Titania in her bower in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Right now Hub audiences have the unusual chance to take in the second of two genius-on-genius Midsummer Night's Dream mash-ups: after Boston Ballet's splendid mounting of Balanchine's version last month, we can now savor Benjamin Britten's gorgeous response to the same masterpiece at Boston Lyric Opera (through this weekend at the Schubert).

It's pretty much agreed that both these derivative works are masterpieces in their own rights - and what's more, they serve as conceptual bookends for their expansive source. Balanchine stresses the romance and structure of Shakespeare's mother of all romantic comedies (and all but ignores its goofy "mechanicals"); Britten, meanwhile, emphasizes the work's infinite variety rather than its unity - musically, he conjures a different sound-garden, in fact, for each "cast" of characters.  And surprisingly he punches up the comedy, particularly the baggy-pants stuff; indeed the mechanicals are all but center-stage much of the time, and their travesty of the "tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe becomes the opera's hilarious climax.

It's here that the BLO soars to the same brilliant level it achieved in recent productions of Agrippina and The Emperor of Atlantis (it occurs to me that comedy may be their strong suit). But at first it seems director Tazewell Thompson and set designer John Conklin are a little lost in the woods themselves, and it takes the production a long time - indeed, the entire first act - to come together. The singing, however, is first-rate throughout, and Britten's instrumental writing is so lustrous that classical fans may not mind the conceptual confusion unfolding on stage.

No doubt Thompson and Conklin thought they were simply taking a note from Britten's own approach: just as the composer devised individual sound-scapes for Midsummer's different characters, so Conklin and Thompson seem to have concocted a separate look for each as well.  (Perhaps they also think that the "contradictions, confusions, and disguises" that afflict the play's characters should afflict the audience, too.)  Thus the lovers are roughly Edwardian, while Oberon and Titania seem more historic and fanciful; meanwhile the fairies look to be modeled on the Boy Scouts.  Odder still are the many design gambits Conklin offers and then discards: the general mood is mod and coolly geometric, but sometimes the furniture grows or shrinks like decor from Alice in Wonderland, and when the mechanicals wander through the forest, the trees are labeled "TREES" (apparently because Bottom and his crew are so literal-minded).  The moon remains an organizing motif, at least - but when things grow more surreal after Bottom's transformation, even it gets tricked out with a Man Ray photograph - again, just in case we don't "get it." 

A few of the contradictions and confusions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo(s) by Erik Jacobs.

These ideas aren't "wrong," exactly, it's just that they keep calling attention to themselves, and begin to seem too clever by half - and that makes the opera feel disjointed and slightly incoherent, when actually Shakespeare's complex text and Britten's delicately ambiguous music are both highly unified beneath their surface effects.  (For the record, the opera's underlying style is something like Purcell gone modern - and it's worth noting that this is a rare case in which a Shakespearean opera is based on Shakespeare's own text, a stunning achievement in and of itself.)  There are some lovely vocals to savor, from the sweet countertenor of John Gaston's Oberon to Nadine Sierra's languidly plush turn as Titania, to Andrew Shore's robustly rendered bully of a Bottom.  And the children of the PALS Children's Chorus charmed whenever they sang.  Still, the performances somehow couldn't make much headway against a persistent sense of conceptual drift; and it didn't help that stage director Thompson and new music director David Angus both favored a very measured pace - which only gave us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, they were getting at.

A heartbroken Thisbe (Matthew DiBattista) mourns the fallen Pyramus (Andrew Shore).

Luckily, things turned a corner at intermission; Britten's music gathers more dramatic momentum, and Conklin settled on a design motif, and the lovers got a wonderfully punchy scene to strut their stuff (that's Chad A. Johnson, Heather Johnson, Susanna Phillips, and the clarion-voiced Matthew Worth, above).  Best of all, the mechanicals did a boffo job with "Pyramus and Thisbe."  It's a little surprising to realize that Shakespeare actually invented "camp" some four hundred years ago with this little skit (it even includes what may be the stage's first drag queen), but Britten understood its true nature all too well, and offers up a hilarious parody of classic bel canto opera, complete with a mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor (above left), in which Lucia is a brawny lad with a mop on his head (played originally by Britten's lover/librettist, Peter Pears).   Here the whole sequence was pure perfection - balancing beautifully Shakespeare's point about perspective being everything in romance with his deeper affection for the faith that makes all romantic (and artistic) feeling possible.  And thus somehow Britten and Boston Lyric Opera brought off the depth of this great work as few theatrical productions do, making this Midsummer something of a dream in the end.

