Is there such a thing as too much Mozart? Maybe the powers-that-be at Minnesota Opera asked that when planning this season. The company’s already offered Mozart during three seasons this decade, but those operas are crowd pleasers. So maybe audiences would warm to a comic opera by a Mozart contemporary, Vicente Martin y Soler. Especially something that composer wrote in tandem with Mozart’s favorite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.
That seems the best explanation for why Minnesota Opera is currently staging Martin y Soler’s “Diana’s Garden,” a work that went head to head with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in seeking the florins of Viennese operagoers in 1787. Yet Minnesota Opera’s production — which opened Saturday at St. Paul’s Ordway Music Theater — is unlikely to inspire you to wonder where Martin y Soler has been all your life, despite the imaginative staging ideas of director Peter Rothstein and some fine singing by the leads. While a briskly paced comedy prior to intermission, the opera slows considerably, a victim of the composer seemingly having a lot more music than da Ponte did story.
Yet Minnesota Opera deserves credit for not leaning upon one more “Carmen” or “La Boheme” to flesh out its season, instead introducing audiences to something new … or rather, quite old, but relatively undiscovered. The production provides a pretty enjoyable history lesson, demonstrating that Mozart didn’t invent bright, buoyant orchestrations or overlapping monologues sung by four, five or six singers. He just did it better than anyone else. That said, Martin y Soler was a skilled tunesmith, as evidenced by several involving arias that owe much to the vocal and comical skills of the production’s impressive eight-person cast.
The story? Oh, it’s about three randy shepherds who inadvertently wander into environs controlled by Diana, the mythological goddess of the hunt. They become pawns in a contest between immortals about which is better, love or virtue, as they lust after nymphs and Diana herself. Thanks to some period props and the eye-catching costumes of Alice Fredrickson, this mythological land looks a lot like 1950s America, complete with dry martinis, bobby soxer skirts and appliqué run amok. Will one of the shepherds succeed in seducing a rifle-wielding goddess sworn to chastity? What do you think?
The best thing about Martin y Soler’s score is that it offers opportunities for each cast member to shine, and this talented ensemble takes full advantage. At the fore is Leah Partridge as a dynamic Diana with a particularly impressive upper register and a commanding stage presence, most memorably during a show-stopping extended credo of an aria in which she whips up a martini while cleaning her gun.
As the shepherd who softens her icy heart, tenor Alek Shrader sports a very distinctive quality of voice with all of the Italianate oomph one could want, yet with an arresting softness to his attacks. And what a joy to encounter a bass-baritone voice as clear and powerful as Craig Colclough’s, especially when wielded by such a gifted comic actor. And Martin y Soler’s score receives appropriately Mozartean care and energy from conductor Michael Christie and the Minnesota Opera Orchestra.
Is “Diana’s Garden” a lost gem of the operatic repertoire? No, but this production makes it a pretty enjoyable comedy. And it definitely has some voices worth hearing.
What: Minnesota Opera’s production of “Diana’s Garden”
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $200-$25, available at 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org
Capsule: Not a masterpiece, but quite a well-sung rom-com.
