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

Los Angeles Opera's partnership with Polish National Opera has paid off, first with a darkly scintillating production of Don Giovanni, now with a bizarre yet superbly coherent La Damnation de Faust, designed and directed by Achim Freyer (also responsible for the staging of Bach's Mass in B Minor here in 2002). Beyond the placement of a skull and book of spells downstage, Freyer does not employ the Romantic iconography of the Faust myth, with its rocky vistas and Gothic townscapes. He anchors the work in the nineteenth century but views it through the distorting lens of modern art. His production recalls the masters of apocalyptic caricature, from Delacroix to Georg Grosz, European cabaret, modernist ballet, the paintings of Chagall and absurdist drama. It all has the disconcerting effect of a surrealist dream, of the cozy world of Central European folklore seen as a hideous nightmare. But while this inventive spectacle is macabre, it is also witty, eloquent and oddly magical. Freyer employs his own ensemble of mimes and dancers, and they lend the production a wonderful grace. During the "Hungarian Marcia," they enact a battle that is hilarious and horrible, and the "Minuet of the Will o' the Wisps," on a darkened stage, in costumes with flashing lights, is an utter joy. Freyer attires the gigantic L.A. chorus in grotesque masks that celebrate blasphemy and disturbingly embody the oppressive claustrophobia of small-town life. This is director's theater of the highest quality.

Freyer's most significant achievement is to have found a modern idiom to suit the music of the great Romantic ironist Berlioz. No other composer had Berlioz's genius for balancing the opposite poles of Romantic experience--the transports of love with the horrors of demonic possession, or the ecstasy of contemplation with the degradation of excessive indulgence. The juxtaposition of Romantic extremes produced a unique music that never sounds quite the same from performance to performance. Freyer's spectacle brings out the wide range of Berlioz's score, from grim irony to supernal playfulness. Though Berlioz didn't write this "dramatic legend" as an opera, surely he would find much to admire in Freyer's staging.

He might be less sanguine about the purely musical aspects of the performance (seen Sept. 10). Kent Nagano has a fine sense for the unconventional, and he made the most of Berlioz's irregular rhythms and heterodox orchestration. The filigree of the score was captivatingly played, but at times the orchestra lacked weight, so it was difficult to hear "the dreadful bubbling of great lakes of fire" as Faust was cast into the abyss. Samuel Ramey sang with security, though Mephistopheles has such a strangely truncated role in Damnation that he was unable to make a strong mark on the action. Denyce Graves (Marguerite) sang the ballad of the King of Thule with affecting clarity, but "D'amour I'ardente flamme" sounded as if it came from the mouth of a different singer; she was unsteady in the middle of her register and consistently flat toward the top. Paul Groves as Faust was constrained in the higher reaches, and in fact there were one or two moments when his voice almost disappeared, but those occasions were exceptional. Otherwise, his compact tenor voice gave Berlioz's meandering vocal lines unusual direction, and it rose splendidly to major challenges, such as Faust's invocation to nature. Faust is the dominant character in Berlioz's version of the myth, and Groves's gaunt, desperate figure held the audience and proved thoroughly convincing dramatically. A troubling, tumultuous phantasmagoria, Achim Freyer's Damnation was a heady audience-pleaser. During intermission, the word heard most on people's lips was "fun."

"Fun," however, had nothing to do with L.A. Opera's next offering, the world premiere of Deborah Drattell's Nicholas and Alexandra. Instead, the stage was awash with misery. Admittedly, it is difficult to find anything enlivening in the fate of the last of the Romanovs, which stands as a paradigm in the popular imagination for the decline of the archaic European monarchy. This opera ...