Home The Theaters Season Schedules Season Highlights Click on titles for additional pages The Festivals Festival Schedules Resource Links                   Woyzeck the Play, Wozzeck the Opera, Saturday, January 7, 2006 Maeterlinck and Opera, Saturday, May 20, 2006   Click here to ask details about participating in a FestivalTour seminar                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Idomeneo in San Francisco   Munich in 1781 was hardly the big city, not an enlightened Paris where Gluck had recently turned the opera world on its ear, not a European capital like Vienna where Italian operatic imperialism was unassailable. But Munich was certainly aware of operatic life in the big city, and did its best to compete, doing so by the commission of an opera called Idomeneo to a bright young Bavarian composer, an ascending star, W.A. Mozart.   No one would know then that this little opera with its big aspirations could become a mainstay of current big house repertory, though truth to tell it sits there a little uncomfortably. While it has the big chorus scenes Paris loved, even the sine non qua ballet that opera companies rarely attempt these days, not to mention the scenic spectacular that universally wows, it inevitably also has the Mozart genius that goes well beyond these old opera stories and their splendid vocalism. It is music that heads straight for the heart and the mind. The Marriage of Figaro is just beyond the horizon (five years away) as immediately after Idomeneo Mozart begins exploring the more nuanced world of comedy first with a singspiel and then two small, unfinished buffa's.   But meanwhile the serious Idomeneo is built on an already dead operatic irony. To save his own life Idomeneo must sacrifice another life, and to save his people he really has to do so, even though Idamante, his son and his victim, has saved the people from the terrible sea monster that Neptune unleashed when Idomeneo was reluctant. Opera seria is big and bold and improbable. Rossini would again make it so only a few years later, but never Mozart, a valiant child of the Enlightenment.   This early Mozart indulges the women who love Idamante in delicate and passionate personal expressions of their love. Mozart places Idamante's father in quiet, deep torment, and even Idamante (in Mozart's Munich the castrato Vicenzo dal Prato) voices real grief in his often above-the-staff, male-soprano showpiece. And these are only the seeds of discovery for the exposition of human souls in his greatest masterpieces, the Da Ponte comedies -- these Idomeneo creations soon enough will become his Countess and Elvira, his Count and his tongue-in-cheek castrato, Cherubino.   San Francisco is now only sometimes the big city operatically speaking, certainly not the New York of the renewed Met, or even Munich of today for that matter, and in the case of the current edition of Idomeneo, San Francisco does not even try to compete with big operatic thinkers, as it did in the 1977 when Jean Pierre Ponnelle made the first San Francisco Idomeneo. Instead San Francisco Opera dusted off its twenty year-old John Copley production, entrusted it to the broad musicality of its music director, Donald Runnicles, and cast it with blue chip singers, even including a couple of the stars of this rare repertory.   The Copley production does indeed provide a comfortable background for this minor Mozart masterpiece. Its settings designed by John Conklin delicately reference antiquity, its costumes coolly incorporate tunics and togas for its choruses with rich, courtly seventeenth century dress for its protagonists. Mr. Copley makes his actors' movements flow with the music in naturalistic ways, motions that are continuously choreographed, that echo the naturalness of the music rather than illustrate or impose the artificiality of the opera seria genre. Mr. Conklin's visual images flow in the same fashion, seemingly in continuous movement as aria follows aria. The entirety of the staging was like a beautiful wallpaper that surrounds voice and music.   Maestro Runnicles brought the entire second act to a timeless, sublime musicality, the departure trio dangling its hopes and fears, the arias melting with emotion. The great third act quartet unfolded grandly, then four graphically magnificent horses rose gracefully from the sea (masking any sort of terrifying sea monster). And the music never faltered. Well, only once -- a small moment of real drama when the cue for the deus ex machina was a trifle late and we all had a fleeting moment to laugh at the ridiculousness of such things. This evening in toto was like a perfect recording, we knew the music need never end.   Tenor Kurt Streit provided his fine Idomeneo, his well-produced, clear voice able to encompass the huge range of emotions inherent in this difficult role. The Idamante of mezzo-soprano Alice Coote amply filled the musical, vocal and even histrionic needs of this complex role, a perfect Idamante for this Copley exercise in musical flow. Genia Kühmeier sang beautifully as Ilia, glorious pianissimos flowing into passionate outpourings. Even the smaller scale of the spurned Electra of Iano Tamar seemed perfectly at home in the calm flow of this production. Bass Robert MacNeil was adequate as the High Priest of Neptune, less so the Arbace of Adler fellow Alek Shrader.   Lucia di Lammermoor in San Francisco   The well traveled Lucia production of veteran English director Graham Vick landed on the stage of War Memorial Opera house in the hands of assistant director Marco Gandini. Typical of brand name opera it was theatrically sound, and quite beautiful to look at in the production design of Paul Brown, another English brand name among the world's important opera houses.   If Graham Vick sometimes takes chances, and stretches sensibilities, as example those purported in his Lisbon Ring cycle project, this Lucia di Lammermoor was an exercise in staging a numbers opera in storytelling terms that did not strain sensibilities. Its scenes unfold in a succession of arias and duets in which one character confronts and reacts to another, with the apparent risk of tedium inherent to anything unrelentingly sequential. To avoid such risk this production worked overtime to engage the audience through visual character magnification and scenic movement.   The risks of tedium are in fact very real, that is unless Donizetti's bel canto takes flight, as it did in San Francisco. Thus Vick's exaggerated production values became superfluous making the miracle of this production that its excessive means did not themselves become boring, and that finally the production was probably helpful. This was much the same case as the Graham Vick production of Tannhauser last fall.   The visual concept exploited the always useful technique of geometrically modifying the visual field of the stage through the use of shutter flats. Though the succession of shapes risked becoming a compendium of nifty geometric shapes they all, of course, flowed easily. The Vick production was effectively (what else) lighted by English designer Nick Chelton ranging from very dark to very bright values with possible emanation from any number of directions, and at crucial moments making use of shadow puppet effects. These copious techniques again risked becoming a catalog of tricks though of course it all flowed beautifully.   This Lucia di Lammermoor was bel canto, and if not of definitive style it moved to a level of lyricism that transported body and soul to another sphere. Conductor Jean-Yves Ossonce (said to be making his American debut though the program booklet strangely mentions Minnesota Opera) was the primary force contributing to the musical effectiveness of the performance. Mo. Ossonce kept his tempos lilting, never allowing Donzetti's continuum to touch ground, with ample license given to fine flights of horn, harp, flute, clarinet and of course voice. This French conductor placed no barrier before the stage (unlike much of the conducting in the recent Das Rheingold) participating wholeheartedly with the lyricism of his stage to the degree that his presence melded itself into that of the singers.   Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti gave reason to re-title the opera Edoardo di Ravenswood as he offered a no-holds-barred vocal performance in flights of lyricism that were bel canto raptures, be they of pleasure or pain. Extraordinary in Mr. Filianoti's performance was his willingness to move to the edge of his technique, and blurring sometimes the boundary between bel canto and tenorismo. Bel canto is a performers art, and one could only be grateful to Mr. Filianoti for revealing himself as a singer rather more than as the lovesick, impotent Scottish estate heir. His stagger and lurch approach to acting was equally singerly, right at home in and appropriate to bel canto.   At the bow of French super-star Nathalie Dessay the audience leapt to its feet, suitably impressed that the world's reigning Lucia had graced its stage. In so many ways she herself embodies the role, her wide-eyed, frail figure that of Donizetti's vulnerable heroine, her voice able to soar in beautiful lines to bel canto's heights, her temperament able to project real madness. Though her famous Lucia is obviously quite mannered by now it was never at odds with this production, except perhaps in the weird celeste/flute duet in her mad scene (what was that?!). Surely her original Lucia was more real than it is now, and it is scary to imagine what it will be twenty years from now -- given the stalwart nature and secure vocalism of this excellent artist she will still be singing it.   Competing with these two vivid performances the Ashton of Italian baritone Gabriele Viviani in his American debut was pale by comparison, yet he capably and securely upheld up the musico-dramatic needs of the villain of this production. The American contingent of San Francisco's international cast competed less well. The Raimondo of Oren Gradus was indeed competent while the rough voiced Arturo of Andrew Bidlack betrayed his youth and lack of finish. It is rare that the Adler Fellows hold their own against more experienced artists, placing the audience at the disadvantage of having to forgive youth and inexperience while paying international opera house prices for tickets.   The exhortation to search out the closest exit in the event of emergency evacuation of the theater reappeared after it mercifully had disappeared in Das Rheingold.   Das Rheingold in San Francisco   One wishes, but only every so often, for the good old days when a Ring was a very special event. Now it seems the Ring may have overtaken Aida as the most produced mega-opera, at least among the big companies around the world. This does gives us the advantage of seeing it in many different ways, clarifying its mysteries, laying bare its weaknesses, with the result that one approaches any new Ring with skepticism rather than blind enthusiasm.   Das Rheingold is surely the producers nightmare of the four, as it has eleven roles requiring major voices, not including the Rhine maidens. One should expect any major American company to ably fill these spots, as San Francisco Opera has done though without great distinction. At the same time Rheingold has little of the musical-emotional payoff we expect from Walküre and Götterdämmerung thus it generates less excitement at the box office. There was the disappointment of visible empty seats at its opening.   Nonetheless the Eb major rumble of the Rhine never fails too ignite shivers of anticipation for the huge and indeed magical exposition to come of the nineteenth century's socio-economic problems, and Wagner's effective but naïve denouement. San Francisco's gold rush was simultaneous with the genesis of Wagner's Ring treatise, thus the famous prelude seemed to belong in San Francisco and in its opera house, the gray, gold and pale blue colors like the Sierras. Gold lights bounced from the reflecting surfaces of the polished woods of the strings and the luster of the silver and brass instruments, seeming to betray the placement of the Rhine gold.   Once these initial conceptual shivers had dissipated we were left with a scrim on which throbbed two dimensional colors, lots of them, naively illustrating Wagner's river. Moving into the river generated some excitement, with a transparent blue floor, three gold clad river nymphs, and a huge black and white projection of a mountain stream tumbling over stones. Maybe this is the Sierras, San Francisco will be Valhalla, and there was another conceptual shiver and more fog than ever before flowed onto the War Memorial Opera House stage. Alberich appeared slipping and sliding on the damp stones, dressed as a forty-niner, a strong, physical performer, Richard Paul Fink. Alberich and the Rhine maidens ceremoniously floated a large gold silk cloth around the stage, then Alberich wrapped himself in it and fled the stage.   The temporary residence of the gods was filled with lounge chairs, tables, architects' blue prints, one had the impression that it might even be a construction trailer or a trailer park. Its inhabitants, Teutonic gods, trailer-trash even if dressed in what appeared to be post-Victorian garb. Within this context there were excellent performances, Jennifer Larmore as a truly convincing trailer-class Fricka, Jason Collins and Charles Taylor were the handsomely voiced, handsome, if no-good hangers-on Froh and Donner. Tamara Wapinsky made a vibrant, beautifully sung and acted, young adolescent Freia. Mark Delavan was the appropriately vain, thin-voiced, head-of-household Wotan. The several extended family squabbles of Das Rheingold unfolded in sometimes amusing, always un-focused staging.   Adding yet another conceptual dimension Fasolt and Fafner were giant cartoon characters complete with stainless steel fingers. Descending from the steal beam construction of this disfunctional family's new high-rise dream home, the sympathetic Andrea Silvestrelli (Fasolt) and the rough Gunther Groissbock (Fafner) were comic book heros. The sleazy story unfolded as it always does in the lively, well staged Nibelheim scene with some fine, if perhaps too cheap Disney special effects. The especially effective Loge of Stefan Margita brought the sparks of intrique and deception that define some of those seedy friends we all have, particularly those of us who live in trailer parks.   