OPERA REVIEW : A Troubled ‘Il Trovatore’ in Costa Mesa

So where are those Marx Brothers when we want them?

Verdi’s beloved but precarious “Il Trovatore,” which was ventured by Opera Pacific on Saturday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, brims with melodic inspiration. It also teeters on the brink of melodramatic caricature.

It still can make poignant sense, however, in the cool, bright light of 1993. All it needs is a quintet of bel-canto paragons equipped with leather lungs--or, failing that, stylish musical and theatrical leadership that compels the observer to take Verdi’s passions seriously on their own primitively Romantic terms.

David DiChiera and Co. mustered Carol Vaness as Leonora. Thank goodness for small revelations.

The rest, alas, was pretty ludicrous. This was a provincial night at the opera, the sort of almost-comic ritual that confirms every non-aficionado’s prejudices about this ancient, most irrational of art forms.

The stage direction vacillated clumsily between modernist cliches at one extreme (irrelevant pantomime during the prelude, artsy flashbacks, cinematic freezes, stylized inaction) and lazy, laissez-faire evasions at the other (shameless staggering and lurching, old-fashioned posing). The hand-me-down sets kept rearranging the same odd collection of canvas walls, towers and steps in a vain attempt to suggest the disparate locales of Biscay and Aragon.

The phlegmatic, self-absorbed, stentorian tenor spent a lot of time pinching the bridge of his nose in grim anticipation of his high notes, which tended to emerge flat anyway. The gutsy baritone roared his music in the same monotonous fortissimo whether contemplating love or hate. The mezzo-soprano impersonating Azucena, the 15th-Century Gypsy hag, sported clunky high heels.

The musical hits passed by with reasonable gusto and little finesse, but communication between stage and pit was a sometime thing. So was agreement regarding tempos. And the rickety band providing the accompaniment, an ensemble identified as the Opera Pacific Orchestra, sometimes gave the impression that it was sight-reading the score, and not too accurately at that.

One had to wonder what a girl like Vaness was doing in a show like this. The prima donna from California, a preeminent Mozart specialist, is expanding her repertory these days to embrace the great Verdi heroines. Her Leonora represents a big step in a lonely direction.

Vaness does not command a warm and luscious dramatic soprano in the manner of Zinka Milanov. She meets Verdi’s arching challenge honorably, however, with more slender, more compact tone, with greater ease in the top range and with welcome facility and expressivity for the coloratura flights.

On Saturday, she looked elegantly slim and moved most gracefully in Charles Caine’s stately costumes. More important, she negotiated the long, ascending lines with breathless legato security, floated lovely pianissimo phrases wherever needed, proved that she can turn a perfect trill in “D’amor sull’ali rosee,” and took stylish delight in a few well-chosen interpolations and cadenzas. Under the circumstances, one doubly regretted her decision to omit the stretta in the last act, “Tu vedrai che amore in terra.”

Giorgio Tieppo hulked and sulked his way through the heroic platitudes of Manrico. If my ears do not deceive me (and, badness knows, they have in the past), he dared assault “Di quella pira” in the original key. In the all-too-strenuous process, he inadvertently invoked a wondrous passage from “Kobbe’s Opera Book”: “The tenor who sings the high C without getting red in the face will hardly be credited with having sung it at all.”

Florence Quivar, patently uneven as Manrico’s quasi-mother, offered powerful high notes offset by not-so-powerful low notes, gutsy vocalism sometimes compromised by pitch problems. She enacted the stage-director’s intrusive charades with lusty goodwill, but ultimately could not balance pathos with frenzy as a great Azucena must.

For some reason, incidentally, she punctuated the final, portentous cadence with a stagy scream. If Verdi had wanted such a gimmicky, extramusical climax, he no doubt would have asked for it.

Mark Rucker served as the noisily imposing Luna. Joseph Corteggiano replaced Kevin Bell as a rusty-sounding Ferrando (a press release identified the basso as “the proprietor of a most prestigious catering firm in New York City which caters exclusive affairs for New York Society”). The bit players were just that.

Richard Buckley did his best, no doubt, to sustain cohesion and/or propulsion at the conductor’s desk. It was a losing battle. The chorus, trained by Henri Venanzi, fared better than the orchestra.

Christopher Mattaliano, whose optimistic biography in the amateurish program magazine lays some dubious claims to glory, directed traffic within borrowed sets attributed to the celebrated Nicola Benois (who retired at 76 in 1977 and died in 1988). The young stage-director’s most striking innovation probably was his introduction of a gypsy-pipsy ballerina who traipsed through an anvil chorus bereft of anvils.

Almost as startling, however, was his idea to have Luna’s guards stab Manrico for a picturesquely brutal death scene, even though the original text and ever-risible supertitles insist that the hero goes to his death offstage “at the block.”

On, Groucho. On, Chico. On, Harpo. . . .