Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Justin Davidson of Newsday, Melville,
N.Y. that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Sunday. August 3, 1997
THE SANTA FE Opera house is a brown building on a brown hill outside
of town. From a distance, it is a streak of adobe that blends with the
landscape, which is itself highly operatic. An afternoon storm beat its
way through the area the day I arrived, and an hour before Strauss’ "Arabella"
began, the New Mexico sky was bisected in a theatrical stroke that would
have earned a set designer an ovation.
To the east, over the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the sky still looked
swollen, bruised and purple, like the remnants of a violent Act I. To the
west, the curtain was going up on a second act of serenity and redemption,
and the sheet of clear, lavender sky was striated with scarlet. In the
middle was the base of a rainbow, more apparently solid and embraceable
than any I have ever seen.
The whole extravagant arrangement looked rather like the Metropolitan
Opera's production of Wagner's "Ring."
In such a setting, and because the opera house is only partially roofed
and walled, set designers must either compete with the landscape or use
it. The set for "Arabella" was a model of Vienna, tilted up to look like
a city seen from a dipping airplane, with a backdrop of real sky beyond.
Vienna brightened as night fell and New Mexico disappeared, and, at these
altitudes, a chilly summer evening became a reasonable approximation of
an Austrian winter night. More than a few of the blanket-wrapped audience
members longed to join the cast onstage in populating all those cozy interiors.
(Next year, a planned new roof will keep out the rain, but the wind will
still careen through the bleachers.)
That the opera here can, at its best, be worth crossing deserts for
matters to Santa Fe, a city whose center can seem populated entirely by
out-of-towners from lands less rich in top-flight classical music. The
opera's parking lot was filled with license plates from Texas, Colorado,
Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arizona and Utah. But it is not just for affluent tourists:
The bellhop at Bishop's Lodge hotel had been to see "Semele." So had Shaylor
Alley, a young wrangler at the Rancho Encantado resort.
But what happens at the opera here also gets felt in the Northeast:
This year, New York City Opera is bringing in two Santa Fe productions
from previous seasons (Tobias Picker's "Emmeline" and Handel's "Xerxes")
and if City Opera keeps up its promised rate of new productions, more may
be on the way.
City Opera could do worse than simply ship in Santa Fe's whole, handsome
season - although it would have to retool some of the casts. The production
of Handel's "Semele" (designed by City Opera production director John Conklin)
closed off the stage from New Mexico's celebrated sky and substituted its
own, an Olympian firmament that remains serene even when the gods in the
plot do not. Handel knew that opera audiences must be dazzled, and while
this production's gilt-trimmed look and glittering costumes (borrowed from
London's Royal Opera) do their part, the singers sounded drab by comparison.
Elizabeth Futral was a passable Semele, the mortal woman who aspires to
romance with Jupiter, but tenor Rockwell Blake was decidedly earthbound
as her chosen god.
If the singing deities of "Semele" sounded less than heavenly, there
were occasional intimations of immortality in "Arabella." Strauss was always
at his most empathic and perceptive when writing for women, and the first-act
duet between the title character (sung by Janice Watson) and her cross-dressing
sister, Zdenka (Dawn Kotoski), was a touchingly performed portrait of a
neurotic sibling relationship, full of unspoken jealousy and love.
The Santa Fe Opera is fine enough to make its streaks of mediocrity
maddening. The quartet of lovers in Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" stood on
three solid legs - Thomas Barrett's Guglielmo, Alwyn Mellor's Fiordiligi
and Mary Ann McCormick's Dorabella - but was nearly brought down by tenor
Robert Swensen, who wasn't up to the task of singing Ferrando. And this
company can command enough stylish and resourceful design that the second-act
set, an off-putting pile of gray rocks covered in a gelatinous green slime,
was all the more mystifying.
The orchestra, an impermanent band composed of seasonal laborers, was
startlingly adept at switching styles on a nightly basis. John Crosby,
the company's founder, general director and Strauss specialist, elicited
all sorts of velvety sounds from the pit in "Arabella." Richard Bradshaw
piloted the responsive ensemble through the shoals of Peter Lieberson's
score to "Ashoka's Dream."
The world premiere of "Ashoka's Dream," a Santa Fe commission, was big
news here. An interview with Lieberson and librettist Douglas Penick topped
the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Two days later, the review,
larded with superlatives, took up most of page 2.
"Ashoka's Dream" is a curiously cloven work. Penick's libretto, about
the Indian emperor who first unified the subcontinent in a hurricane of
brutality and then experienced an epiphany of peacefulness, has the inscrutable,
archaic quality of Indian poetry read in translation. Director Stephen
Wadsworth has set the opera's series of tableaux against the backdrop of
an Indian altar, densely carved with sinuous and sedentary gods. In front
of it, singers dressed in iridescent silks assume stylized positions, bending
wrists and touching fingers in a graceful but puzzling sign language.
Lieberson's music, though, bears no trace of all this exoticism. Far
from being saddled with faux-Buddhist meditativeness, the score is propulsive
and unsettled, as changeable as the New Mexico sky. The closest it gets
to overt mysticism is in its homages to Wagner - not in the style but in
the way the narrative is simultaneously propelled by a febrile orchestra
and slowed by solemn vocal lines.
Penick has endowed his characters with little more than silhouettes,
leaving it to Lieberson to fill in states of mind with orchestral color
and shading. Rarely do the people in this opera really come to grips with
each other, but when they do - as when Ashoka's no. 2 wife, Triraksha,
is disoriented by her husband's sudden surge of benevolence - Lieberson
inserts a Verdian love duet whose beauty he truncates too soon. It is both
a moving and a frustrating moment, offering a glimpse of this opera as
a potential masterpiece.
The premiere's Triraksha was mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, one of those
priceless singers whose effect on an operatic stage is like that of a good
chiropractor on a spine: She makes everything snap into alignment. In her
presence, Kurt Ollmann, who sang the title role, became more murderously
or transcendently intense, and the music's passions seemed to flow more
freely. Whether or not "Ashoka's Dream" ever makes it to New York, it is
comforting to know that Hunt will be appearing at City Opera in November
in the Santa Fe production of "Xerxes."
