Don Giovanni, Simon Boccanegra, Beatrice and Benedict, Agrippina, & La Sonnambula at the Santa Fe Opera.
The Santa Fe Opera had modest beginnings in the late 1950s: open-air seating, a reflecting pool behind the orchestra pit, and the mandatory wearing of sweaters and ponchos by the audience in case the weather turned sour. Now it plays five operas to packed audiences in a covered theater of imposing dimensions, watched over from one side by the solemn, spotlit bust of Igor Stravinsky—an early champion of the company. Santa Fe’s founder, John Crosby, can be said to have done more for summer opera—and for the performance of contemporary work as well as the operas of his beloved Richard Strauss—than any other American impresario. Since Crosby’s death last year, the company has been in the capable hands of his longtime assistant (and founder of another opera company, in St. Louis) Richard Gaddes. This year’s group of operas, though for the first time in many years (ever?) not including a contemporary work or a Strauss opera, was of uncommon interest—not least because the company had attracted a genuine international opera “star,” Natalie Dessay, to sing Bellini’s La Sonnambula. It’s a bel canto exercise entirely foreign to Crosby’s aesthetic.
It was a most successful season, with only the new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni falling short. Giovanniis a difficult opera to put across, partly because of the temptation to radical but meaningless stagings, and partly because of the obvious casting