E-Mail This Article to a Friend Stranger in paradise Kismet, Stefan Jackiw and Max Levinson, Collage New Music, Musica Viva BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
	Parlez-vous français? Boston Lyric Opera does Lucie, not Lucia  In Boston Lyric Opera’s joint production, with Glimmerglass Opera, of Lucie de Lammermoor (at the Shubert Theatre through November 15, with a live WGBH broadcast November 13 at 3 pm), it’s startling to find Donizetti’s put-upon Scottish maiden — better known as Lucia di Lammermoor — translated, replotted, and recomposed. Donizetti made his revision for Paris’s Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1839, four years after the premiere of Lucia, and though it was long the standard version in provincial French opera, it ‘s now a rarity. I know of no recording. The differences? If Lucia was fatally alone, Lucie is even more so. Expunged from the story is her faithful friend Alisa; in Alisa’s place is Gilbert, a cynical facilitator of bad deeds for whom all liaisons are dangerous if he has anything to do with it, and especially if there’s money to be gained. His addition underlines what a truly guy opera Lucia/Lucie is. Besides the heroine, there’s only the ladies of the chorus, who show up late in the proceedings as bystanders. Most of the music in Lucie is recognizably Lucia, however, and conducted as keenly as it was by Emmanuel Plasson, it can remind you how keenly Donizetti felt for his characters’ plights. Not only did he make beautiful passionate melodies, he was sincere! Combine these with the dramatically trim, straight-to-the mark libretto (by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaez) and you have something akin to the novelistic page turner. And there was some shrewd, canny stage direction as well — in the Mad Scene, the physical gestures were beautifully keyed to the musical details of Lucie’s step-by-step plunge into dementia. As Lucie, Tracy Dahl had at her disposal a strong but slender voice with more color in it than she may realize at present. Her singing was true, free, and agile, if somewhat edgy on high, occupying a secure middle ground between the featherweight coloraturas who were once the norm and the post–Maria Callas heavies. If her physical presence — that of a bouncy games mistress — sometimes worked against her, that wasn’t her fault. The note of piercing sadness always came through. Apart from her dramatic plight, Lucie was in good company. Baritone Gaetan Laperrière, the only native Francophone in the cast, brought an additionally plausible swagger to his big-voiced singing of Henri, Lucie’s ambitious brother. As Edgard, Yasu Nakajima sang lightly and inoffensively. Alan Schneider’s sappy tenor seemed perfect for Gilbert. Tenor Joshua Kohl (Arthur Bucklaw) and bass David M. Cushing (Raymond) gave good vocal and dramatic value. Add to the list some beautifully spare and gloomy set designs, a first-class chorus, and useful English supertitles. At one point in these last, a character did in fact declare, "I love Lucie." There was probably no way around it. BY RICHARD BUELL

Two years ago, Boston Conservatory put on an inspired version of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. This year, the same team — stage director Neil Donohoe, choreographer Michelle Chassé, conductor Reuben R. Reynolds III, set designer Peter Waldron — took on the extravagant Arabian Nights musical Kismet and again got the style and tone pitch-perfect. In 1953, Robert Wright and George Forrest, who’d already put lyrics to Grieg (Song of Norway), used Borodin for a show turning an Arthur Knoblock play into a vehicle for Alfred (Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Kate) Drake. Some of its songs are now standards ("Stranger in Paradise," "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads"), and lesser-known numbers overflow with Borodin’s gorgeous tunes and some very sophisticated (and timelier-than-ever) lyrics. "Not Since Nineveh" begins, "Baghdad, don’t underestimate Baghdad . . . Baghdad, you must investigate Baghdad," then spins a dazzling daisy chain of repeated rhymes: "Not since Nebuchadnezzar’s hanging garden went to pot,/No, not since that village near Gomorrah/Got/Too hot/For Lot./Not since Nineveh,/Not since Nineveh." "In a world to prone to be prosaic," the poor poet hero Hajj sings, "I make my own panacea:/An iota of iambic and a tittle of trochaic,/Added to a small amount of onomatopœia."

