deferred.  – ALAN RICH

]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/06/los-angeles-opera-review/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/02/santa-fe-opera/ http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/02/santa-fe-opera/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2002 21:52:16 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=1809 Think of a place in the high desert, a mile and a half above sea level. Oxygen is scarce at that altitude; it takes extra effort to climb  stairs or sing a cadenza. Water is scarce; maintaining a garden is a high-risk project. A single glass of wine has the kick of a double martini at sea level. In summer the hot desert sun keeps the temperature in the high nineties; wintertime readings down to zero are not uncommon. (The low humidity, however, makes both extremes more bearable than in, say, Manhattan.) Is this the ideal kind of place for starting an opera company? “No,” you’d think, but according to John Crosby you’d be wrong.

Crosby, New York-born (1926), operatic coach and conductor at various East-Coast enterprises, visited New Mexico in the 1950s and seems to have immediately been seized by a vision of opera thriving on a 76-acre ranch property that he had purchased in the hills north of Santa Fe. With a visionary’s zeal and a visionary’s gall, he mapped out an inaugural seven-week season: Butterfly, Così and The Barber to draw the crowds, Ariadne auf Naxos to indulge his passion for Richard Strauss, the world premiere of Marvin David Levy’s The Tower to prove his loyalty to opera’s present and future.

Further safeguarding that future, Crosby installed an apprentice program – the first of its kind to earn the full support of AGMA from the beginning. Most daring of all, he scheduled Igor  Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and had the consummate gall to invite the august composer himself to officiate at rehearsals. In a rickety 480-seat performing space open to the skies, the capacity opening-night crowd on July 3, 1957 made it clear that the Santa Fe Opera was off to a good start. The ensuing  45 years have proved them right.

Crosby stepped down as general director at the end of the 2000 season, while maintaining hold of his baton. Over the years he conducted most of the performances of his beloved Strauss; this summer he leads La Traviata.  He has, however, swapped deserts, and spends most of his time in his new home in California’s Palm Springs.

“Trying to imagine the courage of that man is still a staggering task,” says Richard Gaddes, who stepped into Crosby’s general-director shoes last year. A genial and affable Brit, sixtyish, Gaddes had served the company before as artistic administrator, and left in 1976 to found the Opera Theater of St. Louis. “Think of what it must have taken to convince Stravinsky to commit time to an opera theater that hadn’t even yet  been built.  Still, Stravinsky not only came that summer; he came back several times, and became what you might call the company’s mascot. Tomorrow, when we go up to the opera house, you’ll see the new Stravinsky Terrace, where the audience can linger over drinks at intermission.”

Santa Fe is special. Its downtown Plaza still preserves the city’s plan at its founding in 1610. Try to build even a gas station downtown in any but the traditional Spanish-Pueblo-Indian architectural style, and you get tromped on by the City’s planning board. Before opera it was already a haven for a scattering of painters, drawn there by the gorgeous purity of air and light (and by the hospitality of the legendary Mabel Dodge Luhan, who collected artists at her home up the road in Taos as you or I might collect stamps). Now you won’t find a foot of empty space between the art galleries jammed together along Canyon Road, and the city’s Mayor, Larry Delgado, delightedly pins blame on the Opera. “Some people complain at too many galleries, but I don’t agree. It’s Canyon Road that separates Santa Fe from anywhere else; after all, it could have gone to condos. I don’t want this to be any-old-city-USA. John Crosby saved us from that, and the people after him save us as well.” An operagoer when time allows, and a lapsed trumpet-player, Delgado fingers Carmen as his favorite

Santa Fe in winter, when I looked in to talk to some of its movers, has its own crystalline beauty, and is a lot more manageable besides; you can lunch on The Shed’s outstanding blue-corn burritos without a couple of hours on the waiting line. Eight miles north on I-25, Gaddes guides me through the rebuilt Opera House, the fourth structure in that space. No. 2 had burned to the ground late one night during the 1967 season – without, however, costing the company a single performance date. No. 3, with its split roof and open sides, was a heavenly place under  balmy summer skies but a windswept, watery hell on the not-infrequent monsoon nights. No. 4, which seats 2,128.  has a full roof and, again, open sides, but with, at least, some buffers to slow down potential sidewise gusts. As we visit workmen are finishing off a sound-wall to block out the sound of braking semis on the Interstate. Beside the Opera House stands the brand-new Stieren Orchestra Hall, an acoustical state-of-the-art rehearsal space (and possible recital hall) that enables orchestral and stage rehearsals to go on separately and simultaneously.

In the hall itself, Gaddes points to another improvement of considerable consequence, consoles for supertitles built into each seat-back, each consisting of a screen and a small red button. That button, Gaddes explains, does more than merely turning the titles on and off (as at the Met); it also offers the choice of titles in English and Spanish, and therein, in that small square of red plastic, is potent proof of the Santa Fe Opera’s new and vital direction.

“John’s vision of opera was wholly imperial,” says Gaddes. “He seemed to pride himself on the fact that the vast majority of his audience came to Santa Fe from out of state. He saw the Santa Fe Opera as the American Glyndebourne or Bayreuth, and didn’t concern himself much with whether  or how the local community regarded it. My concern, therefore, was to find a way to bring that community, with its preponderant Hispanic population,  into the picture. Last year we upgraded the supertitle system, so that pushing the red  button allowed the choice of English or Spanish. At the same time we announced that anyone who hadn’t been to the Santa Fe Opera in five years could now buy tickets for fifty percent off.

“Those two things made an enormous difference; they were the main reason that last season’s ticket sales were up 7,000 over the year before. You could look around the hall and spot whole Hispanic families. One night, after a performance that had Spanish supertitles, we went around to check to see which language had been left on the consoles. Twelve percent were set for Spanish. More and more people started coming early with picnic suppers. They came to the pre-performance lectures. This year we’ll have an extra set of lectures at six o’clock before a nine o’clock performance, to allow more time for picnicking. Last year we only provided Spanish supertitles for two operas; this year we’ll do all five.  Another thing: last year we let the city use our theater for a Mariachi festival. John would have been horrified, of course, but that event also let a lot of people discover that mysterious place on the hill that they had never seen before.”

