Opera: Transcontinental Bang

Opera companies of all sizes and ages chattered to life across the country last week like firecrackers on a string. Manhattan’s two companies faced off across Lincoln Center Plaza with year-old productions: the Metropolitan with its comfy,old-fashioned Traviata and the New York City Opera with Beni Montresor’s fairy-tale setting of The Magic Flute. In neither case was the performance on much more than a ho-hum level; in fact, Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballe’s first Met Violetta seemed an almost deliberate throwback to the bad old days when singers were meant to be heard but not seen.

Both companies held back on real novelty until later in the week, and here the New York City Opera moved decidedly ahead. In an attempt to give French opera more of a play, the Met revived and refurbished Charles Gounod’s hopelessly languid Romeo et Juliette—an opera that only illustrates the composer’s remarkable capacity for turning great poetry into sentimental salon entertainment. Furthermore, the performance was sadly deficient in the French accent, both in words and music. Franco Corelli nearly strangled on every attempt to produce the pure Gallic B-flat, while all of Soprano Mirella Freni’s undeniable charm was defeated by the pallid music she was asked to sing. New Director Paul-Emile Deiber grouped his singers around Rolf Gerard’s workaday sets in a series of static tableaux that had little to do with Shakespeare, Gounod, or anything in that vast area in between.

Lights, Blots, Sets at Sea. The City Opera’s new Coq d’Or offered a lot more to see and hear. Designers Ming Cho Lee and Jose Varona filled the New York State Theater stage with a zany array of colors and shapes, set off from time to time by flickering strobe lights and blats from offstage brass players. Soprano Beverly Sills and Bass-Baritone Norman Treigle curved their pliant voices brilliantly around the sinuous Rimsky-Korsakov melodies, and the results restored to life a witty, fantastic and unduly neglected score.

The West Coast’s two major companies meanwhile survived a pair of backstage cliffhangers and got their seasons smoothly under way. The sets for Seattle’s Otello had somehow got onto the wrong ship from Italy, and were put in place only 30 minutes before curtain time. San Francisco Opera Soprano Regine Crespin was forced out of the first-night Gioconda with a throat infection, and Substitute Leyla Gencer (who in past Coast seasons has filled in for Callas and Tebaldi) had to learn one of opera’s cruelest roles in less than two weeks.

Sex, Horror, Fruit Punch. In Indianapolis, where the short-lived Metropolitan Opera National Company began its career in 1965, Sarah Caldwell’s new touring American National Company made its debut before less-than-full but enthusiastic houses. As with her own Opera Company of Boston, Caldwell’s repertory and productions ingeniously blend tradition and novelty: a crisp and neatly paced opening-night Falstaff, with British Baritone Peter Glossop in the title role; and two widely differentiated sex-and-horror shows, Tosca and Lulu, mounted with a media melange of motion pictures, stage sets and photomontage. Set up with a $350,000 grant from the National Council on the Arts, and with approximately the same amount in the kitty from private donations, Caldwell’s company is now only about halfway along to meeting its first year’s budget, but that is some distance, at least.

And in Kansas City, the small, struggling, ten-year-old Lyric Theater was guided by Director Russell Patterson through an attractive and agreeable opening-night Masked Ball in a refurbished movie theater, and plied its 825 loyal patrons with free fruit punch during intermission. Patterson’s company imports no stars, grows its own from inside the ranks and scrapes along from year to year on a near-subsistence level. It, too, is a valid and important part of the American operatic explosion.