From around the world: Houston. (North America).(The Little Prince)(Opera Review)

Audiences here offered a warm greeting to The Little Prince, Rachel Portman's first opera and Houston Grand Opera's twenty-seventh world premiere (seen June 6). Inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic children's book, Portman worked with director Francesca Zambello and playwright Nicholas Wright to craft the opera, with imaginative sets and costumes designed by the late Maria Bjornson. The production captured the oddity, mystery and fun of the novel, balancing profundity with entertainment in a way that made it accessible to adults and children. Especially noteworthy were the humorous costumes and stage movement for the Baobabs, Hunters and the Vain Man. Portman employed a children's chorus as a means of linking the story's many episodes, and thus incorporated an element of the book's intended audience into the production, an effective means of dramatizing this decidedly unoperatic story. Portman's music was accessible and attractive and, like the book, seemed to exist on different levels. On one level it was childlike: unsophisticated, tuneful, repetitious and rhythmically "catchy"--a kind of fantasy on British folk idioms as interpreted by early-twentieth-century British masters such as Vaughan Williams. On another level, it was hypnotic, meditative and almost trance-like. The music was serious but not pointed, an aural analogy for the book's message, which is deep without ever being entirely clear.

Portman very effectively captured moods through her music, and individual numbers had distinct, varied musical profiles. However, either by choice or through inexperience with vocal music, she often sacrificed the prosody, audibility and sense of the text to an attractive melodic line--this despite the singers' excellent diction. This practice, although acceptable in the many arias/songs that dominate the score, weakened the punch of other passages, especially those at key dramatic moments. ...