It took 66 years for Richard Strauss'sDaphne to reach a stage in New York. We must be grateful for belated favours. Unfortunately, the version that opened the City Opera season on Wednesday compounded frustrations.
This fragile "bucolic tragedy" contains some of the composer's most ravishing, most rapturous music. But Joseph Gregor's libretto, a mixture of lofty mythology and lowly symbolism, remains stubbornly stilted. The vocal demands border on the unreasonable and the narrative convolutions reach a daunting climax when the heroine turns into a laurel tree. For all its serious intentions, the mildly modern production directed by Stephen Lawless and designed by Ashley Martin-Davis created more problems than it solved.
The action is supposed to unravel in a classic olive grove with Olympus looming in the background. Not here. The set resembled a Jugendstil tent containing scraggly growths in Grecian pots, decorative beehives, a couple of step ladders and a treacherously curved rake on which someone had printed the text of Daphne's arborous apostrophe. Most of the earthy protagonists modelled common work clothes, though Apollo arrived in old-fashioned godly drag. At the exquisite finale, Daphne was deprived of her beloved tree and transformed into a cold, white statue. Text be damned. The pedestal was oh-so-significantly labelled "NATUR".
One might have overlooked all this silliness if the musical values had been masterly. No such luck. Although Elizabeth Futral looked lovely and floated exquisite pianissimo tones in the title role, she warmed slowly and often swallowed the words. Like many another would-be hero, Robert Chafin all but strangled on Apollo's cruel tessitura. Roger Honeywell found the challenge of his rival, Leukippos, only marginally more congenial. Strauss was not kind to tenors. Ursula Ferri had to play the maternal Gaea dressed like a matron in a Marx Brothers film and her thick mezzo-soprano turned thin when the line dipped inordinately low. John Avey swigged booze and sported a 1920s bathing suit as a meek-sounding Papa Peneios. Ask not why. In the modestly staffed pit George Manahan tended to make prose of Strauss's wondrous poetry. Poor Daphne. Tel 1 212 870 5600
