Three Premieres, Three Hits

By Michael Walsh

But opera managers neglect the war horses at their peril

Samuel Johnson called opera "an exotic and irrational entertainment," and maybe it was in 18th century London. There is nothing exotic about the opera boom in America today. In such cities as Omaha, Dallas and even Moorhead, N. Dak., regional companies have taken root, resulting in innovative and exciting operatic activity.

The Seattle Opera, for example, is in the seventh summer of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, in both English and German cycles. The San Diego Opera stages a Verdi festival, producing the relatively obscure works--this year Un Giorno di Regno--along with the more familiar ones. Usually defined as companies other than the so-called Big Five--New York's Metropolitan, the San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera and the New York City Opera--the regional groups are distinguished by their employment of American artists and even American composers. Last season the more than 60 regional companies in the U.S. attracted 49% of its opera audiences.

An acknowledged leader is Opera Theater of St. Louis. In just six seasons, Richard Gaddes, 39, the company's British-born general director, has made opera flourish in a city where past efforts had mostly been failures.

At a time when some of his colleagues have difficulty selling anything but their umpteenth La Boheme, Gaddes has found an audience for the new and the unusual. The current season is typical: the American premiere of Japanese Composer Minoru Miki's An Actor's Revenge, a double bill consisting of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's The Secret of Susanna and Frederick Delius' last opera, Fennimore and Gerda (also an American premiere), Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Verdi's Rigoletto, all sung in English.

The two premieres received the best performances. The Delius, completed in 1910 and first performed in 1919, proved a major discovery. The perfumed, sensuous score is characteristic of this British composer who spent much of his life in France and suggests Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande in its allusiveness and emotional restraint. Yet there is also a distinctly modern sensibility at work in the opera's structure--eleven scenes (or "pictures," as Delius called them) strung together with orchestral interludes.

The opera is based on the novel Niels Lyhne by the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen and concerns Niels' love for two women, Fennimore and Gerda. Most of it is devoted to his tragic affair with Fennimore; some months after finishing the rest, Delius added the two Gerda scenes, which provide a happy ending.

Sopranos Kathryn Bouleyn and Kathryn Gamberoni stood out in the title roles. Christopher Keene, an important young American conductor, led the score with considerable sensitivity. Director Frank Corsaro captured the lyricism of Fennimore and Gerda with a light, poetic touch. He staged the action behind a scrim, using film and slides to indicate the passage of time and interpolating mimed action during the orchestral interludes.

An Actor's Revenge tells the tale of an 18th century Kabuki actor, Yukinojo, who specializes in female roles. Yukinojo is played by two people: a tenor (Mallory Walker) who sings the role, and a dancer (Manuel Alum) who mimes the part. Walker's relentless shouting tired the ear quickly, but Alum's performance as a man impersonating a woman was riveting.

Miki's score uses nine Western instruments plus the koto (a kind of harp), samisen (a Japanese lute) and the tsuzumi drum. The composer manipulates a few simple musical motifs to achieve great emotional resonance as the themes recur; a sensitive, fragile hybrid that combines traditional Japanese elements with contemporary Western compositional practices, it must be heard in the theater to make its effect. Director Colin Graham, who commissioned the work for London's English Music Theater in 1979, staged the sometimes violent action subtly and with formal grace.

While the unusual operas bring in the out-of-town press, boosting a company's prestige, it is still the chestnuts that pay the bills. Says Michigan Opera Theater's David Di Chiera: "There must be a delicate balance between what the community wants and what will get national attention." The Dallas Opera's Plato Karayanis said his company lost 5% of its subscribers after last season's repertory of Turandot, Delibes's Lakme, Vivaldi's Orlando furioso and Britten's Peter Grimes; with a more conventional season coming up, he expects record ticket sales.

Gaddes cannot readily explain his success with the offbeat. Perhaps his apprenticeship at the Santa Fe Opera --the prototype of the innovative summer company--has something to do with it, as well as his urbane salesmanship. Gaddes also credits public interest in the exciting young singers who have appeared with the company and admits that the BBC's telecast of the 1978 Albert Herring raised the company immeasurably in the eyes of opera-hungry St. Louisans.

"When I was first asked to come to St. Louis as a consultant," recalls Gaddes, "I think I was expected to recommend that they get a large hall, hire Renata Scotto and do Il Trovatore." Instead, St. Louis has heard Rameau's Pygmalion, Martin y Soler's Tree of Chastity and the world premiere of The Village Singer, by the American composer Stephen Paulus.

Yet rapid success, says Gaddes, has brought with it some problems. "We're very much in the spotlight of the regional companies, and I sense we're now being judged as a national festival. But we mustn't lose sight of our original purpose: to give the best young singers an opportunity to perform under the best possible conditions."

Not all the news was in St. Louis this month. At the San Francisco Opera, German Composer Aribert Reimann's Lear was given its American premiere. Reimann, 45, has penetrated the gloomy heart of Shakespeare's King Lear and has written a powerful serialist score that has a symbiotic relationship to Claus Henneberg's adaptation of the play, underlining and commenting upon the action in Shakespeare without really accompanying it. The earth moves, literally, in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's imaginative production. Ponnelle uses the bare walls of the stagehouse as a backdrop for Lear's blasted heath, and sections of the stage are raised and lowered. The effect is chilling in the storm scene. Brilliantly led by Conductor Gerd Albrecht, the performance boasted a powerful, pitiable Lear in Thomas Stewart. Lear has already entered the repertory in Europe. Whether more conservative U.S. audiences will take it to heart remains to be seen. But it deserves the chance. --By Michael Walsh

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