FROM AROUND THE WORLD: TAMPA.(Review)

Nearly one hundred people -- including a cast of two-dozen singers, large chorus, extras and production personnel -- crowded on the vast stage of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center at the conclusion of Anton Coppola's opera Sacco & Vanzetti; there was barely enough room for the composer to take a bow.

Find room they did, and justifiably so. The world premiere (March 17) was a triumph for the eighty-three-year-old Coppola, who conducted the performance, more than three hours long, with remarkable vigor and commitment. Uncle of film director Francis Ford Coppola (who signed on to the production as artistic adviser), the composer received a resounding extended ovation from the packed house of 2,400.

Though time and recent, nationally televised trials have faded its renown, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti fascinated the nation for decades. In 1920, two men committed a daring daytime robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in which a shoe Company's paymaster and his guard were both shot to death. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants, were arrested for the crime. Both were fervent Anarchists. Under questioning, they lied abotlt their political sympathies and whereabouts; those lies, along with circumstantial evidence, led to their convictions and the death sentence. Publicized relentlessly by their attorney Fred Moore, the case became a cause celebre among artists, writers and activists of the political Left, who believed the men were condemned less on evidence than on their unpopular radical politics and immigrant status. Despite appeals for clemency and widespread demonstrations, Sacco and Vanzetti were both executed in 1927.

Coppola indulges in some hoary rhetorical red flag-waving in the program book and in the early scenes, but radicalchic politics, happily, take a back seat to the fascinating story and music. The ghost of infamous Anarchist Carlo Tresca, in a white fedora, suit and long coat, functions as narrator and ironic observer of the unfolding action. A Prologue depicts successive church congregations reacting hypocritically to waves of first Irish, then Italian immigrants; it's heavy-handed, but the opera soon finds its footing. Coppola crafts dramatic scenes of Sacco and Vanzetti's daily lives, with fine arias for both leading roles. Large period photographs of street scenes and the real Sacco and Vanzetti are employed, with a grainy projected film showing a dramatization of the actual crime. Coppola depicts at length the trial, the men's long incarceration and the effects on their families and on American society. This will likely stand for a long time as the only opera offering solo arias for both Justice Felix Frankfurter and Katherine Anne Porter.

Coppola's canvas is large, but his opera remains undeniably compelling throughout its length. Some in the audience complained that Act II dragged, but in general, momentum was skillfully sustained. (Only the scene depicting writers at a soiree seemed to go on too long, though it did nicely illustrate the hypocrisy of some literary types who defended the duo.) The opera is full of memorable moments, such the ...