FROM AROUND THE WORLD: LONDON.(Review)

English National Opera is planning a major refurbishment of its home, to be completed for the London Coliseum's centenary in 2004, when the attractive mock-Roman auditorium and comfortable though shabby foyers will be returned to their former Edwardian glory. Far less thorough-going than the rebuilding program at Covent Garden, the makeover will see the theater dosed for equivalently shorter periods over the next three years.

Meanwhile, the company has launched an ambitious Italian season, offering works ranging from Monteverdi to Dallapiccola. To reflect the theater's restoration, but not -- it is stressed -- forming part of it, a temporary structure of scaffolding and walkways has been built onto the proscenium to be used in all the Italian productions until Christmas. Stefanos Lazaridis is responsible for this accretion, and for the designs of the season as a whole. Directors have been individually selected to work on the various operas.

The limitations of this approach were clear from the opening Manon Lescaut (Sept. 18), directed by Keith Warner. The cumbersome and frankly ugly scaffolding imposed a strong visual identity on the show -- and indeed on the auditorium -- that seemed anything but Italianate, unless one associates Italy primarily with the restoration of buildings. Warner found productive uses for the walkway (notably for the roll-call of condemned prostitutes in Act III), but elsewhere his staging failed to articulate crucial moments of the drama. There seemed to be no magnetism whatever between Des Grieux and Manon. If a point was thereby being made, it utterly undermined the opera's premise and set the stage for a crude, cynical dissection of an opera that charts the progress of a mutually destructive passion.

In her debut with the company, Swedish soprano Nina Stemme sang a grandly voiced though not especially Italianate Manon, big-boned rather than sensual in manner. Her English diction was poor. More stylish and vocally skilled was the Des Grieux of Martin Thompson, also making his company debut, in a performance that combined suavity with strength and featured some brilliant top notes. Paul Daniel conducted the score with the emotional reins held tightly, as if Puccinian passion needed to be controlled rather than reveled in -- but that matched the production, too.

By the following evening -- Steven Pimlott's view of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea -- Lazaridis's scaffolding was starting to look overly familiar, but Pimlott managed the mechanics of the work in and ...