FROM AROUND THE WORLD: SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.(Il Re Pastore, Ariadne auf Naxos)(Review)

An early-summer pair of offerings proved well suited to the bucolic playground atmosphere of Lake George Opera's festival site in the Saratoga Spa State Park. The back-to-back scheduling of Il Re Pastore (seen July 6) and Ariadne auf Naxos (July 7) -- facilitated by some double-duty shuffling of Garett E. Wilson's scenic designs -- encouraged those who attended both productions to reflect on the affinities between the two works.

Of course, the nineteen-year-old Mozart's dramma per musica might have seemed a more logical complement to the Strauss if stage director Drew Minter had not updated the former's Arcadian setting to the American South, post-Civil War, "where previously functioning plantations the size of kingdoms were constantly being parceled out and redivided to share-croppers." (Somewhat like Ariadne's Composer, Minter seems to have yielded to administrative pressure and abandoned his first-impulse Rococo vision to comply with festival logistics.) That Il Re Pastore was sung in the original Metastasian Italian (translated more or less literally in the projected titles) made it no easier to accept the new concept, which turned the Macedonian king into the son of a banker and Agenore and Tamiri into troubled, sexually active teens. Neither did introducing the characters in pantomime during the overture serve much to clarify things. Ultimately, reducing the plot to a children's conflict (soldiers' weaponry became wooden horses, the sheep a stuffed animal) seemed an insult to one's appreciation of the young Mozart's polished, sensitive musical treatment of some very adult concerns. The cluttered set filled the Little Spa Theater's minuscule stage to capacity, accommodating not only conductor Daniel Beckwith and the LGOF Orchestra (aloft and semi-hidden, behind the upper-story windows of the plantation house) but also Aminta's "amico rio," a cascade of real water that trickled incessantly over the rocks down-stage right. Considering the arrangement, amazingly good balances were achieved, helped by a number of strategically placed closed-circuit TVs.

Soprano Jennifer Aylmer, as the shepherd-king Aminta, towered over the rest of the singers with her dark timbre, floating intonation and deft coloratura, her voluminous projection sometimes filling the miniature hall's boxy space ...