Tough economic times have had a noticeable impact on the arts over the past couple of seasons, and Washington opera-goers will notice this most acutely in the conclusion of their city’s first full staging of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, an on-going project since the 2005-2006 season shared with the San Francisco Opera and directed by the prolific if not always popular Francesca Zambello.  Halfway through the Cycle budget cuts forced the delay of Siegfried by one season (it was replaced by an uninspired revival of The Flying Dutchman), to last spring.  Now additional financial troubles have forced the company to downgrade the final opera, Götterdämmerung, to just two concert performances.

Contrary to expectations, the concert format was no let down.  Zambello’s “concept” production, which set the first three operas in an evolving twentieth-century America, seemed to decline in quality and taste (and, likely, budget) with each successive premiere.  We do not know what she had in mind for Götterdämmerung, but in practice the absence of a full stage production meant that the singers simply appeared on a stage sparsely decorated by a “smoke and mirrors” projection of mists and clouds on screens, curtains, and other drops that complement the action of the plot.  Small scale props and costumes that seemed appropriate to the characters (formal wear for Gunther and Gutrune, a simpler gown for Brünnhilde, a gold-lamé Asian chemise for Hagen, dress down basic black for Siegfried) lent credibility.  Indeed, with only a few more innovations and the removal of the music stands (which only some cast members appeared to need), the “concert” performance might have passed for a respectable minimalist stage production.

The musical effort was mostly a success.  Irene Theorin, who sang Ariadne with the company this season, debuted here as the Siegfried Brünnhilde last year, also making her Met debut in the broadcast Walküre of its full Ring Cycle.  The last opera’s incarnation of the role is the most challenging, and Theorin brought admirable vocal and dramatic intensity to the part.  She has a tendency toward shrillness in the upper register, something not noticeable in her performances last season, but 90 percent of her performance this afternoon represented Wagner singing at its best.  She was fortunate to have a strong Siegfried in Jon Frederic West, a true Heldentenor whose strong tones and rich baritonal qualities held up for the entire performance.  Gidon Saks barked through much of Hagen’s music, but the rest of the cast made up for it.  Alan Held, who sang all three Wotan roles in the previous operas, was a welcome addition to this cast as Gunther.  Gutrune is never a standout role because of the weak nature of the part, but Bernadette Flaitz, making her Washington National Debut in these performances, turned in a competent effort, as did Elizabeth Bishop (once a soprano) as both Waltraute and the Second Norn.  Gordon Hawkins reprised his successful Alberich in the character’s brief second act appearance of this opera.  Frederika Brillembourg should be commended for her double duty as the First Norn and Flosshilde.  Carter Scott’s fine soprano rounded out the Norns, while Jennifer Lynn Waters and Brandy Lynn Hawkins sang out the remaining Rhinemaidens’ parts swimmingly.  Philippe Auguin drew possibly the best playing I have ever heard from the Washington Opera’s orchestra, which received choruses of well deserved bravos.  Certainly this was the best of its Wagner playing in recent memory.

Flu season devastated Washington National’s presentation of Richard Strauss’s delightful comedy.  Both tenors who were to share the role of Bacchus and mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, cast in the trouser role of the Composer, cancelled most of their appearances, leaving the company to rush for replacements. Fortunately, the replacements materialized and the show has gone on.  Set in the “house of the richest man in Vienna,” Ariadne auf Naxos includes a prologue in which the master commands that, because of the time constraints posed by a planned firework display, both the serious opera company and a street harlequinade he has hired to amuse his guests perform their works simultaneously.  The opera’s “act” features this awkward dual performance, which oddly enough harmonizes the two very different theatrical genres to reveal colorful, if rather cerebral, insights into human relations and the nature of love and abandonment.

