Innovative Season in Santa Fe

After more than four decades, a new man is at the helm of the Santa Fe Opera House, which houses this country’s premier summer opera festival. Richard Gaddes--a protege of the company’s founder and longtime general director, John Crosby--is leading the company through its first season of the post-Crosby years.

It is a typical Santa Fe season: a couple of hits, some near-misses and only one real dog. The repertory is fresh, the productions are innovative and insightful, the casts have a handful of real discoveries, and even the things that don’t work are mostly noble failures.

Santa Fe produces five operas a season, opening them week by week from late June until the end of July, when all five shows run in repertory. The formula is: two popular staples of the repertory (this year it was Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Verdi’s “Falstaff”), one work each from Mozart (“Mitridate, Re di Ponto”) and Strauss (“The Egyptian Helen”), and something either new or new to America. This year, it was the last of these that yielded the best theater.

Gaddes chose Alban Berg’s first opera, “Wozzeck.” The production remains, three-quarters of a century after the work’s 1925 unveiling in Berlin, an inexplicable rarity in this country. Although it confronts listeners with drama more immediate and terrifying than a Stephen King novel, and music as sensuous as Wagner’s and as transparent as Debussy’s, it is labeled “difficult.”

Berg’s opera follows the play on which it’s based, Georg Buechner’s astonishingly experimental drama from the 1830s, with exquisite fidelity. And despite the introduction of a kind of shadow double for the title character as a directorial “concept,” the Santa Fe production hewed closely to Berg’s text. Director Daniel Slater starts with the premise that Wozzeck, a soldier who is either driven into madness or descending on his own, is suffering from what we know as schizophrenia. But in the end, the opera refuses to answer the basic question: Is the crime that no one notices Wozzeck’s suffering, or is there an unholy alliance between the regimes of military and scientific power to tip him over the edge?

In the title role was the Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard. Hagegard set a glassy-eyed, puffy-cheeked mask on his face and wandered through the role in a kind of trance; the voice didn’t always carry above Berg’s often brutal orchestration, but the singing had enough gravity to make the character sympathetic while remaining, appropriately, a cipher.

Wozzeck’s common-law wife, Marie, was sung by Anne Schwanewilms, a German soprano making her American debut. It was the most auspicious debut of a European singer at Santa Fe this season. Schwanewilms was perfectly at ease with the far-flung stabs into the highest vocal register; she also conveyed vulnerability, regret and desperation.

Set and costume designer Robert Innes Hopkins made his Santa Fe Opera debut with “Wozzeck,” and he found stunning ways to configure the stage, a fan-shaped space with no proscenium that opens onto a view of the distant mountains at the back. A cramped wooden hall suddenly shifted, creating a jumble of broken spaces tilting at odd angles; the moon, which figures prominently as a poetic image in the text, rose behind the action with hyper-real clarity.

Vladimir Jurowski, a Russian conductor also new to Santa Fe, matched the dramatic accomplishments with the score, coaxing an often uneven orchestra to some of its finest playing of the season.

“Lucia,” the least interesting and most ineptly produced production, had moments when it threatened to come to life, when soprano Alexandra von der Weth (in the title role) was not hampered by directorial flights of fancy or when veteran tenor Frank Lopardo let his natural musical intelligence shine through the fluid and elastic bel canto lines of Donizetti’s score.

Production Was a Grab Bag of Ideas

But director Thor Steingraber seemed to have more of a grab bag of ideas than a plan. There was a bewildering succession of different Lucias as the title character descended into madness. The coloratura is confident and fluently rendered, but the role feels undigested, and the length of line was too often interrupted for breaths and pauses. Conductor Richard Buckley got some of the sloppiest playing from the orchestra this season.

In the near-miss category was Mozart’s “Mitridate,” an early opera seria written by the composer when he was 14 years old. It has its charms (mostly in the vocal pyrotechnics department), and captures the fundamental pathos of absent fathers, feuding siblings and illicit love of the Racine play on which it was ultimately based. One of the smallest roles, Ismene, was the most confidently sung, by soprano Celena Shafer, who nailed the taxing vocal roulades cleanly, with radiant tone and a winning theatrical pluck.

As Aspasia, soprano Laura Aikin was almost as strong. Countertenor Bejun Mehta, who was sometimes buried beneath the orchestra (conducted by Kenneth Montgomery), produced a beautiful, dark tone.

The production of Strauss’ “The Egyptian Helen,” directed by Bruce Donnell, was basic but effective. When soprano Christine Brewer (Helen) was singing, time passed quickly, a flow of chromatic restlessness with a gloriously ample and rounded tone sailing effortlessly above the orchestral cataracts.

“Falstaff,” the popular hit of the season, was directed by Jonathan Miller, conducted by Alan Gilbert, with Andrew Shore in the title role. It came close to perfection: detailed, subtle, funny, human and warm. Shore’s Falstaff was an endless romp.