We no longer much hear Bizet's second best known opera, but Washington National has rounded out the early part of its season with its lush exoticism.  Once denounced (and praised) as Wagnerian, the music and settings are supposed to transport us to an ancient Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) afflicted with that most pedestrian of all operatic plots – a vicious love triangle.  Two friends agree to end their animosity over a woman who has taken holy orders until – in her devotional state – she reappears and reignites both her suitors' passion and their battle over her.
            This is powerful stuff, but the cardboard cut outs of Washington's production, borrowed from San Diego Opera and shared with Michigan Opera Theater, scarcely do the opera's passions justice.  Certainly the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes's effort is colorful and even approaches the good sense of fanciful, but too often it veers toward kitsch.
            Under Giuseppe Grazioli the orchestra – never regarded as a powerful ensemble – lurched along with the music without revealing its depths and contours.  The chorus, alas, was too few in number and too low in volume to carry through the ensemble scenes.  The young soloists, all but one making their Washington National Opera debuts in this production, showed occasional flashes of power, but none really stood out with star quality.  Norah Amsellem's Leila was small voiced and a bit too mannered for my taste.  The two rivals for her love, Trevor Scheuneman's Zurga and Charles Castronovo's Nadir, came together well in the opera's famous duet, but otherwise delivered superficial portrayals and lightly delivered music.  Russian bass Denis Sedov has a rich tone, but demonstrated little inspiration or enthusiasm in the role of Nourabad.  Bizet's more famous Carmen is coming up soon in the nation's capital with its home grown star Denyce Graves.  Let us hope it is an effort more worth looking forward to.

New York City Opera's general director-designate Gerard Mortier has promised that although conventional works such as this one will continue to appear in his company's repertoire, they will not be what he calls "your grandmother's Traviata."  Whatever that might mean (this from the man who gave Salzburg its oddly bloodthirsty Fledermaus), if East Coast operagoers find that they miss conventional productions of Verdi's best known work, they can comfort themselves with a short trip to the nation's capital.  Shared with Los Angeles Opera and the Opera Royal de Wallonie, Marta Domingo's (wife of…) production places us in a replica of a bourgeois Paris poised on the threshold of decadence.  Giovanni Agustinucci's sets and costumes are realistic almost to the point of distraction, even if Act II has some fine warm colors that relieve us from the tedium of other even duller traditional productions.  Only a handful of innovations, such as a silent top hat and tails clad man who sweeps the dying Violetta around her room and then leaves, saved the effort from that damning artistic question, "So what?"
            The singing and acting barely helped the piece along.  Elizabeth Futral is a fine second-tier soprano, but her voice, usually testing its upper limits in Verdi's admittedly demanding music, does not represent the best choice in casting.  Her Alfredo, Arturo Chacun-Cruz, is a winner of Placido Domingo's Operalia competition and has enjoyed the maestro's favor.  At times passionate, he nevertheless failed to move.  Lado Ataneli may be one of the handful of singers active today with pretensions to the mantle of past Verdi baritone legends, and he acquitted himself well in the elder Germont's music.  Not everyone might care for his robust volume, but I found it rather engaging.  The minor parts were filled competently – and entirely -by young singers affiliated with the Washington National Opera's Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist program.
            Dan Ettinger conducted in his Washington debut production with sincerity and tried hard to individualize the music with a few unorthodox pauses and emphases, but these did not really detract from the music.

