Sugar and Spice at the Center

By Annalyn Swan

The Met's Billy Budd; City Opera's The Turk in Italy

As befits a 94-year-old dowager, New York City's Metropolitan Opera has a taste for velvet and Verdi. That makes its first premiere this season a surprise: Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, a brooding sea tale seldom produced since its Covent Garden debut in 1951. Meanwhile, as if it had planned its major fall production for contrapuntal effect, the New York City Opera--a 34-year-old, often saucy upstart just across the way at Lincoln Center--reached back to Rossini for a high note. The Rossini opera, to be televised nationwide this Wednesday, is The Turk in Italy, a rarely performed confection perfectly suited to the bel canto charms of Beverly Sills. How they pair off:

Billy Budd is not everyone's idea of a night at the opera. Instead of playing on the heartstrings, Billy Budd aims for the head. The libretto, written by E.M. Forster and longtime Britten Collaborator Eric Crozier, is a literate account of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd. There is little action, particularly in the long, expository and often boring first act. The music, atmospheric rather than active, lacks the great sweeps of sound that make Britten's Peter Grimes so gripping. For all that, Billy Budd is musically original, reasonably accessible--and a modern masterpiece.

The plot is simple, even for an opera. Billy, an able seaman, is impressed aboard the warship H.M.S. Indomitable in 1797, when England was fighting France. The boy's good nature and good looks provoke the hatred of John Claggart, the lago-like master-at-arms. When Claggart falsely accuses Billy of plotting mutiny, Billy cannot defend himself: at emotional moments, a stammer prevents him from speaking. He lashes out with his fist, accidentally kills Claggart and is sentenced under the Articles of War--a verdict upheld by his sympathetic Captain Vere--to be hanged. An allegory of good and evil, the story turns on Vere's attempts to reconcile duty with love of fellow man.

The cast is claustrophobically enclosed in William Dudley's set, a marvelously flexible nautical tower of nested, cannon-studded decks. As the dramatic focus shifts from above to below decks, the set rises and falls--and folds in upon itself like the drawers of a jewelry box. The Met crew sails skillfully through Britten's long vocal declamations. As Billy, Richard Stilwell sometimes fails to project his light, high baritone. But James Morris has a chillingly heartless way with Claggart's ominous bass. Tenor Peter Pears, 68, who sang Captain Vere in the original production, has grown weaker of voice, but he measures out his notes carefully, sometimes to great effect.

The Met makes the most of Britten's atmospherics: the ongoing struggle between major and minor keys that echoes the tension between good and evil, the sinister trombone that shadows Claggart. Billy's sleepy ballad of farewell, sung the night before he is hanged, rivals the poignancy of Mimi's death in La Boheme. The crew's wordless, almost animal-like cry of rage, welling up after Billy's death, is terrifying.

"Give me a laundry list, and I will set it to music," Rossini once bragged. Even for a fluttery comic opera, The Turk in Italy hangs upon the merest shred of a story. Composed in 1814, when Rossini was only 22, it uses the conventional husband-wife-lover triangle of opera buffa, but with an innovative twist. As in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the opera is being "written" by the poet Prosdocimo even as it unfolds onstage. The young Rossini's melodies are no match for his later, glittering The Barber of Seville, but The Turk's ensembles are as joyously light-hearted as its plot.

The New York City Opera does well enough with this engaging trifle. But despite a witty English translation by Critic Andrew Porter, the music and vocal lines -- which should be at the center of operatic comedy -- are often upstaged by the action. Commedia dell'arte harlequins race busily about, changing the flimsy, make-believe props. The chorus prances rather than walks. In the end, the slap stick softens the musical punch so much that the fizz almost fizzles.

Still, the bel canto bubbles to the top. Donald Gramm, as the visiting Turkish pasha who falls for Sills, projects a superbly comic, imperious air along with his bass coloratura. In one delightful scene, Gramm and Sills rattle then-cafe cups at each other in tune to a tete-a-tete of trills. Few others in the cast at tempt such demanding musical embellishments, but Baritone Alan Titus as the poet juggles the plot ingredients nicely. Beverly Sills, somewhat sharper of voice these days, is still a consummate singing actress, with an uncanny ability to focus the attention of a whole theater on a mere flutter of one hand. In the frothy first act she trips up and down the cascades of fioriture with ravishing ease, proving once again why she is the belle of bel canto.

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