On a nearby hill  the spacious home of Regina Safarty Rickless faces a staggering panorama up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.   As just plain Regina Safarty she had  had a distinguished career as mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera and in several European houses. In the Santa Fe Opera’s first year she was Madama Butterfly’s Suzuki – “at $100 a week,” she remembers — and then made her way up life’s ladder as Carmen and Baba the Turk. Now she directs the company’s apprentice program which, like the company itself, has grown in both size and stature. In 1959 came the first apprentice-run concert. In 1960 a grant from the Mellon Foundation enabled the hiring of a voice coach.

Sarfaty hands me a list of graduates from the program since it began in 1957. David Gockley and Lotfi Mansouri, both eminent administrators on their own, came out of the management-training program; the singers’ roster includes James Morris, Samuel Ramey, Sally Wolf, Neil Shicoff…an impressive aggregation. Twenty-three former apprentices in the technicians’ training program moved on to professional posts at the Santa Fe Opera itself. At the end of the season the apprentices do their own show, recitals of operatic scenes. These draw large crowds.

“Out of 800 applicants a year more or less,” she tells me, “we end up with, maybe, 36. Here they train for specific roles, small parts, chorus, or as a cover. They get a small weekly wage, set in the AGMA contract and, of course, room and board. We give them generalized role study, voice lessons, master classes. We guide them through the problems of singing opera at 7,500 feet. Drink lots of water, I tell them,  but watch the booze, because a little goes a long way. Don’t move too much at first. We haven’t lost anyone to altitude…not yet.

“The greater problem is losing people to wrong decisions or too much ambition. To combat this we invite agents to come to Santa Fe, check out the apprentice talent, and also make themselves available for advice on career choices and repertory. Most important is for a young singer to learn to say ‘no.’ You have to learn to turn down an offer that goes beyond what you’re ready for. The agent may not call again, but you get to keep your voice.

“What’s interesting here,” Sarfaty concludes, “is the age spread. In the ‘50s and ‘60s almost all of our apprentices were in the 21-25 range. Now there are some as old as 34. That means that they stay in school longer, and come into life better prepared. It can mean that, at least.”

A glance over the Santa Fe Opera’s 45 years produces the impression of John Crosby’s skewed but distinctive repertory, a list as remarkable for its omissions as its entries. The Verdi pickings are slim: La Traviata averaging five performances each over eleven seasons, Falstaff in four seasons, three of Rigoletto and one of Don Carlo . Of Wagner there is only a Dutchman, performed in three seasons. Mozart fares well, with 15 seasons of Figaro best of all. So does Stravinsky, with the Rake turning up in seven seasons and Le Rossignol in five. Six operas of Hans Werner Henze have received American premieres in Santa Fe, although it may be significant that none of them returned for a second season. And then there is Strauss: five seasons of  Rosenkavalier, nine of Salome and thirteen other operas – lacking only Guntram and Die Frau ohne Schatten to complete the collection.

Will things change? This summer, the absence of Richard Strauss for the first time since 1977 may count as the season’s novelty; an even greater one, however, is the American premiere of L’Amour de Loin, the opera by Kaija Saariaho that has already garnered – in Salzburg and Paris — a round of critical ecstasy unique for any serious-minded opera in these times. As we speak Richard Gaddes is obsessed with that opera’s problems: director Peter Sellars’ demand for towers that may impinge on the orchestra pit, and the need to attend to Dawn Upshaw’s comfort as she lies in a pool of water in the final moments. (“Perhaps we should try a few of those immersion heaters you use for coffee,” he wonders aloud.) The 2002 season also lists Eugene Onegin, La Traviata and the company’s first La Clemenza di Tito and L’Italiana in Algeri.

“Of course things will change,” Gaddes continues, “if only because of the vast differences in style between John – who ran a magnificent opera company close to his vest – and my own, let’s say, community-minded approach. Specifically, I’m looking at American works. We have Bright Sheng on the list for 2003; we’re talking to Aaron Kernis and to Theodore Shapiro. Tobias Picker’s Emmeline had its world premiere here in 1996 and has done well since then; it’s musically lightweight, perhaps, but it’s a good evening in the theater. We will do better. We’ve begun to reach out to the community that actually lives here, with an HMS Pinafore this past winter in a great old downtown movie theater, the Lensic, that’s been magnificently restored. We’ve done  Noah’s Flood and The Beggar’s Opera in schools and churches. The next step will be to look into Spanish opera – not merely because it’s Spanish, but because it’s good. What do you know about Goyescas?”

Over a splendid burrito on a blindingly sunlit February day, Opera Board President Carole Ely adds to the perspective. “The amazing thing about John,” she says, “was the equilibrium he managed to maintain between artistic excellence and the balance sheet. Richard adds community consciousness to the mix. With John, what happened on the main stage mattered the most. He would have burst an artery before he’d bring that Mariachi festival onto that stage. But Richard did. People have to wonder how September 11 affects our company. Actually, it hasn’t affected us very much. New Mexico has relatively few large corporations, so most of our support comes from a vast list of individuals or smaller corporations – a few thousand here and there.

“Opera has made this community what it is,” she concluded. “Before there were artists, but then there was John Crosby, in this hidden gem of a town in the Southwest.”

Like many Santa Feans, David and Kay Ingalls moved there from somewhere else: specifically, from Los Angeles, where David ran a prestigious bookshop and both had lent their names to a sheaf of cultural agencies. “We moved to Santa Fe,” says Kay, “just to get away from running things.” Now David chairs the Santa Fe Opera Board, and he and Kay are both heavy movers at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, which runs concurrent to the opera season and does its own sell-out business.