Mozart's alluring tale of a seducer and his unenviable fate has returned to the Met in its 125^th anniversary season in Marthe Keller's traditional yet flexible production.  A standard repertoire favorite now logged in at more than 500 Met performances (today's matinee was number 501), the company was fortunate to have assembled such a stellar young cast headed by the well regarded baritone Erwin Schrott, famous in musical circles for being the fiancé of Anna Netrebko and father of her new baby.
            Personal glories notwithstanding, Mr. Schrott's practiced portrayal of the title role did him outstanding credit.  A smooth, husky voice propelled a nuanced performance, which included strong hints of guilt at the death of the Commendatore, unusual discomfort and perhaps even insecurity in the confrontation scene in the Act I finale, and other psychological complexities discernible from Mozart's textured score.  Ildebrando d'Arcangelo's Leporello was a well matched foil.  Astute but perhaps too trusting in his incredulity, his finely delivered catalog aria and comedic talents helped carry a successful afternoon.
            Bulgarian soprano Krassimira Stoyanova is building a well deserved Met career, and her gorgeous singing as Donna Anna strengthens the justification for it.  I cannot recall a better sung "Non mi dir."  Susan Graham, normally a mezzo-soprano, moved out of her range but not out of her league to take on the role of Donna Elvira.  She did not quite reach the top of the role's tessitura, but her intelligent acting spared it the hackneyed "woman scorned" caricature it too often spirals into.  At times her borderline hysteria even made us sympathize with Schrott's more than usually hapless Don Giovanni.  Aged only 26, Isabel Leonard delivered a delicate and affecting Zerlina.  Mathew Polenzani has grown from supporting parts to the main lyric tenor repertoire, and his ardently insightful Don Ottavio continued the trend.  Basses Joshua Bloom, in his Met debut as Masetto, and Phillip Ens, as the Commendatore, rounded out the cast.
            Louis Langree made an impressive debut last season with Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride.  He conducted this afternoon's performance with a Gallic logic, but in a few passages rushed through the score.  Keller's production is reliable but suffers from a few flaws.  In the first scene Don Giovanni begins to remove his shirt (exposing Schrott's fine physique) and straddle Donna Anna, but one wonders what the point of this lustful exercise might be (other than exposing Schrott's fine physique) if he has already ravished her and is now trying to flee.  In the penultimate scene the Commendatore seizes and damns his murderer through a two-way mirror, an effect that verges on Disney.

As New York is roiled by financial crisis, no signs of poverty or distress seem to affect its musical world.  After a lavish red carpet opening night devoted to a sumptuously costumed and dazzlingly bejeweled Renee Fleming, the Met revived several noted productions for the first week of the 2008-2009 season.  Richard Strauss's one act psychodrama inaugurated regular performances.  Reacting to the opera's 1907 Met premiere, America's leading music critic of the day, Henry Krehbiel, felt "stung into righteous fury by the foul stench with which Salome fills the nostrils of humanity.  The Met's board canceled the rest of the run and avoided a work it decried as "objectionable and detrimental" for the next 27 seasons.
          A century later the opera's eroticism is highlighted by a two to three second burst of full frontal nudity at the end of the famous "Dance of the Seven Veils," the lascivious exhibition the title character uses to extract the promise of anything she wants from her degenerate stepfather, Herod Antipas.  The Met is fortunate to have the beautiful Finnish soprano Karita Mattila again on hand for this feat.  Mattila, whose brief nudity created headlines at the 2004 premiere of Jurgen Flimm's effective but garish production, is, like most great sopranos in their prime, of a certain age.  But age now having become so relative, she admirably maintains a figure that can pass for that of an unbalanced young woman.  Her superb dramatic skill and dynamic physical agility were amply on display all evening (performance of September 26) and only seemed to expand as it went on.  Sandro Loquasto's sets give her much room to scamper, climb, balance, and lust while producing some of the repertoire's most challenging music.  Harnessing cold Scandinavian tones, Mattila dominated the evening with a power and intensity that evoked Birgit Nilsson's finest singing in the role.
         As Jochanaan (John the Baptist), the object of Salome's obsessive passion, her fellow countryman Juha Uusitalo followed his house debut, made at the first performance earlier in the week, with compelling authority.  His rich and forceful baritone has made him a phenomenon in the Wagner repertoire in Europe and should give us every hope that it will be brought more often to the Met.  Salome's dysfunctional parents Herod and Herodias contributed a middle aged couple trapped in an amusing unhappiness, but at times their catty interactions seemed a bit too clichéd. Nevertheless, Kim Begley affected the right high-volume but nasally tenor for a perverted uncle cum stepfather and henpecked tyrant.  Ildiko Komlosi's strident but attractive mezzo impressed with its vindictiveness.  The strong supporting cast added much to the evening.  The talented young tenor Joseph Kaiser, who debuted at the Met as Romeo last season, artfully captured the suicidal desperation of Herod's captain of the guard, Narraboth.  Bass Morris Robinson riveted attention in the First Nazerene's brief scene.  The ensemble of Jewish scholars included Allan Glassman, Mark Schowalter, and James Courtney, all solid comprimario performers who sang well despite sliding somewhat into stereotype.  Patrick Summers led the Met orchestra with the same serviceable authority he wielded over Ms. Fleming's performance in the final scene of Strauss's Capriccio on opening night.
          Flimm's production confronts us with a vague Middle Eastern scene that could date from the 1920s or 1930s.  It was too bad that Herod's palace looks like a giant curtain, unsubtly colored blood red.  His turbaned soldiers, armed with pistols and Tommy guns, look like recruits in the army of the Transjordan.  The party guests are done up in mostly stylish interwar evening dress (though Herod's white suit was pure sleaze), an invention that adds enough glamour to make the incestuous and necrophilic plot more disturbingly effective.  Black angels of death with white wings silently appear on sand dunes at stage left, but their shifty presence draws attention away from the action.  Jochanaan is imprisoned in what looks like a mineshaft.  Its rusty mechanical equipment keeps with the era, but the intricacy detracts from the music and drama of his entry and exit.  A simplified staging that preserves the current cast in all its excellence might serve better. – Paul du Quenoy

