As New York’s second opera company, City Opera has evolved as a venue for experimental and less frequently performed works.  In no repertoire is this more apparent than Handel, where daring productions of the composer’s operas face no serious competition from any other American company (apart for Julius Caesar and the recent Rodelinda, the Met barely touches it).  In recent seasons the newly named David Koch Theater has witnessed Ariodante, Xerxes, Rinaldo, Orlando, Alcina, Acis and Galatea, Semele, and Agrippina, in addition to Partenope, which dates from 1998.

Francisco Negrin’s effort is a light take but suitable for an opera that combines a comedic plot with instances of real drama.  John Conklin’s airy, pastel sets evoke the Italian south of one’s imagination, with pale blues and greens suggesting the warmth of sky and sea.  Paul Steinberg’s bright costumes place us there in an outré modern milieu that might well be the province of the royalty and nobility who populate the cast.

The plot of Partenope demands a steady stream of male voices.  The title character, the Queen of Naples, has three suitors – the Greek princes Arsace and Armindo in residence and a would-be foreign conqueror Emilio, the ruler of the barbarian Cumans.  Arsace is pursued by a jilted lover, Rosmira, who arrives to reconquer him in a male guise only he can see through.  Seeking his heart through Partenope’s offices, Rosmira contrives to force him into a duel, which Arsace unmasks by demanding, as the right of the challenged, that the combatants fight stripped to the waist.  Partenope succumbs to her original instinct to fall for Armindo, Rosmira and Arsace are more or less happily reunited, and Emilio, though undefeated in battle, learns humility and accepts Partenope’s friendship rather than her love.

The opera draws great interest as a period piece.  After a rather dull first act, the second and third parts blossom into a cornucopia of well designed arias that require a virtuosity characteristic of Handel’s better works.  The heavily male cast is well served in City Opera’s revival.  We live in a veritable age of countertenors, and both the young (27) Anthony Roth Costanzo’s Armindo and Iestyn Davies’s Arsace were models of the genre with their crystal clear diction and a purity of sound that the vocal type uniquely demands.  Tenor Nicholas Coppolo carried off the role of Emilio with real feeling, and City Opera veteran Daniel Mobbs sang well as Partenope’s tutor Ormonte, the opera’s lowest part.  Cyndia Sieden did rather less well in the title role, sounding consistently underpowered.  Stephanie Houtzeel matched her colleagues as Rosmira, combining dramatic talent with fine mezzo singing that has filled the proverbial trousers of Richard Strauss’s Octavian and Composer in major houses.  Christian Curnyn’s conducting followed the intricacies of Handel’s score with remarkable feeling.

The times are no longer made for heroic idealism.  How then, should one approach the last of Wagner’s “immature” operas – the three works that came before the standard canon his growing crowd of enthusiasts know and love?  Deutsche Oper Berlin’s Wagner Festival has answered that question with a concept production by Philipp Stölzl that would almost certainly been impossible for most of the last century – in effect, with the opera’s re-Nazification (it was, common legend holds, Hitler’s favorite).

Here we have no romantic idealist.  From start to finish this Rienzi is a megalomaniacal dictator, Mussolini in style and Hitler in substance, a living, breathing personification of everything we should all understand about totalitarianism and the cynical sensibility that continues to link it with “populism,” “democracy,” “freedom,” and other concepts that the twentieth century proved to be as malleably subjective as they were once lovingly enshrined as the virtuous destiny of enlightened humanity.

The curtain opens on a fantasist.  Rienzi is alone in his magnificent office, fully attired in a stylized fascist uniform with his back to audience looking out over video-projected Alpine peaks that evoke Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” at Berchtesgaden.  A pantomime reveals that he is listening to the overture along with us.  During the romantic introduction he (portrayed for the scene by a stunt double) pretends to conduct, flips and flops over his desk, does cartwheels, and finds himself sheepish before an aid delivering a report.  The more militaristic-sounding march sees our hero contemplate the video projection as it takes him into space and a contemplation of the globe.

The people he curses are not callous opportunists who have betrayed him, but rather a mob of weaklings who lacked the strength to fulfill his magnificent vision.  One is rightly reminded of Hitler’s Bunker (indeed, the second part of the production is a split stage, with a war ravaged city above and bunker below) ravings, in which he blamed the German people for his downfall and announced that they deserved destruction.  Here we have the same thought, in Rienzi’s final act monologue in which he curses the “degenerate” Romans for their failure to live up to his dreams.  His prayer aria, steeped in the grand opera tradition, accompanies forlorn play with models of gigantic buildings that seem to be replicas of Hitler’s models for his planned grandiose new capital.  Earlier in the opera we are treated to a ballet sequence that merely displays Rienzi delivering a Mussolini-style oration on a giant video screen and the execution, one by one, of the conspirators he publicly pardons.

This effort was entirely successful and a bright example of Regietheater working.  The visual effort was so stunning that the singing almost appears to take second place.  But Torsten Kerl delivered the title role with soaring sonorities that suggest a great future in other Wagner roles.  As Rienzi’s sister Irene, the only other major role, Camilla Nylund sang with a clarion soprano one would like to hear more of.  Kate Aldrich turned in a finely passionate performance as the love-besotted Adriano, Wagner’s only major trouser role.  Sebastian Lang-Lessing led a fine orchestral effort, and no one can ever fault the Deutsche Oper’s chorus.

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.