PERFORMING ARTS

East Village Opera Company

Opera purists, unlock your doors -- it's safe to come out. But if you missed the East Village Opera Company's high-octane show at Lisner Auditorium on Saturday, you missed a chance to hear opera in its wildest new incarnation. The New York-based band turns classical arias into headbanging rock anthems, complete with electric violins, screaming guitar solos and a pair of amped-up singers. And amazingly enough, it works.

The show got of to a desultory start, though, as if the East Villagers had all just rolled out of bed. Keyboardist Peter Kiesewalter, who founded the band with lead singer Tyley Ross, opened with works by Verdi ("Questa o Quella") and Puccini ("Che Gelida Manina"), and soon singer AnnMarie Milazzo joined Ross for the touching "Flower Duet" from Delibes' "Lakme." And though it was all pleasant enough (Ross and Milazzo both have engaging pop voices, sexed up with a lot of growling and breathiness), they didn't exactly pull out all the stops. Even the fog machine seemed to be bored.

But midway through the show, things suddenly caught fire. Guitarist Ben Butler woke up and began turning in solos that started out searing and got more intense when Pauline Kim joined him on her electric violin. Ross, who'd been floating vaguely around the stage, began to swagger in true rock style, turning in a ferocious account of the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute." The fog machine began cranking out huge clouds of the stuff (and really, what is rock without fog?) and pretty soon, the whole house was clapping along to Handel's 1743 hit "Where'er You Walk." Not something you see every day.

Did the arias take a beating? Well, sure. You're not going to hear the nuance and delicacy that you hear in a traditional operatic performance. But that didn't matter; by show's end, the crowd was on its feet. With its over-the-top emotions and soaring melodies, opera, it turns out, translates beautifully into rock.

-- Stephen Brookes

Ghostland Observatory

By this point, both punk rock and synth-pop have been retooled many times. So how about mixing them together? Well, that's also been tried more than once. But an electro-punk tradition that stretches all the way back to Suicide's 1970 live debut doesn't stop Ghostland Observatory from strutting as if it's forged something brand-new -- and Saturday night at the 9:30 club, the Texas duo's swagger was pretty convincing.

Ghostland is singer Aaron Behrens, who sometimes plays guitar, and keyboardist-producer Thomas Ross Turner, who occasionally plays drums. When both turned to their more traditional instruments, the resulting sound recalled '70s punkabilly. But when the backing was all electronic, the music veered toward '80s house music. There were also hints of the two men's pasts: Behrens's in a metal band, and Turner's as a Beatles disciple.

The group didn't entirely convey the funk of its recordings; such potentially slinky songs as "Freeheart Lover" and the vocoder-enhanced "Stranger Lover" were pushed toward, respectively, thumping rock and pounding techno. Ghostland sometimes let a groove linger past its bedtime, and the show's latter half got stuck in the dance-music mode, without the variety of the earlier part. But the duo compensated with a diverse set of encores, notably the punchy "Silver City."

Behrens and Turner's principal miscalculation was to present themselves as spectral silhouettes, obscured by smoke and backlighting. Although the former's braids and the latter's cape were visible, their faces were largely hidden. Ghostland's music isn't sufficiently distinctive for such distancing effects; a little more visibility might have humanized the set's more mechanical passages.