OPERA REVIEW : British Strauss, Smetana in Chicago

The eyes and ears of the music world focused on William Bolcom’s “McTeague” this weekend in the windy, not to mention rainy, city.

The much-ballyhooed premiere created something of a controversy for the Lyric Opera. The audience cheered, as did the local critics. Some of the out-of-town responses proved less ecstatic.

Meanwhile, business-as-usual surrounded the glamorous novelty at the old Civic Opera House. The business in this case was oddly British.

On Friday, Chicago presented Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” in a production created for the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Sunday afternoon, the bill was Smetana’s “Bartered Bride” in a production borrowed from the English National Opera.

“Elektra”: No, thank you.

“Bartered Bride”: Yes, please.

Strauss’ shocking masterpiece doesn’t need a lot of trendy updating to make its impact. The composer and his inspired librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, knew what they were doing. Still, modern directors and designers--especially the Eurotrashy ones--just love to add decorative layers of cheap symbolism and sociopolitical schlock, belaboring the obvious.

The perpetrators in this case were Gotz Friedrich and Hans Schavernoch. Their inspiration: to play the action not, as prescribed, in the Mycenae of antiquity or in any semblance of a palace courtyard but in a sewer pipe.

This, mind you, is no ordinary sewer pipe. It looks as if it were made of corrugated steel, and it happens to be outfitted with a sliding subway-train door and a convenient strip of Venetian-blind windows.

When the tragedy reaches its bloody climax, red glurp oozes from the walls. The obsessive heroine smears the goo on her face, and on that of her innocent sister--who, for reasons unknown, is required to do a blowzy imitation of Jean Harlow.

The pipe is populated by modern-decadent types: schoolgirl sluts, S & M enthusiasts, assorted guerrillas. The protagonist masquerades as a rodent. Everyone tries to look very earnest. Everyone ends up looking pretty silly.

At least everyone sounds loud. If nothing else, the tubular construction must be an acoustic advantage. Given the coarse expressive scale favored by Leonard Slatkin in the pit, the hard-working singers deserve all the help they can get.

Marilyn Zschau ventured the title role, as she had at the Music Center last year. She still musters impressive heft for the mighty climaxes, still stalks the stage with brooding intensity. The strain of this almost inhuman challenge is beginning to tell, however, with unsettling losses in steadiness, in pitch and in dynamic control.

As Klytamnestra, Leonie Rysanek, now 66, once again did her resourceful best to pretend that a time-worn soprano can do justice to a challenge that really requires a gutsy mezzo -soprano. It may be worth remembering that the first interpreter of the role, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, was 42 at the time of the premiere.

Nadine Secunde offered a strong-voiced Chrysothemis, James Johnson a weak-voiced Orest, Barry Busse a pallid Aegisth.

Elijah Moshinsky is another director who has no qualms about taking liberties. But his staging of “The Bartered Bride” subtracts nothing--well, hardly anything--as it adds contemporary illumination.

Moshinsky obviously does not care to present a traditional “Prodana Nevesta.” He has no interest in, or patience for, pleasant-peasant rituals and comic-opera platitudes. He has decided to increase immediacy by moving the action forward, to a vague point between world wars, and to banish any hint of old-fashioned pretty-prettiness. As the characters become more credible, their plight becomes more bemusing and the social milieu more threatening.

John Bury, the sympathetic designer, has created a stylized block set that, despite its sunflowers and painterly meadow, allows no picture-postcard replica of old Bohemia. It works, wittily.

Chicago did not muster a cast ideally sensitive to Moshinsky’s tone and style, and the problems may have been exacerbated on Sunday by last-minute changes of both conductor and leading tenor. The first two acts had their nervous and listless moments. Miracles happened, however, in the last act.

Here, the delicate balance between pathos and satire was perfectly sustained. And for once, the circus acts--very amusing circus acts--served as flights of organic whimsy, not as dumb balletic diversions.

Easily the most persuasive performance--also the one most responsive to Moshinsky’s concept-- came from Graham Clark as a crisply articulated, almost melancholy Vasek. There was no place for caricature here. The tenorino was ably seconded by Kathryn Gamberoni’s Esmeralda, a delectably innocent, gum-chewing, high-wire vamp in dark glasses.

The romantic principals proved somewhat less satisfying. Barbara Daniels sang Marenka beautifully, even though she ignored all opportunities for soft high notes. Unfortunately, she settled for predictable saucy-soubrette manners and an anachronistic costume worthy of “Song of Norway.” Gary Lehman, still a member of the Lyric Opera training program, performed bravely, if a bit stiffly, as a substitute for Neil Rosenshein as the heroic Jenik.

Although Peter Rose introduced a dull, lightweight Kecal, the secondary singers--most notably Martha Jane Howe, William F. Walker, Jean Kraft and Philip Kraus--were splendid, vocally and theatrically. Nearly everyone seemed to savor the English text--a canny revision of Tony Harrison’s quirky English version commissioned by the Met in 1978.

Bruno Bartoletti, the resident artistic director, was supposed to conduct. Illness forced him to pass the baton, however, to a competent assistant, Stephen Sulich, who enforced much dramatic brio, not so much lyric breadth.