Boston Lyric Opera Scores with Händel's "Agripinna"

Caroline Worra in the title role with Christian Van Horn
as the Roman emperor Claudio

"The aria [“Voi che udite il mio lamento"] was particularly moving on Friday, thanks to the pure-voiced and uncommonly sensitive singing of the young countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as Ottone. He was well-matched by his Poppea, the impressive Kathleen Kim, who acted vividly and sang with a nimble, clear, gleaming soprano. David Trudgen sang well as Nerone, even if one could imagine additional dimensions to his man-boy conception of the role. Christian Van Horn was a vibrant Claudio, by turns a chest-baring lothario and moralizing sovereign. Jose Alvarez, David McFerrin, and David M. Cushing rounded out this cast. And in the title role, Caroline Worra was vocally and dramatically commanding as a freewheeling Agrippina, crazed with blind ambition for her son yet not without her own sympathetic vulnerabilities." [Source]

David Trudgen faces down Julius Caesar as Nero. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

You leave Boston Lyric Opera's Agrippina a bit winded, I think: it's so good in so many ways you can't quite believe it.  Or perhaps you're just winded from laughter; for this Agrippina is not only exquisitely sung, and brilliantly acted and designed, it's also screamingly funny, in a go-for-broke pop style that many local productions have attempted but few have brought off (the only competition I can think of was Opera Boston's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, but that's a far lesser opera).  Perhaps the shortest, punchiest review for Agrippina would be: Big voices, big laughs = grand opera, or something like that.  BLO has always specialized in opera as popular entertainment (just as Handel did); with Agrippina, they've practically perfected it.

Although I can already guess what some will say: "It's too funny."  Right.  Too funny.  I know you won't believe me, but I was doubled over with laughter at some of Agrippina (and I thought my partner might have a seizure).  I guess you're not supposed to do that at Handel.  But I'm not sure why - at least when not only the singing and music are first-rate, but the concept and direction are, too.  And incredibly, somehow Agrippina hangs onto its sense of grandeur despite its many pratfalls - and when the libretto spins on a dime in the second act and turns tragic, believe it or not, the production does as well.  In short, you'll laugh and you'll cry.  You could argue whether the BLO cast finds a synthesis of these opposed styles for the opera's final act; I mean, you could if you wanted to.  I'd had so much fun by then that I really didn't care.

I admit, though, that I wasn't sure the BLO could pull off a satire quite this brazen in the opening scene (when a bored Nero almost set his mother on fire).  But I soon realized just about everyone on stage had not only operatic pipes but crack comic timing, too; and at any rate, it became impossible to ignore the tone of Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani's blackly comic libretto (widely viewed at the time as a parody of Vatican politics).  You probably know the basic plot from I, Claudius or L'incoronazione di Poppea: the ruthless Agrippina schemes, well, ruthlessly to place her son Nero (here Nerone) on the throne in the waning years of the reign of Claudius (here Claudio).  Incredibly, Handel and Grimani transform these Roman power plays into a kind of quasi-romantic roundelay, with only the occasional hint of the disaster that Nerone's impending reign would become.

Venice meets Rome meets modernity: Kathleen Kim's entrance as Poppea.

Director Lillian Groag leans heavily, then, on screwball antics, and lets just about everybody chew the scenery.  The amazing thing is that the cast is so strong - and Groag's clever stage business so artfully  intertwined with the music - that it all works, even when it gets a little hammy.  Soprano Caroline Worra makes a kind of mad stage mother of Agrippina - she seems to be devouring the role as we watch; but she's also in glorious voice, and when the empress is suddenly struck by guilty doubts (see masthead photo), suddenly Worra is dramatically riveting, too.  She's matched, however, by Kathleen Kim's piping pepperpot of a Poppea (above), who not only soars dazzlingly through several demanding arias, but has major bedroom-farce chops, too.  But then I can't forget baritone Christian Van Horn's horny Claudius - another amazing match between a voice to die for and bedroom moves that leave you in stitches.  Perhaps not quite as compelling vocally was countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo's Ottone.  Costanzo seemed to have breath control trouble in his big Act II aria, but dramatically it was heart-breaking anyway, and somehow Costanzo's characterization wound up being very endearing.  The other big counter-tenor role was handled more consistently, by David Trudgen (at top), who brought a nicely spoiled spin to the proceedings, but from whom I hoped for a bit more dark twistedness here and there.  There was also very nice work around the edges of the production by bass David M. Cushing, a local boy who has never sounded better.

Caroline Worra and Christian Van Horn.

Meanwhile, down in the pit, Gary Thor Wedow conducted with both sensitivity and muscular feeling - although he wasn't working with period instruments, but rather something like a hybrid modern orchestra with a continuo section.  This bolder sound matched the bold stage business, however, and that sense of a "hybrid" modern/baroque aesthetic played out elsewhere, too  - the houselights were half-dimmed (in Handel's day, they wouldn't have been dimmed at all), and the orchestra pit was lifted to almost audience-level (again, there would have been no break between audience and players in the 18th century).  Even the stage design hinted at an overlay of eras - the cast was clad in a range of modern duds, from Mussolini to Swinging London, but they plotted and schemed among moving chunks of ancient Rome (bisected occasionally by abstract stairs and thrones - often the color of Agrippina's gown, at left).  The great John Conklin was responsible for this layered, ever-shifting vision - constantly re-configured by Venetian courtiers from Handel's day - and it was lit with startling imagination by Robert Wierzel (who I'm beginning to think, after seeing this and Idomeneo, may be the most talented lighting designer alive).  Alas, opening night featured its own bit of stage drama, when two moving columns crashed into each other.  But something tells me they've taken care of that by now - because frankly I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything BLO can't do.  Agrippina marks their third hit, out of three productions, this year.  With their upcoming Midsummer by Britten, they may just go four-for-four.

Life and death in the Third Reich

Kaiser Überall in his bunker in The Emperor of Atlantis.

Okay, folks - this one is important.

