Anna Karenina, Opera San Jose, Sept. 19 2010

This production is a feather in Opera San Jose's cap. Everything came together this afternoon: singers, orchestra, sets, costumes, acting were all first-rate.

With 19 or so scene changes, the sets needed to be simple. They were, but they were also effective. In the prologue, in which an accident at the train station results in the death of a railway worker, the train was simply one single bright light, framed by an Erector Set-like structure. The actual death was enacted on stage by a super jumping into a trap door on stage in front of the bright light. It wasn't a large trap door; I imagine that considerable expertise is required to jump into it without hitting your nose on the edge. The sets for interior scenes involved a minimum of furniture: a few elegant chairs; a desk to represent all of Karenin's study; for the dinner party a long table with candles and flowers was wheeled in. (All set changes took place quickly and in full view of the audience.) For outdoors scenes, a large (say 15x30) backdrop was lowered from above; park benches were supplied when necessary. Anna's suicide in front of the train was represented by her walking toward the bright headlight of the train, ultimately disappearing into the darkness beneath it. To repeat, simple, but very effective. Kudos to the set designer!

Costumes were remarkable. Again, nothing over the top, but all well-executed and entirely appropriate. The amazing thing was how many costumes there were. Anna appears in about half of the 19 scenes, and she seemed to have a new costume for each one. Vronsky had two officer uniforms, one white, one green, and elegant civilian clothes for the scenes following his resignation from the army. Even Karenin seemed to have at least three variations on ultra-formal attire.

Jasminia Halimic made a fine Anna; Kirk Eichelberger as her husband Karenin almost stole the show from her with his mellifluous bass voice. I regretted that no opportunity for applause was provided following his big aria "How strange she is tonight." He would have gotten an enthusiastic audience response. Krassen Karagiozov was somewhat stiff as Anna's lover Vronsky, perhaps reflecting his military position. Michael Dailey as Levin was fine; I think I detect an improvement in his voice since last season. Khori Dastoor (Kitty) is always delightful; Bettany Coffland was good as Dolly, and a much thinner Christopher Bengochea was an active, bouncy, almost too enthusiastic Stiva. Paul Murray, who had impressed me so much as Alidoro in last year's La Cenerentola, had a small part as Yashvin. I would have liked to have heard more of him. The orchestra was conducted by Stewart Robertson, who conducted the opera's premiere in Florida and its repeat performance in St. Louis. He guided them admirably through the "modern" music. The music itself I found to be very lovely in spots, and certainly approachable everywhere. The interlude between parts 5 and 6 is gorgeous, as is Anna's short aria in Part 1 scene 1, "I remember when he first saw you."

My only reservation about today's opera was the architecture of the work. There are 19 scenes, none of them very long, some of them very short. That is something of an echo of Russian opera, think Boris Godunov and Khovanschina, which also consist of a number of scenes that don't particularly flow into one another. The effect in Anna Karenina of the small scenes is that hardly any of them have the time to develop an arc; no time to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Characters come on stage, present practically a snapshot of the action, and then it's time for the next scene. The librettist has been very faithful to the novel, to the extent of including Tolstoy's Part 8 as an anticlimactic final scene following Anna's suicide. I ruminate about a different approach, using Carmen as a model. The original Carmen is a very short novella; nevertheless the librettists not only threw out characters (such as Carmen's husband, whom Don Jose also killed), but added Micaela and completely changed Carmen's murder. And he got four acts out of it, each with a beginning, middle, and end. Could something similar be done with Anna Karenina? Or would you need something the size of the entire Der Ring des Nibelungen?

But tackling any such problem with the architecture is not within the scope of an opera company that chooses to perform the work. Opera San Jose has done a magnificent job of presenting the opera as written, and the results should encourage other companies to take it on.