The real, the mythical, the symbolic, and the cartoon were intermixed in the production's storytelling. Two dimensional, color saturated projections on an upstage scrim sometimes illustrated the story while flat colorful shapes throbbed on the downstage scrim during the orchestrally accompanied scene changes. These scene shifts introduced a further conceptual dimension as back-stage shouting emerged through the scrim and over the orchestra, a rich idea that enhanced the duties of the underworld Nibelungen. When visible on-stage the Nibelungen were not these vocal stagehands but an impressive group of children that added piercing squeals from time to time. If there was no shortage of ideas or means to realize them in this production, there was the suspicion that this was but a list of ideas, not a production concept.   Though Freia had expressed real regret at being separated from Fasolt she is reconciled to the trailer-trash gods, and finally all ascended a gangplank, clinking their glasses of champagne, presumably climbing towards the next episode of their story, or onto a cruise, or something.   Through all of this the San Francisco Opera Orchestra delivered Wagner's score from the eloquent pit, Donald Runnicles at the helm. It is an excellent orchestra, expanded for Wagnerian requirements, amply fulfilling all musical requirements in a hall sympathetic to large orchestral sound. Runnicles is famed for Wagner, and if this Rheingold's musical points were seemingly pallid it was perhaps because the stage was not sure what it was doing.   Of important note is that prior to the performance we were spared the condescending exhortation to seek out our route to the nearest exit (though many of the audience perhaps wished they had a way out during this performance). Of more important note is that the stage director and designers did not take bows. Millions of dollars and massive energy were expended on this production, and as we, the audience needed to express our appreciation to the performers for their work we also needed to express our appreciation, or lack of, to the producers, here left unmentioned as they apparently prefer to remain anonymous.   Pelleas et Melisande in Montpellier   The tale of Melisande and her husband Golaud and her lover Pelleas is not very interesting, really a fairly common bourgeoise domestic situation. Debussy's telling of this banal story is however one of the great operatic masterpieces. Debussy's dark drama exploits the natural and emotional atmospheres and landscapes offered by Maeterlinck's symbolist play about love's fatal attractions, greatly refining the sonorities of the post-Romantic orchestra and challenging the technical resources of twentieth century stagecraft. Well, it was 1902 and one presumes Paris' Opera Comique was a state-of-the-art theater as Paris was the world's state-of-the-arts city.   The Opéra de Montpellier came up with the questionable idea of staging Pelleas et Melisande as a mise-en-espace (costumes, platforms, lights, no scenery and a bare minimum of props (a pail of water, a knife, two chairs and for Melisande's death a skeletal cot), and staging it to Debussy's piano score, created between 1893 and 1895. Debussy did not orchestrate Pelleas et Melisande until 1901 when he was assured of its mise-en-scene at the Opéra Comique for which he added its magnificent orchestral interludes to accommodate time needed for scenic transformations. But a fascinating idea, Montpellier's exploration of the primal moments of this theatrical masterpiece.   Piano previews of Pelleas et Melisande were offered in the poet Mallarme's salon, an intimate platform for exploring the depths of symbolist thought, and in which, apparently, the new art of photography was among discussions. There exists in fact a photo of Debussy at a small piano à droit (an upright) with whom one can imagine singers not accomplished enough to sing at Paris' various opera houses but musically accomplished enough to gather around the piano to satisfy the demands of the avant-garde (here coping with Debussy's experimental, vocally quite un-operatic narrative).   These were not the resources at Montpellier Opéra Comedie where three extraordinary opera singers were the primary players in this salon tragedy, where a sizeable platform thrust itself deeply into the auditorium, where sophisticated lighting instruments were visible and an imposing Hamburg Steinway concert piano sat at the side of the thrust stage. Intimate yes, by current operatic standards though hardly a salon, and most of all an exquisitely exciting theatrical space.   To stage the opera Montpellier chose Jean-Yves Courrégelongue, a metteur en scène who has made a career assisting others, notably Peter Sellars, Patrice Chereau and Montpellier's artist-in-residence Jean Paul Scarpitta, directors of ultimate theatrical sophistication. Sophistication was indeed apparent, as was preparation, good sense and solid technique. Without a specific scenic context and without orchestral colors, Courrélongue's players emerged in high relief. He had had only their movements to embody Debussy's symbolism and did so effectively with abstract actions (Golaud staring forward, Melisande far behind him in the initial forest encounter), abstract placement (Pelleas and Melisande standing off either side of the thrust platform for the final, and fateful declaration of love), abstract tableaux (Golaud, defeated, yet still in supplication of the truth from the dead Melisande). But at rare times too all stage action was suppressed, the players in simple explication of the text as lieder singers.   Mr. Courrégelongue attempted to integrate the idea of photography into his concept, pounding it home in the delicate scene where Yniold regards the fearful lambs headed perhaps to slaughter. His primitive camera projects small cloud images onto a scrim, asking or telling us to reconcile photography to symbolism when we had plenty of other things on our mind, like Debussy's opera. This problematic role, Yniold, was taken by an adolescent girl, allowing the player to assume musical and dramatic complexities beyond the reach of a younger singer, if compromising Maeterlinck's inherent naturalism.   In keeping with the conceit of primitive photography the color palate of Silver Sentimenti's costumes were gray color tones, blacks and whites, in turn of the century shapes, perhaps updated in the case of Pelleas to what Americans recognize as the Great Gatsby (specifically Robert Redford as F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 hero). This interesting if over-specific image burdened Pelleas with precise meanings that possibly clashed with the vague shadows of Maeterlinck's symbolist world. The players were in fact very often dark silhouettes in front of the blank luminous zinc plate scrim provided by the ultra-minimalist decors of Mathieu Dupuy. Though at times this scrim was covered with hazy abstract, sometimes blinking black and white dotted shapes, projections created by Carolina Suarez that distracted from rather than artfully penetrated Maeterlinck's abstract natural world.   The gaunt Golaud of black voiced Laurent Alvaro dominated the stage, relentlessly, uselessly struggling, the Melisande of Marie-Adeline Henry seemed more resolute and more natural than the usual ephemeral Debussy heroine, the Pelleas of Ivan Geissler was perhaps the ideal Debussy hero, lyrical and slight and frustrating in his passivity. All are finished singing actors pursuing interesting careers. Finally Courrégelongue succeeded in keeping Debussy's players as philosophical figments rather than troubled, rather uninteresting humans, rendering his quite effective crescendo to the lengthy denouement an explosion of ideas moreso that an exposition of over-wrought, operatic emotions.   Pelleas et Melisande comes early in the Debussy oeuvre (as does Clair de la lune as example), the great piano works coming from his late period. Thus perhaps one must not expect Debussy's score to be one of his pianistic monuments. It does however have the responsibility of creating Debussy's musical continuum, the center of his symbolist poetic and in fact the substance of his opera far more than are the banalities of its verbal narrative. Alas, the careful, too soft piano playing of Anne Pagès-Boisset seldom rose above accompaniment to this narrative leaving us aching for real musical involvement and at least the few or even the many wrong notes that might inevitably result. The pianist is most certainly the protagonist of this proto-Pelleas et Melisande. May one imagine such a project with a real collaborative pianist. Michel Béroff and Peter Serkin come to mind, and a host of others. One hopes there is a next time, and soon.   Said and done, only to add that Mr. Courrégelongue's staging of the bows was a pretentious mess, a sloppy ending to a slick afternoon.   Don Giovanni in Montpellier   Mille tre seductions in Spain alone, six hundred forty in Italy, though but only one hundred in France [?!], these numbers may add up to the number of Don Giovanni productions that have failed around the world, maybe last year alone. One sure thing -- Don Giovanni seduces audiences into the opera house, and he most often leaves them there.   The Opera National de Montpellier opened its latest version last summer with two performances at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier, and continued the run with three more performances in late March/early April. Intelligence gathered from conversations in front of the opera house after the final performance revealed that perhaps the summer performances had not been seductive, that the rehearsals for the March reprise had deepened the characters, and that with the final performance on April 6, this Don Giovanni had arrived.   And seductive it was indeed, though with some bumps along the way. As these well-known characters revealed themselves, one was struck by their youth, all late twenties-early thirties. Primal operatic fears (was this yet another premature use of young-artist-program singers?) were allayed as these singers immediately passed as finished artists, their youth displayed in fresh, well-focused voices in handsome, histrionically expressive postures.   Stage director Jean Paul Scarpitta deployed a clinically suspect evaluation of Don Giovanni's 'Don Juan syndrome.' Scarpitta's Don was not the confident stud, instead a troubled young man. Scarpitta's Donna Anna was the Freudian one, hanging desperately onto the Don despite the threats of her father. Masetto was not a bumpkin, Zerlina was not a pushover, and Donna Elvira was a woman deeply in love. Further dramatic confusion ensued when the Don broke into hysterical laughter in the first act finale, leaving us bewildered at intermission, and frustrated that we had not been able to comprehend the familiar music.   The second act was the revelation, each of Mozart's actors pouring out the torments of youthful love, the Don's Deh vieni alla finestra sung mezza voce, almost vocally whispered, transporting us inside a delicate psyche searching for love, Zerlina palpably oozing love for Masetto in Vedrai carino, Elvira possessed by love in Mi tradi, Donna Anna's mind racing in Non mi dir, Ottavio's lovely Il mio tesoro pitifully stated. The power of these expressions of love transcended into the mind and soul of the young Don and induced his chaotic and terrifying end (the corps de ballet, Da Ponte's implied devils disguised as waiters, swarmed onto the stage, cleared the dinner table and brought Scarpitta's banquet of young love to its end).   The opera did seem to end here, but after a while the survivors finally appeared on stage, Ottavio quite alone, Zerlina and Masetto quite together. Anna and Elvira then stepped forward and grasped hands, sharing their youthful desolation. With them, and with us was the young man who saw it all -- Leporello, always at the side of the Don and absolutely as bewildered by love and life as was his master, and perhaps as was the Montpellier matinee audience recollecting its lost youth.   The second act achieved an almost unprecedented level of lyricism as Scarpitta's concept was absorbed by conductor Hervé Niquet and his early music ensemble Le Concert Spirituel, and driven to dizzying heights by insanely fast if revelatory tempos. Niquet's music was enacted with ultimate class by the Montpellier cast. The American Franco Pomponi, bare-chested in white tights, infused unusual nuance and complexity to the Don. The lithe Leporello of the Dutch baritone Henk Neven evoked the possibility of a definitive Leporello performance. The Italian Donna Anna, Raffaella Milanesi now holds the record for having sung the fastest Non mi dir in history, her love sick rival Donna Elvira tenderly portrayed by French soprano Isabelle Cals. Zerlina and her Masetto were large scaled characters deeply in love, performed by Georgian born Anna Kasyan and French baritone Nicolas Courjal. Finnish bass Petri Lindross provided a vocally resplendent, very, very young Commendatore. Though graduated a bit soon from his young artist program, tenor Cyril Auvity made poor Don Ottavio beautifully pitiful, earning for himself a huge ovation.   Jean Paul Scarpitta took us inside Mozart's music, his stage and costume design offering decor that supported but never defined this interior space, as carefully lighted by Urs Schonebaum.   Aida in Berlin   The last new Aida at the Deutsche Oper was fifteen years ago, staged by the grand old man of West Berlin opera, Götz Fredrich. Thus it was high time for a new look and the first chance to see it was at its premiere on March 2. Inexplicable, perhaps foolhardy was the Deutsche Oper Berlin's choice of an American production team for this Italian Egyptian classic. Led by stage director Christopher Alden, the team included Roy Rallo as co-director, Andrew Lieberman as designer, Doey Luethi as costume designer and Adam Silverman as lighting designer.   