E-Mail This Article to a Friend The seventh veil (continued)

MEANWHILE, Boston Lyric Opera imported a production from the defunct Opera Festival of New Jersey: Rossini’s delicious 1813 comedy ("dramma giocoso per musica"), L’Italiana in Algeri ("The Italian Woman in Algiers"). The staging, also imported from New Jersey, by the BLO’s former artistic director, Leon Major, updates the action to the 1920s. The heroine, Isabella, wears flapper dresses; members of the Bey of Algiers’s entourage listen to Carmen on a wind-up Victrola and smoke cigarettes; the Bey and his Italian captive sing a duet circling the Shubert stage on girls’ bicycles; and a snazzy Mercedes Benz makes several appearances. Martha Mann’s costumes add color and wit to Erhard Rom’s flimsy set. (It’s nice to have some singing from up on a parapet overlooking the stage, though.)

But Major relentlessly emphasizes shticks over character and storytelling. The choreographed stage movements during Rossini’s brilliant ensembles seem arbitrary. Too many directors these days don’t trust the music, so when inspiration for funny business runs low, there’s nothing left to hold one’s interest. Comedy works best when we care about the characters, when they’re essentially innocent, taking what they do seriously and not winking at or elbowing the audience. By the time Rossini’s humor has come to depend on the urgency of Isabella’s plan to rescue her captive lover, Lindoro, Major is running on empty and the production drags.

Mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella is pure musical (or situation) comedy, mugging shamelessly between double takes. But her singing wasn’t refined or dazzling enough to put me on her side. The one who won my heart — and steals the show — was her Lindoro, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, whose sweet voice and stylish vocalism project an appealing sincerity. His acting, not exactly Method, has improved since his previous BLO appearance two years ago, as Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia. The Bey is the superb bass Eric Owens, who’s put in the unenviable and embarrassing position of having to make fun of his own girth. (Several times he’s directed to fall prone on the stage, kicking his feet in a tantrum.) He’s a very good sport. There are also fine performances from baritones Christopher Hutton and Gary Lehman, mezzo Eudora Brown, and the sturdy men’s chorus (doubling as Algerians, pirates, and Italian sailors). The orchestra plays with flair, though conductor Dean Williamson’s chugging pace inhibits the teamwork. L’Italiana continues at the Shubert November 12, 14, and 16.

I HADN’T HEARD a live performance of Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust since 1986, when the Cantata Singers last did it. It’s a beautiful and oddly fascinating work, with Schumann working on his largest scale: orchestra, full chorus, and numerous soloists. Yet what I felt listening to the Cantata Singers performance on Sunday was how much it seemed like a huge chamber piece, much more intimate and personal than other musical works based on the Faust story: Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, Gounod’s Faust, and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with which James Levine just began his tenure at the BSO.

The Schumann starts out in an agitated symphonic mode, as if it were the beginning of a lost fifth symphony. But after that, we get tender love songs — lieder — and duets (which Schumann also wrote). There are massive choruses, among the greatest music in this score. But the main direction is inward, maybe because the first two parts concentrate on the meditations of a single character, Faust, who trades his soul for pleasure and a higher good. And even the solos that separate the choruses seem very private.

The first two-thirds were actually composed 10 years later than the last part. Yet the David Hoose, like Benjamin Britten on his great recording, makes the stylistic variety — the knotty complexity of the first two parts, the effortless sublimity of the "Transfiguration," the free-form floating quality of disconnected "scenes" — seamless and meaningful. Hoose had going for him a superb orchestra (concertmaster Danielle Maddon, flutist Christopher Krueger, oboist Peggy Pearson, clarinettist Bruce Creditor, and John Grimes on timpani, to name only a few), the chorus at its most glorious (both full-throated and rapturously quiet), and bass David Kravitz as the searching Faust and the mystical Dr. Marianus. Soprano Jennifer Foster also made a good impression as the betrayed Gretchen. The many vocal solos were on a more variable level of technical control.

In the spring, the Back Bay Chorale is presenting another rarely preformed Schumann choral work, Das Paradies und die Peri, a Persian fantasy based on Thomas Moore’s poem Lalla Rookh, and Emmanuel Music is doing even rarer Schumann — his only opera, Genoveva, as part of its five-year survey of Schumann’s complete chamber, piano, and vocal works. We’ll soon know a lot more about this relatively neglected and often misunderstood master — and it’s not even a Schumann anniversary ending in zero.