In review: from around the world: Dallas/Ft. Worth.(North America ... Pique Dame; The Turn of the Screw)

Dallas Opera and Fort Worth Opera programmed ghost stories last fall, shortly after Halloween. Both Dallas's The Queen of Spades (seen Nov. 7) and Fort Worth's The Turn of the Screw (Nov. 8) featured excellent singing, strong orchestral work and minimalist stagings. The resemblance ended there, however.

Dallas's audience is, perhaps unfairly, considered conservative. For decades, impresarios considered it dangerous to present anything that wasn't Italian, so programming Russian opera may have seemed a bigger gamble than those undertaken by Tchaikovsky's Gherman. Dallas did cast a stellar ensemble, most remarkably including a top-rank mezzo at the height of her powers, Larissa Diadkova, singing the Countess. It was revelatory to hear her music sung so beautifully. Indeed, apart from tenor Sergej Larin's scooping and approximate pitch, as Gherman, in Acts I and II, this Queen was wonderful to listen to--but the physical production was shockingly bad.

For a work that is consumed with the architecture of human relationships--the doors we pop out of, the walls we hide behind and the bridges we throw ourselves off of--Israeli director Julia Pevzner opted for a stage bare of most decor, and thus a production stripped of most drama. Three Plexiglas risers converged on a circular dais at center stage, and odd bits of furniture were trundled on and off, but there was nothing to conceal Tomsky (Vassily Gerello, at his most persuasive) in his whisper campaign, and the window to Lisa's bedroom simply flew away when Gherman tried to sneak through it. Since there was no evident point to the staging, it was hard to imagine that any artistic sensibility other than stinginess was at work here. Tellingly, no set designer was credited (a company spokeswoman said the design was a collaboration by several members of the production team), and most costumes were borrowed from the Kirov's stolidly traditional production (which can be seen on Philips DVD 4400704349), but they were neither especially handsome nor appropriate to Dallas's dark, empty stage. Though a choreographer was credited, this Tchaikovsky opera had little dancing: during the pastoral ballet in Act II, the chorus played musical chairs!

Ukrainian soprano Anna Shafajinskaia, acclaimed for her Puccini heroines in Dallas and elsewhere, was a passionate, very Slavic Lisa who knew just what to do with a man in her room--flinging aside Gherman's glasses with aplomb as she brought him to her bed. By Act III, her buttery tone and credible acting had inspired Larin to raise the level of his performance, and he memorably incarnated anguished obsession. Hungarian mezzo Viktoria Vizin was the sleek, penetrating Pauline, ...