OPERA REVIEW : Marilyn Horne Sings Rare Rossini

The bill at the War Memorial Opera House on Saturday was listed as an American premiere. But the work was old--nearly 170 years old--and much of what one saw and heard seemed familiar. Therein lie several convoluted tales.

The opera exhumed for the occasion was “Maometto II” by good old Gioachino Antonio Rossini. The king of opera buffa wrote this exotically serious quasi-historical fantasy for Naples in 1820. It did not enjoy an instant success, and he subsequently concocted two major revisions.

The third version, a Parisian variation called “Le Siege de Corinthe,” eventually got translated back into Italian. La Scala used “L’Assedio di Corinto” in an emphatically spurious edition as a much-publicized vehicle for Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne in 1969. The Met borrowed the same production for Sills’ belated debut in 1975, but, since the soprano and mezzo had engendered some well-documented friction in Milan, the florid hero in drag (and mustache) this time was Shirley Verrett.

When Terence McEwen, the now-departed general director of the San Francisco Opera, planned the current staging, he decided to use the original Neapolitan score, the decors seen at La Scala and the Met, and Horne as the warbling warrior. The result turned out to be an interesting demonstration of resourceful musicology but, alas, a rather dull evening of musical theater.

Part of the problem must lie with the genre.

Rossini’s grandiose score offers a long, dutiful parade of ornate arias, complex ensembles and predictable formulas. The characters sing of blood and thunder but remain stubbornly static. The melodies are sometimes soothing in their prettiness, sometimes numbing in their banality. The dramatic structure is, to say the least, naive.

One pines in vain for a really persuasive fusion of Rossini’s heroic inclinations and elegant instincts. This may be one of those rarities that actually deserves its obscurity.

The San Francisco team did, for the most part, what it could under less than ideal conditions.

Alberto Zedda conducted a presumably scholarly edition with crisp brio, though he may have slighted some arching lyricism in his quest for momentum. Sonja Frisell created stately tableaux and moved everyone efficiently on and off the surface-lavish, old-fashioned sets of Nicola Benois. The cast took its singing very seriously.

When Los Angeles first heard June Anderson in 1980, she was a promising if miscast Donna Elvira in an awful New York City Opera “Don Giovanni.”

Now she is a celebrated bel-canto soprano with few peers anywhere. In her San Francisco debut as Anna (a.k.a. Pamira), she looked marvelously willowy, moved gracefully through the classic agonies of a heroine torn between the poses of love and duty, and met every vocal challenge--high and low, loud and soft, fast and slow--with angelic purity.

Chris Merritt as Paolo Erisso, her father, produced generous sounds to match his generous physique and, unlike most modern colleagues, flinched from neither the lofty tessitura nor the coloratura line. His tone was hardly sensuous but, for once, Rossini’s tenor problems did not have to be solved in terms of omission or simplification.

Simone Alaimo blustered flamboyantly as Maometto, the lovesick sultan who wastes 15th-Century Negroponte. His style, however, proved somewhat more imposing than his basso resources.

Ironically, the weakest performance came from Horne, the presumed star. In the music of Calbo (a.k.a. Neocle), her voice emerged stubbornly rough in timbre and dull in color. She resorted, on occasion, to uncharacteristic forcing and, most painful, couldn’t rise to some of the climactic pitches. This obviously was not her night.

It wasn’t Rossini’s either.