FROM AROUND THE WORLD: SARASOTA.(Review)

Sarasota Opera is at the exact midpoint of an ambitious twenty-four-year project to perform all of Giuseppe Verdi's operas. In this hundredth anniversary of the composer's death, in addition to performing the Requiem and Stabat Mater, artistic director Victor DeRenzi is presenting the composer's first and last operas, Oberto and Falstaff.

Written in 1839, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio is a genuine rarity, seldom performed onstage. For a work coming so early in a composer's development, Oberto is surprisingly fertile in musical richness. The score abounds in arias, choruses and, especially, duets and trios that anticipate the better-known works to come.

Yet a Sunday matinee performance of Sarasota's new production (March 18) made clear why the work remains unknown to most opera houses. Despite the interest in Verdi's origins and the intermittent musical rewards, it's hard to disagree with one matron who exclaimed, on exiting, "That's about the silliest thing I ever saw!"

Oberto is fatally handicapped by a convoluted story that pairs the battle between two thirteenth-century Italian counts with an utterly unbelievable romantic triangle. But more than the plot, the complete lack of dramatic action in Oberto accounts for its long neglect. Stock characters enter, sing a two-part aria and exit, unlike the structures of Verdi's mature operas, in which the music propels the action and underscores the characters' motivations.

Dale Morehouse's stand-and-deliver direction emphasized the opera's static nature. The drama felt decidedly cramped on the shallow Andrews Theater stage, though John Farrell's sets made much out of little.

Bass-baritone Kevin Short was a sonorous and dignified, if physically unprepossessing, Oberto. Tenor Roy Cornelius Smith proved brawny and unsubtle of tone as Riccardo, Oberto's nemesis and the seducer of his daughter, Leonora. Mariana Karpatova was a serviceable Cuniza.

The standout in the cast was Rosa Baker as Leonora. Agile of tone, and singing with gleaming tone, Baker made the best out of an impossible stock ...