Michael Hendrick, a bright-voiced tenor.
The challenges of mounting a new production at the New York City Opera are much eased when the production can first be rehearsed and presented under ideal summer festival conditions at its affiliate company, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y. The problem is that Glimmerglass has an ideally intimate 900-seat auditorium, while the 2,700-seat New York State Theater is anything but ideal.
So those who attended the director Christopher Alden’s production of Britten’s 1946 chamber opera ”The Rape of Lucretia” at Glimmerglass in 2001 will have to put the impact it had there out of their minds in order to savor the City Opera’s premiere of that production, which opened on Sunday afternoon. Still, this alluring and disturbing work for eight solo singers, scored with an ingenious sense of instrumental color for an orchestra of 13, does not turn up that often, especially in a production as imaginative as this one.
Britten and his librettist Ronald Duncan turn the story of the Roman general Collatinus’s loving wife, Lucretia, who is raped by the brutal Etruscan prince Tarquinius, into an interior psychological drama. The opera is essentially dominated by two singers who, in the manner of Greek tragedy, are called the Male Chorus and the Female Chorus. As originally conceived, they stand apart from the action and serve as narrators and commentators.
Mr. Alden eliminates that distancing device by portraying the Male Chorus (Michael Hendrick, a bright-voiced tenor) and the Female Chorus (Orla Boylan, a vibrant soprano in a solid company debut) into an Edwardian-era British couple who sit at home on their leather couch and nightly recount the grim story as a cautionary tale with a moralizing Christian spin.
The set by Paul Steinberg, who also designed the modern-dress costumes, is just two huge, stark movable walls: one showing the musty wallpapered interior of the couple’s sitting room, the other suggesting the yellowish stone wall of an ancient Roman building. But the Romans’ characters intrude upon the space of the Male and Female Chorus, who seem possessed by Lucretia’s story. Even the rape, described by the couple in horrific but obliquely poetic language, is enacted not in her bedroom but on the couple’s couch, as Tarquinius, leering at the unsuspecting Lucretia, nestles closer and then finally pounces.
Tarquinius’s sexual brutality is less evident in the stage action than in Britten’s powerfully ambiguous music, which makes even lulling tonal tunes and wispy harp figurations seem suspect. But the baritone Mel Ulrich, tall, lean, buffed and bald, viscerally conveyed Tarquinius’s twisted nature in his vocally virile and physically daring portrayal. In the first scene, taunting the Roman general Junius (the vulnerable baritone Andrew Schroeder), whose wife has strayed while he was away, Tarquinius homoerotically ensnares the demoralized husband’s arms in the sleeves of his unbuttoned shirt.
At the end of Act I you see how much Tarquinius’s strutting sexuality pervades the lives of the Male and Female Chorus, when the bare-chested Mr. Ulrich sits himself ominously between the couple on their couch and starts groping his crotch as the lights go dark.
As Lucretia, the Finish mezzo-soprano Monica Groop, in her City Opera debut, sang with dusky-toned expressivity and captured the restless longing of the woman for her stalwart husband, here the poignant baritone Sanford Sylvan in a portrayal that conveyed the hamstrung general’s decency. There were also strong performances from the bright-voiced soprano Lauren Skuce and the powerhouse contralto Myrna Paris as Lucretia’s servants. Daniel Beckwith conducted a surely paced and sensitive account of Britten’s haunting score. If only we could have heard those details more intimately.
by Anthony Tommasini
The New York Times