FROM AROUND THE WORLD: BERLIN.(Review)

Hardly anyone gets very excited about Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, but emotions ran high on opening night at the Staatsoper (Sept. 29) when director David Mouchtar-Samorai and designer Heinz Hauser took their curtain calls -- and were practically booed off the stage. Unfortunately, the Staatsoper's troubles this fall were only just beginning. (See "Letter from Berlin," OPERA NEWS, Jan. 2001.)

Mouchtar-Samorai set the opera in a cafe, where characters spoke Turkish and a ragged beggar polished Belmonte's shoes. The pasha's palace looked like a huge black-and-white cage decorated with blue vases and a giant tiger lily at center stage. The floor was covered with lemons that posed a constant threat to the singers, forcing them to keep one eye on the ground to avoid falling.

Aside from a male belly dancer, the most annoying part of the staging was the dialogue. Apparently in an attempt to create meaningful tension, Mouchtar-Samorai inserted seemingly endless pauses in the spoken texts. Whether the characters met in harmony or in discord, they greeted each other in silence, until one feared the prompter had fallen asleep. Whenever cast members finally started to speak, they did so in a style that aimed at naturalism yet somehow rang embarrassingly false.

In Mouchtar-Samorai's interpretation, Constanze came across as a superficial woman who, during her aria "Martern aller Arten," ate breakfast, changed from her silk nightgown into an elegant gown and searched for her car keys. If one hadn't known she was singing about torture and death, one would have thought she was telling the pasha she was off to shop and meet friends for drinks afterwards.

Two singers compensated for the production's shortcomings. Soprano Simone Nold, a beautiful blonde who has been with the Staatsoper for three seasons, sang an exceptionally lyrical, highly emotional, sensual Constanze. Her lush sound, intelligent phrasing and sincere, devoted musicianship captured the Mozartean spirit and made one feel that there was much more to Entfuhrung than a loose string of pleasant melodies. Stephan Rugamer offered a brilliant, unusually profound Pedrillo, far from the classic buffo type. Commanding an even, well-balanced and nicely colored lyric tenor with a secure top, Rugamer might have proven a better Belmonte than Gunnar Gudbjornsson, who simply didn't meet the vocal or histrionic demands of that role.

Tina Schlenker made a passable Blonde, but Mouchtar-Samorai robbed her of stage appeal by depicting her as a lifeless, sour spinster. Bass Thor Kristinsson sang Osmin admirably but, presumably thanks to the director, made little impression onstage; Joachim Bliese as Pasha Selim spoke his role as artificially as possible. ...