Florence. (International).

This year's Maggio Musicale opened with Graham Vick and Tobias Hoheisel's production of Berlioz's Les Troyens, first mounted in Munich in 2001. Seen on two successive evenings--La Prise de Troie on May 14 and Les Troyens a Carthage on May 15--the opera was weakened in its emotional impact by the distancing ironies of the production. The Trojan monarchs were delineated as decrepit and decadent; Ron Howell's choreography for the celebratory dances was consistently parodistic; Carthage was presented as a totalitarian state, with everyone--including Didon--wearing silly yellow uniforms, and the sublimity of the love duet between Enee and Didon was undercut by its being set amid suburban deck chairs. If the work did maintain a certain expressive force, it was because the strong lighting allowed the singers to make effective use of facial expression to highlight emotions, and because conductor Zubin Mehta and the cast dearly accepted Berlioz's music on its own terms, despite the context.

The singing in the first part of the opera, however, was frankly disappointing, if one excepts the chorus (outstanding) and Tigran Martirossian's Panth&. In particular, Jon Villars and Bo Skovhus sounded in poor vocal estate as Inee and Chorebe, and although Nadja Michael sang with consistent intensity as Cassandre, making effective use of an easy top register, her voice showed clear signs of being stretched beyond its limits, and this effectively restricted its expressive range.

Violeta Urmana proved an excellent Didon in the second part, not as an actress (though she managed an effective suicide) but as a generously endowed singer of considerable technical resources and emotional intelligence: the final scenes were particularly moving. Her Enee, Stephen Gould, offered much less musical and vocal refinement, but he did manage to fill many of his phrases with generous, heroic tone. There were also fine performances from Patricia Bardon (Anna) and Erwin Schrott (Narbal). ...