OPERA REVIEW : ‘Troyens’: Marathon of Gimmicks

An interesting thing happened Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when the curtain finally fell--after five sprawling, fascinating, frustrating hours--on “Les Troyens.”

The audience mustered enthusiastic if hardly ecstatic applause for the singers, and an ovation for the conductor. Then the crowd of 3,200 greeted the staging team with a lusty competitive chorus in which boos outweighed cheers.

The responses seemed reasonable.

The Music Center Opera had ventured one of the most vexing challenges in all the literature. Berlioz’s vision of the Trojan War filters the ancient mythology of Virgil’s “Aeneid” through a massive, often inspired score that accommodates both classical structure and romantic rhetoric with a Gallic accent.

The heroic impulses of this convoluted epic are difficult to project even when approached with literal conviction. They have defeated many an opera company that can boast resources greater than ours. When Los Angeles last saw “Les Troyens,” in a straightforward production by the San Francisco Opera at Shrine Auditorium in 1969, nearly two hours of the work had been deemed expendable.

Musically, the Music Center authorities tried to do the right thing. They engaged Charles Dutoit--an authentic, passionate Berlioz expert--to conduct. They decided to perform every note in the so-called complete edition, and then some, adding the reconstruction of a superfluous scene that the composer himself had failed to orchestrate.

Dramatically, the Music Center made a major, possibly fatal, miscalculation. Instead of doing everything possible to clarify the formidable narration, Peter Hemmings & Co. allowed a gang of trendy whiz kids to impose layers of theatrical obfuscation.

The result is a pretentious exercise in postmodern claptrap. Although it looks nice, on its own picturesque terms, the production stubbornly trivializes the music and vulgarizes the narrative. It is clumsily executed and, most damaging, it makes the difficult plot doubly difficult to grasp, even with the aid of supertitles.

Francesca Zambello, the thoughtfully perverse stage director, obviously doesn’t trust Berlioz very much. Her distrust is obviously shared by her sympathetic allies in gimmickry: the set designer John Conklin, the costume designer Bruno Schwengl and the choreographer Susan Marshall.

These four apparently like to jolt the viewer with not-so-subtle surprises. In their theater of alienation, an oddly skewed universe is viewed through a shattered dome that represents the Pantheon in Rome.

Assorted ghosts of interpolated gods, both Roman and Greek, stalk the busy boards. A shaft of light--can it be a gigantic neon bar?--appears and disappears mysteriously against the backdrop. The Trojan horse is first seen as a cute little shadow puppet, then as a huge, three-dimensional severed head.

And so it bumbles. Troy is a dark place in which everyone wears black and looks vaguely antique. Cassandre and her cohorts, awkwardly trapped on a tiny downstage platform, tear climactically at the Velcro flaps of their black robes so they can commit group-suicide in matching white nighties.

Everyone gets tangled, sooner or later, in a mass of billowy curtains and/or ropes. Hylas, the Phrygian sailor, sings his ravishingly nostalic aria suspended precariously from the ceiling. This is profoundly symbolic of something or other.

Carthage becomes a light place inhabited by utopian architects, comic servants and refugees from Offenbach operettas. The dress code here is gay-nineties caricature-chic. Didon (a.k.a. Dido), the once-tragic Queen, makes her entrance swaggering in butch military drag. Before literally waltzing off with Enee, she slips into something more comfortable: a purple off-the-shoulder evening gown and a hat adorned with fruits and feathers.

During the would-be agitated “Royal Hunt” and should-be sensual “Storm,” a jumble of modern dancers perform bump-and-hump rituals in various combinations and permutations. Elsewhere, the choreographer offers exotic demonstrations in the sinuous art of the backstroke.

The singers march and crouch and stagger con brio. They try hard, usually with success, not to knock each other down. When death looms, they smear themselves urgently with red goo.

Everyone works frantically to follow the director’s quaint orders. Unfortunately, the grandeur, the sweep and the finesse of Berlioz’s score get damaged at best, lost at worst, in the hectic process.

The essential musical qualities are compromised, of course, only for those listeners who insist on keeping their eyes open. With eyes mercifully closed, one can appreciate the inherent sonic splendors as reproduced by Dutoit and a superb instrumental ensemble that has the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as its nucleus. The Swiss conductor may value verve over introspection, but he sustains tension against the odds, savors dramatic contrasts and paints with an extraordinarily broad scale of orchestral color.

The huge cast is more notable for diligence than for savoir-faire. On Saturday, Nadine Secunde sustained the idealistic hysteria of Cassandre poignantly, though her slender Wagnerian soprano seemed a bit high and light for the difficult task at hand. Gary Lakes looked stodgy and sounded a bit monochromatic as Enee, but he mastered the dangerous tessitura honorably and, with Carol Neblett as Didon, brought sensitive luster to the ethereal love duet in Carthage. Neblett modeled her impossible costumes stoically, and sang with eloquent thrust as soon as she managed to control the unsteadiness that marred her first aria.

Most notable in supporting assignments were Greg Fedderly as a fresh, sweet-toned Hylas, Marcel Vanaud as a tough and bluff Chorebe, Kenneth Cox as a forbidding Narbal and Paula Rasmussen as a dignified, mellifluous Anna. Nikolas Nackley, a boy-soprano attempting a role better suited to a mezzo-soprano, brought mature aplomb to the duties of Ascagne.

Jonathan Mack made much of the scena restored to Sinon, but came to momentary grief with the ascending flourishes of Iopas. Marvellee Cariaga (Hecube), Michael Gallup (Panthee) and Louis Lebherz (Priam) were their usual imposing selves.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale, trained by Jonathan Draper, exerted valor under stress. Still, the chorus seemed a bit undernourished in the great climactic outbursts allotted the assorted warriors, citizens and ghosts. The booers out front made a mightier noise.