FORT WORTH — We’ve had a run of semi-staged Wagner operas lately. Six months after the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Ring Cycle, the Fort Worth Symphony presented The Flying Dutchman Friday night at Bass Performance Hall.
Conducted by music director Robert Spano, staged by James Robinson, with some powerhouse singers, the Fort Worth presentation made a good argument for the compromise approach: singers on the downstage extension, orchestra playing from stand lights upstage, with chorus behind.
This provided both visual and sonic immediacy — and power — you don’t get in an opera house. Naturally, English supertitles were provided.
Dutchman is a lot easier to semi-stage than the Ring because it involves fewer things: no aquatic Rhinemaidens, no gold, no magic spear or sword, no ring of fire, no final purging by fire and flood.
The FWSO didn’t even bother with the Dutchman’s chest of jewels or the painting of him with which Senta is obsessed, or the stage full of spinning wheels. The only props were a ship’s wheel and a couple of kegs on a low platform on the left of the stage and a chair on the other side.
Nor at the end did the lovesick Senta plunge into the sea, to rise again redemptively clutching the Dutchman. She simply turned away from the audience and stood there.
Between the singers and Robinson’s direction, though, the characters and their interactions were vividly personified in ways that, with a different director, happened only intermittently in the DSO’s Ring.
Senta can seem a naive dreamer, but Heidi Melton made her a complex figure. Alternating between blushing maid and near madness, she commanded an enormous soprano that could shade from hot primary colors to gritty earth tones.
The Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas in search of a faithful woman’s redemption, was portrayed by veteran Wagnerian Greer Grimsley. At age 68, his bass-baritone remains rich, firm and flexible, and he personified the old seaman’s balance of hopelessness and fleeting hope, and his final fury at perceived betrayal.
Portraying Senta’s father Daland, Raymond Aceto, another veteran Wagnerian, supplied a formidable, finely focused bass and a deft balance of self-importance and money-grubbing superficiality.
One normally feels for poor Erik, hopelessly in love with Senta. But, with a strenuous tenor that belted too consistently, even when it should have evinced some lyricism, Viktor Antipenko made his ardors more annoying than sympathetic.
Jonathan Kaufman supplied quite a handsome, well-behaved tenor for the Helmsman. Luretta Bybee occasionally lacked the decibels to be heard over the orchestra, but her mature mezzo and fussbudget manner suited Senta’s nurse Mary.
Costumes, by Nicole Alvarez, were mostly basic black, with trench coats for the men. The action was expressively lighted by Alex Mason; Greg Emetaz projected swirling water and rolling clouds on the stage shell and forward reflectors.
With singers well behind him, Spano seemed to have a sixth sense for what they were doing, or about to do. Coordination was never in doubt, and with only occasional exceptions balances between singers and orchestra were well gauged.
The orchestra, which is very good these days, gave one of its finest performances. Spano stirred up thrilling storms of sound — those brasses! — but he was no less attentive to the score’s delicacies.
Lively choral contributions were supplied by the combined Fort Worth Kantorei (Maritza Cáceres, director) and UT Arlington A Cappella Choir (Karen Kenaston-French, director).
With a single intermission after the first act, Friday’s performance lasted two hours and 40 minutes. Repeat performances are highly recommended, but allow extra time for downtown driving and parking challenges posed by the Main Street Fort Worth Arts Festival.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $26 to $99. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.
