FROM AROUND THE WORLD: NEW YORK CITY.(Review)

"Few operas have had a more complicated gestation than Donizetti's La Favorita," wrote Donizetti biographer William Ashbrook in his program note for Opera Orchestra of New York's concert performance at Carnegie Hall on March 7. The writer informs us too that "Donizetti himself had no hand in the Italian versions of La Favorita," but OONY's conductor/ artistic director, Eve Queler, in a note of her own, rationalizes using an Italian version of Donizetti's 1840 French grand opera La Favorite on the grounds that "Donizetti was an Italian bel canto composer." Her choice fell on a recent Italian edition, revised to restore the work closer to the composer's original intentions.

Textual questions aside, La Favorita is made to order for OONY, which specializes in fielding big, healthy voices backed by an orchestra and chorus two or three times the size of what nineteenth-century composers could have expected to find in most European theaters. Thrust forward this way, the music has a visceral impact comparable to hearing, say, Caruso leaping as a physical presence from the horn of an acoustic gramophone, rather than detoured through electronic circuitry. OONY's regular audience is notably discerning and enthusiastic.

As Leonora, the king's euphemistically entitled "favorite," Jennifer Larmore, in a gown discreetly suggesting the nineteenth century, displayed her customary command of runs and roulades, but her lower range currently shows a rough grain, at odds with vocal velvet. In more simply shaped, higher-lying phrases, she unfolded a variety of colors and shadings, with smoother texture. Dramatically, the mezzo succeeded in portraying a troubled woman, a victim of the social code of her time, whose pure love for Fernando conflicts with her obligation to King Alfonso, who has tricked her into becoming his mistress. In her opening duet with the Fernando of Gregory Kunde, both singers used shifts of timbre to express their reactions to each other's lines.

The role of Fernando covers a wide range, from soft-spun bel canto to steely indignation, and there were times when Kunde's tenor seemed stressed by its demands, but he too played out his character's predicament. The secure heavy artillery of this cast was manned by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as the haughty Alfonso, ...