Tristan is probably a little nobler than most of us but certainly the
most unlucky of all. This must be the idea behind staging the entire
opera on a fallen or sleeping or even dead angel, which Harry Kupfer
first introduced here in 2000. This season?s revival plays only three
times. I made the trek in honor of my close and recently departed
friend, Phil Raines, a noted Wagner scholar who died this July 4.

The stage is almost filled by a large, bronze sculpture, on and around
which the action takes place. It is a huge prone angel with a round
child's head, one wing ramping down to the floor of the stage and the
other arching upward as a wing might. In Act I its wings serve the
spatial needs of the ship perfectly. But paradoxically, the whole
stage is too empty to present a continuous identity of place requisite
to this end. In the present production the place Tristan died was the
same place he taught Isolde the metaphysics of love in Act II. Isolde
died exactly where she and Tristan sat at the end of Act II before
Marke?s entrance, which was the same place where Brangaene switched
the potions in Act I.

Tristan wears a full length coat and Isolde a red robe with black
brocade around a black dress. Brangaene is in blue. Katarina
Dalayman brings a Mona Lisa look to the role of Isolde and Clifton
Forbis is almost a Heldentenor.

Tristan is a man ennobled by his suffering, ultimately the suffering
of orphanhood. Once this is grasped Act III, which I have always
dreaded, it takes on the dimensionality of Sophocles' Oedipus of
Colonus and we suddenly find ourselves on a very high plane indeed.
Isolde stands over Tristan looking at the audience motionless, a
silent martyr to his nobility; in Act II she is perched upward on the
ramp of the angel's wings and watches the humiliation of Tristan,
kneeling on the ground with his head in his hands, as King Marke's
monologue pours out his disappointment over him. Her poses include an
element of Stabat Mater that reaches its culmination in the Liebestod,
where the angel on which the action takes place rotates and Isolde is
left on the stage alone, to lie down on its other side while the
lights dim to nothing.

The late Wagner scholar Phil Raines, who died this July 4, had been
asking what Tristan meant when, replying to Marke's monologue, he says
he could not answer his question and that Marke could never understand
the answer anyway. This production demonstrates that Tristan's
childhood was mangled by the death of his father the moment he
inseminated his mother, and of his mother the moment she bore him, a
degree of dismemberment others cannot understand even if they try.
This is the source of his boundless yearning, a yearning not for
Isolde?s love but a yearning much older, from a time in the gray
morning light when he first heard his father was dead. Through his
rambling autobiography, we learn from Tristan that ?The Look? that
moved Isolde so much when he "came to" in her healing cave and she
spared him was not the beginning of a life redeemed by love but only
the beginning of an eternal yearning. He had almost succeeded in
sublimating his yearning by winning her for Marke, but now, with ?The
Look,? he saw the loving face he had been denied seeing at birth, the
face whose life became dedicated to him by dint of his vulnerability.
Once he drank the potion, he became powerless to deny he had had this
experience, and he was doomed.

The solution for Tristan is to return to his mother's womb, as he says
right after Marke's monologue. But he needs Isolde at his side, to
look down at him again and at his wound, so that he can go back the
way he came, by reversing the process she began when she brought him
back to health and he looked into her eyes.

