From Around the World: PRAGUE.

Opera-rich Prague began the year with "Opera 2001," an ambitious two-month festival/competition in which companies and conservatories throughout the Czech Republic presented guest productions alongside new offerings by the capital's two leading troupes, the National Theatre and the State Opera. A broad range of works, from Monteverdi to Poulenc, graced the historic stages of the Bohemian capital in a deliberately eclectic collection of production styles. Meanwhile, both principal theaters continued repertory performances.

The National started the festival off excitingly with its first Tristan und Isolde in seventy-five years. (In both previous productions, 1913 and 1924-25, the Tristan was Theodor Schutz, the creator of Janacek's Steva.) The key elements in the evening's very palpable success were Jiri Kout's superb preparation and propulsive direction of the house's distinguished orchestral forces, which boast an aged-in-wood sound, with particularly plangent cello tone. A Tristan ensemble isn't created overnight, but the National fielded an impressive cast, with all the leads save Isolde taken by company members or regular guests; only Melot was inadequately rendered.

The biggest vocal news was Mariinsky tenor Sergei Liadov weighing in as a serious heldentenor contender, at least for middle-sized houses. Not an especially glamorous or illuminating interpreter, he bore himself with dignity and produced (from a fairly compact frame) more than four hours of steadily projected, often ringing tone, covering the orchestra with seeming ease and staying admirably in tune throughout. More stylistic seasoning will make him a most useful singer. Carol Yahr (Isolde) showed herself an experienced Wagnerian, and the American soprano created an illusion of youth and passion; but, as with many ex-mezzos, the sheer effort of trying to produce powerful top notes robbed the lower and middle registers of all color, and too often her tones emerged rattled and harsh. Yvona Skvarova brought a clear, house-filling mezzo to her honest, touching Brangane, investing each phrase with deep feeling and triumphing over an unflattering gray muumuu, pantsuit and cap. Tall, rugged German baritone Ulf Paulsen appears not yet thirty; his roles in Prague include Kaspar and Escamillo. The voice is dark, wide-ranging and vibrant, and he made a vivid Kurwenal, but such a promising artist should guard against the oversinging that sometimes left him sharp and short-breathed at climaxes. A longtime leading artist at the National, Miloslav Podskalsky (currently on the Met roster) lent Marke natural patrician authority and a warm, smoothly produced basso cantante of fine quality. Strikingly, director Jan Antonin Pitinsky brought Marke offstage a few bars after "O Konig" and well before the Liebestod, as if to render the king abstract and place more focus on the lovers.

Such an approach might profitably have been extended to several scenes in which eye-catching theatricality overwhelmed musical values, as when Kurwenal rehearsed suicide upstage from the delirious Tristan. Worse, between two unusually beautiful and evocative conceptions for the ship and Kareol, Jan Zavarsky's Act II set bought forth high concept: a red, oblique-angled Robert Wilson-style light panel that functioned as Isolde's torch, plus eight glassed half-domes, each spouting a quartet of plaster horse heads that spun and changed colors mesmerizingly throughout the Liebesnacht. Visually arresting, the stage picture totally upstaged "O sink hernieder" -- a shame, as Yahr did her best work here, the voice softening (temporarily) into a shimmering glow. Overall, though, the company's new Tristan well deserved the cheers it elicited.

Two subsequent evenings under young staff conductor Jan Chalupecky confirmed the National's high orchestral standards. Director Josef Prudek's blend of realistic and stylized elements worked better for Jenufa (here properly called Jeji Pastorkyna, Her Stepdaughter) than for Prodana Nevesta (The Bartered Bride). Janacek's shattering music-drama, effectively played on a simple wood-plank set, began and ended with striking innovations. The curtain rose in silence, and only after Jenufa (Helena Kaupova) cut herself with a potato-peeling knife (presaging the whole tragic chain of events) did the insistent mill ostinatos begin churning. At the end of the miraculous coda of understanding and forgiveness that is the final scene, the rejected Steva (Miroslav Dvorsky) ran back to find Jenufa, witnessed her pledging faith with Laca (Jan Vacik) and stumbled off disconsolate.

Kaupova -- an attractive brunette with a nice float and a clear, unforced timbre sensitively supported by Chalupecky in the rigors of Act III -- never put a foot wrong. The ...