MUSIC REVIEW : Alfredo Kraus Saves S.F. Opera’s ‘Romeo’

Thank goodness for Alfredo Kraus.

Terence McEwen, general director of the San Francisco Opera, has put together a bleak production of Gounod’s engagingly sweet and sentimental “Romeo et Juliette” this season.

The bargain-basement sets of Rolf Gerard come from the Met, where they looked like skimpy, old-fashioned window-dressing 20 years ago. The stage direction of Bernard Uzan fluctuates between silliness and ineptitude. The conducting of Michel Plasson maintains tired routine. Although the Juliette is promising, the supporting cast represents a generally embarrassing assortment of would-be’s and has-beens.

And in the middle of this modest mess, stands Kraus--probably the finest, and certainly the most elegant, lyric tenor of the day.

Friday night at the War Memorial Opera House, he illuminated the generally shoddy proceedings with what must be a definitive interpretation of the impetuous young gentleman from Verona.

There are some ironies in this.

In the first place, Kraus wasn’t even supposed to be here. Had things gone as planned, the Romeo would have been Luis Lima. Kraus agreed to fly in between engagements in New York and Dallas as a late replacement for his reportedly indisposed colleague.

In the second place, Kraus isn’t exactly a young gentleman any more. A gentleman? Of course. But young? He happens to celebrate his 60th birthday this week.

That is only a prosaic technicality. Kraus has found the secret of eternal youth.

He sang on this occasion with the same freshness, the same control, the same ease and finesse that always distinguished his art.

He capped the apostrophe to the sun with a rapturous high B (opting for the bright key Bizet originally intended but discarded in favor of the more practical, now traditional, downward transposition). At the end of the second act, the Spanish tenor interpolated a high C that broke through the choral fabric with thrilling urgency. And yet he also caressed the love music and the tragic plaints of the tomb scene with infinite mezza-voce tenderness.

He articulated the text, moreover, with model clarity and point, amid a telling demonstration of legato sensitivity. He remains a vocal paragon.

As an actor, he favored concentrated emotion and economical gesture, cutting an ardent, slender, emphatically sympathetic figure on the stage.

As a singer, an actor and a stylist, he outclassed everyone else within sight and sound.

Given a less prepossessing Romeo, Ruth Ann Swenson might have seemed a more prepossessing Juliette. She is very pretty and very young. She commands a pure and bright, high-ranging, well-focused soprano that is more effective in the carefree bravura of the introductory Waltz than in the agonizing drama of the reinstated Potion Aria.

She can simper with girlish affectation. She can sing ornate music with accuracy and sweetness. She can float a lovely pianissimo line. She even can muster a reasonable approximation of a trill.

Still, at this juncture and in this context, she remains a bit bland, a bit tentative and cliche-oriented.

A really inspiring conductor and a more discerning stage director would, no doubt, have brought out more in her. Plasson, unfortunately, provided fast and flabby musical leadership, and Uzan, when he wasn’t fussing over extraneous detail, tended to confuse drama with traffic control.

Donna Petersen offered an endearingly crusty portrait of the old Nurse. But the rest of the cast flirted, with varying degrees of success, with disaster.

Gwynne Howell encountered both pitch and depth problems as Friar Laurence. Joseph Rouleau brought the wobbly wreck of a once-decent basso to the duties of Capulet. Stephen Dickson as Mercutio summoned none of the necessary fleetness and charm.

Madelyn Renee as Stephano proved that being a Pavarotti protegee doesn’t justify engagement in a major opera house. Dennis Petersen introduced a shockingly feeble Tybalt, Peter Volpe a shockingly shaky Duke of Verona.

The ever-distracting supertitles, not incidentally, managed to coax a laugh out of the non-capacity audience just as Romeo was spinning out his most exquisite, most poignant amorous declaration. In this day of instant technological glory, people apparently find reading the opera more important than listening to it.