Showing Signs of a New Bloom

Luciano Pavarotti appeared in the Royal Opera’s tattered 39-year-old production of “Tosca” Monday night, in what is expected to be the tenor’s farewell appearance in opera here. The next night brought to Covent Garden a brilliant new production of “Don Giovanni,” starring the increasingly popular Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, who just may become the next Pavarotti in his ability to win over mass audiences and connoisseurs.

From a company whose reputation has undergone a disturbing decline over the past decade, the message was clear: Out with the old and in with the new.

The Royal Opera appears to be back on track. Indeed, the year-end London critics’ reports last month were, as one the few dissenters put it, “an epidemic of enthusiasm.”

Although for years internal problems have plagued Covent Garden, and the Royal Opera and Ballet companies that inhabit it, few outsiders realized just how seriously dysfunctional the administration was until a five-part television documentary, “The House,” riveted the British public in 1996, making a true-life soap opera out of every misstep.

After that, things only seemed to get worse. Administrators came and went at an alarming rate, and often with the clumsiness of comic opera characters. By the time the house closed in 1997 for major renovations, it was on the verge of bankruptcy, and performances in makeshift interim venues during the construction just about brought it down altogether.

Its reopening in December 1999 was a near disaster. The hall was again posh; the stage mechanisms were modernized, but backstage was said to be chaotic. One of the opening’s new productions, Ligeti’s “Le Grande Macabre,” to have been conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, was canceled at the last minute, because the stage hands couldn’t manage it and a new production of Verdi’s “Falstaff” the same week.

Nothing was encouraging. The Royal Opera music director Bernard Haitink tried to resign and had to be cajoled back. The chorus threatened to strike. An American executive director, Michael Kaiser, was brought in to turn finances around. He accomplished that to a certain extent but then left after a little more than a year to head the Kennedy Center in Washington. His replacement, Tony Hall, was plucked from the news division of the BBC and has no experience in the performing arts.

So it came as almost a shock to read the overwhelming critical praise of the house last month. But British critic Norman Lebrecht says that he suspects little has improved in the two years since he completed his provocative expose “Covent Garden: The Untold Story.” He credits “the reasonable run” at Royal Opera so far this season--which included a much-admired “Parsifal” conducted by Simon Rattle--to the artistic planning of Kaiser. Still, he warns that everything at the house operates at maximum tolerance, ever on the verge of falling apart. “I can’t go into the place without fearing that something is going to go wrong,” he says.

I attended “Tosca” with similar trepidation, but with more about the 66-year-old Pavarotti, who has not been credible on the opera stage for some time. His sold-out four appearances in the Puccini opera (the final one was Monday) had fans camping out overnight for the few dozen seats the house puts out for sale the day of the performance. And Pavarotti endeared himself to Londoners by not canceling, even though his mother died just before the opening night (which had the tenor flying back and forth between London and Modena, Italy).

Pavarotti looked, walked and sounded far better than he has in recent years. He still seduces with the famous Pavarotti bloom in the parlando passages, but the thrill of the high notes is gone. The tenor arias were approached so carefully that there was no sense of character or spontaneity.

It was a dead night for drama, despite an excitable Tosca (Carol Vaness) and refined Scarpia (Sergei Leiferkus). The production, originally created by Franco Zeffirelli for Maria Callas in 1963, is as musty as the Underground. The orchestra, however, played with astonishing beauty under Jesus Lopez-Cobos.

If Tuesday’s “Don Giovanni,” directed by Francesca Zambello, symbolizes the future of Royal Opera, then the company may, in fact, be on the way to restoring its former glory. Some of Lebrecht’s worries about technical inadequacies were born out in glitches on stage. And not all the critics were impressed by Maria Bjornson’s simple set, of a curved, revolving wall. But the set proved a fascinating piece of instillation and folk art, with its raw brick and large Spanish Madonna. The damnation scene was spectacular. And the drama was vivid.

Zambello intended no easy answers for characters with complex inner lives. Terfel’s Don was neither monster nor charmer, but a sexual force of nature. He had a kind of magnetic animal vigor that made him more amoral than immoral, confusing and animating all who came in contact with him. Donna Elvira (Melanie Diener) found a perverse sexual attraction in Giovanni’s cruelty. Leporello (Alan Held) was enslaved by the Don. Even the hatred of Donna Anna (Adrianne Pieczonka, who sang in Los Angeles Opera’s “Lohengrin” in September) toward the Don was ambiguous and filled with sexual ardor.

Colin Davis was the disappointingly bland conductor, but at least his solid musicality offered the cast a level of support that allowed them dramatic freedom. The orchestra once again played with exceptional finesse and color, helped by the house’s ideal acoustics, which sound unchanged since renovation.

Two nights at Covent Garden are hardly enough to evaluate the Royal Opera. But there is no question that the company has the capacity for artistic excellence. What it needs most, besides a stable administration, is a commanding, venturesome music director. American-born conductor Anthony Pappano, who assumes the post in the fall, is exactly that. As for a stable administration, we can only wait and see.