Versatile Eaglen Soars at the Bowl

The projected Hollywood Bowl concert performance of Puccini’s “Turandot,” with extraordinary Scottish soprano Jane Eaglen in the title role, was exuberantly announced by John Mauceri in April, at the time the 1998 Bowl season was revealed to the press.

Subsequently, glee was replaced by disappointment: Eaglen would indeed appear--a longtime colleague of Mauceri, she made her Bowl debut with him in 1993 and has since been accepted internationally as an important rising dramatic soprano--but only in a down-scaled program now called “Opera Goes to the Movies.”

In the event, Sunday night in Cahuenga Pass, the reconfigured concert still proved a success and no disappointment at all--first through Mauceri’s clever and keep-’em-guessing programming, then through Eaglen’s brilliant singing. An enthusiastic audience expressed its approval loudly and stayed for an encore.

Wagner dominated the first half, first with the “Tannhauser” Overture, “Dich, teure Halle” from the same opera, then with the two predictable excerpts from “Tristan und Isolde.” And Wagner came back at the end in a felicitous encore, Brunnhilde’s “Ho-jo-to-ho” from “Die Walkure.” Moral: Send ‘em home smiling and with high Cs in their ears.

In between, there was Puccini in two excerpts from “Madama Butterfly,” the aria from Catalani’s “La Wally,” two songs by Doyle from the film “Sense and Sensibility” and the same composer’s Overture to “Much Ado About Nothing” and, changing the pace, music from Ennio Morricone’s score to “Cinema Paradiso.”

The performances had considerable authority. Mauceri, a broad conductor rather than a deep one, obviously knows his way around all this disparate music.

Eaglen, gowned on this occasion in two contrasting items, the first a solid royal blue, the second a glittery copper cover over black, sang with pure tone, effortless technique and a reserved manner. Words are clearly not a matter of great concern to her, but she does deliver them, if only in a generalized, not a dramatic, way.

One worries that the soprano must breathe so often--long lines are thus interrupted, and not for communicative purposes. And one worries that so little temperament comes across from stage to listener. Eaglen’s voice is a phenomenon, true, but notes by themselves, no matter how beautiful, do not give a musical experience.

The Bowl Orchestra achieved some noble moments in the “Tristan” pieces, in the Intermezzo from “Butterfly,” in Franz Waxman’s Wagner-derivative “Dusk” (from “Night Unto Night,” 1949) and in the extended theme from “Cinema Paradiso,” in which Bowl concertmaster Bruce Dukov was the golden-toned violin soloist.