SALZBURG DIARY : L.A. Forces Confront Messiaen

It began at 4 in the afternoon. It ended at 10:30 at night, and not a moment too soon.

At the curtain calls, a capacity audience numbering 1,549 mustered enthusiasm for a splendid cast headed by Jose van Dam. Wild cheers greeted the tireless conductor and virtuoso orchestra: Esa-Pekka Salonen and an expanded version of his Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Lusty boos--amid the inevitable counter-bravos--rewarded the work of the dauntless director, Peter Sellars, and his progressive scenic allies. It was business more or less as usual at the Salzburg Festival.

Between the first orchestral flourish and the final throbbing master-chord, one encountered much mystical reflection, a little purple piety and a vast, chirpy invasion of symphonic birds.

There was more, so much more: an exploration of the power of percussive agitation, with exotic, otherworldly embellishment via the inevitable ondes-martenot ; welcome patches of lyric relief; a daring demonstration of high-tech theatrical distraction, and--perhaps most important--a nice, long dinner break.

The occasion, in case you have been visiting another planet, was the first performance here, and the second anywhere, of Olivier Messiaen’s only opera--the sprawling, daunting, totally unrealistic and occasionally beguiling “Saint Francois d’Assise.”

If all had gone as hoped, the composer would have attended the gala opening on Monday. He reportedly had not been too happy with the world premiere nine years ago at the Paris Opera, and he looked forward to the possibility of a second lease on Franciscan life. Unfortunately, Messiaen died last April at 83. His widow, muse and frequent collaborator, Yvonne Loriod, represented him in Salzburg, beaming what looked like constant approval even during the earliest, steamiest rehearsal.

It is easy to see why no company had dared stage this very magnum, dangerously mawkish, perilously intellectual opus after the initial effort. “St. Francois” asks very much, both of its performers and its observers. To some eyes and ears, it returns rather little.

The question in Salzburg was basic: Would a traditionally passive and cautious audience respond favorably to this extraordinarily complex, oddly static, frequently noisy challenge--especially as staged by a provocative American Wunderkind who likes to toy with neon lights and video monitors?

The answer was ambiguous. The first-nighters sat patiently through the longueurs of a treatise that takes a lot of time to say rather little and then says it again. Most of the audience returned after the 75-minute intermission that separated the clangorous musings of final acts. The applause at the last, much delayed, whomping cadence suggested more than relief. It also conveyed a trace of the self-congratulation that comes with survival of an exceptionally trying but potentially useful ordeal.

The ovations certainly rewarded a brilliant musical performance. If Salonen and his orchestra had been upset by the cool response to their debut concert here, they now had the satisfaction of being hailed as conquering heroes.

Messiaen’s score represents a circuitous obstacle course for a huge orchestra, and for a conductor unfazed by the most complex rhythmic and structural hurdles. Salonen proved himself a quiet master of Messiaen’s coloristic quirks, his motivic detours and his dense harmonic convolutions.

The Finnish maestro sustained clarity, exactitude and focus with grace against all odds. He untied the linear knots with seeming ease, gauged the mightiest climaxes with intelligent bravado, and even sustained a semblance of tension on the way.

He couldn’t make the trite sound poignant, or the repetitious fascinating. He did, however, perform all the miracles available to him, and he inspired the Philharmonic to ride out the marathon with gutsy elan.

At a press conference last week, the irresistibly hyperbolic Peter Sellars called “St. Francois” “one of the greatest masterpieces of the century.” He promised the public “an ecstatic spiritual experience,” a poignant examination of the crises facing man today: disease, famine, economic as well as ecological ruin.

It sounded promising. The result, however, was fraught with contradictions.

No one could doubt Sellars’ serious dedication or his sensitivity. At times, however, he seemed to function as his own worst enemy, and the singers’ too. For all his hocus-pocus invention, he could not prevent Messiaen’s stubborn efforts at moral uplift and his habitual obsession with anything ornithological from seeming diffuse at best, turgid at worst. Nor could the director create dramatic conflict where the composer gave him none.

Abetted by George Tsypin, his sympathetic designer, Sellars built a strange avant-garde universe for this lofty discourse along the 100-foot expanse of the Felsenreitschule stage (originally a riding academy built into the cliff of the Monchsberg). The wooden skeleton of a cathedral towered at stage right, counterbalanced by a network of perilously raked platforms at the left.

A gigantic neon grid, designed by James Ingalls, held center stage, sometimes exuding its own mysterious glow and often flashing gaudy light designs to reinforce the harmonic colors for which Messiaen had envisioned lasers. The cross of Jesus recurred as a neon leitmotif, projecting the symbol of sacrifice and salvation in garish jukebox hues.

Most irksome, perhaps, Sellars dotted the playing area with as many as 40 TV monitors, some serving in various configurations as floor props (the leper’s bed of pain, St. Francis’ tomb, a trio of cruciforms) and others simply dangling in the air. The screens depicted jerky images of birds, flowers and, most often, loving close-ups of an anonymous young monk bearing a wooden cross in the wilderness.

Messiaen’s plot may be stilted and static (he wrote his own libretto), but Sellars gave the viewer a lot to watch. Too much. One kept losing the tiny protagonists, the potentially poetic tableaux and the central action--such as it was--amid all the flickering gadgetry and modernist gimmickry.

Ultimately, Sellars’ appeal to the eyes seemed as unfocused as Messiaen’s appeal to the ears. Problematic, too, was the director’s creation of an ongoing threat to the composer’s fragile emotional appeal. Even when the music and text dictated tragic repose, the stage bristled with nervous energy.

The cast performed heroically. Van Dam, a holdover from the Paris premiere, brought extraordinary reserves of dignity, finesse and, where needed, fervor to the strenuous duties of the central saint. Dawn Upshaw sounded ethereal and looked sweetly innocent in the stances of the quasi-boyish Angel, effectively seconded by a scarlet-winged Sara Rudner (the former Twyla Tharp stalwart) as her dancerly alter ego. Ronald Hamilton projected the pathos of the Leper most deftly. Urban Malmberg, John Aler and Tom Krause attended memorably to the assorted monkly agonies and ecstasies.

The 120 members of the Arnold Schoenberg Choir looked properly drab in contemporary-mufti costumes designed by Dunya Ramicova and struck their unison poses dutifully while positioned in awkward places on the set. The massed singers, more accustomed to concert than opera, exerted reasonable dramatic ardor even when, disconcertingly, they sang with scores in hand.