Opera's Summer Rites

Opera, says Mr. Scruples in Mozart's The Impresario, "occasionally loses skirmishes, but it invariably wins the battle for survival." On the theory that some of the most interesting battles are taking place in that realm known as regional opera, TIME'S music critic William Bender visited St. Paul, Katonah, N. Y., and Ottawa. He encountered imaginative programming, talented young singers, skilled managerial talent and audiences as eager for the untried as the familiar. His report:

ST. PAUL OPERA is an adventurous, four-year-old summer festival with an extensive following not only in Minnesota but also in bordering Wisconsin and Iowa. It has given the world premiere of Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke, the American premiere of Carl Nielsen's Maskarade, and staged such other esoterica as Delius' A Village Romeo and Juliet and Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men.

The current St. Paul season ranges from a Carmen in French to a Siegfried in English. Last week the company offered the American premiere of Engagement in San Domingo by Germany's Werner Egk, 73, whose music tends to be grandiose and wildly varied. Engagement is a kind of Caribbean Aida set in what is now Haiti during the black natives' overthrow of the French colonists at the turn of the 19th century. The heroine is the mulatto Jeanne, who falls in love with the French officer Christoph, though her revolutionist mother Bobokan is plotting his death. At the end, Jeanne is killed by Christoph, who mistakes her attempt to help him for treachery.

The story is a natural for opera, set by the composer in a style that can only be called Egk-clectic. The blues, dashes of Strauss and Puccini, an occasional roll of voodoo drums--all these are woven into a skillful pastiche. If hardly innovative, it is easy to listen to and, at key moments, appropriately bravura. Never mind such questions as why Egk chose the blues to evoke a Caribbean mood, instead of a music more indigenous to the West Indies. Music Director Igor Buketoff led a crisp, idiomatic performance that drew the most from Egk's acrobatic orchestral score and made the blues passages seem natural, less like interludes. As Jeanne, Newcomer Barbara Hendricks from Little Rock, Ark., displayed a ravishing lyric soprano voice. Karl Brock not only handled the rigorous tenor lead role of Christoph with a convincing mixture of despair and bravado but also produced a splendid English translation of Egk's German libretto.

In addition to the fine performances, one of St. Paul Opera's biggest contributions to regional opera is the launching of a program to share production costs (sets and costumes) with four other companies--the Seattle, San Diego, Houston and Washington, D.C. Each season, the Gramma Fisher Foundation * in Marshalltown, Iowa, contributes $100,000 for a new operatic production that is mounted by one of the companies, then made available in succeeding years to the others. St. Paul, for example, currently has a very stylish Manon that was introduced earlier this year in Houston. The plan is a sensible, sane method of cutting the staggering costs of opera today, and it is fortunately catching on elsewhere.

CARAMOOR, devoted only partly to opera, is located 40 miles from Manhattan in exurban Katonah and thus barely qualifies as regional. But its locale, an Italian villa surrounded by 180 wooded acres, makes the summeiiong festival a remote, ethereal world apart. Opera performances are held in a 1,500-seat outdoor Venetian theater. The stage is built around three dozen 9th century Greek and Roman columns smuggled out of Italy decades ago and subsequently bought by the late Walter and Lucie Rosen, who owned Caramoor.

In this exquisite setting, the company's excellent veteran musical director Julius Rudel last week introduced an offbeat operatic double bill consisting of Antonio Salieri's Prima la Musica e Poi le Parole (First the Music and Then the Words) and Mozart's The Impresario. Since both works deal with backstage intrigue, and both had their premieres together in 1786 on commission from Austria's enlightened Emperor Joseph II, the two one-acters would seem made for each other.

There is a legend, fostered notably by a Pushkin poem and later by Rimski-Korsakov in an opera (Mozart and Sa-lieri), that Salieri poisoned Mozart. Scholars discount the thesis, but there is no doubt that Salieri hindered the career of his younger colleague. Small wonder. Salieri was a hack who saw Mozart as a threat to his own reputation. Is such historical byplay justification enough for combining the two works at this late date? Alas, no. Prima la Musica has about 15 minutes of passable music; at a length of 70 minutes, it is maddeningly vapid.

But as the lights went down after inj termission, the mercurial opening bars of Impresario's overture transformed the evening. By the standard of the composer's later works, Impresario is a trifle. Its characters are types--Mr. Angel, the elderly financier, Mme. Goldentrill, the aging diva. Yet how boldly the types are cast, and how fresh the music. It was a good show, even though Director Frank Corsaro placed the action in the Edwardian era in a wasted effort to provide contrast with the Salieri. Sopranos Karan Armstrong (Goldentrill) and Ruth Welting (Miss Silverpeal) filled the theater with fine singing and fetching looks.

For opera buffs, the evening's most notable portrayal was Scruples (the impresario) played by Francis Robinson, 64, the perennial opera raconteur, radio personality and assistant manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Though Scruples is a nonsinging role, he does have most of the punch lines ("Opera?

A ridiculous Italian disease that won't last!"). Robinson was splendidly languid and elegant in depicting a man grown bored with opera and its intrigues.

NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE, in its fifth year at Ottawa, is a working, growing symbol of Canada's cultural life. Its main hall has but 2,100 seats and, like the European auditoriums that served as its model, it is an ultimate and easeful place to hear opera. Its backstage plant is the best in Canada--almost as big as the Metropolitan Opera's. Best of all, there is Conductor Mario Bernardi, who since 1971 has presided over one of the first-rank summer opera festivals on the continent. He began the current season with a new production of Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio.

Seraglio predates The Impresario by four years and is written in the style of the Singspiel (literally, song-play), the popular 18th century German comic opera. These days it needs a clever stage style--or more expert clowning--to make a convincing evening. This, alas, the opera failed to get from Director Anthony Besch, who unaccountably kept the action stiff and stately.

Fortunately, the music of Seraglio is one glorious moment after another, and here there was no disappointment.

Conductor Bernardi has a discreet, controlled way with Mozart that was especially beneficial to some of his younger singers--notably Dutch-born Sonja Foot as Constanze and Montreal's Anna Chornodolska as the maid Blonde. Bass Joseph Rouleau, a regular at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was lecher-perfect as the Pasha's harem keeper, Osmin. The star of the evening, though, was the five-year-old National Arts Centre Orchestra, a chamber-sized ensemble of 46 that Bernardi conducts in concert during the winter.

It plays Mozart with a darker hue than usual, yet is clean and energetic. Canada does not have another orchestra like it, and the ensemble is certainly a match for its smaller U.S. counterparts --notably the Los Angeles and St. Paul chamber orchestras.

* Named for the opera-loving mother of J. William Fisher, a sometime composer and retired board chairman of Fisher Controls Co., Inc.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.