FROM AROUND THE WORLD: HOUSTON.(Review)

At his death, Borodin left Prince Igor as much a shambles as the twelfth-century Russian city of Putivl at the opera's end. Houston Grand Opera had its first go at the wreckage on January 26, offering a conflation credited to director Francesca Zambello, conductor Alexander Anissimov and set and costume designer Zack Brown. Together, they cut and pasted Acts II through IV into one and ended the opera not in the rejoicing of the "traditional" Rimsky-Korsakov/Glazunov completion but in a lament for hapless Mother Russia. Alas, even with a mostly Russian cast, the production was laid low by staging and acting as subtle as you'd see in a high-school auditorium, and by conducting that made too much of the opera sound as weighty as, well, Manon.

Originally the company was to have offered a real rarity, Anton Rubinstein's The Demon, but it was withdrawn because of what were said to be dramatic problems. The decidedly low-rent sets used in Prince Igor -- modular scaffoldings and stairways recycled from San Francisco Opera's season-in-exile during renovation of the War Memorial Auditorium -- suggested cost-cutting expediency. With the action transposed to the late tsarist era, at least we got splendid imperial costumes for the men, elegant dresses and hats for the women. The Polovtsians were done up like Mongolian Gypsies.

The acting, alas, ranged from impassivity (Sergei Leiferkus in the title role) to silent-screen ardor (Nzia Nioradze as Konchakovna). And can we please have a moratorium on the single most annoying mannerism of modern opera stagings, singers standing on the furniture?

That said, Leiferkus sang stirringly, his baritone alternately blazing and smoldering, and Vladimir Vaneev's Khan Konchak was a fine adversary, with a sturdy, well-focused bass. Vladimir Ognovenko left no doubt of Galitsky's scurviness -- even to the overdone point of tossing lingerie about the stage -- but he sang powerfully and well. The leading ladies, Nioradze and Zvetelina Vassileva (as Yaroslavna), offered honorable but rarely compelling singing, as did Vsevolod Grivnov's Vladimir and James C. Hollow's Ovlur. Some ...