It was a site specific production as Berlin was the protagonist, physically represented on the Deutsche Oper stage by fine, slick modern architecture that self consciously evokes the historical and traditional Berlin – massive brick walls, ample marble, huge block shapes, clumsy neo-gothic references (nothing at all to do with the international avant guard mercantile Berlin plops of Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, or Jean Nouvel). Designer Andrew Lieberman encased Aida's eight scenes in this interior space, scene changes marked by light changes, the gamut of Verdi's atmospheres virtuostically evoked by Adam Silverman.   As Berlin has been reborn as political propaganda, Aida too was born as political propaganda to celebrate Egypt's new stature as the part-owner and guard dog of Suez Canal. Verdi reluctantly accepted the enormous commission only when he learned that if he did not Wagner might. The nineteenth century French Egyptologist Mariette Bey provided Verdi with the gruesome background of a fanatical second millenium B.C. church/state to which Verdi sacrificed the not-so-innocent slave Aida. Just now on a cold wet day in Berlin this sacrifice became a chilling love-death drowning.   Making this new Aida circular, the Alden/Rallo staging opens with a drowned body dragged from a black marble basin, the baptismal font in an evangelical church kept spotlessly polished by Aida, humbling herself as a servant to its massive power. Aida and the large congregation are clad in DDR socialist uniforms (gray skirts/pants, white blouses/shirts), holding, sometimes waving their Maoist bibles. These images from contemporary and recent history easily recall the countless fanatical tyrants and regimes that add political piquancy to centuries of opera stories.   The high priest Ramfis, an impeccably suited leader preaches on his platform, his face and body plastered against the marble, heaven-directed central pillar, his bible held tightly against the pillar to take strength from its strength, his voice magically, extra-corporeally (loud speakers) directing his followers. Radames, immobile on a folding chair, pours out his Celeste Aida. He is ordained by the priestess Amneris whose grace is marked by a symbolic tiara. Aida, Radames and Amneris sit unmoving on three adjacent downstage chairs to voice the conflicts that will momentarily rock the foundations of the church.   The Alden/Rallo triumphal scene is a masterpiece of satire with its frenzy of images illustrating the American mega-church phenonomen and its insidious use of vanity and self-indulgence as techniques of mind control. This scene is highest comedy and harshest condemnation, yet always with the theatrics of magnificence that Verdi envisioned for this, his most famous scene. Capping the first part of the evening the triumphal scene was rewarded with thunderous applause from the opening night audience.   Back in the thick of emotional conflict Aida teased the high C of O patria mia, and made one of the evening's few staging movements, walking towards her father, hidden in the midst of a sea of empty chairs. The Alden staging poetic is based on developing concept not character. Dramatic tension is generated through the gradual revelation and friction of larger concepts, the actor himself not a character but a concept. Thus dramatic interaction is irrelevant, as the music, voice and body are symbol and fact of the concept. Alden succeeds in creating huge tensions, and these tensions palpably gripped the opening night audience.   Directors Alden and Rallo's vocal collaborators were eager participants in the ritual. Soprano Annalisa Raspagliosi was the beautiful young Aida, seemingly as comfortable polishing the floor as reaching for her high C. Mexican Tenor Carlo Ventre filled the shoes of Radames with his fine, well-schooled Italianate tenor, coolly the sacrificial murderer and the lover of Aida. Mezzo Irina Mishura made a large voiced, small scale Amneris, most effective at the end when humiliated in power and love and stripped of her grace, she delivered the last words of the opera, a curse, crouched in darkness against the proscenium. Bass Raymond Aceto exuded a raw, almost real charisma as the high priest Ramfis, accompanied always by a mute, ruthless, sexless, stately blond matron acolyte embodied by Jacqueline Wagner. Baritone Zeljko Lucic was the less exotic and in fact confusing Amonasro, projecting a human presence, the only such warmth in this otherwise coldly conceptual Alden/Rallo Aida.   Marked by refinement of concept and elegance of realization, the production was light years away from the blatant and obvious, if serviceable conducting of Renato Palumbo, oblivious to the formidable theater art that was happening on the stage.   The one hundred seventy six cast members took bow after bow, Mo. Palumo was loudly applauded. After a suspenseful delay the production team appeared, the audience howled its appreciation and approval -- it only sounded like boos. Maestro Palumbo did not come to the post-performance party.   Jenufa in Toulon   Janacek's Jenufa is built on a short story, Her Foster Daughter by Czech novelist Gabriela Preissova, a brief episode in the life of a young girl struggling with her life in a timeless rural society. Janacek amplified the elements of the story into opera, fusing its stark eastern European naturalism with Russian fatalism, interweaving the comfort and cruelty of its human world with the beauty and harshness of its physical world. Within the close confines of this larger world personal and social conflicts erupt, and are resolved with simplistic brutality. Yet in Janacek's Jenufa there is redemption, redemption belonging to the purest Romantic ideal of love. Unlike the musical Romantics Janacek tells his story not in larger, sweeping musical and dramatic idealistic terms, but in the smallest and most precise details of the gamut of emotions that interplay among simple human psyches. And finally the miracle of Janacek's musical story telling is the gigantic proportion of its redemptive resolution.   Quite an undertaking for the Toulon Opera that already this season has had real difficulty dealing with the comparative simplicities of Gluck and Gounod (well, Gluck said he wanted to be simple, and everyone says Gounod is simple). Maybe these gentlemen are really quite a bit more difficult than they seem, given that Toulon succeeded fairly well in dealing with the formidable challenges of Janacek's opera, but failed to meet the challenges of Orphée et Eurydice and Romeo et Juliet.   Toulon assembled a cast that brought Janacek's countryside characters to vivid life. Czech soprano Helena Kaupova embodied Jenufa with a sizable sweetly lyric, young voice and a peasant presence in the flush of youth, at once passive and stalwart. Austrian tenor Peter Svensson embodied Laça in a big, almost beautiful voice, with a not-too-bright presence that was sly, passive and brutish. Canadian tenor James McLean portrayed Steva, spoiled because of his boyish cuteness, who had learned long ago how to escape from his deeper feelings. American soprano Nadine Segunde brought rigidity, blind stupidity and dignity to Jenufa's foster mother, Kostelnicha, in strongly voiced scenes that were indeed effective though never quite hitting this character's delicate humanness.   The production was by Jean-Louis Martinelli, whose origins in straight theater were clearly apparent in this attempt, his only, to stage opera. The production was also warmed over, having had its original performances at the Opéra de Nancy in 2002. In Toulon the production was restaged by Ruth Orthmann in second hand direction that perhaps exacerbated the naiveté of blocking, and the patently obvious staging solutions that betrayed the emotional complexities of Janacek's storytelling.   Rare is the production that can assimilate the multitude of social, natural and personal tensions that make up Janacek's opera. Mr. Martinelli eschewed the natural world and its ironic insertions into human lives, the warm light of fall reduced to a pile of potatoes on a completely white stage, and the excitement of the emerging colors of spring indicated by a single bouquet of flowers. The frigid stillness of winter was ignored as Steva stood in an open doorway to deliver a good part of his second act scene with Kostelnicka. The social world that in fact imposes the tragedy of this infanticide was reduced to a small chorus unable initially to generate a spontaneous social energy or finally, lined up against a colorless spring sky, to project this world's sympathetic morality.   This left Toulon's fine cast on its own (certainly with some help from the stage director) to create Janacek's drama. Besides the four principals the Grandmother Buryja of Zlatomira Nikolova effectively grounded the family drama, as the mayor, rendered by Jean-Marie Frémeau, grounded the social drama. The smaller roles, the frivolous Karolka of Olivia Doray, the lively Jano of Anna Kasyan, et al were sensitively cast. All this with a formidable orchestral underpinning led by conductor Friedrich Pleyer who very effectively delved into the details and subtleties of Janacek's score at the expense of realizing its hysteria or fully capturing its grander emotional sweep -- not a bad trade off if there has to be one.   Janacek's Jenufa builds to a huge denouement, Kostelnicha's crime recognized, Jenufa's nearly incomprehensible humanity extended. Love itself exudes from Laça and finally Jenufa in overpowering orchestral and vocal outpourings. For this sublime moment Mr. Martinelli placed his lovers on a high platform upstage mostly hidden behind a scrim that depicted a primitive, gold painted Madonna and Child. Perhaps there are gulags somewhere in the antarctic to send musically insensitive stage directors for re-education.   Orphée et Eurydice in Montpellier   When a production of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice is announced you usually take no notice of who is singing Orphée because you probably have never heard of him anyway. But such was not the case in Montpellier when one did notice because you had heard of him. With disbelief you saw it was Roberto Alagna, though the idea soon became explicable, remembering that Maria Callas had sung the Liebestod so why not Roberto Alagna singing Che faro senza Euridice (J'ai perdu non Eurydice).   Equally absurd was the idea that Marco Guidarini was conducting, the Genovese conductor who had made even the reticence of Pelleas et Melisande eloquently alive in Nice, who had fired its suppressed love triangle into a passionate eruption. Hardly the man to illuminate this signature, cool musical document of the French Enlightenment, calming the excessive grief of the Baroque within the intimate confines of the Rococo.   The Montpellier season itself seemed peculiar, programming first the famous Offenbach parody of the Orpheus myth last December before stating the myth two months later, one presumed in the pristine form Gluck had imposed upon it in this, his most famous reform opera.   These mysteries were quickly explained (03/02/08). Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice had been de-constructed by director David Alagna (Roberto's brother) in light of the latent high drama and deep intelligence in this Gluck masterpiece. He had given free rein to his own obviously formidable theatrical imagination, and was taking full advantage of the vocal and histrionic resources of his tenorissimo brother, Roberto. David (dah-veed) is hardly the first director to plumb the depths of Gluck's masterpiece and will not be the last. But this Orphée et Eurydice, while made of the Gluck Orphée, is anything but Gluck's opera, nor one Gluck could possibly have imagined, except perhaps for the Romeo et Juliette ending imposed by David Alagna, an ending that surely Gluck would have preferred to the happy ending imposed on him by convention.   Once past David Alagna's mute prologue, an interpolated first scene of a noisy wedding party that rudely punctuated Gluck's translocated incidental music, the second scene, now Gluck's own, unfolded with skillful paramedics pulling first the lifeless body of Euridice from an overturned, crushed bright red Renault, and then the inanimate body of her husband Orphée. There was no longer any possibility that this was not a parody, a fully and clearly defined made-for-television-movie reality opera supplanting opera's most hallowed pastoral myth. And then the cry "Eurydice" from the world-class Verdi tenor, with some of the biggest vocal coglioni (balls) around in full evidence. Any further fears of the banal were banished right along with all collegium musicum regrets.   Alagna lamented at Eurydice's tomb, supported by her grief stricken parents, surrounded by a sea of umbrella covered friends, the cellos of Guidarini's full blown orchestra throbbing sobs, the crushed red Renault replaced by a long black hearse. Overcome Orphée fell into the pile of dirt about to cover Eurydice's coffin, his face and chest against the stage floor that now became a massive sounding board for his, and Gluck's magnificent Chiamo il mio ben cosi (Eurydice, Eurydice, ombre chère).   Amor, baritone Marc Barrard in a floor length black leather cloak, gave Orphée his options. The long black hearse brought Orphée to heaven's waiting room, a rather crowded worldly mortuary for souls in transition. Knowing stratospheric travel, contemporary audiences understand that temperatures are frigid in the heavens, thus Guidarini's Mahlerian trombones sounded their chilling tones, bringing into sight a corps de ballet of suspended frozen bodies. That of Eurydice identified, the long black hearse arrived to bring her back to earth, not without the well-known discussion passionately voiced by the beautiful Serena Gamberoni. Furious with Orphée, she first made love with the tall and handsome Amor in its front seat.   