Elemental Opera at Santa Fe

Desert-bright weather in the southwestern United States has long inspired architecture that opens itself to the land and the sky. Pueblo cliff dwellers carved shelters into walls of rock; Spanish settlers wrapped houses around courtyards that became, in the words of the pioneering California architect Irving Gill, “outdoor living rooms.” In a similar spirit, Los Angeles modernists like R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra designed semitransparent homes with light frames and sliding doors. In the performing arts, dry summers fostered the building of Greek-style amphitheatres, the Hollywood Bowl being the most famous example. Schindler wrote in 1926, “The distinction between the indoors and the out-of-doors will disappear.”

One of the most spectacular instances of indoor-outdoor architecture in the Southwest can be found on a hill north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the edge of a rugged landscape of mountains, mesas, and arroyos. Santa Fe Opera, which presents a five-work season each summer, occupies a remarkable performance space that is open on the sides and the back, with swooping roofs that have the weightlessness of wings. In an acoustical mystery that invites comparison with the beautiful anomalies of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, voices project handsomely in the auditorium without getting lost in the wind. Bewitching serendipities are routine. At a recent performance of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” a stiff breeze kicked up as the Helmsman sang, “Dear south wind, blow once more!”

Santa Fe Opera was the creation of the impresario and conductor John Crosby, who launched the company in 1957, having fallen in love with the area as a teen-ager. (He spent a year at the Los Alamos Ranch School, just before it was shut down and transformed into the Los Alamos National Laboratory.) Crosby’s first season featured Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” with the composer in attendance. This established the mold for a forward-looking repertory that mixed standard Romantic titles with new work, Baroque fare, and bel-canto revivals, not to mention vast quantities of Richard Strauss. Crosby also instituted the Apprentice Program for Singers, which bolstered such performers as Sherrill Milnes, Samuel Ramey, Roberta Alexander, and Joyce DiDonato.

The immediate success of Santa Fe Opera—Stravinsky adored it and came back five more times—set the pace for what is now a bustling summer-opera scene in the United States. Glimmerglass, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and Opera Saratoga followed its lead. The resulting extension of the season has been a huge boon to working singers, not to mention music lovers with ordinary incomes. (A subscription to all five productions at Santa Fe can cost as little as two hundred dollars—less than the average price of one Taylor Swift ticket.) The time-slowing beauty of the setting is an extravagant bonus. Few would dissent from the verdict of the late opera maven Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said that there is no lovelier place to hear opera in the summer.

The chief novelty at Santa Fe this season is a new version of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” which, at the age of four hundred and sixteen, is the oldest opera still regularly performed. Although Harry Bicket, Santa Fe’s music director, is a specialist in early opera, he decided against using a period ensemble of harpsichords, theorbos, sackbuts, and the like; this would have required a total reconfiguration of the company’s resident orchestra. Instead, Bicket turned to the composer Nico Muhly, who has refashioned Monteverdi’s masterpiece in a captivating modern guise.

Various adaptations of “Orfeo” have circulated during the past century and more: Vincent d’Indy, Carl Orff, Ottorino Respighi, and Bruno Maderna, among others, tried their hand. Muhly, more respectful than most, preserves the crisp, clean lines of Monteverdi’s score while filling in all manner of instrumental filigree: delicate arpeggios in the harp, buzzing tremolos in the strings, decorative flourishes in the winds. At times, he makes more boisterous interventions: when Orfeo enters Hell to retrieve his beloved Euridice, trumpets let loose with ad-libitum double-tonguing fanfares. But nowhere does Muhly indulge himself at Monteverdi’s expense: rather, he acts as a fluent interpreter, bringing his own antic grace to bear.

Yuval Sharon directs the show, employing set designs by the artist-architects Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson. The most striking effect comes courtesy of Santa Fe: at the outset, the allegorical figure of La Musica is sitting in a hospital bed atop a domelike hill, watching the sun go down over distant mountains. Given that Orfeo is himself a personification of music, Sharon’s staging evokes the fate of the art form in an age of mass reproduction: after Euridice dies, her voice persists by way of a gold-plated Victrola, which Orfeo carries with him from Hell. For the most part, though, Sharon and his collaborators concentrate on straightforward, earthy images: a green hill for the world above, a misty grotto for the underground. Verdant colors and robust movement match the Monteverdi-Muhly score.

The tenor Rolando Villazón is singing Orfeo, but a stage accident put him temporarily out of commission for opening night. The baritone Luke Sutliff, a former Santa Fe apprentice, stepped in, finding keen expressivity at the top of his range. Among the supporting players, the mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy stood out for her coolly piercing portrayal of La Messaggera, who brings news of Euridice’s fate. The chill of her announcement is accentuated by Muhly’s orchestration, in which bass clarinet, contrabassoon, harp, and cello perform a deathly turn from E major to G minor. Operagoers who saw “Tristan und Isolde” at Santa Fe last summer might feel a twinge of déjà vu: Tristan expires on the same quietly shuddering progression.

I saw two other operas during my time in Santa Fe: “Pelléas et Mélisande,” directed by Netia Jones, and “The Flying Dutchman,” directed by David Alden. Both stagings tend toward grungy industrial imagery—churning wall fans are a shared element—and both make a somewhat head-scratching impression. Jones places the archaic castle dwellers of “Pelléas” in a bunker rife with signs of disease and delirium: oxygen cannisters are wheeled out, projections of medical data flicker on walls, mysterious doubles appear. Alden, for his part, transposes the maritime denizens of “Dutchman” to a regimented container-shipping milieu. As arresting as the images sometimes are, they get in the way of the operas’ fundamental qualities: Debussy’s eerie radiance, Wagner’s elemental swell.

The productions are more newsworthy for showing the progress of young singers on the rise. Samantha Hankey applied a startlingly lush, lustrous mezzo-soprano to the role of Mélisande, rescuing the character from the prison of Symbolist enigma. She had an able partner in her Pelléas, the ardent baritone Huw Montague Rendall; Zachary Nelson, as Golaud, erred on the side of gruffness. The bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee exhibited astonishing raw power as the Dutchman, booming out so impressively that he might have been audible at the Tesuque Casino, up the road. His delivery, however, needs more nuance and variety. Elza van den Heever, who sang Senta, demonstrated how much can be communicated with differentiated phrasings and pointed diction.

The young German conductor Thomas Guggeis led the “Dutchman” in jumpy, erratic fashion. Bicket, showing his experience and range, contributed a poised, stealthily wrenching “Pelléas.” Instruments in the pit came across as vividly as characters onstage: the hovering lamp of Bart Feller’s flute, the pensive stride of Kelly Cornell’s horn. A few birds joined in before bed. At one point, I sensed a floodlight glowing somewhere above and behind me; it was the moon. ♦