If you care about twentieth-century opera (or opera in general); if you care about Jewish history and the Holocaust; if you care about World War II; hell, if you care about the old "human spirit," then you must see Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, which is currently holding court in a mostly brilliant production from Boston Lyric Opera, only through this weekend at the Calderwood Pavilion.

The big news here is simply the opera itself, which feels like an incredible discovery.  Even though most opera buffs have at least heard of it, few have seen or heard it (myself included) - due to its short length, fragmentary nature, and curiously whimsical tone, it has rarely been seen in the United States, or indeed anywhere.

Yet it's certainly one of the major cultural documents of the Holocaust, and perhaps one of the major operas of the twentieth century.  I know, I know - you think I'm hyperventilating.  Just go see it and then tell me I'm hyperventilating.  (I don't think you will.) [Update - unfortunately, the production has completely sold out.]

First, though, a warning - you may want to come late.  As if the first New England production of this rarity wasn't challenge enough, BLO has also commissioned a companion piece to fill out a full evening of performance (Emperor reigns for only about an hour). The idea - a very worthy one - was to add to the marketability of the opera by creating a handy companion piece for it.

But alas, the evening's prologue, Harvard composer Richard Beaudoin's "The After-Image," though pleasant enough in an earnest way, is a bit attenuated and tedious. The piece is a meditation on the meaning of a photograph, and as it's based on texts from Rilke and Rückert, it hints (or half-hints) at all sorts of intriguing intellectual issues regarding history and the transmission of meaning. But somehow this "tableau for two voices" never quite coheres; if you can imagine Susan Sontag warbling along to the Quartet for the End of Time,  you've got roughly the idea. And things weren't helped much by silly performance art flourishes from director David Schweizer that obscured, rather than illuminated, the overall arc of the evening.

Still, I suppose there's no use crying over spilt Rilke, and once the far-more-robust opera proper gets going, everything is suddenly imbued with the strange fire of a wild poem written in one's last hour, in which one attempts desperately to convey everything one knows about life and love before the final curtain falls.  That sense of poetic urgency is so palpable because the composers of The Emperor of Atlantis were, indeed, facing annihilation: Ullmann and his libettrist, Petr Kien, composed it from behind the barbed wire of the Terezín concentration camp, which was the "showplace" of the Nazi work camps (designed to fool the Red Cross into believing the camps were habitable). At one time four concert groups operated within the walls of Terezín, and Ullmann composed some twenty works during his time there; he never saw Emperor of Atlantis performed, however. Sensing its piercing allegory, the authorities shut it down during rehearsals, and Ullmann and Kien were soon transported to Auschwitz, where they were quickly murdered.

The dance of death in Emperor of Atlantis.

This was the official reaction to the brilliant allegory at the heart of Kien's witty book, in which the mad Kaiser Überall (that's him up top, mustache, epaulets and all) has declared a war to end all wars - indeed, its only real purpose is to kill every single person on the planet.   The carnage becomes so great, however, that Death himself is affronted, feeling he is being treated like a kind of mechanical lackey - and soon he's on strike, leaving the Emperor practically apoplectic as more and more people are unable to expire on schedule.  Executions grind to a halt - they're pointless - and on the battlefield, soldiers lay down their useless weapons and begin to sing to each other of love.  Clearly this can't go on; but Death only relents, and agrees to pick up his scythe, on one condition - that the Kaiser be the first to fall to it.

You appreciate immediately, I imagine, the genius of the libretto.  And Ullmann's music is barely a step behind; perhaps it's a pastiche, but what a pastiche - in Atlantis, snatches of Weimar cabaret bump into “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles,” bits of Bach, and even a melancholy reworking of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" (that most Germanic of hymns), as the Grim Reaper returns to his work.  The ironic mood reaches its highest, sweetest peak in the lovely aria granted to the Kaiser at his death - it's really the most beautiful music in the entire opera.  And at moments like this The Emperor of Atlantis seems to sail beyond the normal bounds of irony and into some sublime new sphere - this is irony that can break your heart; the humanity of Ullmann and Kien's conception - their almost whimsical portrayal of their own killers - stands as one of the noblest artistic gestures of all time.

All this found its fullest form (and force) in a galvanic central performance by Kevin Burdette as Death (combined in this version with the associated role of "The Loudspeaker"). Burdette is blessed with both a commanding bass and hilarious comic chops, and in this dazzlingly manic tour de force, he seemed at times to all but personify the opera. Almost as good were baritone Andrew Wilkowske (another inspired clown with a great voice) as the Emperor and tenor John Mac Master (above, with Burdette) as a harlequin who's nearly as bitter about how things are going as the big guy himself.

Director David Schweizer seemed to recover his sense of humor after the languors of "The After-Image," and generally delivered a defiantly witty take on the opera's action, although at times the staging was a bit generically Regietheater-esque.  At other moments, however - as in the funereal finale - Schweizer delivered delicately haunting moods and imagery. Designer Caleb Wertenbaker's set (left) was a grand post-industrial wasteland littered with technological junk, while the talented Nancy Leary's imaginative costumes evoked something of the desperation of life in Terezín (both Death and the Harlequin sported accessories made of barbed wire).   This, actually, was one of the few moments in which the production referenced the Holocaust concretely - something I felt it could have done more often; how even more piercing this gallant piece of modernism might have seemed! Then again, perhaps some distance on the work is what's required; otherwise this particular testament to humanity could be almost overwhelming.

