San Diego Opera’s Heroic Attempt at ‘Lohengrin’

SAN DIEGO — San Diego Opera is not much-practiced in Wagner. Over the past 13 years, San Diego has grown into a substantially larger and more nationally prominent city. And over the past 13 years, its opera company has grown as well in prominence. But missing from Civic Theatre have been the operas of the composer considered the supreme challenge for any company. Sunday night, a new production of “Lohengrin” ended San Diego’s Wagner drought.

The production is new to San Diego but was originally created for the Royal Opera in London, and it has a peculiarly foreign feel in San Diego. The sets and costumes, which are by John Napier (famed for the look of blockbuster musicals, including “Cats” and “Les Miserables”), are striking. Their dissonance of Christian kitsch and pagan ritual has a certain British “Sensation” sensibility.

Lohengrin’s swan is projected on the wall as if it were a modified Batman logo. Lohengrin, the pure knight of the Grail, is Christ-like in appearance. King Henry, in a pope’s finery, is carried on this throne by monks (who wear the oddest beige pumps) and placed atop shelves lined with human skulls. The steeply raked stage is bare but for banners and large totems that stand for good and evil and are placed on sleds (it’s a snowy scene). Good is represented by a cross that is associated with Elsa; it is topped with a hand and has what appears to be a wrapped corpse tied to its frame. Evil is harder to distinguish--an animal skull with horns on top, a box with something inside it that’s too small to see. Lohengrin and Elsa (always dressed in dazzling white) spend wedding procession and wedding night on a stage bathed in blood-red light.

This is, in other words, a production fraught with Postmodern irony (even the first words in the program book, from a car advertisement and in large type, are “How ironic”). But irony needs surety to register.

The performance began nervously. Thin strings and sloppy wind entrances set a tone. The Herald (Kimm Julian), balancing precariously, high above the stage on a raised cross, announced the King in tremulous tone. No principal singer in the first act was vocally comfortable. The chorus did not appear to know where it was or why it was where it was. Andrew Sinclair, the director (he had been the assistant director of the original production by Elijah Moshinsky at Covent Garden), didn’t have much opportunity to get much beyond the basics of stage blocking.

Fortunately, “Lohengrin” is a long opera and there is time for growth and redemption. But the orchestra and chorus only further tired. Eva Johansson (Elsa), on the other hand, had a shining tone when she hit notes solidly, and she eventually began to do so with regularity, although she stood and swayed like a jellyfish all night. John Keyes was a sad-sack Lohengrin; his wide vibrato hindered a heroic sound, but he was touchingly poetic in his famous narration, “In fernem Land.”

Still, it was evil that saved the day. Ortrud, the only genuinely malicious character in the opera, is also the most sympathetic. It is she who challenges Lohengrin, a trickster knight who insists upon being trusted without revealing anything about himself. And it was she, in the form of an exciting young Bulgarian mezzo-soprano, Mariana Pentcheva, who Sunday night brought a sharply human dramatic element into the production.

*

Single-handedly, she enlivened a sagging stage, to overcome a sour orchestra. She had an authority as singer and actress that made her seem braver than the heroes. Her domination over Ortrud’s husband, Telramund, sung by Greer Grimsley with tone less black than his robes, was arresting.

Reinhard Hagen (King Henry) also had Grimsley’s problem: His over-the-top costumes were more attention-getting than his voice.

Heinz Fricke was the efficient conductor who seemed to hope that an excess of logic from the podium (one phrase swiftly and unimaginatively following the last) would translate into some logic on the stage. At least it meant that the ceremonial scenes, the performance’s worst embarrassments, were gotten through quickly.

San Diego Opera does much well. But opera companies with grand ambitions are often judged by their Wagner. Thirteen years is a long interval, and the company is out of practice.

* “Lohengrin” continues Wednesday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and Feb. 22 at 7 p.m., $31-$93, Civic Theatre, 202 C St., San Diego, (619) 232-7636.