OPERA REVIEW : No Blood, No Guts in S.F. ‘Chenier’

SAN FRANCISCO —  Umberto Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier” is a terrible opera. I love it.

It is gushingly tuneful, blissfully simplistic, shamelessly gooey. It represents a veritable lexicon of veristic vulgarity.

Pretending to pursue the noble, patently Italianized virtues of liberte , egalite and all manner of fraternite, Giordano plays tight with emotions and loose with history. “Andrea Chenier” may not be the “garbage can of operatic refuse” so gleefully described by Ezra Pound, but it certainly doesn’t do much to stimulate the spirit or stretch the intellect.

One would like to think that the young composer was totally sincere when in 1896 he wrote his tragic ode to the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. It may be worth remembering, however, that, as the decades passed, he celebrated Mussolini’s fascism in music of comparable fervor. The man was, if nothing else, versatile.

He also was, if nothing else, a master of blood-and-guts manipulation. “Andrea Chenier” works, really works, on its own marvelously tawdry terms.

All it needs is conviction, in depth. All it needs is a passionate conductor guiding three singers equipped with leather lungs and a modicum of lyric finesse.

The current revival at the San Francisco Opera musters one appropriate singer--Aprile Millo as the self-sacrificing heroine, Maddalena--and little else. This exercise in fatuity is doomed at the top. It is an “Andrea Chenier” without an Andrea Chenier.

The charismatic title role is a dream-come-true for any tenor who can look reasonably good in tights, brood picturesquely, sigh with poetic poignancy and, at vocal-climax time, rattle the rafters. San Francisco casts of the past have boasted such names as Gigli, Martinelli, Del Monaco, Tucker, Corelli and Domingo.

Bruno Beccaria, the latest in the line, doesn’t belong in the line. His voice is too small, too dry, too dull. He forces, he wobbles and he bleats. As a heroic figure, he projects ardor worthy of the Pillsbury dough boy.

He certainly doesn’t pay much attention to his beloved, even in the shadow of the guillotine. Undaunted, Millo gives an expressively generous, stylistically informed performance in the best old-fashioned prima-donna tradition.

On Saturday, she sang with arching splendor, investing the introspective passages with a fine pianissimo shimmer and rising exultantly to every whomping cadence. Her line was gratifyingly even, from gleaming top to resonant bottom, and her characterization was as sympathetic as the musical and theatrical context would allow.

Paolo Gavanelli completed the central triumvirate as a stolid, small-scale yet blustery Carlo Gerard. In the bitter reflection of “Nemico della patria,” his bark proved worse than his bite.

With such ill-balanced principals, even a great, tempestuous conductor might have trouble pleading Giordano’s case effectively. Nello Santi, who officiated here, is no great, tempestuous conductor. He is a solid routinier , and on this occasion he seemed strangely somnolent, needlessly sentimental and, most surprising, pervasively fussy.

Many second-rate composers can benefit from gingerly restraint. Giordano, alas, is not one of them.

The flimsy, pretty-storybook production--directed by Lotfi Mansouri with designs by Wolfram Skalcki (sets) and his wife Amrei (costumes)--dates to 1975. It looks even older.

Mansouri, now head of the San Francisco Opera, provided a detailed, usually fluid action scheme that overstressed the obvious. He reduced all the aristocrats to swishing fops and ended every scene with a cinematic freeze amid an ominous crimson glow. Paula Williams, the traffic-cop on duty, did her job efficiently--so efficiently that the presumably unruly masses were allowed to threaten no one. The rabble, this time, was not roused.

The large supporting cast mustered some telling cameos. Michel Senechal, the veteran character specialist from Paris, reveled in the precious platitudes of the old Abbe. Dennis Petersen sketched a compellingly sleazy L’Incredible. Victor Ledbetter was baritonally staunch as Roucher. Scott Wilde attracted instant attention as an unusually sonorous Schmidt.

Yanyu Guo almost exerted enough charm to make one overlook the dubious political correctness of a blackface Bersi. Catherine Keen jerked the tears of Grandma Madelon with a pliant though bland contralto. Daniel Sumegi invested Mathieu with macho swagger compromised by gravelly basso tone. Hector Vasquez preened on command as Fleville, and Jacalyn Bower did what could be done with the thankless duties of the mamma soon to be morta.

Still, it was all in vain. San Francisco had staged an operatic oxymoron: an “Andrea Chenier” with no blood and no guts.