Fine singing, weird stagings in Santa Fe Opera’s ‘Rusalka’ and ‘Flying Dutchman’

SANTA FE, N.M. — Staging operas in times and places very different from those imagined by their composers and librettists can be revelatory — or needlessly confusing, if not downright destructive.

Of the three Santa Fe Opera productions I saw this year, at least Netia Jones’ reimagining of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, reviewed earlier, didn’t get too much in the way. Sir David Pountney’s rethinking of Dvorák’s Rusalka was a head scratcher, though, and David Alden’s version of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman was inscrutable when it wasn’t downright perverse.

All three productions at least had mostly excellent singing, and the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra is playing very well these days. (I passed on Orfeo, in a new orchestration by Nico Muhly, and Tosca.)

Rusalka in a psychiatric hospital?

The only one of Dvorák’s 10 operas on the edge of the standard repertory, never done by the Dallas Opera, Rusalka is getting its Santa Fe premiere this summer. It’s based on Czech and German fairy tales.

The eponymous water nymph falls in love with a Prince, but can win him only by being turned into a human. The witch Jezibaba works the necessary magic, but at great price.

Rusalka becomes beautiful, but speechless, and if she fails to win the Prince’s lasting love, she’ll be turned into a flickering will-o’-the-wisp. She then can be redeemed only by killing the faithless Prince.

You’d hardly know any of this from the Santa Fe production. Pountney stages it, according to the company’s website, as “a Freudian fairy tale set in a psychiatric hospital in Vienna.”

We’re to see Rusalka’s youthful infatuation and transformation to attract a love interest, his passing infatuation and ultimate betrayal, as a coming-of-age parable, of a most basic human experience. Well, OK.

With some surrealist touches (for the clownish Gamekeeper and Kitchen Girl, as they hack away at birds for the upcoming dinner), Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes favor ca. 1900 looks.

But a psychiatric hospital? How does that clarify the story?

For the first act, set designer Leslie Travers lines the stage with institutional walls of high white doors that open and shut for entrances and exits; drawers below extend for steps. A higgledy-piggledy tower of white chairs looms on the right, over a shallow pool.

In preparation for the ill-fated marriage ceremony for Rusalka and the Prince, tall vitrines with chandeliers display a variety of extras, and sometimes the boxed-in Rusalka. The flamboyantly red-dressed Foreign Princess, appearing on a golden horse statue, wins the Prince’s affections before he realizes his mistake. In the last act, the vitrines tilt every which way, as if after an earthquake. Malcolm Rippeth’s dramatic lighting heightens all effects.

Amid sometimes extraordinary physical demands, including singing the famous “Song to the Moon” while climbing and writhing on that precarious tower of chairs, Ailyn Pérez is a deeply sympathetic Rusalka. Her soprano seems to command limitless resources of power and color. Robert Watson’s not very princely Prince summons some impressive top notes, but his tenor tends to congest a bit below.

Mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis is a campily over-the-top Jezibaba. The production places Rusalka’s water gnome father Vodnik in a wheelchair, from which James Creswell delivers vocal grit and beef. With a brightly substantive soprano, Mary Elizabeth Williams is appropriately imperious, and manipulative, as the Foreign Princess.

Some of the most impressive singing comes from company apprentices in smaller roles: Jordan Lloyd as the Gamekeeper; Kaylee Nichols as the Kitchen Girl; and Ilanah Lobel-Torres, Lydia Grindatto and Meridian Prall as an extraordinarily mellifluous trio of Wood Sprites. (Their opening scene of teasing Vodnik is a witty takeoff on the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold.) The offstage chorus of nymphs, prepared by chorus master Susanne Sheston, sings beautifully, too.

The mental institution conceit makes no sense to me, but musical values were certainly high on Aug. 4. Apart from some blurry wind tuning at the start, the orchestra played splendidly. Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, an alum of the 2015 Dallas Opera Hart Institute for Women Conductors, skillfully coordinated, shaped and balanced the music.

The Dutchman as exploitative wheeler-dealer

David and Christopher Alden, twins, have made parallel careers as controversial stage directors. Sure enough, David Alden’s version of The Flying Dutchman wasn’t anything Wagner — or many of his admirers — would recognize. (Christopher Alden directed a somewhat less peculiar Dallas Opera Dutchman in October 2018.)

As with Pountney’s mental-institution Rusalka, David Alden’s Dutchman was based on a concept that made no sense to me: that the Dutchman is an exploitative international businessman. In fact, Wagner portrays him as singularly powerless, cursed to ride the seas except for a port call every seven years. His curse can be broken only by marriage to a faithful woman.

Senta, infatuated with legends and a portrait of the Dutchman, is set to become the redemptive wife, but the marriage is forestalled by a misunderstanding. The libretto ends with the Dutchman sailing off and his red-sailed ship sinking, Senta plunging herself into the water, and then the two of them rising heavenward thanks to her sacrifice.

In Alden’s staging — with sets by Paul Steinberg and Brendan Gonzales Boston, costumes by Constance Hoffman and lighting by Duane Schuler — the doomed “ship” rises as a cluster of big, black containers. The Dutchman first strides onstage as a suited businessman to sit at a big desk. Guano-streaked statues come to creepy life apparently represent the Dutchman’s crew.

Without revealing specifics, let’s just say there’s no feminine redemption — that quintessential 19th-century operatic cliché — at the end.

At least one can close eyes and admire superb singing. Nicholas Brownlee’s Dutchman produces a big, glorious trombone of a sound, but he also scales it down sensitively. Elza van den Heever personifies Senta’s passion as well as naivete in a luminous soprano. Morris Robinson is aptly dense-toned as Senta’s money-grubbing father Daland.

A late sub for Erik, Chad Shelton is wholly persuasive as Senta’s ill-starred suitor, with an ardent Italianate tenor. Bille Bruley has a potent, edgy tenor for the Steersman. Gretchen Krupp is the sonorous taskmaster Mary.

Most impressive of all may be the chorus, from Santa Fe’s first-class apprenticeship program. Prepared by Sheston, they produce thrilling, finely focused walls of sound. Having just conducted Dutchman at the Met, the young German conductor Thomas Guggeis drew vivid, responsive playing from the orchestra in the Aug. 5 performance. But at least in my seat, directly in the line of fire, trumpet and trombones occasionally could have been less aggressive.

The 2024 Santa Fe Opera season will include the world premiere of The Righteous, by American composer Gregory Spears, plus Don Giovanni, The Elixir of Love, La Traviata and, to be conducted by former Dallas Symphony assistant conductor Karina Canellakis, Der Rosenkavalier.

Details

Santa Fe Opera continues through Aug. 26. 800-280-4654, santafeopera.org