“We came here summer after summer,” says Kay, “to ride horses and swim and go to the opera. Then we came once in the winter, just to try things out. That did it; we bought a lot at the edge of town, and then we decided on this great old house right in town. We walk over to The Subscription every morning, have coffee, read the papers and rub shoulders with Nobel winners, people in the sciences and in the arts. When we lived in Pasadena the ride to the Los Angeles airport was always a mess of traffic. Here the Albuquerque airport may be farther away, but it’s a lot easier to get to.”

“It’s an easy place to live,” says David.

“Yes, and it’s an easy place to love,” says Kay.

Barring a questionable detail here and there, John Coyne’s sets could easily have passed for snapshots of medieval Nürnberg – best of all the spacious, beautifully colored church interior for Act One and the broad and uncluttered riverbank for the final songfest. Neither Coyne nor director Hans-Peter Lehmann, however, could quite untangle the glorious tangle of activity throughout Act Two, with performers disappearing and re-emerging from behind free-standing scrims and a towering upstage vertical that bore uncomfortable resemblance to a destroyed structure of recent tragic memory. The great contrapuntal brouhaha that ended that act became more mess than mélée; Sachs’ rescue of Walther at the end had to be taken pretty much on faith. The opera’s final moment, the apotheosis of artist over critic, was cluttered beyond Wagnerian intent  by having the disgraced Beckmesser return to the fold and deliver a penitent hug to the triumphant Sachs. (Sorry, folks, but music critics don’t work that way.)

James Morris sang his first Sachs — out-of-town preparation, he freely admitted, for assuming the role at the Met a month later. For reasons good and otherwise, his performance (heard on October 13, the second night) was pure, unsurprising, all-purpose Morris: the voice nicely colored, the intonation pure, the stage presence noble, the words immaculately shaped – and the drama, the rich throb of humanness that elevates this role above any you can easily name, sadly understated. That human throb came through more tellingly in René Pape’s eloquent, loving Pogner (also Met-bound).  Thomas Allen’s Beckmesser came across as an even greater surprise, with a thread of pain under the comedic shenanigans that provided a further dimension to a personage too often relegated to slapstick status.

Robert Dean Smith  – Kansas-born but in his U.S. operatic debut — was the Walther; Janice Watson, the Eva: an appealing, bright-voiced pair who, for once, looked and sounded as young as they were supposed to. (Jay Hunter Morris and Elisabeth-Maria Wachutka were slated to replace them in the last two performances, with Robert Orth as Beckmesser.) As David and his Magdalene, Michael Schade and Catherine Keen were no less splendid, and contributed especially elegant support in the great Act Three Quintet.

But that wondrous ensemble – and, indeed, everything about the texture of Wagner’s irresistible comedy that makes transcendant and all-too-brief  its five hours in the opera house – owed the most to the musical leadership of the company’s music director Donald Runnicles. Half-a-minute into the much-loved and thrice-familiar Prelude, with every orchestral detail fixed into place and the music’s spirit surging forward, and you could suspect something remarkable was taking shape. Give or take small details here and there, you’d be right. ALAN RICH

]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/02/re-san-francisco-opera/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/01/peter-hemmings/ http://www.soiveheard.com/2002/01/peter-hemmings/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2002 21:16:41 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=1797 PETER HEMMINGS, Enfield, Middx, England, April 10, 1934 – Dorset, England, January 4, 2002

Where others had failed, or succeeded only halfway, Hemmings planted the operatic seed in the Los Angeles cultural desert and nursed it into full bloom. Determinedly ignoring a chorus of naysayers, charming a support structure into existence by dint of soft-spoken earnestness and elegant British tailoring, Hemmings came to Los Angeles with the mission of founding that city’s first-ever world-class opera company, and fulfilled that mission with surprising ease. Even the ultimate omen – the curtain stuck halfway up at the opening-night Otello — did not block his upward path. When he retired in June, 2000 – yielding his place to his hand-picked company superstar and logical successor Plácido Domingo — his 14-year-old Los Angeles Opera had long shaken off its initial omens and challenges.

Hemmings’ lifetime was almost entirely operatic. At Cambridge he headed the University Opera Group and aimed  briefly at a singer’s career. Instead he moved into music management at London’s prestigious Harold Holt Ltd., from there to a personal assistant’s post to the manager of the Sadler’s Wells Opera and from there, in 1962,  to run the newly formed Scottish National Opera, which he built over 15 years into one of Britain’s most adventurous companies..

A stint at Sydney’s Australian Opera, where Hemmings groomed the company to make the most of the newly-won reputation engendered by  its glamorous new hall, was cut short by political infighting. In 1979 he strayed outside opera to manage the London Symphony. Five years later, however, the call came from the Los Angeles Music Center; it was high time, it said in so many words, to create a place in the operatic firmament for that famously nonoperatic city.

Los Angeles’ operatic desires had previously been feebly fanned by visits from the San Francisco Opera (in the notorious acoustic horror, the 6000-seat Shrine Auditorium) and occasional one-shots in the Music Center’s early days. In 1984, a three-production stint by London’s Royal Opera (including a Turandot with Domingo) sparked an outcry for a local company of Los Angeles’ own and Hemmings was tapped as founder-director.

He moved wisely and well. Installing Domingo  as resident superstar gave out word that the Los Angeles Opera would rise above the city’s boondocks reputation. A fine mix of repertory and exotic items – Otello, Butterfly, Fiery Angel, Wozzeck, Mahagonny, Don Giovanni, the complete Les Troyens – enhanced that reputation. So did some enlightened backstage choices: Goetz Friedrich to stage Otello and Janácek, David Hockney to design Tristan und Isolde, Peter Sellars to move Pelléas et Mélisande to a Malibu beachfront, Simon Rattle to conduct Wozzeck. As with any company afflicted with high ambitions, there were duds here and there; local critics could count on one or two yearly one-on-one confrontations, over a splendid lunch, for Hemmings to defend (with scoresheets and full documentation) this inadequate conductor or that tottering diva.

