Harem beauties

Abduction seemed a natural for Martin Pearlman's Boston Baroque, which closed this season with the first local version in many years. We had a good period-instrument orchestra -- John Grimes's timpani giving bite and bounce to the Turkish janissary music (which also includes tingling triangle, smashing cymbals, and birch-brushed bass drum), Christopher Krueger's singing flute and piccolo, Marc Schachman's eloquent oboe -- and a castful of strong singers. But an Abduction is harder to pull off than you think.

I continue to admire Pearlman's solution to the problem of spoken dialogue. The plot (all in the title: Belmonte, a Spanish nobleman, sneaks into Turkey to rescue Constanze, his fiancée, her feisty English maid, Blonde, and his manservant, Pedrillo, from the clutches of the Pasha Selim and his foolish-but-sadistic haremkeeper, Osmin) is so silly, and the music so rich, that for a concert performance the dialogue might just as well be omitted. Yet a series of complex, disconnected musical numbers (arias, duets, trios, a marvelous quartet, plus choruses) could make Mozart's musical pacing an undifferentiated blur. With just enough dialogue, the numbers can be "placed" and the plot kept moving. And since it's pointless to speak German to an American audience, you get the accomplished actor/director/linguist Laurence Senelick to do a lively and efficient English condensation (a job he's done before for Boston Baroque).

Senelick's English dialogue was full of contemporary diction ("the Mother of all moments") and some delectable wordplay. Osmin is a "suspicious, malicious misanthrope"; Pedrillo, searching for an acceptable euphemism, calls Constanze "the Pasha's favorite -- uh -- Favorite." Introduced to the Pasha's new architect (Belmonte), Osmin contemptuously sees no difference between a "building constructor" and a "boa constrictor." With Senelick himself coaching, the dialogue moved quickly and, juxtaposed with the sung German, actually helped express the failure between two cultures to communicate.

Feeling, in Abduction, is more important than production values. This was not one of those busy "semi-staged" concert operas. Movement was minimal but effective. How the singers raised or lowered their music stands became pointed expressions of emotion.

Boston Baroque's early instruments were here backing some high-powered non-specialist singers. As the ardent Belmonte, 29-year-old Atlanta tenor Richard Clement, happily becoming a Boston staple (BSO, Boston Lyric Opera), demonstrated a stylish Mozart lyricism and floated wherever possible some ravishing long-held notes. In the crucial non-singing role of the Pasha Selim (ancestor of Sarastro in Mozart's next -- and last -- singspiel, The Magic Flute), the ART's best actor, Will LeBow, captured the perfect balance between "Turkish" tyranny and Enlightenment wisdom. Leading bass of the San Francisco Opera Kevin Langan, like a tall, officious Franklin Pangborn with low notes (slightly lower than usual at Baroque pitch), really inhabited the role of Osmin. He has a couple of the most devilish (and beautiful) comic arias ever written, and the audience ate him up. American soprano Jane Giering-De Haan, who sings mostly in Germany, had the vocal chops (high E's) and the lively personality for spitfiery Blonde, one of opera's most high-wire soubrette roles.

Tenor Philip Creech (Pedrillo) was also charming, but 17 years of singing at the Met have sadly scarred his voice. More damaging to the opera, despite her creamy vocalism and technical control over the wide range of Constanze's music (high D's), plus the stamina to sing two of Mozart's most dangerous soprano arias without pause (and on adjacent nights), was Met soprano Sally Wolf (known worldwide for her Queen of the Night), another audience favorite. Even Joan Sutherland, who was often criticized for blandness, made the famous defiance-of-torture aria "Martern aller Arten," with its frequent changes of tempo and temper, thrilling. But Wolf, eyes glued to her score (even in the spoken dialogue), made no distinction between indignation and tenderness, despair and forgiveness. Phrase after phrase emerged with the same blank placidity. In the climactic line, "At last, death will free me," the word "Tod" ("Death") was merely one more note to pass quickly over. She sang the preceding "Traurichkeit" ("Sorrow") aria meltingly, yet there was never any connection with individual words.

Pearlman himself contributed to the problem. Abduction is full of booby traps, twists and turns for which a conductor has to be ever on the alert. The Overture and parts of the first act had signs of real life and temperament. But the remaining two acts flagged and drifted, enfeebled by sloppy ensemble work and the neutering of what should have been incisive contrasts -- both from number to number and within each number. Pearlman let Mozart down in the very places where he was deepening the stereotypes and transforming trivialities into scintillating, earthshaking art.