The grief of the Alagnas' Orphée was real, it was wrenching, and it was fully considered in the finest Gluckian manner, but no longer with his formidable eighteenth century emotional discipline. This new Alagna perspective was a forging of the considerable art of twentieth century operatic hyper verismo with twenty-first century conceptual art, realized with the considerable resources of one of France's finest opera companies. Roberto Alagna is a phenomenon. As much an artist as he is a tenor, he gave full realization to these often contradictory terms in this performance, putting the heated vocal posturing of the heroic tenor in service to cool, smart conceptual art.   Among the triumphs of the evening were the visually stunning stage pictures created by director/designer Alagna, with the costumes of Carla Teti. But most remarkable of all was the cool control exercised by David Alagna, never forcing his staging beyond the boundaries determined by Gluck's reformist intentions and the immense wit of his own vision. With this Orphée et Eurydice held always in such delicate balance he proved himself a true artist.   Marco Guidarini, the Alagnas' willing musical collaborator, brought an exploration of color and a musical urgency to Gluck's score that added new luster to France's centuries old tradition of orchestral art. It cannot be left unsaid that the flute solo in the blessed spirits ballet music has never been played more beautifully.   The Montpellier Orpheus ritual complete the excited cast took their bows, the wildly enthused audience showered the stage with flowers. Finally, and only finally did Roberto bring his brother David onto the stage for a bow to a chorus of boos.   Roméo et Juliette in Toulon   The splendor of the Opéra Toulon Provence Méditerranée is the theater itself, an early version, maybe the first of France's nineteenth century opera palaces. Sometimes this grandness is echoed from the pit with Toulon's accomplished orchestra and generally excellent conducting. That the Toulon Opera is provincial opera as its full name even indicates, does not imply that opera in Toulon need not be good opera as it is easy to recall hundreds of well-sung performances in smart productions in small cities and out-of-the-way places throughout the world.   Though the Toulon Opera usually provides adequate singers, it almost never offers productions (mises en scènes) of quality, though at best generic settings occasionally provide at least a context for telling a story. The most recent case of an at-worst scenario were the late January performances of Roméo et Juliette. The production was imported from L'Esplanade Opéra Théâtre de Saint-Etienne, one assumes a professional theatre (no credentials were offered in the program booklet) though this Roméo et Juliette production was blatantly amateur.   As grand opera Gounod's trivialized telling of Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece does not demand singing actors who physically embody its young lovers as does, for example, Bernstein's West Side Story. But it does expect singers who can vocally impersonate the impassioned lyricism of young love, where beauty of voice alone can fulfill the ideal of the physical beauty of youth. There is a wide range of performers between these two extremes, and most productions of Roméo et Juliette manage to arrive at some reasonable reconciliation of the two.   In Toulon the Juliette was Nathalie Manfrino, appropriately young though she betrayed an ignorance of acting technique (unusual these days in up-and-coming young artists), and she lacked the technical and vocal brilliance needed to establish a dramatic vitality for Juliette (there was an intermission announcement [01/02/08] that she was suffering from a cold and begged our indulgence). The Roméo of youthful appearing Fabrics Dalis was neither heroic nor poetically swain-like, and while an accomplished singer he would be more at home in character tenor roles rather than essaying the vocal and physical postures of the romantic tenor.   The Friar Laurent of fine bass Paul Gay was not the foolish old prelate who unites the young lovers in a politically impossible marriage but a tall, muscular young man who looked ready to jump into bed with either of the two young lovers. Juliette's nurse Gertrude played by Marie-José Dolorian was prevented from any credibility by a costume that surely came out of the Esplanade Opéra-Théâtre de Saint-Etienne's production of The Abduction from the Seraglio. Mercutio was well sung, if heavily sung by gray-haired Peter Edelmann making it beyond all credibility to place him as a cohort of young Romeo. Of the supporting players only the Tybolt of Antonio Figueroa and the Stephano of Blandine Staskiewicz were dramatically convincing and vocally sufficient.   Conductor Emmanuel Joel-Hornak found no lyricism in Gounod's score, hampered perhaps by the impossibility of the production. But more than likely he simply does not connect with the sentimentality and dramatic naiveté of Gounod's opera.   Pique Dame in Lyon   Suicide loomed large in Tchaikovsky's mind, with the two emotionally charged, self-inflicted deaths in La Dame de Pique. Suicidal in the opera also would have been the intended duel between the competing lovers, a form of Russian self elimination that had already claimed the life of Pushkin, the creator of the original Pique Dame tale (1834). In one further case of self destruction the phantasmagoric Pique Dame herself had to know that she was buying death by accepting the secret of the cards. Tchaikovsky's own suicide was in 1893, three years after the opera's premiere at the Marinsky in St. Petersburg in 1890, and nine days after the premiere of his Symphonie Pathetique (though the Opéra de Lyon's program booklet attributes his death to cholera, the cause condoned by Soviet era sensibilities).   Tchaikovsky's soul is the stuff of sensational speculation, and it is enticing to transpose these speculations onto the tortured soul of Hermann, the hero of Pique Dame, his consuming compulsions tricked by vindictive Russian fate. In Lyon at the Opéra Nouvel (30/01/08) this famous story was told by director Peter Stein, his collaborators and an excellent array of interpreters, notably his diminutive hero Hermann resembling Pushkin's comparison to Napoleon far more than embodying the handsome Tchaikovsky we see in photographs.   Bulgarian tenor Kostadin Andreev, singing Hermann this evening (and only one other of the total seven performances), attacked the role, physically possessed in staggering and lurching movements, urgently voicing his distress. In short a theatrically and musically intriguing introduction to the central figure, the fateful lover and tragic victim of Modest and Peter Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame (Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was the librettist who, with Tchaikovsky, had transformed Pushkin's story into a conventional Russian opera of its time). And tenor Andreev kept us intrigued for the duration, elaborating this character born of Carmen's clumsy Don Jose but quickly evolving into the physically supple and vocally boiling-over lover of the gullible Liza, though the nearly inhuman form of the diabolically possessed gambler was never far beneath the surface. Finally this pathetic, dying young soldier sent us running to the Pushkin tale to find out where he got those 40,000 ducats to bet, a detail left unexplained by the libretto. The daunting challenges of director Peter Stein's approach to this role were well met by this young, multi-dimensional artist.   Based in theatrically sophisticated Berlin, Peter Stein is a master director, working with precise minimal movements to create and sustain dramatic tension. Each motion -- a hand touching a cheek or a slow (or fast) walk up or down stage for example -- is charged with dramatic content and made always with absolute complementary musical motivation. His choruses are a single persona, not crowds, never individuals. The chorus is in constant, generally geometric and unison movement, its energy enhanced at times by moving scenic elements, always sustaining a physical tension that heightens the sense of intense story telling.   Herr Stein's musical collaborator was Russian born, Vienna trained Kirill Petrenko, willing to support Herr Stein's tensions at the expense of neglecting the indulgent ironic pathos exuded by Tchaikovsky's music. Mo. Petrenko further agreed to excise Tchaikovsky's entire Pastoral and ballet thereby upsetting the balance of the larger Modest and Piotr Tchaikovsky music-dramatic structure, forcing Tchaikovsky's central scene into a single, fast, dramatic crescendo to the fireworks accompanied mock appearance of Catherine the Great as a huge, self moving puppet.   Designer Ferdinand Wogerbauer's visual language well supports Herr Stein's obvious tensions, with minimal shapes and forced perspectives in cardboard, comic book images like the light bulb lighted lightening bolts, the snowy night cutout for Liza's suicide, even the diamond shaped gambling table concocted platform with Hermann's head dangling, dead, over its downstage point. Ironic in the truncated Pastoral scene were the black and red blocks of architect Jean Nouvel's theater echoed on the stage.   Tchaikovsky is the master of pastiche, juxtaposing for example in the last scene a sad gambling song, a noisy drinking song and a suicide. In the third scene he segues an art song duet with a sad Russian ballad followed by a foot stomping folk song and finally a torrid love scene. Amidst all the seven scenes he inserted a huge pastoral, an eighteenth century intermezzo with ballet starring Daphnis, Chloe and Pluto, as, after all, Pushkin had set his tale in the Russia of Catherine the Great and that is what they did then. But in place of introducing a bit of the more appropriate Rameau, for example, Tchaikovsky recast Don Giovanni's immortal ball scene, an homage to his beloved Mozart. In the following scene Tchaikovskian musical philology regained its purity when he resurrected of an aria from Gretry's Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784) for the Pique Dame Countess. It all works as seamless theater and convincing operatic story telling and this is Tchaikovsky's genius.   Tchaikovsky's insertion of the extended Rococo pastoral motivated the cameo appearance by Catherine herself. By cutting the pastoral director Stein eschewed Tchaikovsky's intention (and Pushkin's) to place the story at this earlier time, instead forcing the scenographic crescendo to her apparition in the same bustled silhouette as we had come to associate with the Pique Dame. Then as one of her apparitions in the nightmare scene we saw Pique Dame herself as a huge, self-moving puppet, like Catherine the Great.   Others of her phantasmagoric guises of the third act echoed the mock grotesqueries of the Mexican Day of the Dead or the American Halloween (a custom now finding resonance in France as well). Perhaps there is no Halloween in Russia or Protestant Germany, thus maybe these were not meant to be the really silly apparitions they seemed to be, but were serious grotesqueries, part of designer Wogerbauer's cardboard vocabulary. Whatever the motivation for the comic book language the powerful pathos and intense ironies of the third act were blatantly destroyed. The death prayer for the Countess' funeral was overwhelmed with scary images, and the touching choral prayer for Hermann's final peace seeming to be still in the shadow of the waving arms of an inflatable Pique Dame seen only moments before.   The Hermann of Kostadin Andreev convincingly established the core of Tchaikovsky's melodrama, the Liza of Olga Guryakova eloquently embodied the naiveté of a country girl, with simplicity and elegance of voice from her doomed soul crouched against the edge of the proscenium. Prince Yeletsky, Andrey Breus as her rejected rich and handsome fiancé, was rich in voice, generous of spirit, and appropriately pallid in the magnetic presence of Hermann. The Countess of Marianna Tarasova was an ancient, ugly, and selfish creature, a relic of such an ugly and selfish past, propped-up in her chair humming Gretry's old tune. The Tomski of Nikolai Putilin was strangely old, though on the same high level of all supporting players.   The association of the Pique Dame with Catherine the Great remains shrouded in mysterious recesses of Peter Stein's psyche.   Manon Lescaut in Genoa   Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut at the Teatro Carlo Felice (17/1/08) started out with a bang -- as the evening's conductor made his way to the pit's podium he was instantaneously recognized as Daniel Oren, not the young conductor announced in the program. As Mo. Oren turned from a very brief, cursory acknowledgement of his applause he was already raising his arms to attack Puccini's fragile masterpiece.   And attack he did, dispelling the myth that this work is fragile, needing delicate balances of interpreters, music and production to take on an ephemeral life. Oren's Manon Lescaut is a masterpiece of verismo at its finest and melodramma at its purest. The first of Puccini's mature works (only Edgar and Le Villi come before) Manon Lescaut (1893) betrays the French origins of verismo in distilling the abbé Prévost's Manon story into four emotionally charged scenes. Massanet had already told Prévost's histoire much more realistically and delicately, but some ten years earlier.   And forget about Manon and her brother's high-born origins, both embody the baser instincts verismo likes to find among the lower classes, look only to Henze's wonderfully sleazy Manon in Boulevard Solitude to complete this picture.   And do think melodramma, the super Italian soupy film genre (like Catene [1949], the film that made Sicilian audiences weep in Cinema Paradiso) where the woman succumbs to understandable temptation, only to regret her fall before being forgiven, though too late.   While Oren is not Puccini, he is Puccini's music pure and simple, sometimes remaining immobile, then stomping then jumping on the podium, emitting grunts and snorts, usually singing along, while expansively pulling his orchestra together to emote in one huge voice along with his inspired singers, then applauding appreciatively his singers right along with the enthused audience. Mo. Oren is a phenomenon.   