From around the world: Cincinnati.(North America)(Opera Review)

As the soloist at the center of Cincinnati Opera's triple bill--Poulenc's La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), Weill's Die Sieben Todsunden (The Seven Deadly Sins) and Bolcom's Medusa--soprano Catherine Malfitano posed herself a monumental challenge, but heard on June 26, she stormed through these demanding scores with her trademark intensity and the most ingratiating singing this listener has heard from her in years. For sheer vocal beauty, it would be hard to top the girlish sweetness with which Malfitano pronounced the opening scenes of Weill's ballet chante, all the while performing complex movement (choreographed by Lucinda Childs) that became even more elaborate during the episodes when her character, Anna, is silent and her family (a male quartet) sings. A brief (very funny) video interlude during the "Greed" episode gave her an audibly necessary chance to recharge her batteries, but she was otherwise on the go every minute: constantly onstage and, in the Poulenc and Bolcom pieces, the only performer on view. Bolcom's cantata, given its world-premiere staging (and heard for the first time only last March, in Evanston), was written for Malfitano and calls on her to use every bit of her voice, from shrieks and gurgles to Sprechstimme declamations to rapturous legato. By the end, the audience was roaring.

The staging, by Cincinnati's artistic director, Nicholas Muni, proved less successful than its leading lady. Updating La Voix Humaine to the era of cellular phones does bring home librettist Jean Cocteau's concept of isolation and miscommunication, but Muni couldn't justify the party line that's essential to the opening sequence, or the lack of a phone cord with which the heroine, Elle (She), can strangle herself. Allowing one performer in Todsunden to incarnate both Anna I (a singer) and her sister, Anna II (a dancer), corroborates but over-literalizes Anna I's statement, "We're really not two people," and the work loses much of its mystery and charm. After all, Anna continues to refer to herself in the plural; Malfitano's holding up photographs of herself couldn't evoke the proper duality. Medusa, for all its musical and textual interest (with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein), is narrative, not drama--a myth recounted and explicated by the soloist, who occasionally quotes central characters. Though Muni devised a quantity of arresting imagery, there were significant troughs between visual crests, and Medusa never came to theatrical life.

Dany Lyne's set used the concept of a highway or journey through life. This was explicit in Voix, ...