Concert note.(4 opera performances)(Opera Review)

Sweeney Todd, Xerxes, Mourning Becomes Electra & Ermione at City Opera, New York.

For the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center, the spring season in the New York State Theater typically begins with a run of a musical theater work. This year's selection was Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, which I heard on March 11th. The piece contains some of Sondheim's more persuasive music and verse; still, I have never been especially fond of it. At heart it's a Grand Guignol horror show for the preadolescent mind, a second cousin of the "slasher" film genre. Yet it has its odd appeal and has not wanted for performances or audiences. Mark Delavan, a genuine operatic baritone, made a huge (albeit amplified) sound as Todd; Elaine Page struggled, with some success, to skirt the immense shadow of Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett. All in all, the production played cleanly, conducted by the company's music director, George Manahan.

On March 30th I heard a revival of Stephen Wadsworth's acclaimed production of Handel's Xerxes (or Serse). It had much of the flavor and brio of Wadsworth's original, which opened in Santa Fe and trundled around the country, enjoying success in a number of venues, including an earlier City, Opera visit. Its conceit is that it is set not in Persia but in 1730s London; indeed, much of its style derives from Thomas Lynch's excellent set of a London street and townhouse. Alas, Wadsworth's careful direction was not quite settled on the night I heard the work. The cast seemed a bit tentative in their roles, and the production suffered for it. Sarah Connolly's Xerxes--the focus of the action--needed a good deal more personality, although she sang well. Amy Burton (Romilda) and Lisa Saffer (Atalanta) projected strongly. The castrato role of Arsamene taxed David Walker's countertenor. The singers would have done well to eschew most of their reprise aria embellishments. Conductor Gary Thor Wedow is not a convinced Handelean, and the music dragged as a result.

Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is widely dismissed as an inferior retelling of the Oresteia trilogy, but the play's recent success in London demonstrates O'Neill's sense of theater and cements his role as a major playwright. As his works tend toward a distinctly operatic flavor, it is no surprise that the composer Mark David Levy and the librettist Henry Butler alighted on Electra and refashioned it into an opera. Levy's Electra had its premiere, with a glittering cast, at the Metropolitan Opera on March 17, 1967. It was revived and, as is the case with most American operas, it disappeared. In 1998 it was revised again by Levy and presented with great success at the Chicago Lyric Opera.

The City Opera premiere is a further reworking of the score, first seen last fall in Seattle in Michael Yeargan's spare production, and it centers on Lauren Flanigan as Christina Mannon (the stand-in for Clytemnestra). It strips away the wordiness of the play but retains all its melodrama, fitting it perfectly for the ...