From the start, Hemmings appended an active Resident Artist apprenticeship program to the company’s operations, out of which several major artists have emerged –- baritone Rodney Gilfry for one, a walk-on in that opening-night Otello now a worldwide star. Hemmings’ final Los Angeles production was a triumphant Billy Budd with Gilfry as Billy. Like its star, the Los Angeles Opera had grown impressively – from a 22-performance first season to well over 60 performances, most of them sold out, in Hemmings’ final year.

In 1998 Hemmings was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He returned to England in the summer of 2000 and, after a brief bout with cancer, died at his home in Dorset, survived by his wife Jane and five children.

Chukhadjian (1837-1898) – the latest Grove reverses prior practice and appends an initial “T,” while San Francisco’s program literature had it both ways – was born in Turkey of Armenian parentage and studied in Milan (where he apparently listened well). Settling later in Armenia he composed prolifically, turning out a repertory of light operas with such arresting titles as Hor-Hor, the Chick-Pea Seller and The Balding Elder, works which went some distance toward establishing an indigenous Armenian repertory. His most ambitious opera, composed in 1868, was, however, to an Italian text; it  bore the title Arsace II, with libretto  by Tovmas (or Tommaso) Tersian, and concerned the exploits, treachery and death of the title character, the 4^th-century Armenian tyrant Arshak the Second.  Only excerpts were performed in the composer’s lifetime; in the 1940s the score was rediscovered among the papers of Chukhadjian’s widow. It was then extensively revised and outfitted with a new Armenian text by a certain Armen Goulakian, in which the historic tyrant had metamorphosed into a proto-Stalinist superhero. That version still circulates in Armenia. Okay so far?

San Francisco’s Arshak II was, however, not very much of the above. There is in Paris, if you’re ready, a “Dikran Tchouhadjian [sic] Research Centre” which, in 1998, persuaded general manager Lotfi Mansouri to graft the original Arsace/Arshak onto roots it never really possessed, by commissioning  a translation of Versian’s Italian libretto into Armenian – a process comparable, say, to “restoring” Lucia di Lammermoor into Gaelic. This neo-Arshak, as translated and edited by latter-day Chukhadjianists Haig Avakian and Gerald Papasian, is what had its world premiere in San Francisco on September 8.

How did it get there? Armenian violinist Gerard Svazlian, who had played in the opera at the National Theater in Yerevan, brought his enthusiasms to his present post in San Francisco’s opera orchestra, raised a seven-figure bundle among Armenian communities nationwide toward an eventual performance. He then got Mansouri – himself from the neighboring country of Iran – to look beyond the matter of special-interest groups buying into cultural resources, and accord Arshak II place of preference as the final novelty of his stewardship.

Why did it get there? That, alas, is not so readily answered. For all the hopes raised by the possible rediscovery of a grandly conceived historico-socio pageant by a composer concerned with nationalistic opera – and 1868 was also, after all, the year of Boris Godunov — the actual result of all this dedicated research and restoration is just one more workmanlike product of the mid-century Italian opera factory that chugged along in Verdi’s shadow.  The plotline is solid enough: black-hearted tyrant rejects loving wife, murders brother, lusts after sister-in-law, repents too late. At the final bloodbath the crown lies onstage, unclaimed. Armenia’s crown? Scotland’s? Tasmania’s? Little in the score defines place or ethnicity. A neutral wash of Bellinian harmony beguiles the ear at times, but the music seems fatally mired. It doesn’t move, in either the physical or emotional sense. The composer, we read, was variously described in the press of his time as “the Armenian Verdi” or “the Armenian Offenbach,”  but his Arshak II — at least in its considerably (and considerately)  cut  San Francisco incarnation – seldom rises to the level of, say, an Armenian Mercadante.

Even so, the work drew masterpiece treatment under Loris Tjeknavorian’s sturdy baton. On John Coyne’s set, a series of rotating piled-up rough-cut pieces, Francesca Zambello’s staging was your basic good, solid epic-opera biz: chorus left, chorus right, bodies down front; heroine in a prison cage up above. Among the Armenian vocal contingent, soprano Hasmik Papian radiated convincing intensity as the rejected Queen Olimpia; the impressive bass Tigran Martirossian was the high-priest Nerses.  As the evil Arshak, Christopher Robertson cut a striking figure not quite matched by a rather voiceless delivery; Armenia’s Anooshah Golesorkhi is slated to assume the role in later performances. As the scheming sister-in-law Paransema France’s Nora Gubisch got to steal scenes in the way mezzo-sopranos in romantic operas are meant to.

San Francisco’s opening-night Rigoletto was, by comparison, mostly business-as-usual, in the 1997 Mark Lamos production on Michael Yeargan’s splendid Chirico-esque forced-perspective unit set. The young (24) Sicilian soprano Désirée Rancatore was the winsome new Gilda in her U.S. opera debut, charming and adept if somewhat small of voice for this oversized house. Frank Lopardo was the dashing, resonant Duke; Stephan Pyatnychko the merely adequate Rigoletto. Marco Armiliato conducted, observing none of the cuts that used to disfigure this wondrous opera in less enlightened times. From her highly visible first-tier box, the company’s new general director Pamela Rosenberg beamed at the well-dressed crowd. It wasn’t really her night as yet; her own programming won’t fall into place for another year. That, too, promises enlightenment.    ALAN RICH

Director Lotfi Mansouri, in collaboration with Richard Bonynge had created this version of the Widow, with Hassall’s text,  in 1981 as a vehicle for Joan Sutherland, padding out the 80-plus minutes of its already generous score with borrowings from elsewhere in the Léhar canon – an interminable ballet to a medley from  The Count of Luxembourg, a bland final piece from Paganini and a comic aria (for the flunky Njegus) that Léhar had tacked onto the Widow later in its history. All told, San Francisco’s Widow, in Mansouri’s restaging intended as his company farewell,  held its audience – depressingly paltry as witnessed on December 5 — captive (if not exactly captivated) a near-Wagnerian 3-1/2 hours. The Los Angeles Opera production, first staged by the Utah Opera in May, 2000 – running simultaneously in the same version with the same director and designers but without the trendy-Wendy lugubriously unfunny text – zoomed past at 20 minutes shorter.

