OPERA REVIEW : A Troubled ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ Is Revived in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — A baseball team from Los Angeles, we are told, recently beat some local gang by the bay. We won the “Cosi fan Tutte” sweepstakes too.

Who knows? There may even be hope for Dukakis.

Be that as it may, the news about Mozart at the War Memorial Opera House on Friday was unsettling to local chauvinists. The lowly upstarts down the state at the Music Center had just triumphed with a magical, sensitive new production of Mozart’s tragicomic masterpiece. San Francisco had to make do with a dutiful, problem-ridden revival of an 18-year-old production populated with an uninspired cast.

This “Cosi fan Tutte” was once directed and designed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. When the production was new, it managed a genial, precarious balance between artificiality and realism. The framework--a charming stage within the stage--was stylized. The action scheme often tended toward choreographic symmetry. The characters and their dilemma, however, were real. Ponnelle’s perspective allowed no room for hand-me-down stereotypes.

Now Ponnelle is gone. The creations of the late and much lamented sorcerer have been entrusted to faithful apprentices. They can follow the law of the surviving prompt books, but not, in all cases, the spirit behind that law.

Equally damaging, new singers come and go. A lot happen to have come and gone in this particularly unlucky production. A certain air of improvisation lingers ominously over the effort.

Even before fate had begun to muddle matters, Terence McEwen, the general director of the company, chose a “Cosi” cast of distinctly variable aptitudes. Then he abruptly resigned, leaving his hapless associates to pick up the odd Mozartean pieces.

They did what they could. It wasn’t enough.

The central sisters, Etelka Csavlek and Diana Montague, looked exquisite. Unfortunately, they didn’t invariably sound that way.

Csavlek, a spinto soprano from Budapest, is hardly a natural Mozartean. She might have given San Francisco a compelling Manon Lescaut, but McEwen nostalgically bequeathed that assignment to the superannuated Pilar Lorengar. Miscast but undaunted, Csavlek acted with grace, wit and charm. Still, she lacks both the range and the technique for Fiordiligi’s two great, demanding, crucial arias.

Montague, the British Dorabella, sounded sweet, though a bit tight and dry. If memory serves, she was more impressive, and certainly more provocative, as a Rhine-maiden in Peter Hall’s ill-fated Bayreuth “Ring.” Perhaps she sings better when wet and nude.

The suitors turned out to be a rather bland, ill-matched pair.

Denes Gulyas, another product of the Hungarian connection, introduced a rather stilted Ferrando with the right voice and the wrong manner. He sang a few soft passages with considerable finesse, many loud ones with verismo desperation, and any ornate ones with a commitment to omission rather than commission. Both second-act arias landed on the cutting-room floor.

Stephen Dickson served as an early replacement for the originally scheduled, much demanded Thomas Hampson. As such, he offered the lyrical counterforce of a mellifluous, standard-brand Guglielmo.

The most polished performance of the evening--a couple of pardonable recitative glitches notwithstanding--came from Renato Capecchi as Don Alfonso. A late replacement for the indisposed Tom Krause, he repeated the crisp and elegant impersonation of the old cynic that he had introduced here under Ponnelle’s personal guidance when the production was new. At the same time, he manipulated the remnants of his slender baritone with artful evasion. Perhaps we now can look forward to saluting him in this congenial challenge every 18 years.

Despina, Alfonso’s scheming accomplice, was dispatched in the first act with a broad and vulgar flounce by Gianna Rolandi. She reportedly succumbed to influenza during the intermission, and was replaced in Act II by a brave young novice named Janet Williams. Although her singing tended toward the soft and fluttery, she looked winsome, acted with suave soubrette spunk and saved the show with breezy nonchalance.

Richard Bradshaw conducted with more technical competence than interpretive distinction. It probably wasn’t his fault that the tricky ensembles tended to unravel in confusion.

Jutta Gleue enforced the framework and the traffic patterns of the basic Ponnelle plan as deftly as one has a right to expect under awkward circumstances. It probably wasn’t her fault that the supertitles prompted premature laughter and, worse, compromised the integrity of the design by masking the top of Ponnelle’s set.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles. . . .