FROM AROUND THE WORLD: COPENHAGEN.(Review)

However well-equipped the current legion of Danish star singers at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen seems to deal with the specific stylistic requirements of the Verdi repertoire, it remains a fact that productions of Romantic Italian opera are not up to par. If anything, the local Verdi Festival served to stress the point, with a total score of one and a half out of four.

The week-long festival opened with a master class conducted by ever-ebullient Birgit Nilsson, now eighty-three years old. Musicologists Julian Budden (from the U.K.), Philip Gossett (from the U.S.) and Pierluigi Petrobelli (director of the Verdi Institute of Parma) were invited to discuss the composer in question, and two Verdi exhibitions opened at the Royal Library. But the goings-on at the National Theater did little or nothing to live up to expectations that by right should have been high. The becoming confidence shown by young artistic director Kasper Holten has never been higher, stagings of German and even Russian repertoire fare well, and until recently we had a passable production of Don Carlo and a decent Aida to satisfy our taste for Italian works. But alas, the company's resident directors (Holten himself and Mikael Melbye) don't seem to regard Verdi as their rightful turf.

Of the four operas given at the Verdi Festival, two productions, Otello and Un Ballo in Maschera, had their Copenhagen premieres within the past couple of months. British director John Cox's Falstaff dates from 1995, and Danish director Daniel Bohr's version of La Traviata goes all the way back to 1983.

Cox's Falstaff alone continues to carry its weight. Never the most ambitious, adventurous or idiomatic of productions, it settles for a good-natured laugh and manages considerable charm; it looks as fresh as if it had been rehearsed from scratch the same morning. It was a match made in heaven when Michael Schonwandt, music director of Royal Opera and the foremost Danish opera conductor, brought his invigorating energy, lucidity and well-calculated tempos -- not to mention sheer sense of fun -- to this most blissful of Verdi's scores.

With his honey-toned legato and voluptuous tone, RDO's resident Falstaff, British baritone Jonathan Veira, made an eloquent case for this rather uncomplicated, although highly musical, take on the opera. Veira exudes tremendous compassion and is an improvement, vocally, over Swedish baritone Ingvar Wixell, who starred in this production when it first opened. Veteran baritone Guido Paevatalu was an impressive Ford, daring at times to opt for Shakespearean expression rather than pure bel canto. Susanne Resmark was perhaps the most endearing and most gloriously-sung Quickly I have seen onstage -- but then, all the merry wives were adorable.

Charm is what the eighteen-year-old and very worn-looking Traviata unashamedly aimed at as well, but it failed miserably. Even in the early 1980s this production must have seemed old-hat. The gilded, tasteless, fake art-nouveau tracery that framed the proscenium, the blandness of the social milieu and the generalized direction of the singers made this Traviata an unacceptable choice in a Verdi festival. Soprano Anne Margrethe Dahl deserves a staging ...