E-Mail This Article to a Friend Flying high The BSO’s Fliegende Holländer, the Cantata Singers’ St. John Passion, and Mark Morris’s new musicians BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Except maybe in Boston, James Levine is probably best known as an opera conductor, and he has been since his Metropolitan Opera debut 33 years ago. So of course there had to be an opera in his first season as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director. That turned out to be a concert version of Richard Wagner’s first operatic masterpiece, Der Fliegende Holländer ("The Flying Dutchman"). This was a good choice, since Wagner is a rarity in Boston — there just aren’t enough voices to go around, and there’s no decent venue for Wagnerian spectacle. And Dutchman, with its gripping story, minimal action, and big choruses, augurs well in concert. We wouldn’t see the arrival of the ghost ship or Senta leaping off a cliff, but we’d certainly hear these dramatic events in the orchestra.

And the orchestra was where most of the action was last Friday at the first of the three BSO performances. Levine’s vigorous conception emphasizes all the action, color, and visceral excitement of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler — The Sea Hawk or Captain Blood, with the roiling and coiling sea holding every character in its relentless grip. One of Levine’s most striking illuminations was the way he underlined the rhythmic and harmonic similarities between the chorus of sailors longing for their women after their long voyage and the chorus of women spinning as they wait for their men to return. The storytelling couldn’t have been more gripping, and the orchestra played with ferocious empathetic identification.

What Levine seemed less interested in was the spiritual undercurrent, the dark mystery of the cursed Dutchman condemned by God to sail around the world, never to die, until the devotion of a loyal woman saves him from his doom — an aspect of the score made more chillingly palpable by Otto Klemperer’s more deliberate tempos on his extraordinary recording (where the sense of mystery is intensified by Klemperer’s insistence on Wagner’s original 1841 version, without his 1860 addition of a sentimental major-key "transfiguration" theme at the end of both the overture and the opera). At the BSO, there wasn't much distinction made between the earthy music of the mercenary Daland and the otherworldly music of the Dutchman.

One piece of casting made this Dutchman an especially hot ticket — big-voiced Metropolitan Opera star Deborah Voigt as Senta, the heroine determined to save the Dutchman with her love. (She was the Senta on Levine’s 1994 recording.) But opening night, Voigt was nursing inflamed vocal cords and Senta was sung, heroically, without any orchestra rehearsal, by British soprano Elizabeth Byrne. It would be wonderful to report that a new star was born, but Byrne’s triumph was that she got through it without major musical mishap, though she lost control of her most important single note, the climactic high one at the end. Her voice has a glinting timbre, but it lacks anything like Voigt’s vocal opulence, and it gets shrill and wobbly as she forces it louder or higher. Some sopranos with smaller voices — Phyllis Curtin (in a memorable Sarah Caldwell production at MIT), Anja Silja on the Klemperer set — have created vivid characterizations: a Senta mesmerized by her own fantasies, haunted by her image of the Dutchman even before their first encounter. Byrne gave an honest but uninspired performance that I don’t think overcame the audience’s disappointment. She did the BSO a big favor, but I’d be very surprised if it invited her back.

In what has become a signature role, as the Dutchman, the towering Finnish baritone Juha Uusitalo was the most effective and affecting singer, stirring and sensitive, never forcing. More controversial was the young Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko, not yet 30 and oddly cast as Daland, Senta’s father, and emphasizing Daland’s weasly smarminess rather than his coarseness. (He was an extremely creepy, sinister Hagen in the Mariinsky Opera Ring Cycle I heard last summer, and he’ll be singing that role and another Wagnerian villain, the brutal Hunding, under Levine at Tanglewood this summer.) You didn’t have far to look for coarse singing — that came with German tenor Alfons Eberz, who bellowed his way through the role of Erik, Senta’s hunter boyfriend. A better tenor, Paul Groves, was a boyishly sympathetic Steersman, and he and Uusitalo were the best actors in the company. Mezzo Jane Bunnell was fine as Mary, Senta’s conventional-minded nurse. The biggest hand went to the large Tanglewood Festival Chorus, full-throated and energetic as sailors (real and spectral) and maidens. But it was Levine and the orchestra that made one ache for more Wagner — more opera — at the BSO.

The new regime at the BSO continues to extend its public profile. The Monday between the final two performances, Harvard University presented a symposium on Der fliegende Holländer co-sponsored by the Goethe Institute: six scholarly papers followed by Levine and members of the cast in a panel on on "The Flying Dutchman in Performance." Asked whether the BSO is planning more Wagner, Levine said there’d be more opera but another Wagner would be some years down the line. I guess we’ll just have to take what we can get.