Manon Lescaut is told in four big strokes, deceit and flight, boredom and theft, deportation, and lastly death in the deserts of Louisiana, all the better that we all know that Louisiana is not a desert and often has too much water. All were rendered as enormous, explosive emotional situations, disproving forever that Puccini's Manon Lescaut is fragile, and proving once and for all that while it may not be the first (Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana is 1890), Manon Lescaut remains one of the purest examples of Italian musical verismo.   In the absence of a production specifically developed for such a musically brutal conception of Puccini's opera, the Teatro Carlo Felice imported Flemish director Gilbert Deflo's production from the Deutsche Oper Berlin. At first his white box conception (actors in high relief in relatively neutral surroundings with few props) evoked a deja vu disappointment, but as the musical force of the production took over the white box setting began to essentially service the telling of the story without either effectively absorbing it or detracting from it.   Director Deflo is obviously a theater director with actors at his disposal whose movements and physical attitudes can fill such a neutral space. In the expanses of the Carlo Felice stage the conception was most effective when character singers were at work, as for example the rich Geronte, and his household staff in Act II, these caricatured abstractions working well with the exaggerated emotions. Or the actresses as the exaggerated prostitutes in Act III effectively separating Manon in her degradation from their flashy pride. Here too Deflo's minimalism was effective in the use one small scenic element, a small boat, to send Manon and Des Grieux off to America. The principal singers whose movements and physical attitudes are specific to the needs and habits of opera singers were less effective, looking as if they had been thrown into a warmed-over production, which of course it was.   The Manon of Micaela Carosi rose magnificently to the occasion, her rich, warm, spinto voice offering Oren everything needed to encourage her to bring out the subtleties of pathos of this difficult role. Renzo Zulian, singing two of the seven performances, delivered a Des Grieux with little finesse but with ample vocalism to serve musical needs. Manon's brother Lescaut, sung by Gabriele Viviani, proved less of a vivid vocal presence while the Geronte of Carlo Lepore was classy singing in ridiculous clothing.   Robert Schumann: Scenes from Goethe's Faust in Rome   Goethe's Faust is a two-part play intended to be read, not staged, though in 2002 it was staged by Peter Stein in a mere twenty-one hours. Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust is an oratorio meant to be performed in concert, not staged, though just now its seven scenes were staged at the Teatro Regio in Parma by Hugo de Ana in three long hours.   Robert Schumann was not an opera composer, though we learn from the Teatro Regio's program booklet that he did compose one opera, Genoveva, an experimental, recitative-less work that has been staged in recent times at Palermo's Teatro Massimo. Strange, this Italian preoccupation with Schumann.   Schumann is unknown operatic territory, as is Goethe's Faust Book II (1832) unknown operatic territory. We do know a bit of Book I (1806) from Berlioz (1846), Gounod (1859) and Boito (1868) though it is accepted sacrilege to associate these derivative masterpieces with the real Goethe Faust. But Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust are simply that, the actual Goethe verses, the first three briefer scenes are from Book I, the final four scenes, longer and more involved come from Book II, meaning that the larger part of the work is uncharted territory for audiences and this critic as well, among probably most others.   A pristinely Romantic spirit, Schumann, like Schubert and Woyzeck's Buchner, and maybe Bellini and Chopin, had a relatively brief, disturbed and unhappy life. All of these early nineteenth century Romantic geniuses worked best in small or closed, often programmatic forms. Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust were not composed as a musical unity, much less a larger dramatic unity, but as separate, brief segments composed in mostly backwards order over ten or so years.   Yet for us in the theater there was a beginning, middle and end, and we struggled to make it so, having only producer Hugo de Ana's staging to help us. Mr. de Ana worked with basic solutions, in the first scene personalizing Goethe's Faust to become Schumann himself with Clara Schumann seated at a grand piano as Gretchen, though this conceit was then abandoned. The following scenes were blatantly straightforward as for example the realistic cathedral where Gretchen prays, or symbolic like the huge projected compass (drafting tool) for the palace where Faust envisions his grandiose earthly projects. Faust expiates his remorse for Gretchen's death in a fantastical, silver lighted forest (silver is the word used by Goethe) with the elves and spirits of the large chorus dressed in large, light reflecting, silver robes. The final scene representing celestial perfection was made by the large chorus alternately holding or sitting on small, lighted boxes, though a cherubim encased in a plastic box descended from above from time to time.   Thus we had only Goethe's words to guide us through the evening, with Book II being famously abstract and difficult, and here made more so by Schumann's use of truncated and non-consecutive tracts. For synthesis of word and music we had to rely on Faust, Mephistopheles, Gretchen and various symbolic characters to bring these scenes to life. Gretchen is not a large presence in Schumann (or Goethe), thus the small scale performance by Daniela Bruera was adequate. Mephistopheles looms large in Schumann's scenes, and a huge, dynamic presence would have been helpful in simulating a dramatic action. Michele Pertusi delivered a Mephistopheles that would have been convincing in an oratorio rendering of the work, but missed grounding the role on the operatic stage. Faust himself, Markus Werba, began the evening as a too young and too green Faustian presence, and soon lost his voice besides. Thus an extra intermission was taken to give time to organize cuts in the score, notably Faust's death monologue. The rest of the evening Mr. Werba made some sounds, mouthed most lines particularly in the higher tessitura, therefore at the more dramatic moments, and beautifully enacted several sublime moments.   Moments made sublime in part because there were no words, the Schumann orchestra singing out the Faustian condition, Faust himself physically embodying these inspired musical utterances -- particularly at his death, in his embrace of the physical world, and ultimately at his apotheosis, the Schumann score in the hands of conductor Donato Renzetti in heartfelt coincidence with these Faustian postures.   Hugo de Ana is a brilliant designer, an obviously extraordinarily expensive designer. Schumann's overture was accompanied by a stunning vision of heavenly bodies flying through the solar system. His use of projections and lasers through out the evening was spectacular, with massive physical scenery intermixed as well in an onslaught of visual images that overwhelmed the simplicity and integrity of Schumann's music. Mr. de Ana's costuming was confusing as well, combining abstracted flapper era evening dress with costumes appropriate to timeless legends, many costumes with fantastical flourishes that would wow in a Las Vegas show but seemed vulgar in the Teatro Regio.   Schumann's musical impetus is ephemeral, even momentary, and his sound is uniquely transparent, and curiously unobtrusive while remaining gloriously lyrical. Mr. de Ana's shapes are volumetric and huge, and always beautiful. His concepts are basic, straightforward and literal. But slice it how you want, Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust is an oratorio not an opera.   Tosca in Rome   There are always compelling reasons to make a quick mid-winter trip to Rome, but probably none more important than to see the new production of Puccini's Tosca that inaugurated the Opera di Roma's 2008 season. The Opera di Roma has staged more than seventy editions of this, the most Roman of all operas, with about a thousand performances over the past 108 years. Thus, since its prima absoluta in Rome on January 14, 1900, they have had enough practice to get it right. And that they did, well almost, at the gala opening night on January 14, 2008.   This newest edition was staged by Franco Zefferelli, now 85 years old, and he was true to form as the maestro absoluto of gigantic opera. Famous are his many super-sized productions at the huge Arena di Verona -- Aida, Carmen, and most recently a Trovatore, to name a few. Memorable was the heroically sized Otello at the Metropolitan Opera maybe 20 years ago, and the more recent, oversized La Boheme at the Met with over 300 people on stage for the Café Momus scene.   This new Roman Tosca was huge too, about as huge as it could be in the ample, if finally limited confines of the Rome Opera, and made more gigantic by means beyond mere physical size. Zefferelli utilized huge, heavy stage elevators to raise a very large chorus to stage level and into the Basilica Sant'Andrea delle Valle for the famous Te Deum. Facing forward and unmoving this chorus thrust its massive sound directly outward, against which Scarpia avowed first his lust for Tosca and finally his humility in front of God.   Three big singers dominated the stage with super-sized voices and big opera singer presences. It was an international cast, the Tosca of Austrian soprano Martina Serafin, the Cavaradossi of Spanish tenor Marcelo Alvarez (the era of Spanish tenorial hegemony continues), and the Scarpia of ubiquitous Italian baritone Renato Bruson. Zefferelli's challenge was not to mold these singers into his conception of Puccini's characters but to impose their generic renderings of these roles onto the spectacular scenic tableaux of Rome that he created, even allowing them at times to move forward onto the black stage apron to do their thing directly to the audience, scenery be damned.   Conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti took this considerable stimulus to generate a musical reading that fully enveloped this gigantism. Though Puccinian tempos were observed, though sometimes on the slow side, Mo. Gelmetti fully elaborated the not too deeply hidden hysteria in Puccini's score in full-throated orchestral sounds. The result was riveting indeed, strangely stealing the thunder from Strauss' Electra as the prototype of twentieth century operatic aberration.   Both Mo. Gelmetti and Zefferelli know that to scratch the surface of Tosca makes Rome, not Tosca, its protagonist. For centuries Rome has struggled to reconcile its weighty, restrictive Christian presence with its permissive pagan atmospheres, and to protect the solidity of its traditional ecclesiastical structures from the new social and political ideas that continuously arrive from a more progressive Europe. The Roman actress Tosca is trapped in these conflicts, jealously enthralled by the patriotic artist Cavaradossi and at the same time infatuated by the power of Scarpia, the head of ecclesiastic Rome's secret police.   Zefferelli played with the massive weight of past and present Rome in the execution of Cavaradossi atop the Castel Sant'Angelo. The scene opened as expected with the imperial eagle proudly placed above highest ramparts. Huge stage elevators then raised this massive structure to reveal a dark prison beneath holding Cavaradossi, who soon moved onto the black stage apron to deliver the showpiece of the opera, e lucevano le stelle complete with a hokey vocal choke on the last phrase.   The effect was brilliant, the ovation was gigantic and well deserved indeed. The excited crowd demanded that the show be stopped and the aria repeated. Sig. Alvarez slipped off-stage to grab a sip of water while the clarinet player (this aria is actually a duet for clarinet and tenor) took his equally well-deserved bow. Though Alvarez seemed a bit winded vocally the second time around he pulled himself together for his final duet with Tosca, tenorial splendor at its peak.   Less Italianate was the Tosca of Marina Serafin, vocally a dramatic soprano rather more than an Italian spinto. Serafin's sound is in fact very big but it seems to be produced with remarkable ease, without the visceral push that defines the spinto. The result is a quite beautiful if not vocally thrilling lyricism that nonetheless served the over-the-top musical front emanating from the pit. Though this Tosca seemed more a musical means than a dramatic force her final leap did indeed set a new standard for cheap operatic thrills.   It would be illuminating to see an operatic Scarpia as a powerful, sexual symbol of authority rather than as the usual dirty old man. Renato Bruson is a master of this role and still vocally secure, though at more than seventy years of age he can no longer enrich this neurotically erotic opera with the sexual and vocal force needed to confuse Tosca. To see a Tosca endowed with these more complex overtones check out Carmine Gallone's 1945 film Davanti a lui tremava tutta Roma where Scarpia is the Nazi commandant of Rome (the Tosca is Anna Magnani to the voice of Renata Tebaldi).   Orphée aux enfers in Montpellier   Offenbach's vast catalogue is under-exploited here in the south of France where the omnipresent Les Contes d'Hoffmann is usually complimented by a La Périchole and the Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein. Happily this past holiday season Nice offered La Vie Parisienne and Montpellier trotted out a handsome Orphée aux enfers. This leaves only a new La Belle Hélène to update the local quotient of the standard international Offenbach. One can only dream of more Offenbach revivals.   