The tables turn at the climax of Tosca.

The famous line that everyone quotes about Tosca is Joseph Kerman's snarky quip that it's "a shabby little shocker."  Well, as Boston Lyric Opera proved last weekend, the Puccini potboiler may be a shocker all right, but it's none too shabby.  Stripped down from a lugubrious, if well-crafted, melodrama by Sardou, the libretto plays like a taut thriller studded with lurid episodes and hairpin turns; this is the rare opera with a palpable sense of suspense (indeed, everything in Quentin Tarantino derives from, and is degraded from, Tosca).  And the score may simply be Puccini's finest.  It not only includes one of his loveliest arias ("Vissi d'arte"), but the second act in particular is (nearly) through-composed with startling sophistication and a superb sense of drama.  The composer relies throughout Tosca on a kind of semi-Wagnerian system of motifs - but unlike Wagner, Puccini doesn't spend time developing them in purely musical terms (while the action stiffens into stasis); instead, he weds his musical motifs almost seamlessly to the drama unfolding onstage.

The parapet in Rome from which Tosca meets her doom.

The plot itself is brazenly heartless; Sardou's constant advice to his protégées was "Torture your women!," and the eponymous Tosca, a vain but good-hearted opera singer thrust into  intrigues she can barely understand, endures one torment after another before a final blow that drives her to a plummeting suicide, from the parapet of the famous Castle Saint'Angelo (at left) - just as the curtain falls, too.  The opera was originally set amidst the battles over Rome between Napoleonic and Neapolitan forces - but the BLO production (borrowed from the Scottish Opera) updates the basic conflicts into fascist Italy: the chief villain, once "Baron" Scarpia, is here a jack-booted chief of secret police, while Tosca's lover, a painter who falls into Scarpia's clutches, is vaguely aligned with the Resistenza.

Not that actual politics matter much in the hothouse atmosphere of Tosca - they're just a means to highly dramatic ends; the final suicide only arrives after two murders, a near-rape, and several scenes of torture (below).  And fortunately, the BLO production doesn't push its "updating" to any obvious Peter-Sellars-esque political morals, either; director David Lefkowich often seemed happy to effectively block his action, then bask in the atmosphere provided by the funereal grandeur of Peter Rice's smashing sets, lit with the burnished rays of a perpetual sunset by Paul Hackenmueller (one glance at these designs, and you knew poor Tosca was doomed).

Even though, of course, she's innocent of everything (except a sudden, murderous impulse which you can hardly blame her for).  This nihilistic theme, of helpless innocence pointlessly punished, was a new one in opera - and a new one on the stage in general - and it still packs a punch, particularly in the moving performance of Jill Gardner in the title role.  Ms. Gardner possesses a rich, but not particularly individual, soprano, and her rendition of the famous "Vissi d'arte" was hampered by blocking (she was half-prone, "imprisoned," if you will, on a bed) that provided a striking stage image but must have given her very little room for breath support.  But Gardner is also a truly wonderful stage actress - one of the best stage actresses I've seen cross a Boston operatic stage - and her Tosca was always both amusingly vain and yet poignantly, vibrantly alive.   And her sudden killing of Scarpia - you could see the mad inspiration dawn on her - chilled just as it should, while the famously macabre, guilt-ridden scene that follows she played to the absolute hilt.  (In one of the production's few surprising flourishes, she threw away with a shudder the crucifix that Tosca usually places in penance on Scarpia's corpse.)

Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, is brutalized by the minions of Scarpia (far right). Photos by Jeffrey Dunn

Her co-stars were no slouches.  With his hawk-like demeanor, Bradley Garvin looked the perfect Scarpia, and brought a cruel alacrity to the character's various predations - although the voice, though fine, was again not at the high level we've come to expect from such recent BLO productions as Ariadne auf Naxos.  The production boasted one true vocal star in tenor Diego Torre, who was a bit too earthy to be believable as the lover of a grande dame like Tosca, but whose singing was glowingly lyrical, if marred by a phlegmatic scratch (we later learned he took a few days off to battle a bronchial infection), and whose acting rose to a moving, if slightly withdrawn, intensity as he faced imminent death.  There was also a nice comic turn from Steven Smith as an easily flustered priest, and a sweet one from young treble Ryan Turner in the final act as the Jailer's Son.

In that last act the production seemed to stumble a bit - the blocking seemed more tentative, and Ms. Gardner didn't seem as shaken by her ordeal as she might be; moreover the music sometimes flowed over insufficient stage business. Nevertheless, the music was gripping all the same; the sound from the pit - under the baton of Conductor Andrew Bisantz - was always darkly robust (Bisantz did a similarly impressive job, in a very different vein, with last season's Turn of the Screw). It seemed that in this remarkably strong and solid production, any momentary weakness was balanced by a different strength; no wonder the crowd, clearly hungry for this kind of shot of pure operatic adrenaline, gave the cast a sustained standing ovation. A year or two ago, when I began writing that Boston Lyric Opera had turned an artistic corner and would (or should) become the dominant force on the operatic scene, I got several ridiculing emails. Now, after a series of productions as strong as Tosca, that seems to be the conventional wisdom.

A memorable Idomeneo

Neptune makes his presence known in Idomeneo, re di Creta. Photos by Charles Erickson.