Chris Alexander’s award-winning production, on loan from the Seattle Opera, places the action in an unidentified major American city (“let’s say in Washington DC,” Alexander said in an interview).  Although it is hard to imagine any private entertainment so lavish in the nation’s capital, the prologue is set in what looks like the “staff only” area of the Phillips Collection or one of the city’s other smaller museums.  Institutional lavatories are converted for use as dressing rooms by paper signs marked “Bacchus” and “Ariadne,” after the opera-within-the-opera’s leading characters.  The act unfolds in what looks like a piano lounge, with on-stage dinner guests (including in some performances the opera-loving Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg themselves) surrounding a circular stage and flanked by works of art.  Zerbinetta, sung charmingly yet precisely by the talented Russian coloratura soprano Lyubov Petrova, delivers her aria “Grossmächtige Prinzessin,” in which she tells the abandoned and lovelorn Ariadne to deal with the fact that men stray, reclining atop the piano.  And it was a delight to have the evening ended with the fireworks promised by the plot.

Petrova’s performance was the vocal highlight of the evening.  Swedish soprano Irene Theorin has received much attention for her fine Wagner singing and delivered a radiant Isolde at Bayreuth this summer, but somehow her Ariadne just did not come together.  She sang the dreamy “Es gibt ein Reich” will artful sensitivity, but the rest of the role fell flat, vocally limited and dramatically wooden.  Her leading man, tenor Corey Bix, fared worse, delivering an underpowered performance that noticeably collapsed in the last scene of the opera, Bacchus’s finest music.  Elizbeth DeShong’s Composer was well crafted and delivered in attractively urgent tones; it was too bad her physique could not complement the delicate balance between animus and anima that the role demands.  Jennifer Lynn Waters, Cynthia Hanna, and Emily Albrink, all Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists, sang the roles of the comforting nymphs.  Washington National Opera regulars Corey Evan Rotz, Greg Fedderly, and Grigory Soloviov made their usual competent contributions as members of the harlequin troupe.  Honolulu Symphony conductor Andreas Delfs cannot be faulted for the orchestra’s pedestrian playing of Strauss’s score.

Washington’s elite – or at least those in it who have leisure time in these heady days of health care drudgery — turned out in force for the opening of the National Symphony’s season.  Among the audience one could observe former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and wife Andrea Mitchell, ubiquitous Washington insider Vernon Jordan, noted journalists Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthamer, and former Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey, among others famous and infamous.  Despite the rainy weather, the beginning of the Symphony’s 79th season was no dull affair, with flowers, abundant evening dress, and even the appearance of the orchestra’s ladies in colorful evening gowns.  Principal conductor Ivan Fischer has had a mixed reception in the year since he assumed the post, and, though I rather enjoyed the concert, reactions were far from uniform.

The entire Kennedy Center complex will follow a “Focus on Russia” theme this season, complete with a longer than usual visit by the opera and ballet of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater.  So it was entirely appropriate to begin the program with a rousing performance of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Russlan and Ludmilla.  This was followed by a playful rendition of Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta,” a pastiche of folk pieces in the tradition of his native land, which he shared with Maestro Fischer.  The common heritage was, to be completely honest, probably the only reason to include the piece, but no one regretted it.  The Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Melodies) ended the first part of the program.  Based on Hungarian gypsy tunes rather than the abundant Spanish variety, national provenance again was clearly the reason for including the piece.  But once again it was no mistake.  Jozsef Lendvay’s solo violin brought the music to life with artful elegance.

Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 opened the second part of the program. Soloist Evgeny Kissin, still a prodigy after all these years, delivered a strong Romantic interpretation, eased by Fischer’s likeminded conducting. Kissin, who will also play the piece this season for the opening nights of the Boston Symphony at home and at Carnegie Hall, made us forget that the piece, really Chopin’s first work in the genre (his Piano Concerto No. 1 was written later than this piece but published earlier and is thus listed first), is not among the concert repertoire’s most thrilling selections.  He received a well deserved standing ovation at the end.  The next selection returned to the world of opera, this time Richard Strauss’s Salome, in the form of its famous dance.  Fischer sacrificed subtlety and seductive power to raw sound, but it is always a thrilling piece of music to hear and imagine, even for Washington’s cerebral audience.  The gala character of the evening virtually demanded something familiar for its conclusion, and we found it in the other Strauss’s best known waltz, On the Beautiful Blue Danube.  The orchestra played it jauntily enough, though it never really seems to excite anyone.  The Dvorak dance given as an encore was much more enjoyable.  It was too bad that the nation’s capital was not honored with a pre-concert performance of the national anthem, as befits such occasions.