SANTA FE, N.M. — One of the things that keeps opera lovers flocking season after season to the Santa Fe Opera’s unique mesa-top aerie is the chance to discover rarely performed works from the fringes of the repertory. Another is the chance to hear familiar artists in unfamiliar operas. The company’s new production of Karol Szymanowski’s “King Roger” satisfies both categories.
Singing the title role in his Polish countryman’s 1926 opera is something of a specialty of the compelling baritone Mariusz Kwiecien. So when he approached Charles MacKay, Santa Fe Opera’s general director, about staging this fascinating, if esoteric, work here, MacKay agreed at once to do so. The new production I caught here last week is the first by a major American opera organization.
The performance did not convince me “King Roger” deserves a place in the standard repertory, or that it is likely to do so in the near future. At the same time, I was grateful to have encountered the work under circumstances that allow its merits to come through. Chief among these is Szymanowski’s wonderful score, whose lush, iridescent colors conductor Evan Rogister brings out beautifully in the orchestra. Without Kwiecien’s mesmerizing portrayal of the conflicted king, I doubt whether the show would be half as effective, although Stephen Wadsworth’s production, with simple sets by Thomas Lynch and costumes by Ann Hould-Ward, respect the spirit, if not always the letter, of the text.
What holds “King Roger” back, besides its almost total lack of conventional drama, is its opaque libretto. Everything happens on the unconscious level. (Wadsworth, in his director’s note, calls it “a sort of fever-dream.”) We never get a handle on what motivates Roger, the troubled monarch of 12th century Sicily, to give up his throne, power and marriage to Queen Roxana to follow a mysterious shepherd into the wilderness. There are strong suggestions of homoerotic yearning, that the interloper’s world represents Roger’s suppressed desires. But the text makes a jumble of the struggle between Roger’s Apollonian world of reason and order, and the Dionysian realm of erotic and spiritual freedom embodied by The Shepherd.
At the end, the king rejects both existential states as the stage is flooded by sunlight. What exactly that means is left to each spectator to decide, but the ending remains a cop-out. Szymanowski, who was gay, seems to have been working out a kind of self-therapy here. But his wholesale tinkering with Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz’s libretto reduced it to a psychological muddle. What “plays” on recordings refuses to do so on stage, even with a savvy director such as Wadsworth in charge.
Kwiecien fully inhabits the lyrical agonies of Roger, his burnished baritone riding the rich climaxes powerfully while never stinting on tonal and expressive refinement elsewhere. William Burden brings a properly plangent, seductive tenor to the role of the shepherd/demagogue. Erin Morley floats Roxana’s song with great vocal and physical allure. Dennis Petersen portrays the sympathetic adviser, Edrisi. Rogister impresses as a young conductor to watch. Lyric audiences can do just that next season when he makes his Chicago podium debut with “Rigoletto” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “King Roger” plays through Aug. 14.
Santa Fe’s storied association with the Richard Strauss operas goes back to the company’s earliest years. This season’s repertory includes a Strauss rarity, “Arabella.” Crucial to the success of Tim Albery’s production are the contributions of two artists familiar to Lyric audiences — conductor Andrew Davis and soprano Erin Wall, who gives a radiant performance in the title role.
This final collaboration between Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal lingers in the shadow of their enduringly popular “Der Rosenkavalier.” Specious comparisons hinder a just appreciation of this 1932 romantic comedy, set in pre-World War I Vienna and outfitted with a delectable score. Arabella, the beautiful, marriageable daughter of an impoverished Austrian count, is courted by several suitors but holds out for Mr. Right. She finds the man of her dreams in Mandryka, a wealthy but unsophisticated Croatian landowner. Their path to happiness is blocked by a naughty misunderstanding caused by her adoring younger sister, Zdenka, who goes through most of the opera disguised as a boy.
“Arabella” gets its due here, with set and costume designs by Tobias Hoheisel that grow more colorful as Arabella matures from conquettish girl to self-aware woman. The score is a veritable symphonic poem for the stage that makes exacting demands on the orchestra as well as the singers; these the Santa Fe musicians meet most capably under that master Straussian, Davis.
While not as spunky an Arabella as some, Wall brings keen emotional identification to the duets with Zdenka and Mandryka, and particularly to the heroine’s rapturous monologues. Mark Delavan makes the most of Mandryka’s crudely provincial bluster. Too bad his baritone proves more rough than ready and nearly evaporates by the end of the evening. Heidi Stober makes a sweetly androgynous Zdenka. Zach Borichevsky scales Matteo’s treacherous tessitura with ease. Dale Travis and Victoria Livengood miss no opportunity for ripe humor as Arabella’s parents. Ryan Opera Center member Kiri Deonarine chirps prettily as Fiakermilli, the belle of the coachmen’s ball.
The 2013 Santa Fe Opera season will comprise the world premiere of Theodore Morrison’s “Oscar,” based on the life of Oscar Wilde and starring David Daniels in the title role; Rossini’s “La Donna del Lago,” with Joyce DiDonato; Offenbach’s “The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein,” with Susan Graham; and revivals of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and Verdi’s “La Traviata.”
The present season runs through Aug. 25; 800-280-4654, santafeopera.org.
Twitter @jvonrhein
