FROM AROUND THE WORLD: PARIS.(Review)

The Paris Opera's first commission of the century, K ... by Philippe Manoury, was one of the finest new shows the theater has produced in recent times. Pre-performance press and interviews with the composer were daunting, however. A post-Second Viennese School score would be enhanced by a large battery of electronic effects prepared at the underground Paris center for musical research, the Ircam. Add to this a libretto taken from Kafka's disturbing novel The Trial, already the subject of Gottfried von Einem's opera Der Prozess (1953), and all looked set for an evening of impenetrable modernity. In the event, Manoury produced an opera that held a less-than-capacity audience spellbound for its one-hour-and-forty-five-minute running time (world premiere, March 7).

Make no mistake, this is not user-friendly contemporary music of the John Adams school. However, the composer lays great importance on clear comprehension of the text. The resultant vocal recitative style owes more to Monteverdi than to Boulez. The musical language, while dissonant, is not twelve-tone, and as the drama reached its climax, the music became purer and more rarefied.

The electronic element of the score was masterful. From the control booth, the composer served up effects that came from sixteen speakers dotted around the house. Sounds of menacingly murmuring crowds, typewriters and a synthesized chorus encircled the public, bringing the caustic and implacable world of Kafka vividly to life. The theater's acoustics were exploited fully, most spectacularly in the cathedral scene, where the theater was transformed into an echoing gothic structure with such wizardry that one was forced to think the heretical, and wonder why the acoustics aren't tampered with more often. The electronic soundtrack was combined with an orchestral score, played with glowing tone and unfailing enthusiasm by an orchestra that seemed genuinely inspired by the event, and by the first-rate conductor, Dennis Russell Davies.

Andreas ...