OPERA IN COSTA MESA : SECOND CAST TONES DOWN ‘PORGY, BESS’

They have taken away the searchlights. The brouhaha has evaporated in the cool night air of Orange County. The lily-white audience still chats during the prelude, but now it dresses casually, applauds meekly, goes home quickly at the end.

In the space of 24 hours, opera in Costa Mesa has gone from glitzy super-event to business-as-usual.

As the ever-perverse fates would have it, the business Thursday night at Segerstrom Hall was even more interesting than it had been at the festive opening of “Porgy and Bess.”

A new set of principals for the Houston Grand Opera production, sponsored here by Opera Pacific, brought a compelling aura of introspection to Gershwin’s folksy masterpiece. The basic values may not have changed, but the differences in nuance and stress were enlightening.

Returning to the role he first sang in this production 11 years ago, Donnie Ray Albert conveyed the innate pathos of Porgy through understatement.

Although he commands a big, burnished, exceptionally resonant baritone, he made a mighty noise only in the inevitable climaxes--and the heroic outbursts seemed all the more imposing as a result. Much of the time, he insisted on scaling the tone down to intimate proportions, proving in the process that Gershwin benefits from mellow bel canto as much as Verdi does.

Albert played Porgy with the melancholy always close to the surface. “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” was hushed and whimsical, not a banjo-ornamented exercise in bravado. The Buzzard Song, by the same expressive token, exuded somber foreboding beyond the norm.

Heavier, slower, perhaps a bit older than his immediate predecessor, this hulking yet sensitive Porgy seemed marked by tragedy from the start. As such, he provided an apt counterforce for the poignant, strikingly unconventional Bess of Henrietta Davis.

Most portrayers of the floozy with the heart of tin make a dazzling impression when first they slink on. Davis didn’t seem altogether comfortable in her crimson finery. When she flashed a shapely leg to retrieve the bottle of booze hidden in her garter, the gesture seemed merely functional, hardly exhibitionistic.

A tall and handsome woman with a devastating smile, she suggested essential vulnerability rather than natural glamour. Even when playing the Carmen of Catfish Row, she resembled a victim more than a predator. Blame the wanton flights on weakness, on circumstance and on happy dust.

Davis’ somewhat wiry soprano sounded often resplendent, sometimes edgy. She made a sensuous feast, however, of the love duet, floated exquisite pianissimo tones as she halfheartedly left her man for the fateful picnic (“Goodbye, Porgy, Goodbye”), and launched “Leavin’ for the Promised Land” with a beguiling bit of gospel-coloratura improvisation.

Michael Edward-Stevens, the new Crown, was cast against type. His figure is lanky rather than burly, his baritone lightweight rather than overpowering. Nevertheless, he conveyed a reasonable macho threat and, with Davis as his reluctantly sensuous partner, raised the temperature in the hall drastically during the Kittiwah Island encounter.

Priscilla Baskerville, the Serena, has sung Bess in previous productions, including the overblown one at the Met. In “My Man’s Gone Now,” her soft-grained soprano tended to mute the fierce outbursts of grief, and she only approximated the exotic glissandi. Her sound was pervasively beautiful, however, and her characterization patently sympathetic.

Although the voices remained amplified, some minor acoustical adjustments did improve the precarious balance between stage and pit--to a degree. John DeMain again conducted with a telling fusion of passion and savoir-faire.