From around the world: Annadale-on-Hudson, NY.(North America ... Janacek's Osud receives its American premiere)(Opera Review)

The centerpiece of" Bard Music Festival's exploration of the music and world of Leos Janacek was the American stage pre miere of Osud (July 25). Its conversation piece, however, was (hands down) the stunning if idiosyncratic Performing Arts Center by Frank Gehry which opened earlier this year. With Osud, Gehry made his debut as a theatrical designer, offering the strikingly textured set (two huge contrasting sculptural units evoking floral reproductive biology), though the program billing two more experienced theatrical design figures (Craig Webb as associate set designer and John Conklin as design consultant) suggested a more complicated collaborative process. With brilliant 1920s costumes (by Kaye Voyce) and Jennifer Tipton's customarily masterful lighting, the show looked wonderful as a progression of memorable, camera-ready images. JoAnne Akalaitis's production scored some points in Act I's crowded spa, but the repetitive, stylized movement by the omnipresent ensemble soon grew tiresome in Act II, which the libretto (in one of its few cogent features) casts as an interval of passionate domesticity between two structurally parallel permeable "public scenes." To an already tangled narrative, Akalaitis introduced hyperkinetic bravura where simplicity might have served best.

Osud, written after Jenufa (with which it shares many a musical gesture) but unperformed even on Czech soil until 1958, remains a problem piece due to its oddly unbalanced story and uncompelling text (by teenaged librettist Fedora Bartsova, massively rewritten by Janacek), which tells of the composer ...