OPERA REVIEW : San Francisco Revives Verdi’s ‘Nabucco’

Verdi’s “Nabucco”is an impossible opera to comprehend. Even with the aid of supertitles, one can’t tell the people of Jerusalem from the Babylonians, much less the good guys from the bad guys or the victors from the victims. They keep changing, from scene to scene to scene.

An ordinary mortal certainly can’t unravel the exotic 6th-Century BC plot, a supremely convoluted fusion of biblical melodrama, Technicolored extravaganza and formula saga, tinged with a wild array of aesthetic obfuscation, spiritual kitsch and genuine sentiment.

Still, the young Verdi invested “Nabucco” with a wealth of compelling, arching, often wondrous melodies. He created exceptionally striking Romantic challenges for three resourceful singing actors. Not incidentally, he also gave Italy “Va, pensiero,” the chorus that has served, after a fashion, as an abiding cry for national unification and freedom since 1842.

The current revival of “Nabucco” by the San Francisco Opera doesn’t exactly unravel the narrative threads, mask the primitivism or minimize the inherent inequities.

Gerald Freedman’s picturesque staging scheme, which dates back to 1982, is a stilted hybrid that vacillates between the silly simplicity of a stylized oratorio and the stock exaggerations of an old-fashioned operatic charade. As such it teeters between unintentional comedy and would-be tragedy.

The physical production remains a hodgepodge, too. Thomas J. Munn’s economical sets involve a versatile assortment of platforms, steps and slabs. These are adorned with fancy projections--images of bona fide antiquities photographed by Ron Scherl at the British Museum.

The relatively abstract, relatively modern, relatively cluttered scenic design serves as an odd frame for Beni Montresor’s glitzy array of ungainly and antidramatic Christmas-pageant costumes--hand-me-downs from the Paris Opera.

Maurizio Arena, the conductor, settled for comfortable routine, attentive vocal accompaniment and some alarmingly untidy orchestral playing Tuesday night.

Under the generally listless circumstances, this “Nabucco” was dominated, easily and often effectively, by the artists in the three central roles.

Piero Cappuccilli portrayed Nabucco, a.k.a. Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, would-be god and temporary madman. He must be one of the last of the genuine Verdi baritones.

His characteristically mellifluous sound--big, dark and flexible--rose to the high climaxes with imposing ease. He brought a seamless legato to the long, poignant, ascending lines, and shaded the text with fine dramatic zeal. He conveyed pride, ferocity and pathos, in turn, with invariably muted eloquence.

Mara Zampieri, who made her U.S. debut replacing Ghena Dimitrova in the excruciating role of Abigaille, turned out to be somewhat more problematic.

She ripped into the outbursts of bravura rage with fearless elan. Chronically uninhibited, she left no doubt that she can sing high and low, fast and slow, loud and soft, always with artful purpose and hefty extroversion. She cut a handsome figure on the stage, and conveyed ample degrees of glamour, hauteur, menace and repentance, as needed.

She also emitted a generous amount of weird, ugly or forced tones. Resonance was in short supply. So was support. She was not above resorting to a hoot here or a scream there to enhance expressive impact.

Her essentially unorthodox singing seldom sounded pretty. But it often was undeniably exciting. One looks forward, with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation, to her Lady Macbeth next month with the Music Center Opera.

Paul Plishka as the high priest of Jerusalem, Zaccaria, wore his holiday robes and white beard with seasoned dignity. More important, he conveyed the lofty rhetoric with rare breadth, urgency and rolling, wide-ranging basso tone.

The supporting players turned out once again to be pallid. Leslie Richards as Fenena introduced an opulent mezzo-soprano compromised by an unsteady technique. Quade Winter looked more heroic than he sounded as Ismaele.

Deborah Voigt, the stately Anna, at least contributed some ringing high notes in the concertati. Daniel Harper (Abdallo) and Peter Volpe (High Priest of Babylon) faded into the canvas.

The chorus, trained by Ian Robertson, made the least of its potential moment of glory.

If a certain pall lingered over the performance, some of the blame must rest with the audience. The dressy and stodgy Tuesday-nighters sat on their hands, as they always do here. Sometimes opera isn’t a spectator sport after all.