Arabella, Santa Fe Opera, August 6 2012

Off to Santa Fe for an “opera orgy”—five operas in five days, a more concentrated experience than even the Seattle Ring, which is four operas in six days. First on the list was Arabella by Richard Strauss. I’ve only seen one other performance in my career, but that performance (1998, in San Francisco, with Janice Watson in the title role) was so emotionally moving that I was looking forward to a repetition.

Santa Fe Opera performs in a theater that has a lot of “outside awareness”: patrons seated from the front of the orchestra to near the back have no walls to their right or left; if it’s raining and there’s a strong wind, patrons on the edge can get wet. Also, the back of the stage is open to the elements. It’s possible to watch a thunderstorm in the distance while the stage action is taking place. For Arabella, however, the sets covered this view. In Act 1, we saw a collection of curved grey walls representing the hotel room where the Waldner family is living. To the left there was a sofa on which Adelaide (Arabella’s mother) consulted with a fortune teller; to the right were a number of doors, one leading to the rest of the hotel, the others to the other rooms of the suite. For the second act, the wall on the left with the sofa was retained, while the wall on the right was turned around and the doors removed to form the location for the party. On the upstage side of this latter wall an out-of-sight staircase allowed characters to arrive and depart. In the third act, the walls were turned around again so that both left and right walls curved toward the audience. There were three doors on the left; on the right, a curving staircase led from stage left up to a door leading to the Waldner’s lodgings on the second floor. In the interior of this curved wall there was an upholstered bench. It was all very appropriate; there was no excess of directorial “concept.”

Our cast:
Count Waldner: Dale Travis
Adelaide von Waldner: Victoria Livengood
Arabella: Erin Wall
Zdenka: Heidi Stober
Matteo: Zach Borichevsky
Count Elemer: Brian Jagde
Mandryka: Mark Delavan
Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Director: Tim Albery

Of these, the standout performer was Mark Delavan as Mandryka. An uninformed patron might have thought that the opera was titled Mandryka, so powerful was his portrayal. Dale Travis made a fine Count Waldner; the remainder were up to their tasks without making a permanent impression in my memory. The finale did not carry the impact of my 1998 San Francisco performance. A friend who also saw that performance said “I was bawling,” and I was doing my best to hold it together. Sorry, that didn’t happen this time. A beta or a bit less, based on Mark Delavan’s Mandryka.

To our surprise and delight, an Opera San Jose resident artist, Michael Dailey, was among the chorus. He would have a named role in Maometto Secondo; perusal of the program revealed that he would be in all five operas. We figured out how to get backstage after the performance to say Hi. He had lots of praise for Sir Andrew, the conductor.