OPERA REVIEW : ‘Fidelio’ Opens Season

Inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday, the Music Center Opera opened its fifth ambitious season with the glorious pathos of “Fidelio.”

It was the first local staging since Nov. 9, 1964, of Beethoven’s only opera. On that distant but memorable night, not incidentally, San Francisco brought a traditional production to Shrine Auditorium with a cast led by vocal heavyweights: Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers.

Outside the Pavilion on Tuesday, the performance-artist Tim Miller and numerous colleagues, all clad in striped prison garb, staged their own ironic overture to Beethoven’s ode to freedom. It was an agitprop demonstration protesting governmental interference in the arts. One participant waved a placard depicting two senators--McCarthy and Helms--as “twins separated at birth.”

In many ways, the political action on the plaza proved more compelling than the political action on the stage.

Gotz Friedrich, the celebrated director from Berlin, made his lofty intentions clear in a program note. He wrote that “Fidelio” “takes place wherever and whenever terrorism and violence threaten mankind.” He saw “no basic demand to update the piece” from the 18th-Century Spain envisioned by the composer. Together with his designer, Peter Sykora, he thought he had “created a nonspecific environment for the story of Leonore’s brave, love-motivated deed.”

If only Friedrich had the courage of his aesthetic convictions. He did resist the temptation to play the opera in some modern banana republic, as had been the case in a San Diego perversion last year. He did not move the conflict to contemporary Kuwait, as some directorial Wunderkind must be doing at this very moment in some trendy German house. But he did resort to a series of overwrought devices--some banal, a few confusing, a lot distorting.

Friedrich and Sykora placed the action--naturalistic but grim, grim, grim, even in the Singspiel episodes--in a stylized prison courtyard, dominated by movable black-brick walls and a central, all-too-modern guard tower.

The prisoners, whose chained bodies tumbled noisily out of kennel cubicles, had to be concentration-camp inmates. When they hailed the bliss of (nonexistent) sunlight, someone flipped a switch backstage and a postcard image of a New Mexico landscape materialized like kitschy magic on the illuminated bricks.

Leonore, disguised as the hardy hero, sported blue jeans. The villainous Don Pizarro, who came equipped with de rigueur shades, resembled a spidery fusion of Nosferatu and a storm trooper. His guards turned out to be wooden World War I holdovers.

Marzelline, the erstwhile soubrette, underwent erotic paroxysms when she declared her yearning for Fidelio. Jacquino became a nasty, leather-jacketed thug. No wonder the girl preferred the handsome, if effeminate, stranger.

After the hysterical reunion of Leonore and her beloved Florestan, Friedrich and his musical accomplices retained the time-dishonored device of interpolating the Third “Leonore” Overture, the magnificence of which invariably reduces the finale to anticlimax. In this version, the symphonic intrusion was exacerbated by an extended mime episode. Leonore cradled her long-lost husband in her arms, gazing at eternity while he took a little nap.

The bearded tenor did awake in time for the valedictory chorus, which ended with the blessed couple bathed in a spotlight and framed by a scrim that descended conveniently to depict the cosmos. Germanic symbolism isn’t invariably subtle.

One must respect Friedrich’s seriousness of purpose and his disdain for certain operatic cliches. One must admire his probing intellect. Sometimes, unfortunately, he seems inclined to probe too far in the wrong direction.

The theatrical excesses of his “Fidelio” could have been mitigated by inspired musical impulses. On this occasion, inspiration turned out to be painfully scarce.

Jiri Kout, the conductor, slighted the majesty, the sweep and the poignancy of the score in favor of speed for its own breathless sake. He trampled nuance in the process, blanketed the voices, and elicited surprisingly untidy playing from the expanded Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

The cast looked fine. For the most part, it sounded feeble.

Karan Armstrong--who happens to be married to Friedrich--was attempting the strenuous title role for the first time in her long career, perhaps unwisely. She acted with muted ardor tinged with telling desperation. A bandage on her hand attested to a broken finger--the result of a fall three weeks ago--but if she experienced any pain, she hid the fact bravely.

She could not hide her vocal grief, however, whenever her lyric soprano confronted heroic climaxes. She whispered the B-natural that should crown the great “Abscheulicher” aria, and betrayed frequent signs of strain and unsteadiness elsewhere.

Gary Bachlund, replacing the originally scheduled Placido Domingo, sang Florestan with the warm, fervent tone of a bona-fide junior Heldentenor . He paced himself badly, however, all but strangling on the excruciating tessitura at the end of “In des Lebens Frulingstagen” and neglecting to modulate the dynamic line.

Karen Beardsley, replacing the originally scheduled Elise Ross, introduced a pretty, temperamental, all-but-inaudible Marzelline. Jonathan Mack sang sympathetically as the woefully unsympathetic Jacquino.

Michael Devlin, our resident would-be Heldenbariton , blustered stoically as the resident Nazi. Lenus Carlson, forced to play Fernando as a blond deus ex machina in a spiffy camel’s hair coat, delivered his noble rhetoric pallidly. Gregg Fedderly and Louis Lebherz revealed major voices in the minor duties of the solo prisoners.

Only one principal sustained world-class standards. Matti Salminen defined the usual paternal platitudes with booming basso amplitude, with incisive articulation of the German text and with hearty if not too folksy generosity of spirit. He towered above his colleagues, both literally and figuratively. If only the opera were called “Rocco.”

The impact of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, trained by Jonathan Draper, was hampered by Friedrich’s melodramatic posturing and Kout’s high-volume hectoring. Still, the chorus made a mighty, jubilant sound when possible.

And now, onward if not necessarily upward, to “Nixon in China”. . . .