Count Ory

One of the funniest spectacles to be seen hereabouts in a long time is taking place on the stage of the Wilbur these nights. Count Ory and a dozen knights, all disguised as nuns, gain entrance to a palace in which a countess and her female friends have retreated with Lysistratan resolves while their husbands are off on the Crusades. The men's lecherous aims are temporarily side-tracked when one of them discovers a well-stocked wine cellar; a drunken orgy ensues until the ladies suddenly come on the scene.

Later at night, the Count, still in nun's garb, slips into the countess' bedroom and, by mistake, makes love to his own page, who has dressed himself up as a woman, while the countess observes from the sidelines.

These two scenes make up most of the second half of the evening and are well worth a trip into Boston. The specific vehicle for all this comedy is Rossini's opera Count Ory (given with only a few small cuts), and its agents are the members of the New England Opera Theatre, of which the indefatigable Boris Goldovsky is artistic director.

Ory, written in a couple of weeks in 1828, is Rossini's penultimate operatic work. He wrote one more opera the next year; and, having reached the Shakespeareanly canonical number of 37 stage works, he suddenly renounced opera writing, coincidentally at the age of 37, and never composed another stage work during the rest of his long life.

Rossini was at the height of his powers when he wrote Ory. Frankly, I am not an ardent admirer of Rossini; and this work shows many of his weaknesses, such as poverty-stricken harmony and overly square phraseology. The libretto is scarcely more than adequate--Rossini himself used to say he needed nothing better than a laundry list.

Still, in the last "official" census among scholars for the most eminent composers of all time, Rossini tied with Benjamin Britten for 59th place; and that isn't doing badly at all. Certainly, one must grant that Rossini had a great talent for melody and for using the human voice superbly (he was a fine professional singer himself). He also knew how to score well for orchestra; no other work of Rossini is orchestrated with such elegance and nuance as Ory. And the bedroom trio in Act II is inspired writing of the first order; Berlioz was quite right in proclaiming this scene absolutely the finest music in Rossini's entire oeuvre.

Ory was of great historical importance, for it fixed the French light opera style for a hundred years. It was the chief stylistic source for the Offenbach comic operas, as well as for the Gilbert & Sullivan ones. But Goldovsky has proven to anyone's satisfaction that it is more than a textbook "influence," that it is an eminently viable stage work today and does not merit the obscurity into which it has fallen, especially when the almost ubiquitous Barber of Seville is not a whit better.

Goldovsky has assembled a highly capable young company of solo singers and choristers; and some of them can even act. In this production, John McCollum is as fine a Count Ory as one could want. Ewan Harbrecht, as Countess Adele, has a small but beautifully trained voice, and tosses off all her demanding fioriture with complete case. Ronald Holgate (The Tutor) has a rich bass voice; all he needs now is to strengthen his bottom register. David Smith (Raimbaud) has a pleasingly full timbre, as has Doris Okerson (Ragonda) when she gets over her initial edginess.

Goldovsky is a staunch advocate of performing foreign operas in English. I have come around to his view-point, but only in regard to comic opera. I still feel the advantages of doing tragedy in the original are unassailable. At any rate, Ory is being done in a colloquially up-to-date and often witty rhymed English translation by Robert A. Simon. And the diction of the singers is surprisingly good.

Functioning both as stage director and conductor, Goldovsky has chosen effective blocking and byplay, and keeps the performance moving along at a good pace. His beat is clear and his cueing exemplary (though he ought to curtail his Toscaninian grunting and humming). Nevertheless, the orchestral playing is far from polished. The company can doubtless not afford a sufficient number of orchestral rehearsals; the players are quickly recruited more or less at random from the Union local and thus cannot possibly achieve a nuanced and precise ensemble. I fear nothing can be done about this shortcoming.

For the settings, Elemer Nagy installed a ring of corrugated fiber-glass flats, on each of which a colored slide is projected from the rear. There are still a few technical kinks, but this promises to be a satisfactory and economical solution. Nagy's lighting is adequate except that the night bedroom scene is far too bright.

In the past, I have always come away from a Goldovsky production with the impression of having seen a show of amazing vitality and freshness--qualities that the more venerable institutions often lack. This show is no exception.