It isn't often that a Mozart work feels like a discovery. But Idomeneo, re di Creta, his first major opera, feels a bit like one, as it's long been overshadowed by the later masterpieces, and has only slowly made its way into the standard repertoire. Indeed, what's more intriguing about Ideomeneo is that over its course, you can almost hear Mozart discovering himself. Written when the wunderkind was only 24, the piece opens as a lovely, but standard-issue, "opera seria" (the leading mode of Mozart's day), with that format's usual choruses, noble solos, and tragic tone.

But slowly Idomeneo - which is basically a variant on the Iphigenia myth - edges away from tragedy and toward something more like mournful comedy; and Mozart begins to spin more duets and quartets as a lighter, yet more mature moral sensibility seeps into the proceedings. And somehow a mysterious alchemy occurs. By the final curtain, we can tell we're listening to the revolutionary who would write Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.

This sense of discovery is redoubled when one considers the recent history of Boston Lyric Opera, which is presenting a beautiful and well-sung (if slightly trimmed) version of the opera through this weekend: slowly Boston has been discovering it, too. I've been arguing for some time that BLO - long derided as a suburban upstart - is actually our next Boston-Ballet-like success story, and Idomeneo serves, I think, as a ratification of that claim, the capstone to a startling season which has included such memorable productions (and superb vocal ensembles) as The Turn of the Screw and Ariadne auf Naxos.

Although no, the production's not perfect; in fact, it has a weakness right at its center. As the title character, Jason Collins is vocally adequate but not much more - and dramatically he seems to lean more toward fits of pique than conscience-stricken remorse (to preserve his life in a violent storm, Idomeneo has promised Neptune to sacrifice the first person he encounters on shore; that person turns out to be his son, Idamante).

Fortunately there's sterling work elsewhere in the cast. As Idamante (a breeches role), the lovely Sandra Piques Eddy struck just the right heroic profile, and what's more, her pure-tone mezzo proved luminously flexible, thanks to her utterly secure technique. Alas, as Idamante's love interest, Camille Zamora (at left, with Eddy) seemed slightly miscast, though she was generally appealing. Or perhaps the trouble was that she was simply upstaged by the great Caroline Worra as her rival, the spurned Elettra. Worra is blessed with a beautifully burnished timbre, and threw herself into her role with abandon, at times even teetering on the edge of comedy - she made Elettra's final meltdown one for the vocal and dramatic history books.

Elsewhere bass Craig Phillips offered a Neptune (suddenly revealed from the person of a pauper, at top) whose voice seemed as deep as the sea, and the chorus was in robust form throughout. In the pit, conductor David Angus led the orchestra with energy, although he had decided to mix a fortepiano (rather than a harpsichord) and period horns with a generally-modern ensemble. The results were not displeasing, although to an ear accustomed to period performance they sometimes sounded oddly mixed, neither fish nor fowl. But maybe that was the idea - to give this transitional opera a sense of musical transition, too.

Likewise, director Lilian Groag seemed to want to gently push the drama down the road we all knew Mozart would eventually go: toward a vision of gracefully balanced worldliness - toward the Enlightenment, if you will. Thus she framed the central drama of the opera as a play-within-a-play, put on by rustic villagers amid the ruins of a heroic past. Several reviewers didn't seem to get the point of this, but I have to admit, they had half a point themselves - Mozart puts this idea over just fine all by himself. Still, a few of Groag's interpolations struck me as truly inspired - having Neptune speak from the mouth of a pauper, for instance, summed up with beautiful economy a central tenet of Mozart's art: that the divine spark is in all of us. And at any rate it was wonderful to perceive in the direction an awareness of Mozart's larger political and dramatic meaning; would more local productions had this one's level of intellectual ambition. After all, Mozart (with his great librettist, Da Ponte) went further than Shakespeare ever did in transposing, and adjusting, our idea of nobility to the dimensions of actual humanity. This is the message of his life itself - that of a bourgeois genius who had to endure being literally kicked in the ass by various vacuous nobles - and you can feel its democratizing pressure in embryo, as it were, in Idomeneo.

But it must also be said that much of the power of this version derived from its physical production, including a truly stunning set by John Conklin (via a Glimmerglass production of, yes, Iphigenia), beautifully coordinated costumes by Constance Hoffmann, and even more evocative lighting by Robert Wierzel. I must say that after seeing his work here - and after last year's Rusalka - I'd have to rate Mr. Wierzel among the greatest lighting designers alive; his effects in Idomeneo seemed to literally radiate from the ancient columns of the set itself. Like much of this production, their luminous beauty lingered in the memory.

From the ridiculous to the sublime

Tragedy meets comedy in Ariadne auf Naxos. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

I wasn't surprised that Boston Lyric Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (which you still have a little time to catch) turned out to be one of the best operatic productions of the season. But I was surprised (a bit) as to the reason why.