Hoffmann is never a problem -- big music, big singers and big sets easily impress. But that is that for easy Offenbach. La Périchole and La Grande Duchesse are masterpieces of simple humanity and simple humor, yet one can only dream of what a Grand Duchess delivered by Offenbach's legendary mezzo Hortense Schneider must have been, or savor the memories of Stéphanie d'Oustrac's Perichole in Marseille not so long ago, or Maria Ewing's Perichole in San Francisco long, long ago while suffering through overblown performances of these complex and sophisticated slight and silly pieces. And one can only groan at recollections of ponderous parody productions of Orphée aux enfers in Santa Fe or La Belle Hélène in Aix-en-Provence.   Like Monteverdi's Orfeo who can move Hell only when he stops trying to impress Hell, Offenbach's operettes become deliciously amusing as they are meant to be only when they are not working at being funny, when Offenbach's simple parodies are not themselves parodied. Orphée aux enfers in Montpellier came in somewhere in the middle ground, sometimes simple and fun, more often imploding upon itself from the sheer weight of production and hyper-energized performances.   Offenbach made much of his genius for simple humanity and simple humor in his early, small theaters, the original Orphée aux enfers written in 1878 with two acts and four scenes for the second manifestation of his Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens (a law had just been passed that allowed more than four performers on its stage!). But Offenbach, as so many of his producers since, succumbed to the urge to elaborate on his successes inaugurating his residency in the big, new Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1874 with a style énorme version, an orchestra of 60, a military band of 40, 120 choristers, 78 dancers, in 4 acts and 12 scenes. One can only dream or dread that the Opéra Bastille may one day produce this version.   The producers in Montpellier split the difference, coming up with a version in two acts and four scenes that relied heavily on the 1858 version, adding material from the 1874 version. Whether artistic or budgetary, the decision it was a good one, offering an afternoon (23/12/07) that was finally amusing if not so very deliciously so. The success owes more to the staging of Claire Servais (who inevitably had revised the text as well), than the conducting of Montpellier's resident early music conductor Hervé Niquet whose lugubrious seeming tempos seldom ignited Offenbach's mercuric score. But maybe that is about as fast as you can dance the can-can anyway.   Claire Servais' staging relied heavily on sight gags of which there were many, and a few good ones (Diana's dogs, Pluto's car, John Styx' hand), a technique that draws attention to what is supposed to be funny and obligates the performers to execute a theatrical process rather than bring a role to life. The roles in Orphée aux enfers are already compromised because they are broad and bold caricatures, thus finding and projecting the je ne sais quoi of Offenbach's humanity is elusive. Of the performers only the Pluto of Loïc Félix, and to a lesser degree the Opinion publique of Hanna Schaer found some of this unique Offenbachian humanness and consequent charm. Though the Orphée of Frédéric Antoun was appropriately funny from time to time this Orphée did not capture the capricious honesty of the male spirit that the role wishes. Marco de Sapia, a fine, young performer, worked too hard to make the Jupiter and Gabrielle Philiponet, the Eurydice, was too busy singing to allow us to share her delights in ephemeral sexual attractions.   Much larger than Offenbach's Théâtre des Bouffes, Montpellier's Opéra Comédie (and the Opéra Royal de Wallonie and the Théâtre Municipal de Metz) beguiled the producers into making the most of sets and costumes. Set designer Dominique Pichou made a fine Olympus, a perfect balance of caricature with other worldly atmosphere, and enfers itself was an appropriately functional space to show off the plentitude of elaborate costumes designed by Jorge Jara and the lively can-can of a corps de ballet, including Diana's four male hounds now sporting colorful skirts they waved in perfect unison with seven ballerinas (some kicking higher than others). The final chorus was repeated three or four times to the great delight of a flock of Montpellians filled with holiday spirit.   Orphée et Eurydice in Toulon   Orpheus is synonymous with opera -- the poet sings, making art and action one, and in the myth he must move hell itself. The bigger challenge though is to move an audience, and this task is both easy and hard. Easy if there is the artistic integrity that the myth itself demands, but hard because both hell and audiences instantly perceive when art falters. Or falls flat on its face as did Orphée et Euridyce at the Toulon Opera (09/12/07).   Announcing a production of an opera with any mention of the Orphic in the title has come to suggest a flirtation with art itself. The Harry Kupfer 1991 production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (the 1762 Italian version for castrato) at the Komische Oper Berlin incorporated the orchestra, audience and art itself into its catharsis, the Trish Brown/Roland Aeschlimann 1998 production of Monteverdi's Orfeo at Brussel's Monnaie graphically elaborated and then resolved the puzzles of the Renaissance's Orpheus myth, the 400th anniversary of the birth of opera was celebrated at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2000 with a production of Peri's Euridice, one that instilled vibrant life and high entertainment into this venerable artistic artifact.   Thus there were precedents to engender excitement about a new production of Gluck's 1774 version of Orphée et Euridyce for Paris where Orpheus would be sung by a tenor rather than by a castrato substitute (a male or female mezzo soprano) or by the baritone of the 1867 Berlioz edition, not to mention that Toulon Opera possesses a fine ballet hinting that just maybe we would have all the forces necessary to realize Gluck's vision of what Wagner later re-envisioned as Gesamtkunstwerk.   With the modern orchestral forces of the Toulon Opera there could be, thankfully, no attempt at a precious Collegium Musicum reading of the work, thus the tuning tone A was at approximately 448, considerably higher than the A at 393 in 1774 (giving some real justification for Berlioz' baritone). That Toulon's fiery Italian conductor Giuliano Carella was in the pit evoked a bit of trepidation as the circumspect and ceremonious proceedings of Gluck reform operas never caught on in Italy, his Alceste judged a turgid de profundus at its 1767 Milan premiere.   But if there were any pleasures at all in the evening they came from the pit during the third act when Euridice confronted Orpheus' coldness in a duet that Carella made quiver with the very Metastasian hyper-emotions that Gluck had wished to restrain. Carella then drove emotional excitement and simple raw speed through Eurydice's death culminating in Orphée's great lament, delivered in chokingly exaggerated orchestral phrasing to Orphée's unbridled despairing lyricism, far from the heroic self-awareness Gluck and the Enlightenment's Orpheus had worked so hard to achieve, but worth the price of admission.   The first two acts of Orphée et Eurydice are extended scenes for chorus and ballet in which Orpheus' predicament unfolds, each scene centered around an Orpheus monologue and aria. While the pushed quality and fast vibrato of Russian tenorino Maxim Mironov worked in Carella's passionate third act these fine Rossini attributes were out of place in the stately pace of these acts, the measured emotions of Chiamo il mio ben and Che puro cielo simply did not materialize making these two acts a musical and dramatic void.   The brief appearance of the Eurydice was the only excitement offered, German soprano Henrike Jacob exuding a heated, Carmen like physical and vocal sexuality that was blatantly foreign to the intelligence of the Orpheus' tragedy.   The two pantomimes of the second act, the furies barring Orpheus' entry into hell and the blessed souls of the Elysian Fields, unfolded in what seemed to be some sort of anti-choreography, the first pantomime clumsily mimicking grotesque motions and the second a moving circle miming some sort of dead harmony -- so much for Gluck's intention of integrating the complex ballets of the intermèdes of French tragedie lyrique into the action of the opera. All the more confusing because there was a choreographer credit in the program.   Jack-of-all-theater-trades Numa Sadoul, born in Brazzaville though one assumes naturalized to France, staged the opera, taking the chorus that Gluck had so carefully integrated into the opera out of the action, dressing the choristers in costumer Luc Londiveau's idea as to what would pass for eighteenth century finery, seating them in the first two levels of the boxes overhanging the orchestra pit. With Amore, French soprano Joanna Malewski, and her two mute accomplices in eighteenth century dress as well, director Sadoul apparently intended to frame the action within some sort of historical context though no perspective made itself discernable. The result was the distancing of his audience from any confrontation with the complexities of the Orpheus tragedy.   But, voilà, the ballet! Finalment! Everything finished except for the last chorus celebrating the inevitable happy ending, sixteen golden eighteenth century courtiers invaded the stage, and we saw that they were not the clumsy furies and the bored souls of Act II, but eight real ballerinas and eight real ballerinos who carried out a complex choreography in classic ballet movements for perhaps thirty minutes. They danced to the music that Gluck was obliged to provide for an extended ballet segment at the 1774 production, a ballet that had absolutely nothing to do with his opera and occurred only after the unities of his tragedy were complete.   But in Toulon Gluck's final celebratory chorus was a stinger to this ballet, director Numa Sadoul somehow outmaneuvering Gluck. France would be far wiser to invest in augmenting its arsenal of nuclear weaponry rather than adding more mediocre or worse productions to its opera repertory.   Marius et Fanny in Marseille   French playwright/filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (1894-1974) is loved in France and unabashedly worshipped in Marseille where he was born. He has a bit of an international following as cult figure for devotees of twentieth century cinema as the maker of Manon de la Source, and is appreciated by foreigners for depicting idealized Provençal personalities that we actually sometimes meet.   Pagnol wrote during one of the bloodier eras of France's bloody history -- two huge wars taking place on French soil, the Vietnamese and Algerian colonial wars, student riots and constitutional crises. But these cataclysmic events are not topics in the Pagnol oeuvre as Pagnol tells the little stories of decent, unimportant people taking delight in doing the decent if sometimes painful thing in the face of quite understandable human failings. These stories document a humanity that seems simple and pure when rendered in Pagnol's delicate art but are at the same time the ingrained pastime we all know as gossip.   Marius et Fanny is an opera based on three plays written by Pagnol in the 1920's and 30's, Marius, César, and Fanny, and then made immediately into films. These plays have been dubbed the Marseille trilogy as they relate a love story that takes place on Marseille's Vieux Port. Besides this world premiere the Opéra de Marseille offers two more operas this fall, Madama Butterfly and Il barbiere di Siviglia, brilliant programming, as these operas are both mirrors and polar opposites of Marius and Fanny, offering contrasts that tell us everything we need to know. When Marius who has abandoned Fanny returns he does not take their child with him when he again departs, and the abandoned Fanny does not kill herself but in fact marries her much older, rich suitor and is content. A further significant contrast is that Butterfly and Barber are important operas, Marius et Fanny is not.   Romanian born, naturalized French composer Vladimir Cosma created the opera, its book based on Pagnol's words but the music is all Cosma. No stranger to Pagnol works, Cosma composed the music for the 1990 films made by Yves Robert of Pagnol's 1957 novels La Gloire de Mon Pere and Le Chateau de Ma Mere. Among the more than 200 film and television scores he has created so far, international cinema audiences may rememberDiva (1981), one of the first French films made in the colorful, melodic new cinéma du look style with Cosma's facile imitations of Eric Satie's Gymnopédies integrated into his pastiche of well known opera arias.   There is a deep chasm between Pagnol and Cosma, both accomplished twentieth century artists emerging from two of its more distinct emotional and artistic climates. Pagnol is delicate and original while Cosma is bombastic and derivative, able to conjure Le Wally, Puccini, Bernstein, Rogers and Hammerstein and Tony Bennett (voir Sasha Distel) successively and simultaneously, and able as well to easily construe a series of musical numbers that resembles a real opera or better operetta. Such extravagant means are foreign to the Pagnol innocence that reassures a simply humanity within the unspoken inhumanity of its contemporary history. On the surface beguiling, Cosma's Fanny et Marius mostly fell into meaningless, clichéd musical gesture, its music better suited to amplifying wide-screen Technicolor images than simple emotions.   