The heck w/ Tim Page's negative review! My wife and I had a lot of fun last night at the Washington Opera's presentation of *The Abduction from the Seraglio* at the Kennedy Center. The opera has alternating casts and we got the one that Page panned, or at best, damned w/ faint praise: Constanze: Mary Dunleavy Blonde: Jane Gierling-De Haan Belmonte: John Osborn Pedrillo: John Daniecki Osmin: Guenter Missenhardt The Pasha Selim: Thomas Stewart Conductor: Julia Jones (substituting for Heinz Fricke, who's preparing for the Tristan which opens at the end of next month) Interestingly, Ms. Jones, whom Page takes care not to criticize too severely (saying only that, under her baton, the orchestra and chorus did not perform w/ the same precision that one would have expected from Fricke), was my main disappointment. Our seats were in Row K center of the orchestra, and the overture sounded like something coming over an AM radio. The orchestra's weakness was less of a problem when the action started, as this is an opera for its singers. Mozart wrote this at age 26 when the DaPonte operas and Magic Flute were still far in the future (in relation to Mozart's life span), but his gift for sparkling arias and spectacular ensembles, where everybody is singing something else and the music yet all seems to fit together, was already very much in evidence. A most elegant example, I thought, was the end of the second act, where Belmonte and Pedrillo are confronting their respective sweethearts w/ their suspicions that the young ladies may have succumbed to the desires of their captors and the respective ladies' reactions to those insinuations. The dialogues between the principals (Belmonte and Constanze) and between their servants (Pedrillo and Blonde), running in both cases from question, to outrage, to pleas for forgiveness, to hard-hearted refusal, to further pleas, to forgiveness (ending the act) were a tour de force of different moods rendered in song all fitting together so naturally and so pleasingly, in a way I've rarely heard in operas by other composers except perhaps Verdi (and some would add the finale to Der Rosenkavalier). Like Page, I liked the singing of Jane Giering-de Haan (Blonde), which he preferred to that of Mary Dunleavy's Constanze, which he (like me) found "piercingly loud" on occasion. Among the singers, Missenhardt, as Osmin, as much as stole the show, and the audience, in registering its applause, seemed to agree. I wasn't particularly carried away by the tenor roles of Belmonte and Pedrillo, which I realized were necessary to the story. As I think about it now, and, I suspect, someone can correct me on this, I find most of Mozart's tenors, be they the ones I heard last night, or Don Octavio, or Pamino, or the young gallants in Cosi (is there a tenor in Figaro?), wimpy. I blush to admit that, until I read a write up in the opera magazine sent to subscribers, I didn't know much (actually I didn't know anything) about the now 70-year old Thomas Stewart whose role as the Pasha Selim is a speaking one only. His life has been interesting. He's married to Evelyn Lear. As seems to be the custom at Kennedy Center New Years Eve productions, the cast, after the last curtain call, called upon the audience to join them in "Auld Lang Syne", the words of which were flashed on the surtitle board. Missenbach, here from Germany, appeared to be confused at what was going on, seeking left and right for elucidation, but my wife thinks he was just hamming it up. Unlike Page, we liked the sets, although it seemed odd that the gate to Pasha Selim's house opened to a beach. Maybe he just had a large waterfront estate. One scene, on the actual beach, had a small sailing ship floating on the horizon that, while having nothing to do w/ the action, slowly made its way from one side of the stage to the other. The opera was over at 10:45 and we lingered in the Center's Grand Foyer for the waltzes and "dancing" that were to usher in the new year. I write "dancing" in quotes because, when the dance music starts, the foyer is so crowded (maybe 5,000 people) that there isn't much room to do more than just move from side to side in time to the music. That just suits me fine, as I can't dance, and can camouflage my inability w/out making too much of a fool of myself. They gave out hats and noisemakers; I drained a tulip glass of the cheaper champagne, and by twenty minutes after midnight we were down at the center's parking level, where we could wish our daugher and son in law a happy new year over the telephone. Walter Meyer