I had expected this version (imported from the Welsh National Opera) to be remarkable in its witty physical comedy, after visits to rehearsals and chats with its director; instead - and probably most opera lovers will be glad to hear this - it was carried by some truly sublime singing. Boston Lyric is becoming known for assembling strong ensembles (rather than showcases for star turns), as evidenced by last year's Don Giovanni and this winter's Turn of the Screw. I'm happy to report that Ariadne auf Naxos belongs in that august company - indeed, it may boast the strongest cast of the three. The Strauss score features four notoriously difficult parts - the Composer (a pants role), Ariadne, Zerbinetta and Bacchus, and it's common for one or another of these (usually Bacchus) to prove second-class. But in Edyta Kulczak (Composer), Marjorie Owens (Ariadne), Rachele Gilmore (Zerbinetta) and Brandon Jovanovich (Bacchus), BLO put together a quartet of powerhouses. This production will be remembered most of all as a night of glorious singing.

Indeed, if this Ariadne foundered slightly early on, it did so because of its stagecraft. Which is ironic, since the opera is so much about theatrical conventions and inside jokes. The famous set-up is that "the richest man in Vienna" has commissioned two works - a tragic opera (titled, of course, "Ariadne auf Naxos") and a baggy-pants comedy (performed by a visiting commedia troupe) - for the entertainment after a huge banquet. The trouble is that both pieces have to be finished by nine o'clock, when the fireworks are set to start. But the banquet drags, time runs short, and it's suddenly announced that the tragedy and the comedy will have to be performed simultaneously. You can guess what happens next.

This opening "prologue" (as it's called) depends theatrically on a sense of growing chaos as time ticks remorselessly away - and the theatrical side of things is important, because much of this sequence is recitative rather than aria. But in this version, things seemed far too calm backstage, with hardly enough frenzied rushing hither and yon (often you see both the banquet and the fireworks roll by), and little sense of an impending artistic car-crash. Oddly enough, the bemused tone of the proceedings was just about right, and mezzo Edyta Kulczak gave an impassioned reading of the Composer's dismay at what was about to happen to his/her beloved score. But the success of this kind of thing is, as they say, all in the timing, and the actor-singers just weren't clicking like a well-oiled machine. There were a few timing problems in the pit as well, where Strauss's subtle, shifting sense of ensemble seemed to fray at times under the baton of conductor Erik Nielsen (horns, that means you).

But Nielsen pulled his crew together once the "opera within an opera" began, and most of Ariadne's music (and particularly her transfiguring finale) sounded superb. Everything else about the production grew more original and intriguing, too. The tattered set (beset, despite its artificiality, by actual winds) was surprisingly evocative, and the sophisticated lighting, by Tim Mitchell, seemed to literally glow from the stage itself. As Ariadne, Marjorie Owens deployed a formidably Wagnerian soprano, but gave it haunting touches of mournful delicacy as she wept in her abandonment on her famous rock, and she nailed her diva-esque tantrums once the harlequins showed up, too. Her girl-group back-up (of Naiad, Dryad and Echo) likewise hit just the right tenderly droll notes. The commedia troupe proved not quite as rowdy as I might have liked, but this was forgotten once Rachele Gilmore launched into Zerbinetta's famous aria, a killer piece of coloratura in which the soprano explains that to get over one guy, you simply have to find another (as she has herself, over and over). It would be hard to think of a better Zerbinetta than Gilmore, with her ripe, lightly sensuous presence, and her deliciously pure and agile voice, and this set-piece almost couldn't have been more delightful.


The finale of Ariadne auf Naxos.

The big surprise of the evening, however, came with the arrival of Bacchus; from his opening bars, tenor Brandon Jovanovich let it be known that he had not only the range to hit the pitches (which climb into the stratosphere) but also the power to blow out the back wall, too, and his final duets with Owens felt like the promised series of (at least vocal) fireworks (Owens just won the Grand Finals of the Met auditions, and Jovanovich is off to the Met as well, along with Chicago and San Francisco, so this may be your last chance to hear these performers here in Mudville). Not that the final moments of Ariadne turned into a series of vocal guantlets; quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, the mood of the piece deepened just as it should, and with a little help from a truly inspired lighting effect from Tim Mitchell (which pulled together both those impending fireworks and Bacchus's invocation of the eternal stars), the final moments achieved something like transcendence. Out of a lifetime of theatre- and opera-going, this Ariadne's closing tableau will stick with me as one of the great stage images I've ever seen. If you catch the last performance, I'm sure you'll agree.

Of Strauss, slapstick, and Ariadne auf Naxos

The commedia troupe strut their stuff in Ariadne auf Naxos. Production photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

Denni Sayers can't help herself; when someone is hitting somebody else with a big kielbasa, you can tell she just has to get involved.

"Brilliant, that's brilliant!" she giggles as she launches herself from the director's chair of a rehearsal of Boston Lyric Opera's Ariadne auf
Naxos (which opens tomorrow). "But can you hit him on this note - " she turns to the rehearsal pianist, who responds with a tinkling phrase - "rather than this one?"

She takes the sausage from the tenor and wham! smacks the bass with it on the downbeat.

"Oh and hit him right there," she says, pointing to a precise spot on his forehead. "Got it? Right there." Wham!

The bass sinks in a graceful spiral to the floor; the tenor waves his blunt instrument around like a tom-tom, and the room cracks up. And Sayers returns, still giggling, to the director's chair to dream up another prime slice of slapstick.

It's a typical moment from Ariadne auf Naxos, the opera that sounds like high tragedy but often plays more like a Warner Brothers cartoon. Intentionally. Because Richard Strauss's masterpiece is the tale of an opera company - specializing in a chunk of high tragedy (about the abandoned Ariadne weeping on her rock) - forced to share the stage with a commedia dell'arte troupe. That would be Harlequin, Truffaldino and their comrades (see above) - but you can also think of their many descendants, from Charlie Chaplin to Roger Rabbit, instead - who specialize not in high tragedy but low comedy, in fact precisely in setting a banana peel before the path of august convention.