Michael Yeargan’s sets  — as nearly identical on both California stages as never mind — filled the eye with a pastiche of Art-Nouveau Paris, including the swirls and squiggles of Hector Guimard’s subway entrances; Thierry Bosquet’s fin-de-siècle costumes seemed to float free of gravity’s constraints,  At the Widow’s first entrance –  sheathed in blazing  red atop a staircase engulfed by white-tied admirers – you had to wonder if another Dolly had been cloned. On the podium, in his San Francisco Opera debut, Erich Kunzel’s presence should, you might think, guarantee the proper accents for congenial musical theater. But no, not in this lumbering, joyless pageant of merriment betrayed.

Australia’s Yvonne Kenny had those accents, however: the wisdom, the cynicism, the lustrous voice. So did Austria’s Angelika Kirchschlager – surprisingly, a light mezzo in a soubrette role – and so did the ardent Camille de Rosillon of America’s Gregory Turay, a young tenor clearly on the rise. But Danish baritone Bo Skovhus’ Danilo was mostly huff, a far cry from Los Angeles’ airborne Danilo, Rodney Gilfry – slated to take on the role in San Francisco’s later performances — who sang and danced rings around Carol Vaness’ Widow.

Less – far less – might have been more.

Tones of greater delight, and greater dramatic honesty, had filled San Francisco’s opera house in preceding weeks. The 1985 Falstaff abides as one of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s most endearing creations, and so it was in its November revival (seen on November 18), staged by former Ponnelle assistant Vera Lúcia Calábria, with the immenso , sonorous mountain of a John Del Carlo in the title role, Nancy Gustafson as the wise, endearing Alicia and a hilarious ragtag of comics – Doug Jones’ Bardolfo, Stanislaw Schwets’ Pistola and Jonathan Boyd’s Caius – nicely welded under Calábria’s direction. Donald Runnicles’ musical leadership – as in his Meistersinger weeks before, restated the sometimes-forgotten principle largely ignored in the aforementioned Merry Widow: that the essence of truly comedic music lies deep within the notes themselves.

Leos Janacek’s Jenufa made its overdue return to San Francisco’s repertory on November 19, in a modest, handsome production from the Dallas Opera. Francesca Zambello’s staging traced the stark, bleak lines and scary empty spaces of Allison Chitty’s design,  in which warmth and communicativeness seemed perpetually lost. Patricia Racette’s tense, desperate Jenufa had its dramatic foil in Kathryn Harries’ overpowering recreation of stepmother Kostelnicka and drew fitful warmth from the sympathetic but troubled Laca of Richard Berkeley-Steele. (Harries and Berkeley-Steele, both Brits, were making their San Francisco debuts.) Veteran soprano Helga Dernesch, a San Francisco love object since her debut there in 1981, sang Grandmother Buryjovka, small role to grand applause.  Jiri Kout conducted the serious, intense performance.

]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/2001/12/san-francisco-opera-report/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/2001/11/long-beach-opera-%e2%80%9cpowder-her-face%e2%80%9d/ http://www.soiveheard.com/2001/11/long-beach-opera-%e2%80%9cpowder-her-face%e2%80%9d/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2001 21:08:35 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=1785 “I go to bed early,” says Margaret, Duchess of Argyll to a gossip-columnist snoop, “and often.” That said, however, you need to know that Powder Her Face, the opera by Thomas Adès that in six years has blazed a trail of adulation worldwide, from Aspen to Zagreb, is not exactly your basic bedtime story.

What it is, in fact, may not be so easy to relate in a family-oriented publication, but it’s worth the try in the wake of its sensationally successful staging (November 9-18) by California’s undauntable Long Beach Opera. You have to know first that its central character, although made out as the latest in a long line of implausible operatic monsters alongside Lulu, Salome and the Queen of the Night, is this time quite real. Born Margaret Whigham, later the “Mrs. Sweeny” catalogued in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top,” finally the infamous Duchess whose sexual appetites made headlines in a 1963 scandal that almost scuttled Britain’s Tory government, she died in 1993 at 81, in poverty and ignominy.

Only two years later Powder Her Face, with its deliciously scabrous libretto by Philip Hensher and its defiantly eclectic score, made its own headlines and rocketed its composer – a stripling of 24 at the time – into the underpopulated ranks of true originals among serious composers. The work was first staged, and recorded on EMI Classics,  by London’s Almeida Opera; the Long Beach production was the first professional American staging. Most intervening performances, for reasons that will be clear in a minute, have been in concert or “semi-staged.”

The opera hurtles forward in eight brief scenes, starting and ending in 1990 as the impecunious Duchess gets the heave-ho from the hotel manager, and flashing back to early triumph as the “Debutante of the Year” awaits the Duke’s proposal, then to their elegant marriage reception, then downward as the marriage disintegrates and the Duchess must seek fulfillment elsewhere. A hotel waiter cooperates in this regard;  as he pours out his, er, heart, the outpouring is received with gurgling concupiscence. (The Duke, meanwhile, also turns a trick or two.) A judge seals the divorce verdict, detailing the Duchess’ “intimate knowledge of perversions which few of us can credit.”

