San Francisco Classical Voice

And above all, in addition to many refinements of operatic convention, he uses a complex and subtle orchestration not only to enrich the sound but even to characterize. Thus, for example, when the young romantic tenor Ernesto sings self-pityingly at the beginning of Act Two of his plans to seek a far-off land (Cerchero lontana terra), a mocking trumpet accompanies him, perhaps to suggest how far from reality or even intention his scheme is. Touches such as this, depending greatly on woodwinds and brasses, provide a rich commentary on the course of the drama, and there are striking extended passages for such instruments. But the Lyric Opera, constrained in part at least by the paucity of space in the tiny Eureka Theater, supplied an orchestra consisting in its entirety of a string quartet and piano. (I hope that the band was larger for the company's past productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre).

The cast consisted largely of performers with a good deal of previous operatic experience. Ironically, the most satisfying was the least experienced, Alec Jeong, playing Ernesto. Though he was educated in music, Jeong's academic specialty was Chinese ethnomusicology, and opera is an amateur pursuit for him. His only previous role is Ferrando in the Lyric Opera's recent Così fan tutte. Nevertheless, he sang sweetly and for the most part truly, and his stage demeanor alone was restrained and self-assured.

Kimarie Torre played, or more accurately overplayed, Norina (she alternated the role with Yoosun Park). Her coyness before the mock wedding and her shrewishness after it suffered from a lack of modulation, so that in each case what began as amusing soon turned tiresome. On the whole, while her singing was up to the virtuosic demands of the opera, her habitual high volume led to too many lapses in intonation at the top. Moreover, in her first appearance as a supposed girl fresh from the convent, she inexplicably chose to produce a shrill and grating sound that reminded one of Papagena pretending to be an old lady.

The principal comic players, Razvan Georgescu as Pasquale and Jo Vincent Parks as his conniving friend Dr. Malatesta, were at their best in the numerous duets in which one sang a melodic line while the other muttered a rhythmic patter. The former had the bass range required by his buffo part and the latter the larger range demanded of a baritone who must occasionally take on the buffo part himself. But both sang with consistent harshness, perhaps because they seemed to feel the need to sing as if they were in a much larger house; and Georgescu especially lacked the warmth of tone needed to make Don Pasquale, whose punishment must seem at the end to be almost tragically too severe for his wrongdoing, become a touchingly sympathetic character, if only for a moment. Georgescu's considerable experience helped him in some self-assured and deft comic byplay, but he brought little more to the role. Donizetti's great little opera, unlike Ben Jonson's rather nasty play, is more than only farce. Falstaff it is not, but the endless flow of lyricism and the reconciliation at the close of the third act turn it from farce to comedy, and that crucial quality was not present enough in the show.

The fault lay not so much in the artists on the stage as in the direction, both theatrical and musical. Director Kay Kleinerman has studied music, but she has apparently never directed an opera before, a fact which may account in part for the lack of modulation on the stage: the cast bellowed too often, and they all overdid their comic bits. And it was a mistake to equip Ernesto irrelevantly with a tennis racket and a wardrobe and manner that might have been more at home in a comedy by Oscar Wilde. Music Director Barnaby Palmer conducted with his eyes glued to his tiny orchestra, which, perhaps because of architectural exigencies, was situated to one side of the stage rather than in front of it, and he rarely glanced at the stage forty-five degrees to his left. The result was a certain crucial loss of control. Matthew Berglund's stage design and Maggie Whitaker's costumes — Ernesto's apart — were charming and hinted at what might been a more satisfying production.

As the work of many local organizations has repeatedly shown, smallness can be as good as and even better than the largeness of our grand institutions. A production of Donizetti's earlier comic masterpiece, L'elisir d'amore, by the Festival Opera of Walnut Creek a couple of seasons back was distinctly more pleasurable than the high-powered production of the same opera by the San Francisco Opera that year. But there is no substitute for rigor; and the size of the Lyric Opera's orchestra for the current production suggests that there are limits to smallness too.