![]() ![]() "Death in Venice" deserved better than Wolfram Skalicki's dated scrims and Kenneth Riegel's parched, superannuated protagonist.įortunately, Mansouri has tended the Russian Pavilion well. But lesser operas (Prokofiev's "Fiery Angel" in 1994 comes immediately to mind) have scored here previously in stimulating productions. This Thomas Mann adaptation is not the composer's strongest work, and it drew neither critical nor audience ovations. ![]() The following evening, one could mosey down to the Mansouri Career Pavilion, in which the boss exhumed a dowdy, unimaginative production of Britten's " Death in Venice" he cooked up for the Canadian Opera 15 years ago. In the Nostalgia Pavilion this season, one could first pause at a refurbished version of the mediocre Armando Agnini "Tosca" designs concocted for opening night of the house 65 years ago and a level of histrionic engagement from soprano Carol Vaness and bass-baritone James Morris that seemed several decades older. Audiences seem encouraged to absorb themselves so completely in the Experience of Opera that they're not supposed to notice the deficiencies in singing (especially in the inexperienced "Figaro" cast of the past few weeks) or conducting. In his endeavors to win new audiences to the form, Mansouri has converted opera into a theme park call it Opryland if you will. "Pelleas" - at least looked alluring, but they lacked the resonating qualities of great collaborations. The season's new stagings - "Rigoletto" and Mansouri's inability or reluctance to attract the world's top opera directors remains the most tangible failure of his tenure. Except for improved lighting plots, the season could have happened in 1967 as easily as in 1997. ![]() After the wretched year in exile in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, one might have hoped that the productions (at least the two new mountings, the one reconstruction and the three borrowed packages we saw last fall) would have exploited the possibilities of the War Memorial facilities with fresh directorial insights. That trio added up, however, to only 33 percent of the fare, scarcely a respectable showing for such a heavily touted season. One felt musical and dramatic values preserved, enhanced and functioning in tandem. The fall's three indubitable winners - Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro," Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" and Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" - attained modest miracles. Mansouri could boast his artistic successes, to be sure. This was the other and often less lovable S.F. Yet, what they found for much of the 75th anniversary season was bewildering casting and a lot of ill-conceived stagecraft. Given some of the rude audience behavior - applauding arias in the middle, talking through music while the curtain was down - many of the neophytes did follow the sound of the high C's. The acknowledged hope during those summer seasons was that the new opera converts would follow the company back to the War Memorial. We heard a lot about theatrical values, verisimilitudinous casting and a recognizable human scale and it wasn't puffery, either. Out of the adversity of the War Memorial's 20-month closing for seismic upgrading and cosmetic overhaul, general director Lotfi Mansouri made a successful bid for opera as popular (if not exactly mass) entertainment. "La Boheme" at the Orpheum and followed it up with a somewhat less convincing mounting of "Madama Butterfly" last spring at the Golden Gate. Opera of which the public saw little during the past six months is the company that in 1996 boldly set out to attract a wide new audience for musical theater with a revolving cast production of Puccini's ![]()
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