Besides the Duchess — killer music for the fearless dramatic soprano that Irena Sylya almost was save for occasional diction problems — an economical cast takes on multiple roles: a high soprano (the phenomenal Catherine Ireland) as maid, reporter and call-girl, an agile tenor (James Schaffner, a splendid, graceful newcomer)  as waiter, bellhop and lounge lizard, a bass (the stentorian Donald Sherrill) as Duke, hotel manager and judge. The orchestra numbers 15, heavy on winds and brass, spangled with whirring, bustling percussion including several fishing reels for a clickety-clack evocation of some down-and-dirty tango. The music throbs, grates and, on occasion, bellows bravely; after the opera’s scant two hours, you get the sense that you’ve heard one each of every kind of music in the books. It’s just that sense of omniscience, in fact, that contributes to the work’s irresistible thrust. “Never a dull moment” may overstate the case, but not by much.

For a company whose last time out was a modern-dress Elektra in a California beach house, the off-the-wall excesses of Powder Her Face seemed made-to-order, and so they proved. On a blocked-off portion of the stage at Cal State-Long Beach’s Carpenter Center, Andrew Lieberman’s designs accomodated both opera and audience – the latter perched on bleachers against the back wall. Against a side wall, Neal Stulberg’s crack little orchestra seethed and throbbed and drenched the premises in audible color. Geoff Korf’s lighting added much, with its dancing shadows conducting a whole ‘nother orgy out on the sidelines. An ornate glassed-in mobile structure served both as hotel room and museum display-case; in David Schweizer’s staging one was never sure whether the Duchess was genuine or stuffed – until, that is, the very end. Then the Duchess, broke and alone, made her slow exit into the empty theater — up and out, very fragile, very human — and suddenly the whole extravaganza of the past two hours took on another, unforgettable dimension.  ALAN RICH

It had been a brave, perhaps foolhardy, venture in 1975 for Glynn Ross to arm his fledgling company, a mere dozen years old, for its first Wagnerian ascent; the results, tradition-based if a patchwork at times and with alternating performances in English and German, were hardly disgraceful. Speight Jenkins, who succeeded Ross as general director in 1983, presided over the last years of that production. In 1986 he instituted a second Ring , a new staging by François Rochaix in a new conception: the postmodern look that was all the rage at the time, with the Valkyries riding on carrousel horses and an Erector-set Fafner. Version Number Three, which presented the cycle three times – each within six days – during this past August, and which had sold out at the box-office exactly one year before, was neither of the above.

It was, as insistently described by Jenkins and stage director Stephen Wadsworth, a “Green” Ring. Designer Thomas Lynch’s  forest of tall conifers, among which the Gods laid their malicious plans, Siegmund courted Sieglinde and Wotan bickered with Fricka – and which returned at the very end to honor the perpetuity of life and love – could have been any glorious woodland within a few miles of Seattle. (Time and again in the frequent speech-giving at which he is a virtuoso, Jenkins has insisted that this Ring is not up for borrowing, that it is Seattle’s alone.) Two rugged, rocky crags framed the scene of Siegmund’s murder in Die Walküre; the same structure, more heavily forested, served as Fafner’s habitat in Siegfried and, with its greenery in autumnal decay, as the scene of Siegfried’s fall under Hagen’s spear in Götterdämmerung – all aglow in Peter Kaczorowski’s wondrously naturalistic lighting designs.

If the settings were grand, the gadgetry was no less so: the trick lighting that rendered Alberich instantly invisible and transformed Loge into tongues of flame, the Rhine-Maidens as highly skilled trapeze artists at the cycle’s beginning and end, a realistic Forest Bird hopping from branch to branch and, above all, the stage-filling Fafner, a Velociraptor out of Jurassic Park, at once terrifying and adorable.

Director Stephen Wadsworth, who bestrides both opera house and theater in his burgeoning career – including a previous Lohengrin and Dutchman for Seattle – had most recently won plaudits for his staging of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in San Francisco, thus confirming his Ring qualifications with his insight into dysfunctional families.   In the light of contemporary stage interpretations imposed upon the Ring — with a George Lucas treatment for the Los Angeles Opera on the not-too-distant horizon  — Wadsworth’s Seattle production, with enlightened support from his design and tech crew, could be considered downright retro, but in the best sense.  The Valkyries sported winged helmets, as they did at Wagner’s Bayreuth. Valhalla’s  Gods lumbered around in Martin Pakledinaz’s all-purpose, all-century robes familiar from any opera you’ve ever seen.  Siegfried’s

immortal howler, “dass ist kein Mann!” got the audience laughter that it has since its ink was wet.

Some small deviations from the Wagnerian writ did occur, and they made sense – or, at least, captured the interest. Wotan and Fricka held their Die Walküre confrontation outside Hunding’s recently violated home – the scene of the crime, in other words — rather than up at Valhalla. The Rheingold Erda made her entrance from behind a rock, and, in her Siegfried reincarnation, from a cleft in a rock wall – all because Seattle’s stage lacks the trap door to her subterranean abode. (There will be one in the remodeled house, which will be opened in time for the next Ring-around.) The Siegfried-disguised-as-Gunther outside Brünnhilde’s cave in Götterdämmerung was sung this time by the actual Gunther rather than the prescribed Siegfried, clarifying a moment that has baffled more than one audience in the past. Confronted with the carnage around her near the end of it all, Gutrune also conveniently killed herself, thus resolving a persistent one-survivor-too-many problem.  And the final scene, in Wadsworth’s reimagining, turns from the prescribed Valhalla burnup to a joyous family reunion at the bottom of the Rhine: Brünnhilde back in Wotan’s arms,  the Siegmunds, parents and son, standing by, the Rhinemaidens cavorting overhead (where they remained, by the way, through the curtain calls).

Seattle had mounted the first two Ring operas in Wadsworth’s staging in the summer of 2000 as a kind of sneak preview, and most of the musical forces remained as before – including conductor Franz Vote, who had stepped in last season to replace the indisposed Armin Jordan. Born in Los Angeles, Vote has conducted at the Met and at Bayreuth and at other European companies. At the head of a full-size Wagnerian orchestral contingent drawn from Seattle Symphony ranks, — but not above an occasional bad-horn moment —  he delivered a performance best described as workmanlike: a fine, steady orchestral flow but with some of the most-awaited moments – Siegmund’s withdrawal of the Sword for one – somewhat undernourished.

