New sounds on the Hudson

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The Richard B. Fisher Center, the performing arts facility that Frank Gehry built at Bard College, is in business. After its gala opening in April, the center was closed for final touches on the exterior. There are, for instance, gutters that now prevent beautiful sheets of water from cascading off the sensually curved metal roof when it rains. Unfortunately, Bard has also corrected a delightful glitch in the wiring that had caused backstage sounds to be piped into the restrooms.

But what being in business really means is that the first SummerScape has begun, bringing innovative opera and theater to the Hudson River Valley. The new summer festival is a major expansion of the annual Bard Music Festival, in which a composer and his (at least, so far, his) world are examined in fascinating musical and intellectual detail during two weekends of concerts, lectures and panels.

This year the composer is Leos Janacek, and SummerScape involves a broader look at Czech and Eastern European culture. The festival has opened with two revelatory opera productions: the first American staging of Janacek’s “Osud” and a radical version of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” starring the avant-garde Czech violinist and pop singer Iva Bittova, who, as did Janacek, comes from a Moravian village near Brno.

“Osud” is little known, but that may change. The program notes suggest that in it, the composer -- mourning the loss of his daughter and infatuated with another man’s young wife -- wrote an opera about an opera composer similarly obsessed as a way to exorcise his demons.

Watching JoAnne Akalaitis’ gripping production, however, one was tempted to a different conclusion. What the composer unleashes is so powerful that Janacek may have been fated to spend the rest of his life dealing with those emotions. In Czech, the word osud means “fate.”

The idea of fate resonated boldly in this production, which featured a set designed by Gehry in his first -- but surely not his last -- foray into opera. The abstract backdrop, on which Craig Webb also worked, contained two large, graceful, sexually suggestive objects, with cloud-like tissue above. Exquisitely lighted by Jennifer Tipton, these figures loomed throughout the three short acts as a kind of emotional barometer for the central character, Zivny.

He is working on a vengeful opera about his lover, Mila. They have a child but have been prevented from marrying by Mila’s harridan mother. After a period of separation, they find each other again at a spa and finally wed. But five years later, Mila falls off a balcony during a struggle with her raving mother, and both women are killed. After 11 more years, Zivny is still trying to figure out what love is, what art is, who he is, why things happen the way they do. Explaining his unfinished opera to music students, he collapses into a psychic puddle. The last act, he moans, is in God’s hands.

The libretto -- Janacek’s idea, which he turned over to a young amateur writer -- has always been the opera’s stumbling block. But the music is extraordinary. It was in “Osud” that Janacek developed an abrupt, repetitive style like none other -- at least until the Minimalists came along 60 years later. The opera is an unstoppable, 75-minute rush of great music, beginning with some of the best carnival music ever written and rising to moments of overwhelming rapture and enormous violence.

Against the odds, the Bard production, strongly conducted by Leon Botstein, made “Osud” stageworthy. Janacek’s idea was that the opera would travel from reality to strangeness, as it focused on the humorless composer and his fixations. Akalaitis reversed that. After a surrealistically amusing opening spa scene, we gradually began to see the world distorted through Zivny’s self-obsessed eyes, in which reality, and even Mila, were foreign.

Bard found a talented, satisfying cast that included Michael Hendrick as a vigorous Zivny, Christine Abraham as a radiant Mila and Linda Roark-Strummer as the flamboyantly nutty mother. Everything worked. The opera was sung in (probably not very authentic) Czech and with the English titles skimming over the libretto’s worst inanities.

The chorus was lively, and the American Symphony Orchestra conveyed Janacek’s curious orchestral sound. The 900-seat Sosnoff Theater, in its first outing as an opera house, proved an acoustic jewel, with voices and orchestra alike sounding clear and immediate.

The version of “Don Giovanni” given in the smaller Theater Two offered a fascinating contrast. It was called “Don Juan in Prague” but would have been better called “Elvira’s Revenge.” Although Mozart’s score was performed pretty much straight -- there were a few electronic insertions by New Zealand composer Matthew Suttor, and the orchestra parts were transcribed for the hip, amplified string quartet Ethel -- the entire center of the work was changed by the presence of Bittova as Elvira, the Don’s furious, abandoned conquest.

Bittova, best known in the U.S. for a Nonesuch CD, moved with antic, gypsy-like gestures suggesting they were controlled by some elemental force. She sang with a swooning intensity, including earthy guttural sounds that seemed to come from deep inside her thorax and ethereal sibilants that sounded like a sonic halo.

Though not a trained singer, she coped adequately with Mozart’s vocal lines while also bringing to them something entirely new. She was Elvira taken to a higher dimension. With every emotion, from outrage at Don Giovanni’s toying with her to her amazing capacity to show devotion, she became the heroic feminine spirit of the opera.

The brilliance of this production was the degree to which it allows Bittova to be herself, and the wilder she was, the better. Adapted and directed by David Chambers, an artistic associate of South Coast Repertory theater, it had a postmodern edge, greatly enhanced by Darcy Scanlin’s quirky decayed-looking set and Anna Bjornsdotter’s witty all-over-the-place costumes. (These are the designers who enlivened Long Beach Opera’s recent “Jenufa.”) The opera was sung in Italian with amusing updated English dialogue and a few trims (there was no chorus).

A versatile young cast, which included Hector Vasquez (Don Juan), Jan Opalach (Leporello), Mardi Byers (Donna Anna), Ying Huang (Zerlina), Jingma Fan (Ottavio) and Vitaly Rozynko (Masetto), won me over. Ethel was remarkable, even participating in the action but remaining rapt Mozarteans throughout. David Levi looked odd alone in the pit conducting this small company. But the pacing was just right.

The ending was unforgettable. In Mozart’s conception, all the characters celebrate the Don’s demise. Here, there was only Elvira witnessing his being dragged to hell, with Bittova’s voice electronically modified to a sad, echo-y wisp, the last remnants of her victorious power. It was a sound that needs to be heard again.

Bard is shopping this inexpensive production around, and presenters in Los Angeles should be lining up.

Both “Osud” and “Don Juan” finished their short runs over the weekend, but SummerScape has much more Janacek on tap over the next two weeks.

And Bittova will be back as part of a puppet version of Janacek’s animal opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Already, SummerScape looks to be the most important American music festival since Lincoln Center started its summer festival seven years ago.