FROM AROUND THE WORLD: CHARLESTON, S.C.(Spoleto Festival U.S.A. produces Dido and Aeneas and Manono Lescaut)(Review)

For twenty-five years, Spoleto Festival U.S.A. has taken pride in cutting-edge opera productions. Yet innovation is a double-bladed sword. This year, it sliced through the mustiness of old-fashioned Baroque performance styles to yield a tense, vital Dido and Aeneas. Then it slit the throat of Puccini's Manon Lescaut and bled the opera of almost all its drama and emotion.

These works have more in common than one might imagine, though their premieres came more than 200 years apart. Both were written by men of about thirty who had never achieved operatic success and were trying out new methods: Purcell absorbed French and Italian influences, and Puccini experimented with Wagnerian orchestration. Both composers took scrupulous care to set music to exactly the right words, and each chose a heroine whose headstrong behavior overrules her common sense and leads to death. Puccini kept revising Manon, and Purcell's score was lost for seventy-one years before its first reconstruction, so you could also say no definitive version exists for either.

Spoleto's productions emphasized only the operas' differences. Dido took place on a spare set, with a minimum of movement and restrained acting, and its hour flew by. Singers in Manon Lescaut were encouraged to flaunt every thought or emotion amid gaudy, elaborate settings, and the piece seemed as long as Parsifal.

Grant Llewellyn, artistic director of Boston's Handel & Haydn Society, led a small, spirited orchestra through Dido. The audience waited ten minutes to hear what he could do; some ill-advised historian had resurrected the spoken prologue librettist Nahum Tate wrote for King William and Queen Mary's entertainment. Members of the Westminster College Choir minced through it, depicting the meeting of Apollo and Venus with limp bawdiness.

Designer Yi Li-Ming provided an Isamo Noguchi-like set for the tiny Dock Street Theatre: a few rocks, a back curtain rumpled to resemble woods, and a raised platform where imperious Dido stood alone, until Aeneas humanized her with his touch.

Director Chen Shi-Zheng blended broad humor with drama, finding the right balance. Dennis Petersen's Sailor "rowed" on with a boat around his waist to sing his farewell to Carthage, and the audience giggled. Less than twenty minutes later, the heartsore queen's lament carried the full weight the composer intended.

Baritone Nmon Ford, bare-chested, had a commanding presence and firm voice as the future founder of the Italian people. (For once, one could believe Aeneas was the son of Venus.) Mezzo-soprano Deanne Meek was the proud Dido, singing with grave beauty, with Heather Buck ...