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I attended the Washington, DC performance of Lalla Roukh this weekend. I agree, mostly, with Anne Midgette's review in The Washington Post. The music in the opera is very nice and it was very well performed and it was very nice to hear it, but all in all it was just pleasant and not earth-shattering. For all the hype about "orientalism" in this opera, I didn't hear much, if any, Asian influence in the score. Perhaps that is par for the course for this type of opera. Two other like-mided operas mentioned in the program, Delibe's Lakme and Bizet's Djamileh, do not have many Asian-sounding themes either. I guess I was expecting to hear some nod toward the Eastern setting, like in Puccini's Turandot and Madama Butterfly , but this was probably composed too early in the 1800s for that. The spoken dialogue, while amusing, broke up the flow of the piece for me. I understand that spoken dialogue was part of the opera-comique productions in the late 1800s, but I'm not a big fan. There were some really nice arias, including the very first one sung by Marianne Fiset as Lalla Roukh, which had a memorable melody. I disagreed with Midgette about the singers; I thought they were uniformly good. Bernard Deletre as Baskir had many great buffa moments. The dance scenes were outsourced to the the very fine Kalanidhi Dance company and they really added a lot to the show. The brief choreography for the singers was amusing and well-done. My minor quibbles were about the intonation in the strings and horns and the lack of any scenery on the stage to better set the scene. I understand that this opera company, Opera Lafayette, is into "period performance', and I noticed the horns in particular (I am former/occasional horn player) were using old-school horns. The various crooks needed to be replaced after each phrase since there were no valves on these horns. I have to say the the horn players did a heroic job. It is pretty hard to play half steps, let alone at the pace they had to play, on a horn with no valves! There were some misses, however, and they did mar the atmosphere, briefly. I don't know if the violins were using some kind of unwieldy older instruments as well, but there were intonation problems that cropped up occasionally. In the type of small orchestra they had, someone being slightly out of tune is pretty noticeable. The "set", if you can all it that, consisted solely of a tent in the first act. I held out hope for maybe a little more set decoration in the second act but, alas, there was only a tent, albeit a different, slightly larger one. It seemed like it would have been fairly easy to add in a "Persian" rug or something else on the stage to add some color. The costumes by the New Delhi-based designer Poonam Bhagat were very detailed and colorful, but the chorus wore all black and sang from the back of the stage behind a scrim, not joining the action. With a little more effort in the set design and intonation, this opera could be the nice little cream puff that it probably was 100 years ago. As it was on Saturday, it was an enjoyable evening out with my girlfriend. We both liked the show and she even ran into a guy she knows who told us his wife was one of the dancers!

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Composers & Music / Re: Felicien David's Lalla Roukh