And Sayers (above left) seems like the perfect person to pull these two opposed artistic worlds into conjunction. Although according to her, Ariadne isn't just about deflating the pretensions of high opera; instead, it's about a synthesis of high and low, a new way of looking at life and art from both perspectives at once.

Funny thing is, she seems like the perfect person to pull that off, too. With her sparkling eyes and punkette 'do, you might imagine her banging her head in a club on Lansdowne Street. But instead, she's expending her considerable choreographic skill on finding just the right physical comedy to match one of the subtlest, and quirkiest, scores of the twentieth century.

That's right. Choreographic skill. "To me, it was a natural progression from choreographer to director," she explains. "Since choreography is all about finding character through movement, I found myself asked to help more and more not just with set-pieces of dance, but with dramatic scenes as well. I seemed to be good at helping singers get from point A to point B both physically and emotionally." Gradually, Sayers was cast more and more often as assistant director, and today she generally commands her own productions, although in the case of Ariadne, she's shepherding the vision of Neil Armfeld, a long-time associate who helmed this acclaimed production at the Welsh National Opera.

She's working with an entirely new cast, however. "But that's what keeps it fresh," she laughs. "Working with new people, finding the production inside them - that makes it a discovery again."

But what about those moments when she jumps in and says, "No, hit him here"?

Sayers gets a wicked look in her eye. "I know, I can't help myself! But the whole point is to find it organically, from within the performers. You try to draw it out of them, not 'set it on' them. And this cast has been wonderful - the working atmosphere has just been wonderful. I've got [rising conducting star] Erik Nielsen to handle the orchestra, and the cast sounds ravishing." [Speaking from having heard one rehearsal, in which Rachele Gilmore sailed through Zerbinetta's famous aria, they oh, so do.]

"Still . . ." Sayers gets that gleam in her eye again. "Sometimes a singer needs a little help finding it. In releasing it, I should say. That's where I come in."

Indeed, sometimes it seems that singers have that same problem with dancing that white men have with jumping. "They're very different from dancers," Sayers agrees. "A dancer feels the beat in the body; a singer sees it on the page. I can count beats with a dancer; with a singer, I have to say 'You have to get there by the end of the eighth notes.' What's great is that they get that. Luckily, I learned to read music as a child, so I don't have to work from a tape of the score or anything, like so many movie and theatrical directors do who work in opera. The music itself is right there in my lap. Which is a very good thing," she says with a meaningful look. "Because this score is so tricky!"

Which it is; Strauss is always shifting his time signatures and musical texture. "And of course you can never forget that a singer is always singing. The thing is to get them to not obsess about that as they move," Sayers explains. "As a choreographer you generally work from the floor, from the legs. As an opera choreographer, you work from the breath. You always have to support that, you always have to be in sympathy with that. And you have to design your movement directionally, to keep the vocal focus where it should be. Even if you're choreographing an intimate little conversation, you have to enable your singers to project a huge volume of sound out to people sitting in the dark a hundred feet away."

And then, in the case of Ariadne auf Naxos, you also have to deal with the big sausage. "Actually it's not all slapstick!" Sayers insists. "The opera isn't about ridiculing high tragedy at all - although maybe it's a little bit about ridiculing self-seriousness. Ariadne has to learn to get on with her life, doesn't she? And she does (below), with a little help from Harlequin and Truffaldino - and Bacchus (who swoops in on a gangplank in this production). The opera is in fact a profound exploration of how you move on from a terrible loss. What I hope this production conveys is a vision of two worlds colliding and learning something from each other. The tragedians and the comedians, for all their differences, end up in mutual admiration. And that's a beautiful thing."


The transfiguring finale of Ariadne auf Naxos.

Boston Lyric Opera breaks out

The sacred meets the profane in The Turn of the Screw. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

It was nice to see that with The Turn of the Screw, local critics have once again caught up with me (sorry for the self-congratulation, Bill!). About a year and a half ago I began raving about Boston Lyric Opera, and let's just say I was met with polite disdain - one critic actually snickered at my enthusiasm; didn't I realize how out of step I was? Now, of course, everyone thinks BLO is brilliant - one reviewer has even said their transition began "about two years ago!" Oh, well. This whole process moved faster for BLO than it did for the Boston Ballet, so maybe that's progress!

But back to The Turn of the Screw, which proved deeply satisfying both musically and intellectually. The work is putatively sourced, of course, in the famous Henry James novella, which cleverly hinges on the question of whether a pair of sexually-charged ghosts haunting a governess's charges are, in fact, "real," or just products of her own repressed psychology. Composer Benjamin Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper gave the screw an extra twist, however, by nearly-explicitly linking the material to Britten's own life and issues, and BLO seemed unafraid to let this very loaded scenario unfold onstage.

Britten, of course, was a (semi-) closeted gay composer who notoriously surrounded himself with boys, both on-stage and off. From Peter Grimes to Death in Venice, every single Britten opera pivots on a young boy (all in all, he wrote them into some 30 works), and Britten spent his life - which he shared with tenor Peter Pears - perennially involved professionally and psychologically with one young man after another. Boston's own Benjamin Zander was one Britten protégé, as was the movie actor David Hemmings (who originated the role of Miles in Turn of the Screw).

