From Newsgroup: rec.music.opera

On Saturday, June 20, 1998 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Dylan and Kamala wrote:

Well I'll say this for her, she certainly had the legs for it.
Unfortunately Eilana Lappalainen, the titular earth-spirit in San
Francisco's summer production of Lulu, had very little else to offer either musically or dramatically. The dramatic failure was not entirely her fault. Director Lotfi Mansouri had envisioned his heroine as a glib, happy-go-lucky golddigger, a figure out of musical comedy, Busby Berkely rather than Pabst. If there is one thing that is indispensable to an interpreter of Lulu, it is the ability to project hunger. This is a girl born on the streets, who learned at the age of twelve that sex was the only thing she had to trade
for survival. For her, male desire is--literally--meat and drink. Lappalainen's corn-fed chorine had clearly never missed a meal in her life, and I do not mean this a snide comment on her excellent figure, but on her deeply American sense of complacency, of a kind of greed that comes not from having had nothing, but from having always had plenty and not seeing why one should not have even more. The character, in short, was repellent, a living contradiction of Berg's astonishingly perceptive and compassionate score. Berg was decades ahead of his time in understanding the societal trap that makes Lulu what she is, and in finding the outlines of a human individual in the rather stock temptress figure of Wedekind's plays. Berg's Lulu is not "femme eternelle" at all, but a mortal creature living in a trap that slowly closes, as she learns that the sex she sells, which she imagines gives her power over men, in fact makes her utterly dependent on their vision of her. The "one thing that belongs to her" that she wails against selling on the street in the final scene, was never her own property to begin with. What
she does own, and cannot sell, is her humanity, her existence separate from the fantasies of desire she trades in. But it is this very quality that Mansouri's direction seems determined to erase, and Lappalainen's generic coquette follows his lead.
I suppose it is not fair either to blame Lappalainen for being overwhelmed vocally by this very difficult role; she never should have been cast, and never would have been if today's body-obsessed culture had not made cup-size a more important criterion for the part than lung power. The part is a
heavy one, but no heavier, surely, than Salome, and competent Salomes are
not particularly rare. Lappalainen simply could not be heard for very much
of the time, and even when the orchestra obligingly thinned out and dropped back to give her room for Lulu's lied, and conductor Stefan Lano reined his forces in even more, the soprano made no impression whatsoever, and this
most electric moment of the drama played as drawing room comedy.
But mention of Stefan Lano brings me to what was good about the production. The orchestra made a beautiful, beautiful case for the romaticism and lyricism of this score. Lano is clearly steeped in the music and had
somehow brought the so-often-recalcitrant SFO orchestra into line. So
finely and sensitively did Lanos shape his orchestral portrait of Lulu's inner life that if one closed one's eyes for a moment one could almost see another actress in the role, one that would make an air-breathing woman of Lulu rather than a cartoon. It was heartbreaking to hear this artist
struggle against the nonsense that was going on onstage.
Not all the performances were as bad as the lead's. First among them all,
of course, was Von Stade's debut in the role of Grafin Geschwitz. My
sister, a soprano, complained after the first act that the writing for the voice was ungrateful, and that no singer could have made it beautiful. At
Von Stade's first notes in Act II, I caught my sister's eye and she nodded understanding: these are magnificently expressive lines, requiring only an interpreter who knows her business. Thank God, Von Stade has the last word
in the opera, so that the final moments, in the hands of the Countess and Lanos in the pit, sounded like a valediction for a real Lulu rather than the stand-in we had been watching for three hours.
Kristine Jepson was also musical and convincing as the Schoolboy, and Christopher Lincoln's background in Mozart and Rossini made him a persuasively lyrical Alwa even if he did sometimes sound strained and out of his depth (which made sense for the character, anyway). Tom Fox's
Schon/Jack was a bit more problematic. He acted well, but his voice often spread and became indistinct in its bottom half, although oddly he sounded much more confident in the darker-colored music of Jack in the last scene. Franz Mazura, a famous Schon who appears on the Boulez recording, was Schigolch. I quite liked the painter, Robert Gambill, and David Okerlund
gave a vigorous if appropriately unbeautiful reading of the Animal Trainer/Acrobat.
Bob Mackie's splendiferous gowns, although they were a part of the
triviality I disliked in the production, were undeniably fab, especially the last one, which was black and left one shoulder bare but had a sable trimmed hood and asymmetrical strings of rhinestones that traced all the soprano's lovely contours and my goodness, all the opera-glasses were just popping out like mushrooms! Some of the sets were great too, with these dinky little chairs in the second scene shaped like pink-and-green-and-ivory ivy leaves. But for some reason the set for the second act almost exactly recreated the set for Norma Desmond's mansion in Broadway's Sunset Boulevard which was pretty weird, especially when Lulu stood on the sweeping staircase holding a revolver and acting all defiant.
At one point in the second act the Acrobat mocks Alwa for composing an opera about Lulu, "starring my fiancee's legs. No decent theatre will produce
it." Well, that does not describe the opera Alban Berg wrote, but it's a pretty fair precis of the show I saw last night.
Dylan
=dbd=
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- Wedekind

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