As nearly always at the Opéra de Marseille casting was superb, extraordinary was Marius' father César (the role created by the legendary Toulon commedien Raimu) played by bass Jean-Philippe Lafont, sympathetic was the fine baritone of Marc Barrard as the old suitor Panisse, convincing was the Marius of young tenor Sébastien Guéze (14/09/07). Soprano Karen Vourc'h seemed more comfortable playing the matronly Fanny than the girl-next-door Fanny (14/09/07). As too often in Marseille the production was of little interest, content with a sort of literal illustration that is unsatisfying to audiences now accustomed to thoughtful, sometimes even conceptual staging. The Cosma score was dutifully served up by conductor Jacques Lacome and Marseille's fine orchestra.   But this was Marseille's moment, its audience immensely appreciative of this pop-opera bow to probably its most favorite son. This obvious appreciation was contagious certainly even to those in the audience who will soon be genuinely moved by Butterfly's brilliantly heroic self sacrifice and delighted by the unbridled vocal egoism of Beaumarchais' twisted characters in Rossini's brilliant Barber.   Note that the alternate cast was Roberto Alagna as Marius and Angela Gheorghiu as Fanny. A DVD recording has been made of this performance. Bon dieu. Not to be missed!   Monteverdi Madrigals at the Edinburgh Festival   Much is made of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals by historians of music. This formidable body of music that emerged over Monteverdi's long life dramatically tracks the rise of solo voice declamation of theatrical text and the demise of multi-voice, polyphonic settings of lyric poetry. However not much is made of these extraordinary pieces by early music performers, perhaps because of their inextricable fusion to Italian sensibility and language as well as to their inherently virtuostic technical and musical nature. Surely it is difficult to find places for such brief pieces in larger programs, and then there are those of us who suspect that music of such dramatic force transcends the preciousness associated with early music and therefore does not belong in such programs anyway.   Italian conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini organized a cycle of fifty-one madrigals coming from the eight separate books of madrigals published by Monteverdi over approximately fifty years. The Alessandrini cycle was spread over five, early evening one-hour programs within seven days. After the first, well-attended program word was out that this was the hot ticket at the festival, stuffing the Greyfriars Kirk with an excited audience for the remaining four evenings.   The Alessandrini cycle enacted these small pieces, many of them masterpieces and some not so small after all, with his on-going group Il Concerto Italiano, here comprised of a pool of seven singers, two omnipresent theorbos, three violins, a cello, bass and harpsichord. The cycle became operatic indeed as we became familiar with Alessandrini's singers who soon lost identity as the accomplished young Italian singers they were and became the actual Tirsi's and Clori's, Pastorella's and Pastore's, Amarilli and the suffering poets themselves who speak out in these madrigals. These mythic characters plunged us into an inexhaustible state of tension, our desperate needs teased but never fulfilled, our souls at once torn and satisfied by passion.   Monteverdi lived with this poetic tension over his long life, and it was his muse. Over the five programs our minds were at first charmed by Renaissance madrigal art itself and then, gradually, astounded by the Monteverdi genius as it discovered the solo voice, the expressive possibilities soaring when voices are freed of musical obligations.   The most memorable moments of the cycle were always the five voiced madrigals on poetry by the great Italian Renaissance poets. The early books (I, II, III) were at their most exciting when setting fluid, mixed meter verses by Torquato Tasso, poetry that offered ample opportunities for indulging in natural and emotional description. The masterful, harmonically highly articulated middle books (IV and V) using Battista Guarini's complicated pastoral Il Pastor Fido and the dramatically vivid verses by Ottavio Rinuccini (the librettist for Peri's Dafne and Eurydice, the very first operas) take the five voice polyphonic madrigal to dramatic heights never surpassed.   Though Monteverdi's book VI comes after his first very successful Mantuan operatic efforts it does not pursue the solo voices that opera had discovered, preferring the traditional five madrigal voices here to musically cloth the lament of Rinuccini's Arianna, Monteverdi's lost second opera of which the only existing fragment is this lament, in the opera obviously for solo voice. It is in this book that Monteverdi discovers the brilliant and complex sonnets by both the ultra-modern poet of the moment, Giambattista Marino and the venerable first of the Renaissance love poets, Francesco Petrarca. The long lines of these metaphorically involved and structurally complex sonnets trigger intensive experimentation through the addition of instrumental musical textures. This frees the poets' words to float freely and decoratively above the basic musical groundwork, and for Monteverdi to indulge in five-voice musical elaborations of stridently intense emotions.   The final two books, VII and VIII, hold the great solo madrigals, among them the extended scene Tirsi e Clori, an intense love letter read by a suffering shepherd, a lament for an emotionally overwrought nymph (with three commenting shepherds), and finally the extended Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda that indulges its narrator to recount the brutal actions and terrible ironies of Torquato Tasso's knight who unknowingly thrusts his sword into his beloved, impressively aided by Monteverdi's indulgence in his newly found agitated style. These madrigals were sung full-throttle in full-scale histrionic melodrama, at once over done and perfectly done.   The last madrigal in the cycle returned to the multi voiced madrigal, a six voice concerted (with instruments) setting of one of the most famous poems from Petrarch's Canzoniere, Hor che'l ciel e la terra e'l vento tace (Now that heaven, earth and the winds are silent). This complex work, really a dramatic oratorio, was a most fitting and moving conclusion to Monteverdi's life-long musical adventure, as it was a synthesis of the most basic expressive techniques of sixteenth century multi-voiced madrigals with the most audacious of early seventeenth-century musical discoveries.   Ironically conductor Alessandrini's powerful presence was almost unseen, as his back was to the audience while he ignited and controlled these five hours of on-the-edge emotions and sublime art. Although the program booklet did not identify the singers who sang the solo madrigals, these artists received huge ovations as did, finally Maestro Alessandrini. This Monteverdi/Alessandrini madrigal cycle was a powerful, one fears once-in-a-lifetime experience.   Unfortunately Mo. Alessandrini has been engaged to conduct the three extant Monteverdi operas in new productions at Milan's La Scala, a theater and an artistic environment hardly appropriate for these works.   Poppea at the Edinburgh Festival   Tragic dignity along with Platonic idealism long flushed into a canal, Venice's mid seventeenth century opera scene was real, the real having everything to do with what turned the public on. The Venetian audience was no doubt sexually quite sophisticated, and luckily the senior citizens of Britain must be even moreso as this experience was needed to appreciate director Barrie Kosky's Poppea, a fantasy on Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation of Poppea.   With only an occasional word of Italian to be heard, the guttural utterances of German actors were appropriately matched to the guttural tones of an orchestra of three cellos throbbing between the legs of their players, all this mixed with the lively innuendoes of worldly Cole Porter lyrics. And not a singer in sight.   The curators of the Edinburgh festival must have had some trepidation as this version from the Vienna Schauspielhaus of Monteverdi's last masterpiece could only be perceived as a centerpiece of the festival's focus on the first of the great Italian musical lyricists. Although a synopsis of Poppea's action could not be found in the program booklet a sort of apology could, this in the guise of a listing of director Kosky's weird sexual concepts for opera productions in Austria and Australia. While we all have come a long way and can handle most anything thrown at us by now, the fear lingered that the experience was going to be gross.   And of course it was, though it is hard to decide if the grossness was Monteverdi's opera itself, the very nerve to create a theatrical fantasy on an operatic masterpiece, or the compendium of sexual deviations that was so gracefully inserted into Monteverdi's libretto. Amore was a madame whose pleasures by now have included those of the table, her bejewelled fingers shooting sparks of the je-ne-sais-quoi that ignite and tease passions. Love had twisted Poppea's young husband Ottone into contortions, Poppea was an animal shooting sparks from her teeth and growls from her mouth, Nero's body and mind revealed indulgences that transcended the primitivism of his costume, a piece of sparkling black fabric that hung waist down like a pelt, matching that of Poppea. Seneca appears as a deaf mute, an inanimate statue, a masturbating voyeur.   These were actors whose entire physical, spiritual and vocal presences embodied Monteverdi's characters. We soon understood that while they were not singers, they would sing anyway, the entire text as well as the inserted songs -- both Cole Porter's and finally the magnificent Monteverdi lament and love duet, the rejected empress Ottavia using broken voiced harmonics and squeaks, the triumphant Poppea twisting her low predatory tones under the strange tenorial innocence of Nero. Not opera or even ballad singers, these actors were certainly instinctual musicians.   The generic contemporary German stage box held but two Louis XIV chairs that crashed silently from time to time and a small bathtub that shot into the space from time to time. Within this space the whore madame Amore guides Poppea to her goal, rids Nero of Seneca in a blood bath, thwarts Ottavia's revenge and sends Ottone and his new sweetheart Drusilla off into the sunset, presumably to continue singing Cole Porter songs to one another. This leaves Poppea and Nero alone, sitting passively side by side, professing love in this sudden emptiness. It is empty, and for once we have truly felt Monteverdi's deep intuition that it is suffering and not love that is the fun.   This evening of theatrical hyper-sophistication never strayed too far from Monteverdi musically, with L'incornazione di Poppea's most recognisable themes as well as subtle distillations of Monteverdi's musically elaborate recitatives woven into composer Kosky's musical texture. Theatrically Poppea kept the careful balances of tragicomedy even with or perhaps because of the audacious mixing of Cole Porter songs with Kosky's music. These songs, plus the use of the German language, an always useful barroom piano, the throaty sounds of cello, a greatly simplified love situation made a fine cabaret opera, perhaps musically too sophisticated for the larger theater public and theatrically too sophisticated for the larger opera audience. It was a perfect evening for Edinburgh's festival audience.   Unlike opera traditionally thought to be made of individual performances, theater prides itself on ensemble, thus no individual bows were taken (and so no names are here written). In a well-rehearsed simultaneous motion the actors recognised the musical and theatrical creator of the evening, Barrie Kosky who sat at the piano in the orchestra pit.   Il trovatore in Orange   Orange's magnificent Théâtre Antique was packed to the gills. France's glamour tenor Roberto Alagna was le trouvère, reputedly one of his best roles. And Les Chorégies d'Orange had well met the challenge of assembling a supporting cast for this dashing, now forty-four year-old tenorissimo with the Leonora of American soprano Susan Neves, the Azucena of Russian mezzo Larrissa Diadkova, and the Conte di Luna of South Korean baritone Seng-Hyoun Ko.   Make no mistake, Il trovatore is not about infanticide and bloody revenge. It is about singing. Nonetheless a case can be made for casting a handsome trouvère, and in Orange his gypsy mother exuded an elegance of bearing that could even have engendered such tenorial flash, though of course she is not really his mother and really is a hag. Verisimilitude was completely lost with the pairing of this trouvère's cocky Sicilian swagger with the ballsy swagger of his somewhat shorter Korean brother. It was international opera at its best, meaning that the casting ultimately did make dramatic sense where it matters most for Il Trovatore -- in the voices.   The venue is huge, dominated by a massive back wall with some small architectural detail remaining. Because the stage may be as much as 60 meters wide it reads as a massive horizontal space, clearly impossible to transform scenically. Thus the Orange Roman theater gave definition to minimalist staging long before this late twentieth century style became accepted by opera audiences elsewhere.   So it was staging as usual, this time by Charles Roubaud who has proven himself a fine minimalist in many productions hereabouts, most recently Die Walküre in Marseille. As usual massive armies poured in from the huge side openings, clashed as necessary in the middle and flowed out the other side, here the Aragon soldiers and their officers in tailored pale blue gray uniforms, the Biscay rebels without uniform, mostly in black. By contrast nuns flowed in, circled and flowed out of a hidden upstage opening, white habits billowing. Costumes are everything at Orange. Costumer Katia Duflot rose to the occasion providing something akin to operatic haute couture, never allowing a level of elegance to falter even when clothing Verdi's gypsy hag.   