Imagine asking a young performer to fill the shoes of Alfred Drake. Ryan Mark Malyar may not yet have Drake’s charisma, but he took over the stage and held it better than Howard Keel in the film version. As Hajj’s daughter, Marsinah, Rebecca Strimaitis sang affectingly and, in a blandly conceived role, exuded personality. Weston Olson, the Caliph, has the voice and the looks any Broadway leading man would sell his soul for.

Kismet’s tongue-in-cheek charm is largely missing from the movie, but Donohoe made sure everyone’s tongue was in the right place. At one point, the chorus turned into a billowing flying carpet under Hajj. In "And This Is My Beloved" (Borodin’s famous string quartet transformed into a vocal quartet), each separated lover is trying to describe the other to someone else — the two conversations counterpointed on opposite sides of the stage. As the lovers’ voices blended, Donohoe had them cross the stage, as if they were looking for each other. At the climax of the song, they were actually standing right next to each other — only without knowing how close they were.

Every aspect of this Kismet was an object lesson in how to put on a show. I wish everyone interested in musical theater could have seen it.

Two young artists joined gifts in a Bank of America Celebrity Series Boston Marquee concert: violinist and Harvard undergrad Stefan Jackiw (20) and Boston Conservatory’s Max Levinson (33), who’ve appeared, separately, in previous Marquee events. The program included Stravinsky’s Suite italienne (movements he transcribed from Pulcinella), Richard Strauss’s bravura but shallow Violin Sonata, Mozart’s great B-flat Sonata, K.328, and two confections: a transcription of Liszt’s famous Consolation No. 3 and Saint-Saëns’s scintillating, once-inevitable Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. Levinson is good for Jackiw, whose impressive technique and sensitive musicality doesn’t yet have his partner’s nuances of color and feeling. Jackiw obviously got a kick from the Saint-Saëns (the only time he cracked a smile), but his Mozart — lovely and courteous (he held back when the piano held forth) — lacked the sustained singing line the slow movement ("sostenuto e cantabile") requests and the pure joy of the finale. Where Stravinsky teases and cajoles, Jackiw remained sober. He dedicated his first encore, Nathan Milstein’s transcription of Chopin’s C-sharp-minor Nocturne, to his late teacher, Michèle Auclair, who died last June, and for the first time, unforced heartfelt emotion rose to the surface.

Collage New Music devoted half of its Halloween program to HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!! (1979) — a set of gallows-humored nursery rhymes recited by a "chansonnier," British actor Walter Van Dyk, whose ghoulish white make-up and uninhibited double takes seemed designed to suggest Mark Morris. Music director David Hoose and the marvelous players had a blast with the toy instruments — pennywhistle, kazoo, plastic saxophone, paper bags blown up and popped, and those plastic sticks that whistle when you spin them around. Tuneful, cheeky, and not as menacing as it could be ("He’s had too much roasted goat./See him waving at his boat"), Frankenstein!! made the three well-crafted pieces on the first half of the program — by MIT’s Curtis K. Hughes, Harvard’s Elliott Gyger, and 84-year-old Andrew Imbrie — seem a little lacking in profile.

The hit of Boston Musica Viva’s "Boston Celtics" (Scottish, British, Irish, and Welsh composers) was the premiere of Welsh-born Andy Vores’s Forgot —engaging, touching, singable settings of two Seamus Heaney poems about opposite kinds of forgetfulness (of responsibility and of self), with Canadian soprano Valdine Anderson. No one objected to hearing it twice. In Mad Sweeney, which was getting its American premiere, Irish composer Frank Corcoran’s wild-man recitation from Heaney’s English rendering of the mediæval Irish tale about the mad warrior king and knotty sound world reminded me of Peter Maxwell Davies’s 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King (This was One Song for a Mad King.) All the playing, under Richard Pittman, was spectacular.