Jane Eaglen was her usual glorious Brünnhilde, reaffirming her current ownership of the role on both American coasts and at points in between. There were no surprises; you got what you paid for, and in brimming abundance – a dramatic intensity conveyed entirely though the steely glint of one of the era’s great, gleaming voices, a command of phrase so natural as to seem instinctive, a stage presence uncluttered by further information requiring visual delivery. As Fricka in the Rheingold and Walküre and as the Second Norn in Götterdämmerung, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe was little less exhilarating: a huge, rich voice and, again, an acting presence rudimentary but honorable.  Margaret Jane Wray was the immensely appealing Sieglinde; Marie Plette, the Freia and Gutrune, small of voice but tidily stageworthy; even more noteworthy among the lesser women’s roles was the uncommonly vivid Forest Bird and Woglinde of Lisa Saffer, best known as an ardent explorer of out-of-the-way repertory in New York and elsewhere.

The greater problems occurred among the male contingent. One day before the first Siegfried Canadian tenor Alan Woodrow took a fall while working out, and severed a leg muscle. Considering the roistering, galumphing, teenage Siegfried of Stephen Wadsworth’s action plan, Woodrow’s appearance on the stage was unthinkable. To the rescue, however, came the enterprising Speight Jenkins. British tenor Richard Berkeley-Steele, who was covering the role, had learned the action but hadn’t yet had vocal rehearsals, was sent out to lip-synch, with the crippled but vocally agile Woodrow singing from a chair at stage right. (Despite successful surgery, Woodrow bowed out following the first week’s Ring-, replaced by Berkeley-Steele in sound as well as sight.)

Mark Baker’s Siegmund was of solid coinage; a stronger hand at the podium might have reinforced the gleam at the great moments in the role. About the ensemble of  the lower men’s voices — that dark and fragrant ground in which the organism that is the Ring is most firmly rooted – the report must be mixed. Philip Joll, Welsh-born and mostly active in European houses (although he was a Met Donner in 1988) was the hard-voiced Wotan, toneless in the role’s heartbreaking moments, clearly motivated by the drama but just as clearly outclassed by the resonance of its music. From the rich eloquence of Richard Paul Fink as the adversial Alberich, ironically enough, one heard the sound of a potential, magisterial Wotan; such a feat of lip-synch was, alas, not to be. Denmark’s Stephen Milling was the Fasolt in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre’s Hunding, a stunning young bass, a Sarastro, a Philip II and, in Seattle’s announced Parsifal, surely a Gurnemanz for all seasons.

Like its Ring, Seattle’s Opera House has had its share of incarnations. Built as a flat-floored civic auditorium in 1927, it was totally remodeled, within its original shell, in 1962, the time of Seattle’s World’s Fair; that provided the impetus for Glynn Ross to start up the company the next year. For an audience of 3,017, it provides reasonably good acoustics and benevolent sight-lines; backstage it is more a disaster area, with cramped rehearsal and storage space, wretched dressing rooms and the aforementioned lack of a trapdoor on stage. Now the house shuts down on January 1, 2002, for another total remake that will correct present deficiencies and forestall new ones – with a small loss of seating but even better sightlines. The company will move a few feet eastward, where another performance space – stage, pit and raked seating – is being built into an adjacent sports arena. Plans for the Opera House reopening, in the summer of 2003,  are already in place: Parsifal,  in a staging by François Rochaix (of the previous, hi-tech Ring), the one major Wagner work the company has not yet tackled and, thus, the completion of the collection.

And the Ring? As a latter-day Erda, but without her overlay of doom’n’gloom, the affable Jenkins has that future well in focus: repeat performances at four-year intervals – 2005, 2009, 2013. The way things move among Seattle’s true Wagnerian believers, the box-office line is probably already in place.

On September 9 the London Sunday Times ran a doom’n’gloom article on the company’s financial woes, specifically on the enormous outlay – some $45 million, it was intimated – it would take to realize Domingo’s dream project, the George Lucas-designed Ring slated for the 2003/04 season. The company’s directors, the article claimed, were up in arms, a not unfamiliar stance by the famously conservative Board. “Nonsense,” responded a company spokesman in a protesting letter, but three days later another bomb was dropped, the resignation of executive director Ian White-Thomson after only a year on the job. Against this background, the New York tragedy and its aftermath had cast a further shadow, obliging the company to shuffle and reschedule. The first Lohengrin, scheduled for a black-tie premiere on September 12, was  pushed forward to a dress-Californian matinee on the  15th.

Even so, the shape of the company’s triumphant rebirth was easy to discern. In the fifteen years of Peter Hemmings’ leadership there had been no Russian-language opera. (A Pique Dame had been announced for 1990 but dropped.) Aside from a Tristan memorable more for the David Hockney designs than on musical grounds and Julie Taymor’s gimmicky Dutchman, Wagner had been given short shrift. Several of Hemmings’ bravest ventures had been undercut by impoverished leadership from the podium.  Here, then, was a new beginning in which three previous major deficiencies were dramatically erased. The best news of all was that the two conductors involved – Valery Gergiev and Kent Nagano – now have long-term commitments to the company: Gergiev for an annual visit, Nagano in the newly created post of Principal Conductor.

Domingo’s madman-hero was familiar coin from the Met’s Pique Dame of 1999; so was Gergiev’s urgent, fiery leadership. (Gegam Gregorian – the Gherman on the Gergiev-led video of the opera — assumed the role in later performances; Gianandrea Noseda took over the podium.)  On opening night Domingo’s  60-year-old pipes were still in remarkable condition, his stage presence the woolly-bear galumphing that passes for acting throughout his vast repertory. Galina Gorchakova was his Lisa as at the Met, impassioned if somewhat soft of voice. Sergei Leiferkus was the robust Tomsky; Vladimir Chernov, the Yeletzky; Susanna Poretzky, winner of one of Domingo’s recent “Operalia” competitions, had her few lustrous moments as Pauline. The evening’s loudest cheers, however, rang for the 64-year-old Elena Obraztsova as the Countess; in the role in all opera with the fewest notes and the most powerful impact, just the sound of her dropped cane in the silence surrounding her death haunts the memory.

