FROM AROUND THE WORLD: ZURICH.(Review)

No need to announce a special "Verdissimo festival" to commemorate the composer's death: in Zurich, Verdi is the man for all seasons, and the Opernhaus scheduled no fewer than ten different works from Nabucco to Falstaff, plus the inevitable Requiem, for 2000-01. Exactly one week before the anniversary of Verdi's death, conductor Franz Welser-Most and director Werner Duggelin unveiled a new production of Don Carlo in the four-act Milan version of 1884. The production emerged a winner, not a German-style display of theatrical tricks, but firmly oriented toward Switzerland's opposite border, with an Italian accent on music values.

If on the first night (Jan. 20) Welser-Most didn't rise to his accustomed, exalted level, he never let the performance slip into mere routine. There was beautifully molded phrasing throughout. The strings played ravishingly, including that heartwrenchingly weary cello cantilena that introduces Filippo's "Ella giammai m'amo"; the English horn seemed hardly able to hold back tears while launching into Elisabetta's "Non pianger, mia compagna." But the whole resembled a mosaic of precious stones rather than Verdi's grandiose architecture.

Especially after the recent scandal in Madrid, where he abused the audience during a performance of Trovatore, everyone wondered how Jose Cura would fare in his debut as Don Carlo. Well, he behaved himself -- too decently for a man of his fierce temperament, perhaps, but he looked tall and elegant in crimson velvet pants and fluttering black shirt, the buttons and folds of which he fidgeted with nervously. Elbows held tight against his torso, he portrayed Carlo as an introspective neurotic, an unloved child doomed from birth, baring his soul with his first words -- "Io l'ho perduta" -- in the burnished ...