OPERA REVIEW : Fishing for Bizet’s Pearls

Everybody knows the big tunes from Bizet’s “Les Pecheurs de Perles,” which was exhumed by Opera Pacific at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday.

The hero’s dreamy love song, “Je crois entendre encore,” has enraptured operatic idols--and idolaters--from Caruso to Bjorling to Gedda and beyond. The friendship duet for the central pearl fishers, “Au fond du temple saint,” ranks high among the Greatest Hits for tenor and baritone. The soprano’s reflective cavatina, “Comme autrefois dans la nuit sombre,” offers a tantalizing preview of the haunting lyricism of Micaela’s aria in “Carmen.”

And yet, hardly anyone actually knows “Les Pecheurs de Perles.” Written when Bizet was a precocious 25, the opera is a drastically uneven adventure in quaintly perfumed, melodramatic exotica.

The level of musical inspiration veers from the sublime to the dutiful to the formulaic to the redundant. The libretto by Eugene Cormon and Michel Carre is an inadvertent hoot, predicated on silly cliches that must have seemed antiquated even in 1863.

Until recently, one could encounter “Les Pecheurs” with some regularity in French opera houses. The mighty Met, however, gave it up after only three outings in 1916. California saw tackily modest productions in 1970 in Riverside, of all places; in 1975 at the springtime bargain-basement of the San Francisco Opera; and in 1980 in Los Angeles, courtesy of the New York City Opera.

Opera Pacific doesn’t even try to take the challenge seriously as theater. The current production resembles a cartoonist’s paradise. No banality is left untouched.

Johniene Papandreas’ cheap unit-set from Fort Worth--a preposterous jumble of steps, pillars, balconies, stock icons and phony rocks--defies both style and logic. Marjorie McCown’s hand-me-down costumes focus on spangles, veils, loincloths, silly turbans and helmets, bare midriffs for the women and bare chests for even the paunchiest men.

David Gately’s clumsy stage direction concentrates on fussy traffic patterns, mock-Oriental poses and incidental overwork for a quartet of muscle-bound fakirs. The awkward action often contradicts the primitive supertitles. The best ideas in Kevin Ward’s choreographic scheme probably can be traced to a burlesque house or a men’s gym.

The only missing participants on this road to ancient Ceylon are Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour.

Still, one can find compensations. It is good to hear the hit tunes in context. The music is nothing if not pretty. And the inaugural performance was generally decent, sometimes more than that.

Marcello Giordani, a fast-rising Italian tenor who attracted attention not long ago in a Seattle “Madama Butterfly,” looked properly romantic as the unfortunately named Nadir. More important, he sang with resplendent fervor and, at the end of his aria, even managed to caress the line with stylish, exquisitely tapered head-tones. Although he did not conquer every vocal hurdle with equal finesse, his promise in this much-abused repertory is reassuring.

Janice Hall made her local debut as Leila, the ethereal Brahman priestess who succumbs to distinctly secular passions. She looked innocently seductive and, a few pinched high notes notwithstanding, sounded radiant.

James Dietsch bellowed imposingly--though sometimes unnecessarily--as Zurga, the baritonal king of the fishermen, and he modeled his ludicrous costume stoically. Kenneth Cox boomed darkly as Nourabad, the low bass cast as high priest.

The 39-voice chorus, trained by Henri Venanzi, made a mighty, resonant noise. It was so mighty and so resonant, in fact, that one suspected the evil intrusion of amplification. A trusty spokesman for Opera Pacific would admit, however, only to the use of monitor microphones that send orchestral impulses backstage.

Mark Flint conducted with brio, even when languor would have been preferable. Nearing the anticlimactic finale, he followed the hoary tradition of interpolating “O lumiere sainte,” a bloated trio that Bizet didn’t write. A company press release attributed it to Ernest Guiraud, though most scholars cite Benjamin Godard as the composer.

The fat program booklet offered nary a word on the background of the opera. It didn’t even muster the French title.

The dressy opening-night audience seemed to love everything.