Spunky ‘Don Pasquale’ Closes Season

Start an opera company? Might as well open an expensive, pretentious restaurant, or give birth to sextuplets: The odds are completely against you in one of the most challenging of human endeavors. You can spend millions and still fail.

Nevertheless, there are those who insist on doing it. For example: Marilyn Gilbert and Nathan Rundlett, singers both, who founded Santa Barbara Grand Opera four years ago. This month, the fledgling company marks its 11th production and the end of its second full season.

From the evidence of its spunky, musically presentable and good-looking “Don Pasquale,” seen at the second of six performances in historic Lobero Theatre here on Thursday, the company promises to survive. With an able conductor in the person of Valery Ryvkin signed on for the next three seasons as music director, the inventive stage direction of Bodo Igesz and an enthusiastic cast, this performance of Donizetti’s comedic masterpiece had a patina of professionalism one cannot always take for granted in the lyric theater.

Ryvkin’s cohesive and fluent conducting and Igesz’s sometimes hyperkinetic staging usually hold the entire project together. What makes it fragmented is the five-member cast’s non-ensemble acting and singing, a jumble of styles and musical personalities: Each singer has virtues, but those do not regularly mesh with those of their fellows.

Extravagantly talented, soprano Sujung Kim is the unquestioned star of the production, sailing up above the staff to numerous high and reliable notes, all showy, some almost painfully loud, trilling like a champion, riding the passage work without effort. Kim’s acting has contrasts, but does not dig deep: Her exteriors gleam, but the person underneath makes no appearances. This is a performance about surfaces--and mugging.

Donald Sherrill’s Don Pasquale and Carlo Scibelli’s Ernesto also deliver the outward elements of both characters, and the notes, well-sung. Sherrill’s Pasquale misses the poignancy while usually hitting the comedic mark; Scibelli’s attractive tenor still seems indisposed--as it was in “La Boheme” at Opera Pacific last month--and his acting tentative.

The too-young looking, vocally gifted Aram Barsamian also fails to find all the dimensions and subtleties in Malatesta, while executing Igesz’s complicated moves gamely. Joshua Schneyer makes an amusing and never overstated Notary. Charmingly, the talented chorus--trained by Val Underwood--makes some wonderful and Italianate sounds in its brief appearance and moves well.

The unit set from San Jose Opera, which changes only in the final scene, looks rich and elegant in the uncredited lighting.

* Santa Barbara Grand Opera concludes its run of Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” in Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido, Santa Barbara, Sunday at 7 p.m., Wednesday and Feb. 22 at 2:30 p.m., and Friday at 8 p.m. (805) 963-0761.