OPERATICIZED SHAKESPEARE : ‘TEMPEST’ IN SANTA FE PREMIERE

The harmonies tend toward the microtonal. Dissonance eventually becomes consonance.

A tiny renaissance band accompanies the electronically altered coloratura of the mezzo-soprano sprite Ariel. He/she appears and disappears as a mercurial form vaguely defined by twinkly spangles.

The friendly monster Caliban looks like an overstuffed simian refugee from the wondrous world of Maurice Sendak. In a world of his/her own, Caliban scat-sings the mezzo-soprano blues with the support of a funky jazz combo in the pit.

The mortal lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, explore the vocal stratosphere in sweet, string-oriented lyricism, literally in and on their own time. A massive, percussive, relatively conventional orchestra makes every effort not to keep pace.

Prospero, the all-knowing, all-seeing shipwrecked duke-turned-magician, gets to use all the musical languages in the storeroom--romantic and electronic, conventional and futuristic. His potentially sentimental cantilena oozes into otherworldly Sprechgesang and back.

And so it goes. Cleverly. Noisily. Slowly.

John Eaton’s “The Tempest,” which received its world premiere Saturday night at the Santa Fe Opera, is, if nothing else, ambitious.

It dares confront the complexities of Shakespeare and the verities of eternity. It embraces fantasy tinged with profundity, the ethereal counterbalanced by the vulgar.

It sprawls--in a wild, awful, compelling, fascinating, disorienting, boring variety of tones, stresses and accents--across the modernistic alfresco stage in the New Mexico desert.

Eaton, pride of the faculty of Indiana University, wants to be poignant, cute, overwhelming, heroic, intimate, avant-garde, timeless. Sometimes he wants to be these things in turn. Sometimes he wants to be all these things at once. He doesn’t always succeed.

He defeats some of his own best purposes by dint of overstatement and/or trivialization. Most damaging, perhaps, he repeatedly confuses repetition with development.

Nevertheless, “The Tempest” confirms his lonely stature as a man of the theater who dares to think big. In commissioning the opera, Santa Fe reaffirms its importance as a forum for adventure.

In the final analysis, there may be little wrong with this score that couldn’t be righted with some bold application of the old blue pencil.

One can argue that Shakespeare resists drastic reduction, that Eaton is too willing to stretch the inherent scale of emotive styles, that in the big moments bombast is no substitute for pathos. Still, some generous condensation might sharpen both the musical and dramatic focus and heighten the inherent tensions.

“The Tempest” began Saturday night before a nearly full house at 9 and ended well after midnight before a house that wasn’t even nearly full. The exodus, in an operatic mecca that long ago learned to take even the most astringent novelty in stride, is telling.

For his librettist, Eaton chose Andrew Porter. The super-erudite, eminently British music critic of the New Yorker is a much celebrated translator of operas and a not-so-much celebrated director of operas.

It may be significant that he has described Eaton as “the most interesting opera composer working in America today.” Unfortunately, mutual sympathy does not mean that Porter is automatically equipped to play Boito to Eaton’s Verdi.

Porter has cut the play drastically, though still not drastically enough. He has taken liberties with the original poetic structures, striving, he says, for the rhythmical rather than the metrical. It would be something of an exaggeration, however, to claim that his lines automatically sing themselves.

And it would be more than an exaggeration to claim that a large percentage of the lines--Shakespeare’s or Porter’s--proved intelligible in Santa Fe.

Even with words evaporating in the cold night air or submerging in the dense musical textures, “The Tempest” did enjoy the advantage of a splendid performance.

Richard Bradshaw kept the unruly and disparate musical forces in firm control. A master at untangling all manner of sonic knots, he sustained order and a semblance of theatricality even when chaos threatened to beckon.

Bliss Hebert made canny, flexible use of the curved, open-backed Santa Fe stage. The webbed, deja-vu unit set was artfully adorned and lavishly cluttered in the semi-abstract mode by Allen Charles Klein, atmospherically illuminated by Craig Miller.

The huge cast found its central force in the warm, dignified baritonal Prospero of Timothy Noble. He was strikingly seconded by the shamelessly campy Caliban of Ann Howard and the resplendent Ariel of Susan Quittmeyer.

The high-lying love-music of Miranda was marvelously served by Sally Wolf, whose poised vocal flights made one want to overlook a grotesquely unflattering costume. Colenton Freeman, her Ferdinand, mustered the impossible tessitura bravely, beefily and with some pardonable strain.

The most memorable cameos were contributed by basso Kevin Langan as the endearingly befuddled Gonzalo, by Gimi Beni as a noble buffo exponent of Stephano’s besotted bonhomie, by Steven Rickards as a crafty-countertenor Trinculo, and by Melanie Helton, Lisa Turetsky and Jean Kraft as a graceful trio of goddesses ex machina . The incidental hippety-hop ballet, choreographed by Rodney Griffin, proved very incidental indeed.