German designer/director Gottfried Pilz dispensed with Tchaikovskys scenic suggestions and devised instead a single performing space, a huge room raked left to right serving as park, ballroom, bedroom and gaming house, with a dark space down front that served as a kind of limbo for the madman-hero to contemplate his demons. Everything moved, often feverishly; more than once a chorus burst into the scene like a flood from a broken dam. More than once, also, another kind of deluge – the insistent onrush of dark resonance from the orchestra under Gergiev – left little chance to catch one’s breath, on stage or out front.

A closer rapport with the neighboring movie industry is also on Domingo’s promised agenda; to that end the grand old Maximilian Schell came on to stage the company’s first Lohengrin. With set designs based on paintings that the late Yevgeny Lysyk had originally created for the Mariinsky – including an extraordinary Act Two backdrop like a dozen Cologne Cathedrals interwoven – Schell came up with a conception timeless in the best sense. A huge sculpture, a kind of winged obelisk, served as both Swan and Tree of Wisdom, wondrously lit by Alan Burrett’s stark searchlights at the end as the lost prince Gottfried emerged from its folds. Dirk Hofacker’s costumes were of no time and all time: soldiers’ helmets out of World War I, swords and shields out of Van Eyck, Elsa in a nightie worthy of Dior. The opera was given virtually uncut, minus one short scene for Elsa near the end. The splendor and shimmer of Kent Nagano’s orchestra and the sturdy rightness of his pacing made the minutes whiz past.

Sweden’s Gösta Winbergh was the Lohengrin, his tone steely and commanding at first, softening down to a most appealing tenderness later on. Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka was the endearing Elsa, again spanning a wonderful range from the dreamy “Euch, Luften”  to her insistent cajoling in the Bridal Chamber scene that brings on her downfall. Tom Fox’s Telramund exuded his usual masterful menace.  Eva Marton’s Ortrud was the one major disappointment, not the stipulated mezzo-soprano with her death-dealing tones of darkness and thrust, but an aging soprano scooping her way toward pitches she can no longer command. Lucinda Childs – Einstein on the Beach, remember?  — was credited with the “choreography”: not so much “ballet” as an imaginative stylization of slow moving, especially among Elsa’s entourage. This was one more remarkable aspect in an over-all conception that generated marvelous refreshment for the eye and the ear. Mark it, then, as a giant step upward for opera in Los Angeles… something beyond price-tag.

Those San Francisco years end — officially at least — this summer, as Mansouri vacates his office to Pamela Rosenberg, the company’s fifth general director in its 78-year history and its first native Californian. His name may be off the door, but the traces remain. He owes the company one more production, a Merry Widow scheduled for December. “I had thought to make my exit quietly, on the Marschallin’s arm at the end of Der Rosenkavalier,” he says. “Now I’ll waltz my way out the door to a bit of Lehár instead, arm-in-arm with Flicka von Stade.” One of his future projects involves a book – not the name-dropping tell-all memoir that retired opera impresarios have been known to write, but “something about the growth of opera as an art form in my lifetime.”

His contributions to that growth – and, more to the point, to the growth of operatic consumership in his time – are indeed impressive. It was during his stewardship in Toronto that he dreamed up the notion of English-language “supertitles” (simply from watching an opera on TV and applying a little common sense). If any development has most drastically changed the sight and sound of opera, and the breadth of its appeal, in Mansouri’s quarter-century, it would be this rupture of the language barrier – opposed by some managements at first (famously, by the Met), now a worldwide fact of life.

It doesn’t stop with the supertitles, however. Even San Francisco’s 1989 earthquake had its operatic up side. “The house was damaged,” he remembers, “enough so that some of the board members thought we should just shut down for two years during the seismic retrofitting. I managed to convince them that that approach could be fatal.” What the company did instead was to broaden the venue. In the cavernous Civic Auditorium, in-the-round performances played to thousands more seats than at the main house, and attracted thousands more young operagoers. In another daring move, Mansouri moved the company into a downtown movie theater for a run of La Bohème with several casts – not just the five or six performances of a regular opera season but upwards of thirty. “We sold over 45,000 tickets,” Mansouri gloatingly recalls, “and when the Opera House reopened, a lot of these new people came back with us.”

Some there are, of course, who recoil in horror at what they discern as “rank populism” under Mansouri’s years – compared, say, to the iron-fist elitism of Kurt Herbert Adler, the predecessor once removed. Even the company’s forays into commissioning new opera, it has been claimed, bear the taint of movieland – easy-listening works such as Conrad Susa’s Dangerous Liaisons, André Previn’s  A Streetcar Named Desire and last season’s Dead Man Walking by the relatively unknown Jake Heggie. Mansouri points out that Alban Berg’s Lulu needed a quarter-century to make its way into the repertory, but that Streetcar sold out its opening night and Dead Man warranted an additional performance.

“Of what am I the most proud?” he wonders aloud. “It’s the work I have done to spread the notion that opera is for everyone. People thought I was crazy to run La Bohème for thirty performances in a movie theater, but now Baz Luhrman is bringing his production to Broadway next season. Perhaps my directing hasn’t all that experimental, but at least I’ve shown opera as musical theater – as a very long MTV if you prefer.

“There will be plenty of my work on view here in San Francisco for several years. My 1997 Tosca returns next season, and there will be more of me at least through 2004. No, I won’t be here for the stagings. A friend gave me some good advice.

“ ‘Don’t ooze out,’ he said. ‘GET out.’ ”