Monday's London newspapers are fairly aglow with praise for San Francisco
Opera music director Donald Runnicles's direction of Berlioz's "Les
Troyens" and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's performance at the Edinburgh
Festival.  This is a story of special interest for San Francisco where SF
Opera general manager Pamela Rosenberg used her first press conference to
announce an unprecedented single-evening, uncut production of the Berlioz
opera in 2003, with Runnicles and, likely, Hunt Lieberson as well.

After the first part of the production the week before, the Times review
was positive but mixed - "Runnicles tends to go for `fast and loud,' and at
times heedlessly drowned even soloists with the decibelage of those on show
- the woodwind, especially, could with advantage have been tamed.  Apart
from some nicely shaped, solemnly restrained moments in the first scene,
Runnicles emphasised the romantic rather than the classical side of the
Berlioz equation, and for sheer visceral excitement the performance could
scarcely be faulted."

Times critic Rodney Milnes radically changed that tone after Sunday's
Part II performance, calling it "shattering...  one of those evenings when
lightning struck" and ascribed "a truly epic breadth" to Runnicles' reading
of the score, calling the "superlative playing of the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra" extraordinary.

Milnes is rhapsodic about Runnicles' orchestral coloring: "The moment
the Trojans arrive, brass-drenched gloom hovers over everything like a
pall.  The passion of Dido and Aeneas is at once ecstatic and consuming.
At the end of the work, the stridency of war is in the offing again."
Of Hunt Lieberson's Dido, the Times says: "Through sheer vividness of
delivery, she created in concert a more three-dimensional Dido than one
often encounters on stage.  The sense of personal tragedy at the end was
heart-rending.  Her warm mezzo takes on a vibrancy in the upper reaches
that intensifies feeling to breaking point."

The Guardian equally praises the production, Runnicles and the orchestra,
and then reaches for hyperboles about Hunt Lieberman: "The greatest
performance of the role I have ever heard.  Its force derives from her
ability to generate emotion by the sparsest of means.  A simple walk across
the platform denotes majesty.  The droop of her head indicates anguish.
Phrases and words are etched with immaculate restraint until she gets to
the final scene, when Dido's cries of misery seem ripped from her.  She
delivers the final prophecy in a voice that both is and is not her own."

They should have heard her play the viola in San Francisco!

Janos Gereben/SF
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