Opera Pacific Opens With Grand-Scale ‘Aida’

Opera Pacific, the unofficial guardian of musical theater at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, likes to dabble in lightweight commercial fare such as “West Side Story” and, even more dubious, “Kismet.” When it chooses to be grand, however, it is very grand indeed.

Last year, the company mustered a super-lavish, quasi-veristic production of “La Boheme” staged by Gian Carlo Menotti. Saturday night, to open the 1988 season, David DiChiera and friends turned to Verdi’s “Aida.”

There were no elephants or camels on the premises. But Costa Mesa did come up with a white stallion for a cameo appearance in the Triumphal Scene, and the stage did seem to teem with a cast of hundreds.

This was an old-fashioned grand and gushy “Aida.” It was worthy, in most respects, of a major, serious yet cautious company.

It enlisted armies of supernumeraries impersonating picturesque warriors, prisoners, rabble and hootchy-kootch priestesses. Spears and emblems and banners popped up all over the place. Wolfram Skalicki’s spacious, handsome, stylized-Egyptian sets, borrowed from Miami, looked lavish. The costumes, assembled by Charles R. Caine, looked exotic. And everyone made a mighty noise.

The mighty noises posed something of a problem. The acoustics of Segerstrom Hall have always tended toward the quirky in operatic matters. For “Boheme,” the management falsified the sonic equation by resorting to amplification. On this occasion, everyone sounded as if he or she had swallowed a microphone.

Singers whose vocal output seems modest in other houses boomed and bellowed here with staggering, echo-ridden resonance. This, apparently, was a roster of fuzzy laryngeal giants on a distortion crusade. One kept wanting to get up and turn down the volume.

It was bizarre and unsettling. When questioned during intermission, company officials swore with wide-eyed, passionate urgency, up and down on a stack of scores and on their collective mothers’ sacred memory, that the sound was pure, unaltered, natural.

The public relations manager said so. The general director said so. A singer from another cast said so. And they are all honorable men. . . .

Under these quizzical circumstances, it was difficult to make definitive appraisals regarding the supersingers. Nevertheless, certain aesthetic revelations were obvious.

Leona Mitchell sang the title role with remarkable sweetness, purity and amplitude. She played loose with the text, dropping consonants, sometimes whole phrases, at will, and she tended to darken the vowel sounds in quest of dramatic impact. Still, her vocalises were generally exquisite.

If the high C of “O, patria mia” emerged a shade flat, one could find compensation in her arching legato, her generous portamento and shimmering pianissimo.

As an actress, she was content to strike stock poses and to demonstrate a limited repertory of semaphore exercises.

Ruben Dominguez, the Venezuelan tenor who replaced Vyacheslav Polosov as Radames, produced what seemed like the loudest, longest, beefiest, highest B-flat this side of Franco Corelli. He also mustered a lot of clumsy phrasing and hollow bleating, and tended to confuse breast-stroke practice with histrionics.

Dolora Zajic virtually stole the show as a tough, eminently heroic, ultimately poignant Amneris. The wide vocal range of the role posed hardly a problem for her, although she did miscalculate the climax of an otherwise gripping Judgment Scene. She inflected the text vividly and appropriated the stage with primitive authority.

If she is half as effective under normal acoustical conditions, she may well be the dramatic mezzo for whom the world has been waiting.

Andrew Smith contributed a crude, rough-voiced Amonasro. Eric Halfvarson as Ramfis sounded like a combination of Pinza, Kipnis and Chaliapin--which must be too good to be true. Mario Storace encountered pitch problems as a crusty old King of Egypt.

John Mauceri inspired exceptionally sensitive playing from the Opera Pacific Orchestra, whatever that is, and shaped the drama with poise and introspective deliberation. He cited Verdi’s specific metronome markings to justify his unusually slow tempos. For the most part, the loss in impetuosity was counterbalanced by a gain in majesty.

The local chorus, trained by Henri Venanzi, marched, gesticulated and sang with precise gusto. It could teach its Music Center counterpart a lesson or two.

The incidental dances, choreographed by James Penrod, looked particularly ridiculous when executed by “naked” slaves in strategically shaded, coffee-colored body stockings.

Nicholas Muni, the stage director, allowed the principals to go through their silly, self-indulgent paces--one wonders if he had a choice--but devised all manner of fussy business for the minor characters and walk-ons. The high priest addressed his introductory remarks not just to the leading tenor but to a whole battalion of kneeling soldiers, and the once-innocuous temple ballerina became the victim of a bloody altar sacrifice.

Occasionally, the action ignored the text, and the ubiquitous supertitles made the contradictions embarrassingly clear. Amneris, for instance, told a scowling Radames how much she admired his beaming ardor. Later she announced the arrival of Aida and described her facial expression, even though the soprano had yet to enter.

The supertitles, not incidentally, ended the opera with an awkward misconception. Amneris stood atop the lovers’ tomb exhorting the gods for universal benediction, “Pace, t’imploro.” But the translation above the proscenium flashed a self-centered plea: “Grant me peace.”

It isn’t quite the same.