Daniel Barenboim is a great Wagner conductor. Many of the familiar
orchestral passages were deconstructed and given a new shape, and the
tonal dimensionality of the music was almost always fully represented.
The orchestra, however, was much too loud for the singers (from my
seat right under the chandelier) and tended to impose its own musical
line regardless of what they could contribute. The greatest loss was
the wandering extravagances of Isolde and Tristan's Act II scenes.
Almost no magical moment was given space to appear, though there are
several there. Even in the dramatic Liebestod the singer and the
orchestra were poorly matched. But the music here is so great and
builds so much to the same conclusion that even without coordination,
even with early entries by the horns, and even with a sluggish and
broad representation of the beat, everything was still brought in and
moved forward. Dalayman was able to trump the orchestra with sheer
power whenever she needed to, but should not have had to.

The sloping wings of the angel were hard for the singers to walk on.
Nobody slipped, but a distracting amount of care has to be taken to
balance oneself. Even in the Liebestod Isolde had to position herself
just right onto a low platform in the sculpture to make sure she could
sink without falling off.

I felt the voices of Dalayman?s Isolde and Michelle DeYoung?s
Brangaene were oddly too similar, perhaps a result of DeYoung?s
gradual movement into soprano parts (she sang a piece of Sieglinde?s
music at the Metropolitan Opera?s National Council Auditions last
February). Gerd Grochowski's Kurwenal was particularly convincing in
Act III and was justifiably applauded. Christof Fischesser's Marke
included a very moving and credible loss of temper at the end of his
monologue, when he drags Tristan part way across the stage by the arm.
Forbis reminded us that only a true Heldentenor can sing his heart
out in the way Tristan requires. It will be interesting to see what
Barenboim brings to his Met debut performances with Dalayman and Ben
Heppner later this fall.
- Ken Quandt

The saints have shown us many ways to live a perfect life. Yet somehow the lesson we tend to come away with is that it is the saints who are special rather than their lives. We know they would not have it this way, that they want us to know and to use what they have learned in our own lives rather than idolize them; and we know this because this is what their lives and actions always teach us. Saint Francis is a perfect case. As we come to know him, we idolize him for his humility not because we wish we were less proud but because his humility, as it is described by the stories of his life, is so credible.

It was just these stories that Olivier Messiaen used for his libretto to this opera, and the greatness of this opera ultimately relies on the greatness of Francis's life. Productions of the St.-François d'Assise are seldom mounted and revived even less frequently. The newest, which premiered in Amsterdam today, is the third of this millennium, after productions in San Francisco in 2001 and Paris in 2004. The great news is that this production is at least as great as those.

The orchestra Messaien demands is so large the Netherlands Opera production has put it on stage behind the proscenium, dispensed with a curtain, and placed the action in front of it, on a platform built over the pit. The conductor's stand is offset to the right. In front of this on the right of the semicircular platform there is a large rough icon of a tree made of black planks slapped together; in the center a heap of black crosses; and a bench and a small stepped platform on the left. Above and behind the orchestra there is a large scaffold, and scaffolds on the right and left sides of the stage, all softened by scrim. Above everything is a white ceiling with a huge oval opening showing a dark blue sky.

Francis and the brothers are dressed in traditional capucines with hoods. There is no attempt at all to represent the monastery or even the door the angel will knock on too loudly in the fourth scene, only sparse furniture and scaffolding all around on which the angel or the huge chorus (dressed in flat black hooded gowns) can appear.

In comparison with other productions this one stresses the interaction of St. Francis with the other characters rather than placing him on a pedestal. In stressing the life lived with dramaturgy, this production leaves us with a more concrete sense of personal truth. For this Rodney Gilfry did a wonderful job, and the emphasis on action took some attention away from the question whether he could succeed the voice of José van Dam. To my consternation his voice faltered six or seven times during the first act alone as he moved to upper notes. At the beginning of the second act, we had an announcement that he was singing sick and thereafter the faltering almost disappeared. By the Third Act it was clear he would have to reach beyond his own expectations to complete the piece, but he did. In the closing scene, which was made to depict not the death of Francis but Francis dying, Gilfry's personal effort brought everything else to a climax. His final scale upward, praying that God fill him, ravish him, inebriate him with His excess of truth, came through with heart, free of straining effort though slightly clipped, and made me sob.

There were two great costumes, the Leper and the second garb of the Angel, once she revealed herself to Francis in the Fifth Scene. The latter was a close representation of the kaleidoscopic detail for which Messaien called in the libretto, rather than the plain whites and wonderful one-winged monochrome blue of previous productions. But the Leper was a new idea and a tour de force. He had a plastic scuba-like suit of lemon yellow and black irregular shapes all over and looked like a gila monster. Here the acting of Hubert Delamboye and, as everywhere else, the directing of Klaus Bertish deserves special mention.

