FROM AROUND THE WORLD: COPENHAGEN.(Review)

Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades resists tampering with its time and place. Its St. Petersburg setting includes specific locales anyone familiar with the city will know. Tchaikovsky took pains to evoke that era by lacing his score with stylized references to music of the period. It's the same sort of thing John Harbison did by incorporating newly fabricated jazz songs into The Great Gatsby. But imagine that opera taking place, say, in a spaceship.

Kasper Holten took a gamble when he decided on a single set for the Royal Danish Opera's new production of Queen of Spades, consisting of a large, three-sided wooden box surrounded by scaffolding-like balconies. The result was not an auspicious beginning for Holten, who was only twenty-seven years old and not well known outside Scandinavia when named artistic director of the RDO last May. The visual and aural image of aristocratic stability is not just window dressing but an essential backdrop against which the soldier Gherman's all-consuming obsession with gambling is seen and the stronger currents of Tchaikovsky's music are heard. The eighteenth-century flavor of many of Marie i Dali's costumes was not enough, and her grim set, dimly lit in multiple shades of gray, never distinguished Gherman from the other characters.

Holten gave the principals strong, often sensible direction, but there were ...