The principal singers were kept right where they belonged -- downstage center, le trouvère and his elegant gypsy stepmother in chic, close fitting Spanish black. Leonora on the other hand was covered in yards of a gray-blue gossamer fabric able to be caught by the slightest of breezes, creating an impressively dynamic presence. Mme. Neves remained immobile for her fourth act arias, allowing the movements of her costume to amplify her pianissimos and to brighten the fires of these showpieces. Nine thousand people, maybe ten, roared their appreciation.   Downstage center to be sure, and in obvious rapport with conductor Gianandrea Noseda, this fine cast delivered great arias and ensembles of Verdi's most melodious opera on the level of what seemed near perfection. Though when not communing with his divas and divos this conducting star indulged in lugubrious, self-important tempos, sometimes losing the scores of chorus voices (unlikely as it may seem, tight ensemble has been the rule rather than the exception at Orange over the years).   A stepped structure upstage center gave access the large door centered in the back wall, a point of dramatic entrance and exit. It was here that director Roubaud positioned Alagna, his sword thrust high, to deliver the critically incorrect high "c" of di quella pira. Even though the duration of this high note was kept tastefully brief it evoked a huge ovation, the long duration of which Alagna held this hyper dramatic pose.   The most striking visual element of this Orange production was its use of projection and video, the work of one Gilles Papain. For once the cheap effect stigma of such tricks was overcome, perhaps because projecting video images of such magnitude (an estimated 40 by 60 meters) could hardly be cheap, and images of such size can only be imposing. Inspired by the breezes and sometimes the winds that play around the uncovered theater, these huge, artful video images, always in black and white, created a visual energy in this massive space that complimented its high musical energy.   The shadow of the single branch that made Leonora's garden seemed to move with the gentle breezes that stirred the evening air, battle scene flags beat urgently to the hints of a mistral wind, the huge raft of votive candles flickered dimly in the monastery. Finally a pyre ignited; at first a red slash appeared across the width of the stage, then a huge, intense, red flame burst onto the wall into which Azucena shouted her revenge.   This final image, playing beyond the words but certainly within the intention of Verdi's libretto, was driven with inspired musical brilliance by conductor Noseda, creating the kind of spine tingling finale that occurs every so often in Orange, and keeps us going back for more.   Sorbet Sorbet at Weekend Musical in Carnoules   Summertime in the South of France provides a superabundance of performing arts. Luckily the seemingly unlimited means of the Aix, Avignon, Montpellier and Orange festivals usually fund good performances, sometimes even great performances on standards comparable to Europe's important festivals. But there are lots more festivals hereabouts, small village festivals, and some even dare artistic aspirations comparable to those of the major festivals.   The Weekend Musical in Carnoules, a village in the central Var, is such a festival. Though working on a production standard that is decidedly local it is at the same time uncompromising in its aspiration to create high art. In the past content with versions of pieces like Carmen, Werther and even Milhaud's Trois Opéras Minutes, this summer Weekend Musical took on the daredevil task of making a new opera, a sprawling comedy called Sorbet Sorbet.   Sorbet Sorbet is a collaboration between librettist Bernard Turle and two composers, Véronique Souberbielle and Simon Milton, she French and he British. The result was complex theater of spoken word (French) that flowed into chant, broke into chanson, gave way to dance and converged in complex musical scenes of aria and ensemble. The focus seldom faltered at its July 25 world premiere, though the oblique storytelling left much of the audience often wondering what in fact was happening.   Global warming makes topics like "ice" topical indeed and global markets have made it likely that your sorbet may now be made in China. Thus Bernard Turle fittingly made his story about an ice cream factory caught in transition, not only in its marketplace but also the personalities caught in these larger world transitions. The story, set in the 1970's, is comic, developing the tensions between the generations of the factory's founding family, and the tensions that overwhelm their inner lives as each transcends an age of life. Of course these comic forces are not always funny, but they are always classically comic as we see yet again that these are the forces that renew the world.   Big yes, too big maybe for the Salle Communale in Carnoules, that was mostly a stage set and an orchestra, the overflow audience seeming almost incidental. A large cast, the father and mother, a son and a two daughters, a maid and a foreman, an ice-skating teacher, plus the catalyst, the "green" boyfriend who arrives on a vintage motor scooter -- all principal roles. Not to mention the 20 or so workers in the ice cream factory who chanted and sang and danced throughout the evening.   As the story deftly interlaced the bizarre, the absurd and the weird into the real, the music paced itself, balancing the certainty of gospel style harmonic progressions with the confident plaintiveness of the modern French chanson, juxtaposing the enervating intervals of Richard Strauss quotations with the acoustical play of harmonics, and in the larger moments unleashing orchestral structures that created the warm, cold, comic, tragic, ironic moods that underpinned the story. Though two compositional styles were perceptible they were compatible, and seamlessly integrated. A printed program that credited the specific contributions of each composer would have been helpful.   There were some quite effective performances, among them the mother, a Marschallin figure portrayed by soprano Julia Catalani who pleads to preserve her beauty cyrogenically (by freezing). Bernard Turle himself vividly spoke the few words of the father that acerbate both the incipient family and business confrontations, the rebel daughter Marie-Jo played by mezzo-soprano Danielle Sales was at first convincingly angry and then moving as she gave birth, her lover Kamel was played by tenor John Upperton who brought some high level singing to the production.   High art too was the ice-skating dance scene that opened the second act, walking a fine line between caricature, comedy and even ballet as performed by Cécile the ice-skating daughter sung by composer Véronique Souberbielle herself and an unidentified chorister, both non dancers though Ms. Souberbielle is perhaps a better dancer than singer. Perhaps it was she as composer who provided the brilliantly ironic and highly refined music for this mesmerizing scene.   The chorus, comprised of local townspeople who ably negotiated demanding rhythms and never let down a formidable dramatic concentration, was one of the evening's supreme pleasures.   The nine players of the orchestra, that of London's Midsummer Opera, here specifically a string quartet, plus clarinet (played by composer Simon Milton), flute, bassoon and percussion was led from the piano by its conductor/director David Roblou. This small group brought robust presence to the Milton/Souberbielle score particularly colored from time to time by clarinet and bassoon solos and the wood block punctuation of the percussion.   The cast included Tania Zolty who made the fur hat coiffed ice-skating teacher Madame Kezeeff seem exotic, soprano Cécile Piris exuded a sweetness as the maid that ensnared finally the recalcitrant family scion Hughes, sung by baritone Trevor Alexander. Bass Jean-Philippe Doubrere uttering some strikingly low tones in the final tableau was the wily factory foreman Blandenyck. The formidable job of musical preparation of the singers was not identified, though one assumes it should be credited to Mo. Roblou.   Staged by Bernard Turle who also assembled an impressive array of costumes and props, and effectively lighted by Franck Jouanny, this production had all the polish one expects from the big festivals, and none of the pretension. As all new works, this one too has need of editing as the evening could have ended a bit before it finally did.   L'Orfeo at the Aix Festival   The more famous contemporary choreographers arrive from time to time in the South of France to ply their craft. Pina Bausch inaugurated the Stéphane Lissner regime at the Aix Festival ten years ago with an indifferent, ultimately boring Bluebeard's Castle, more recently Sasha Walz brought her splendid Dido and Aeneas to Montpellier, water tanks and all. Some years back Trisha Brown's troop of dancers showed up in the Cour d'Honneur of the Avignon Festival, enervating a small audience that fled noisily when it had had its fill of stomping and running.   But not so the Trisha Brown L'Orfeo at the Aix Festival where the audience sat entranced for two hours of mushy Monteverdi. Danced rather more effectively than sung, this performance (15/07/07) was driven primarily by spectacular stagecraft, brilliant minimalism and the indefatigable genius of Monteverdi. It is no surprise that there was a pleased audience as this Orfeo was hardly a new trick, having proved itself ten years ago at Bernard Foccroulle's Théatre Monnaie.   Swiss designer Toland Aeschlimann provided a huge white box to enclose the action. The front wall then the back wall held the same huge open circle on which Trisha Brown's flying dancer, La Musica, became the dynamic suspended decorations of a Renaissance ceiling. A sidewall moved forward revealing the third act blackness of Hell and its guard Caronte, its fatal movement heroically resisted by Trisha Brown's Orfeo. Then Euridice was turned to stone, the enigmatic tragedy was achieved, and Hell receded. Eventually the opposite side moved onstage motivating Orfeo's apotheosis by pushing his assent onto Aeschlimann's perfect, heavenly circle. These bold scenographic statements matched perfectly Monteverdi's mythology.   Trisha Brown's nymphs and swains, uniformly clothed in movement friendly loose white pant suits, enlivened the pastoral first act while Orfeo, loosely suited in energetic yellow, expressed his happiness. Monteverdi's Euridice appears only momentarily; here in an elaborate, abstracted short gown in saturated blue, her subsequent death recounted by an emerald green nymph, la Messagiera. The infernal spirits wrapped in cowled black robes rolled on the floor making the river Styx come alive with these unhappy souls marooned in Hell. These strong shapes and colors of Aeschlimann's minimalist costumes attained status as universal symbols of the Christian and pagan tensions that preoccupied the Renaissance man.   There was little distinction in the movements and dynamism of Trisha Brown's ten dancers, the eleven young chorus singers comprising English Voices, and the twelve young soloists of the Aix Festival's Académie européenne de musique. Trish Brown's dance language is urgent and minimal, as is Monteverdi's music. Movements are simple elaborations of ordinary human motions that are quickly executed while moving in concert with other dancers in and out of larger graphic shapes.   There were two professional singers in the cast, the Orfeo of Ed Lyon (appearing in three of the six performances) and the Musica/Messagiera/Speranza of Marie-Claude Chappuis. Mr. Lyon's Orfeo was splendidly sung and choreographically superbly rendered, his lengthy monologues enacted in abrupt, abstracted physical actions, a strongly defined Monteverdian musical word often underscored with a single powerful body movement. Marie-Claude Chappuis's performance was less effective. Her La Musica was vocally insecure, the highly dramatic Messagiera speech was vocally and histrionically tepid, though her movements -- arms and hands choreographically placed in precise, unmoving attitudes that underscored the sense of a verse -- were convincing.   The exploits of the mythological Orfeo, and here his courage to confront hell itself, are nothing if not heroic. Not less so are the vocal and histrionic exploits Monteverdi requires of his Orfeo. Mr. Lyon is a light tenor voice, a slender young swain, who for all his artistry cannot physically be Orfeo. Ms. Chappuis is an accomplished, young early-music singer who possesses neither the adequate vocal size nor the physical presence or charisma to fill an opera theater. The same may be said with some few exceptions of the young singers of the Académie européenne de musique.   Yet this was Ms. Brown's evening of highly theatrical movement in Mr. Aeschlimann's brilliant setting, an artistic accomplishment of considerable stature. Even the inherent difficulty of the piece, the seemingly extraneous apotheosis of the fifth act, was overcome, the physicality of the scenography and choreography making a dramatic crescendo into the final, devil-teased tableau. This was the evening's miracle.   René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale were the willing musical collaborators providing a smooth accompaniment for movement rather more apparently than providing the specific sounds Monteverdi envisioned to amplify the words of Alessandro Striggio's libretto. Though certainly there were some very fine moments, among them the harp accompaniment to Orfeo's plea to Caronte. The twenty-eight players of Concerto Vocale were buried in the orchestra pit depriving the audience of seeing and even really hearing these exotic instruments. Mo. Jacobs offered some acoustical and visual play, placing the sackbuts on the side of the stage for the orchestral prelude, and strings in the rear of the auditorium for the instrumental interjections during Orfeo's plea, though these few brief tricks did not integrate themselves into the larger dramatic texture of the production.   For the past ten years the Aix Festival has been somewhat an artistic desert. This evening did offer finally the Aix audience a production worthy of its attention.