All this only sets Britten squarely in a long line of artists obsessed with very young men or women in a troubling way (Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Dodgson and J.M. Barrie come immediately to mind, not to mention Michael Jackson, Bill Wyman and Roman Polanski!). But before we actually make that leap to the likes of Roman Polanski, we have to remember that even though it's undeniable Britten was possessed by an infantile psycho-sexual complex, none of "Britten's boys" ever accused him of abuse (his adult lover Pears, it seems, operated as a kind of chaperone). When librettist Eric Crozier fell out with Britten, in fact, it was over his emotional, not sexual, connection to the boys. And indeed, the composer's history was one of sometimes abruptly dropping his young charges once their voices broke, or some other even purer boy soprano appeared on the scene - which was psychologically crushing to his former favorites. So it's not a pretty picture, even if it was a perversely chaste one.

And somewhere Britten knew that - at least based on the evidence of The Turn of the Screw. For he and Piper all but drop the crux of the novella - whether or not "Miss Giddens" is "imagining things." In the James original, we never leave the governess's perspective, and only see the ghosts from her P.O.V.; in Britten, the ghosts have their own, individual scenes with the kids - and even a long scene by themselves. They're real all right. And BLO stage director Sam Helfrich took this new twist and ran with it all the way to the basement of the Park Plaza Castle (BLO's temporary digs for this production), where his Quint and Miss Jessel hung out in utterly quotidian dishabille, smoking cigarettes and lazing on a four-poster. We knew this was happening beneath us because the images of these almost too-too-solid lovers were beamed onto large video screens before us (see above), so that we were watching both the opera's text and subtext simultaneously.

This troubled many critics, but I don't think they were being too perceptive. It's true that Helfrich's gambit undercut the spookiness of the Park-Plaza-Castle setting, and robbed the ghosts of the eerie glamour they enjoyed in such sophisticated entertainments as The Innocents (at left), Jack Clayton's brilliant film version of the story. But it matched precisely Britten's intent: to give a dislocated sense of double meaning to everything in the opera. Indeed, this may be the most inspired example of what Wagner called gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork," I've ever seen: the staging precisely mirrored not just the dramatic idea of the piece, but its musical idea as well.

Why is this so? Because Britten's score floats between two worlds, too. The composer opens The Turn of the Screw with what sounds like a standard Schoenberg-style tone row, but configured so that its permutations remain tonal throughout the opera - in fact, they float between two keys (A minor and A-flat major, according to Bettina Norton and Michael Kennedy). So as you can see, there's a whole lotta duality goin' on, which is why the combined video-and-live-action effects were so weirdly resonant.

What gives an added horrific sheen to the proceedings is that what shards of actual melody Britten gives us are often based on children's songs, or what sounds like sacred chant; the final effect is of dislocated sacred music cast over utterly profane action, through which James's tormented governess floats helplessly, like a disembodied conscience. Is it too much to map this weirdly contradictory atmosphere to Britten's own situation? Not when the ghosts seem more interested in young Flora and Miles than each other, I'd argue, and when the tenor, Vale Rideout, not only sounds but even looks a bit like Peter Pears. Thus it was hard not to read this Turn of the Screw as not so much an adaptation of James as an evocation of the Britten/Pears environment - devoted to sacred innocence, but underpinned by a sexuality only just kept in check; onstage we may have been watching two little children singing with aching purity - but behind them we could also make out two corresponding slatterns making love on a bed.

It's frankly hard to imagine any local theatre company (particularly the gay ones!) making a statement this sophisticated about a situation so politically and morally fraught; that alone made The Turn of the Screw memorable as an occasion of truly adult theatre. That the evening was also gloriously sung, and ably played, was to me the icing on the cake. Soprano Emily Pulley, a regular at the Met, proved scarier in her intensity than any of the supernatural forces she battled, and came apart utterly convincingly, even while deploying a flexible soprano of both richness and power. Meanwhile veteran mezzo Joyce Castle (at left, with Pulley), who is celebrating 40 years on the operatic stage, provided a sturdily sympathetic Mrs. Grose. As Quint, Rideout was vocally almost eerily appropriate, as noted, and bravely edged toward a sense of perversity that seemed malevolent yet oddly vulnerable. There was less to do for Miss Jessel, but Rebecca Nash, making her American debut after a series of raves in Europe, revealed a commanding soprano that justified the hype. Young Flora was played by the adult Kathryn Skemp, who was nevertheless physically and emotionally quite convincing as a young girl; alas, at times her trained soprano sometimes overwhelmed Miles, but generally one could feel her keeping in appropriate balance. On the night I attended, I caught the self-possessed Ryan Williams as the possessed little boy, exuding a confidence which made his piping treble all the more poignant. In the "pit," as it were (the orchestra was visible throughout - another good idea), Andrew Bisantz conducted sensitively and with a strong sense of drama.

Overall this was a triumph in just about every way, and gave some idea of what Boston Lyric Opera, with the greatest resources of any opera company in the city, can do with sophisticated repertory. The wonderful Ariadne auf Naxos is next, and something tells me tickets are already going fast.