Gold Medal in Dallas

"You are all singing divinely and acting perfectly," said Stage Manager Franco Zeffirelli during intermission. "You are an Olympic team." Zeffirelli's pep talk was directed to the six-member cast of Handel's Alcina, brilliantly presented last week by the Dallas Civic Opera. The occasion was remarkable not only because it again displayed the Dallas Opera to be one of the most enterprising in the country (despite its short, three-week season) or because the production of the all but forgotten Handel work showed a nice Texas feeling for musical antiques. Above all, the evening served to frame the long-awaited U.S. debut of Australian-born Soprano Joan Sutherland, one of opera's fastest-rising new stars.

The melodic and elaborately embellished Handel work proved to be one of those baroque affairs full of knights, courtiers and disguised lovers, all involved in magical complications. (The 1735 libretto was taken from the famed Renaissance epic, Orlando Furioso, by Italian Poet Lodovico Ariosto.) The imaginative Dallas production made all this easier to take by treating the piece as a play within a play--a musical evening in the home of a nobleman of Handel's period, with the opera itself presented as an entertainment for the guests. The opulent, columned and chandeliered set had a revolving dais at stage center on which the masque's labyrinthine plot could easily glide from court to forest to grotto.

In the role of Ruggiero, Mezzo Blanche Thebom flawlessly handled the difficult vocal and dramatic task of portraying a knight who, bewitched by a Circe-like enchantress, has forgotten his past but is gradually regaining his memory. British Mezzo Monica Sinclair, also making her U.S. debut, displayed a fierce, darkly colored voice, matched at every turn by the other principals--U.S. Soprano Joan Marie Moynagh, Italy's Luigi Alva and Nicola Zaccaria. The star of the evening, though, was Sutherland, and she amply lived up to the reputation that had preceded her (TIME, June 13). Her range was wide, secure and even, her tone warm and sparkling. Her trill, as one critic noted, "really is a trill and not a wobble." In one of the many moments that won her bravos, Sutherland swept up to a high E flat with astonishing ease.

In stage presence and dramatic insight, Sutherland is still no match for that oth er mistress of rare and early opera, Maria Callas. But not even Callas fans could deny last week that in sheer vocal technique, Sutherland had earned her Olympic gold medal.

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