Other singers-in-training perked up the ears, particularly tenor Michael Hendrick and soprano Dina Kuznetsova.

CHICAGO – John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” is coming into its own. It may be the most musically sophisticated opera ever written by an American composer, and some of the score haunts the memory and the imagination. Like all great works, it does not reveal everything at once.

A different conductor and cast at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a different and perhaps more appropriate venue, and a substantially revised production – all these cast new lights and shadows on the landscape. The opera appears in a different perspective. Chicago has sold out 10 performances of this first revival, and the work has received a more consistently perceptive and responsive press than it did a year ago.

Harbison hasn’t undertaken major revisions. The piece does move faster, thanks to about seven minutes of cuts but more thanks to the snappy pacing of conductor David Stahl. The simultaneous strands of the complex score and the tapestry of motivic interconnections are coming clearer.

Only Jerry Hadley as Gatsby repeated his New York role. His portrayal has accrued security and nuance. He made every word meaningful and filled the high-lying phrases with ardor and longing. By a couple of singing generations the oldest member of the ensemble, he showed us the perpetual adolescent in Gatsby (and in everyone). This career-crowning performance is a great vocal and dramatic achievement.

Soprano Alicia Berneche, stepping in for Dawn Upshaw, who is suffering from “vocal exhaustion,” sang Daisy brightly and with assurance, put over every syllable of the text, and created an exceptional characterization of this maddening, self-absorbed yet charismatic creature. The brief scene with her daughter in which she is surprised, delighted, and horrified by a display of spontaneous affection was an extraordinary piece of acting. Tenor Clifton Forbis was also first-rate as Tom Buchanan, singing with a voice of Wagnerian heft and self-importance, but the bluster was there to cover up the character’s fundamental insecurity; Tom desperately wants to be loved, without accepting the corresponding responsibility for loving someone else.

All of the others were fine – Patricia Risley’s mezzo penetrated Jordan Baker’s carefully maintained veneer; slick-haired Russell Braun was the warm-voiced Nick; Andrew Shore was compelling as George Wilson, who discovers his best isn’t good enough. Jennifer Dudley sounded sultry as Myrtle, but her body language suggested a sexual quick fix rather than immortal longings. The Lyric Opera’s orchestra is not the miracle that James Levine has created at the Met, but conductor Stahl secured loose playing of the jazz episodes and tight ensemble and atmospheric coloring in the rest. Director Mark Lamos has taken the opportunity to reblock much of the opera, bringing details and the fundamental rhythms of the piece into focus. It was a mistake, however, to stage the overture as Gatsby’s funeral. This anticipates an ending that should be both inevitable and surprising. Lamos, like Stahl, was at his best in some of the opera’s most eloquent pages, the meditations on the meaning of Gatsby’s life and death at the end.

The Lyric Opera’s new music director, Sir Andrew Davis, officiated the previous night over a new production of another opera about obsession, Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” It was a powerful and fiery performance in which subtly spooky detail was as significant as passion and sweep. The orchestra played well for him, and the chorus, trained by former Boston Chorus Pro Musica director Donald Palumbo, sang splendidly, although there were too many rocky moments of stage/pit ensemble, particularly at the beginning.

There was solid singing from baritone Nikolai Putilin as Tomsky and contralto Nancy Maultsby as Pauline. Bo Skovhus cut a handsome figure as Prince Yeletsky, but he seemed to push his voice beyond its best volume level. Soprano Katarina Dalayman canceled, so a member of the training ensemble, Erin Wood, took over. Her acting was understandably sketchy, but she was musically secure. Although her voice is still growing, she has the makings of a significant instrument. Other singers-in-training perked up the ears, particularly tenor Michael Hendrick and soprano Dina Kuznetsova.

There were two star performances. Felicity Palmer played the Old Countess as an English eccentric – Dame Edith Sitwell? – but she sang with infinitely resourceful artistry and tone of rare patina. And Vladimir Galouzine demonstrated why he is now the world’s leading Gherman – he sang and acted with a coiled-spring intensity that even searing high notes could not release.

Everything in Graham Vick’s production was distorted to show that Gherman’s mind was twisted; the furniture of the early acts wound up upside down on the ceiling in the later ones, while the skulls and skeletons piled up. Meanwhile, everything Tchaikovsky meant to make an effect, such as the terrifying apparition of the Old Countess in the soldiers’ barracks, went for nothing – she simply strolled in. Pure Eurotrash.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8623468.html

by Richard Dyer

The Boston Globe