My White Knight

The opening of every opera season promises a dozen or so nights of superb opera, evenings of glamour and/or high art with the world's greatest singers on the stage and the city's most important opera queens in the audience. But among the more creepy conneseurs of operatic Schadenfreude (among whom I number myself), the really exciting nights are those that just may turn out to be into train wrecks.

The cast for Met's current revival of Der Rosenkavalier (heard November 20) looked, well, precarious. Cheryl Studer, returning to the Met after a nine-year hiatus, has weathered a vocal crisis in the interim, and her Oktavian, Vesselina Kasarova, was making her second attempt at a Met debut after canceling Barbiere di Siviglia a few seasons ago. Then, only weeks before the opening night, Kasarova withdrew from this debut as well.

The good news (or the bad news, depending on how you look at it) is that the Rosenkavalier turned out no disaster at all. It's refreshing to hear the brisk tempi and clean textures Jiri Kout coaxed from the Met orchestra, especially since they are routined to play this score slow and thick for James Levine. Of course, Levine also inspires a precision which unfortunately sometimes seems to elude this orchestra under the baton of a guest maestro. The worst offender was the solo trumpet, cracking and sliding around like a stoned jazzman; on the other hand fiendish Act III prelude ran like clockwork.

For the greater part of Act One, it was impossible to tell much about the vocal estate of Ms. Studer; the Marschallin's music is almost completely parlando. Anyway, I forgot to listen for evidence of wear and tear, so swept away was I by the soprano's intensely musical and deliciously witty performance. Her German/Viennese diction is so crystal clear as to sound overheard, and she listens as intently as she sings. In contrast to Renée Fleming's hausfrau Marie Theres' last season, Studer was a lady, genuine class to her fingertips. Even in the reflective Monologue deftly avoided self-pity.

And then came the "money note" soft high G on "silber'ne Rose," where Studer wavered, sank below pitch and finally cracked. The climactic high B of the Act Three Trio similarly went awry, well south of the pitch. And so it seems the top of Studer's voice is in disarray. Which is a damn shame, because in every other regard, Studer is as ideal a Marschallin as I could ever hope to hear.

Kristine Jepson, the American mezzo who jumped into the role of Oktavian, could be defined as the "anti-Studer." Vocally everything was shipshape, without even a hint of strain in the high reaches of Act Two, and she didn't tire. But the interpretation was general, making the main points efficiently, but never with anything like poetry. I was pleasantly surprised by Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz's Sophie, not the purest voice, but honestly sung and played with real fire, refreshingly free of saccharine.

Marcello Giordani brought Italianate glamour and ping to the tiny but daunting role of the Italian Singer, and among the large cast, Wendy White mugged proficiently as Annina. Sets and costumes continue handsome if beginning to verge on the seedy; Bruce Donnell's production has shed some of the hoary shtick of last season's revival, but I wouldn't complain if he 86ed all that arm-waving in Act Two.

No premonitions of doom preceded the New York City Opera's new Rinaldo; in fact, it's arguably the biggest event of the company's season. The motivation for this Handel production (November 9) was obviously the presence of superstar countertenor David Daniels, who turned his distinctively sensuous tone and exciting musical sensibility to the title part.

Fans of Daniels wait for the moment in each of his operatic appearances when he steps quietly to the front of the stage and spins out the long, long lines of a lament like "Cara sposa." Of course such sustained soft singing requires the firmest possible technique, but with Daniels I never think of technique or even, for that matter, music in the abstract sense. In retrospect I was aware of subtle coloring of the tone, especially in the lower register, that brought an intensely human quality to the otherwise unearthly sense of classic repose.

The bravura showpiece "Or la tromba" succeeded on a less exalted level. Daniels' passagework is fleet and his sense of forward propulsion always exhilirating, but by nature he does not have a trumpet in his throat like, say, Marilyn Horne. His delivery of this prodigious aria was not helped by a gaggle of supers dressing him in Star Wars armor during some the trickiest divisions.

The bad guys in this opera are given most of the fun stuff to do. Armida (Christine Goerke) uncorked a big gleaming dramatic soprano and let loose with a cascade of full-voiced roulades as flamboyant as her drag-empress wardrobe. Tall and movie-star handsome Denis Sedov (Argante) won big ovations for his swaggering arias, sung with a darkly gleaming bass reminiscent of the young Sam Ramey.

Lisa Saffer may lack the lyrical warmth of tone I would ideally like to hear in Almirena's music, but everything she sings is stylish and heartfelt, a real class act. Daniel Taylor sounded sweet and secure in the high-lying part of Goffredo, but the third countertenor in the cast, Christopher Josey, let loose with some unattractive squawks in his frequent and not always welcome arias.

I wish the direction/design team of Francisco Negrin and Anthony Baker had shown a little more trust in the dramatic material. As it was, their reduction of the piece to a campy frolic was vastly entertaining and slickly executed. What I missed was a sense of heroism and danger; what I could have done without was that obtrusive gaggle of "Small House of Uncle Thomas" dancers.

James Jorden