FROM AROUND THE WORLD: SAN DIEGO.(Review)

For many months preceding Mozart's Die Zauberflote, the first fully staged production of San Diego Opera's 2000-01 season, promotional ballyhoo focused on the costumes of Zandra Rhodes, the pink-haired British fashion designer who helped put England on the fashion map in the 1970s. In addition to her trendy London headquarters, Rhodes maintains a studio in Solana Beach, just north of metropolitan San Diego. By opening night (Jan. 20), in the wake of a tremendous publicity campaign and an exhibition of Rhodes's designs at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, absolutely everyone was fully primed in Rhodes's fashion vocabulary. Several first-nighters, both male and female, sported electric pink coifs, while ushers distributed complementary pink boas and boutonnieres to each member of the audience.

The event itself was more memorable than the production. Rhodes wasn't assigned the set designs, these duties going instead to director/designer Michael Hampe and "co-designer" Alberto Andreis. Consequently, the whole enterprise lacked ideal visual continuity. Hampe's designs, mostly star-and-planet-encrusted panels moving across a raked stage emblazoned with a zodiacal circle, were tiresome and poorly lit. In the musical department, conductor John Fiore propelled the score with force but with little nuance; the singing was widely variable.

Rhodes's whimsical creations, though blazing no new frontiers in Zauberflote design, rarely disappointed. The Queen of the Night, blandly but accurately vocalized by Chinese soprano Yan-Guang Cui, descended from the flies in a huge, midnight blue cloak that filled the entire set. Pamina, sweetly and carefully ...