FROM AROUND THE WORLD: HELSINKI.(Review)

A decade ago in OPERA NEWS, Patrick J. Smith reported on the successful premiere of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer in Brussels. "There have been fine, even great, American operas, but never before one presented first with such critical and media fanfare to a European audience." Soon, however, the opera seemed to be making more enemies than friends, not least in its home country. Los Angeles Opera dropped plans for the initial production by Peter Sellars (originally scheduled for five opera houses after Brussels) and managed to destroy the sets in the process. Performances in San Francisco and Brooklyn drew some unusually hostile reviews. Where Adams's first opera, Nixon in China, had an engaging topicality, the choice of headline news for Klinghoffer was for many its undoing. Its core episode -- the 1985 killing by Palestinian terrorists of a disabled Jewish passenger on a cruise ship -- was seen as tasteless, and its sympathetic treatment of the Palestinians seemed to heap insult on fatal injury.

At last the opera has received a second production (seen Feb. 5). It's a sickening moment when Leon Klinghoffer's body slumps off the deck in Tony Palmers staging at the Finnish National Opera. But the passage of years has at least blunted the immediacy of this abhorrent murder, even if the tragedy of the Middle East plays on unabated. Palmer treated the opera with terse realism, avoiding anything like Sellars's stylized, highly choreographed approach. ...