There are many moments in this opera where the main tones being sung fall between tones you can name. One comes near the end of Scene Four when Bernard answers the question he has Jesus put to him, that face is the likeness of His (de Vous, de Vous). Several come in the Sermon to the Birds. Our Angel added a new one that I think did not belong there, a rather too sharp note when she delivered the truth to the Leper in the Third Scene. But in the purity of her delivery, Camilla Tilling held this wrong note without a slip, perfectly in tune. She is very pregnant at this time, and it affected her long notes not at all.

Everybody could see conductor Ingo Metzmacher at work throughout, and yet he was not overly conspicuous except for a moment during the scene change between the first and second scenes. The long intervals of bird music in the Sixth Scene were perfect. Though he was placed behind the singers rather than in their line of sight nobody missed a cue (there were a few monitors for the singers, including one in the front row center). Unfortunately, the piccolo part that announces the arrival of the Angel had to be brought off by a mere human: placed right in the front of the orchestra it came off too loud and shrilly out of tune. Soon enough the xylophone takes it up and covers the error; let us hope this can somehow get fixed.

The chorus was magnificent. Their last note, with orchestral tutti and gleaming white light from the rear of the stage, was louder than the last note of any Gurrelieder I have heard. As to the light, it might have been the very same one Nordey used at the Paris production in 2004: a rectangular array, ten by twenty feet, of about thirty spots that gradually brighten to a level you cannot believe you can still look at, and then black out for the end.

For me the crucial message from Francis's life is his discovery, which Messaien places right at the beginning, that although we might be glad to have all the abilities and good things that God has given us, the only thing we can really take credit for is accepting some part of the pain of Jesus on the Cross with equanimity. This alone is perfect joy. We must not confuse this act of acceptance with self-flagellation: life inflicts enough injustice on us and it is the acts of others we must accept and forgive, not our own. The theme returns in the penultimate scene, when Francis prays that God grant him two things before he dies: to suffer the pain Jesus suffered on the Cross and to find himself in possession of the love with which Jesus was able to forgive those who inflicted this pain upon him. The fulfillment of these two wishes was emblematized in Francis receiving the stigmata, one of the fullest experiences of God's presence an individual can imagine undergoing. It is the function of great art to remind us of these stories and show how very credible they are, how close and near at hand it is for us to bring their pattern into our own lives.

Mozart's last opera, composed for the coronation of the short-reigned Habsburg Emperor Leopold II (1790-1792), completes the Met's season-ending Mozart revivals.  Met music director James Levine yielded the baton for this work – only in the Met's repertoire since he led the premiere of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production in 1984 – to the talented early music specialist Harry Bicket.  The younger conductor may lack Levine's methodical concentration, but he nevertheless led the orchestra with fresh, innovative verve.
            The evening belonged to the duo of Susan Graham and Heidi Grant Murphy, who have made the roles of the lovers Sesto and Servilia, respectively, their home turf (I first came across them in the roles in Paris in 1999).  Ms. Graham's well trained mezzo overcame any difficulty detectable in this season's new production of Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride to deliver a flawless performance in the trouser part of Sesto.  "Parto, ma tu, ben mio," accompanied by a clarinet solo, won the evening's most enthusiastic ovation.  Ms. Murphy's lilting soprano may be small voiced for a house as big as the Met, but it delivers with delicate intricacy.  The Georgian (former Soviet, not Southern) soprano Tamar Iveri made a notable effort as the seductive Vitellia.  Anke Vondung's Annio, another trouser part, rounded off the Roman conspirators commendably.  Ramon Vargas lacked the staid imperial presence necessary for a solid Tito, but clearly worked hard.
            Ponnelle's production is grand and refreshingly avoids Eurotrash temptations to "enliven" the "boring" opera seria genre by updating the setting to the present day or some other time.  His reliance on decaying Roman architecture alludes effectively to Rome's late first century A.D. political decadence and the gracious Tito's hopeful battle against it.  Keeping the opera in its original idiom also gave tribute to the eighteenth-century convention of using antiquity to frame moral messages palatably for the rulers of the time.  Leopold II's reign was not long enough to make a judgment, but we can hope that Tito's clemency to the friends and courtiers who conspired against him might still resonate even today.