Opera: Anne Midgette reviews Verdi's 'Attila' at the Met

NEW YORK -- Booing has crossed the Atlantic. European audiences are happy to show their displeasure with wacky opera productions; but in New York it's generally been held to be rude -- until now, that is, since Peter Gelb's regime at the Metropolitan Opera seems to have helped the audience find its voice.

On Tuesday night, at the curtain call after the Met's first-ever production of Verdi's "Attila," the eminent stage director Pierre Audi and his production team were greeted with a chorus of hooting for his company debut. It was bewildering, since his interesting and decidedly un-radical production had done nothing to deserve it.

Perhaps the boos indicated that some in the audience would have preferred a more traditional-looking Hun, or more traditional sets. Or perhaps it just indicated a reflexive resistance to European direction -- which is unfortunate, since this production was more thoughtful than much of what you see in opera these days

There were certainly no boos for the evening's main debutant, Riccardo Muti. Not for nothing is this conductor internationally acclaimed, particularly for his understanding of Italian opera. "Attila" is early Verdi, which means lots of oompahing in the orchestral accompaniment, but Muti put oomph in the oompah, conducting with a taut, understated dynamism that showed off the music's adolescent vigor. The orchestra responded, figuratively, like a dog showing its belly to be scratched: with abject delight. It was a pleasure to listen to.

The rest of the high-profile production team may not have expected such a reception for their attempts to bring some color to a static opera about Attila the Hun. This "Attila" brought some entirely new faces to opera, like Miuccia Prada, the fashion designer. Her costumes here were a rather restrained amalgam of period furs and leathers, with the occasional distinctive (not always successful) touch: Odabella, the sole female character, sported a droopy, Marge Simpson-like beehive hairdo, while Attila's headdress was equipped with bristling feathers and its own halo of lights.

Also new to opera were the Swiss-based architects Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the sets; and they deserved applause. Contemporary set design tends to approach the stage like a white box to be filled; but Herzog & de Meuron, rather than creating a fictive space, treated the whole vast proscenium like a two-dimensional plane. The result was not unlike a sophisticated comic book: For most of the opera, a wall of dense green foliage dominated the scene, while the action took place in a small, human-scaled strip running along the bottom. It was an intriguing way to deal with the challenge of creating large sets without dwarfing the protagonists, and the two-dimensional approach was in keeping with the two-dimensionality of the characters, for all their stirring music. (Plot summary: Attila the Hun conquers Italy; falls for the beautiful Odabella, daughter of a vanquished leader; rejects overtures from Roman general Ezio; and is killed by Odabella after marrying her.)

The prologue was particularly arresting. The curtain opened on a mountain of rubble that looked presciently like post-earthquake Haiti: slabs of concrete, impaled on iron rods, retaining something of the shape of a building. There was a double irony here: that Attila, in conquering, had destroyed everything, and that a team of architect set designers had designed not a building, but the negation of one. Then this ponderous, weighty ruin was itself negated: In the second scene, the whole shambled structure rose into the air, revealing for the first time the narrow action strip at the bottom of the picture where a group of hermits inhabited their own, distinct space without any buildings at all.

If the large-scale imagery dwarfed the singers, it was only because this particular cast was eminently dwarf-able. Verdi's early operas aren't neglected only because the later ones are better; they're also really hard to sing, and it sounded that way on Tuesday night. "Attila" is full of fantastic music, but it takes incisive voices to bring out the swagger and flourish and fireworks. On Tuesday, they were merely adequate -- like Ildar Abdrazakov, who, in one of the plum bass roles in the repertory, paled among the foliage. As Ezio, Giovanni Meoni made his company debut as an eleventh-hour substitute for Carlos Alvarez; he had a gentle, soft-grained voice, but without any bite. Ramon Vargas intermittently ramped up his own soft sound as Foresto, Odabella's beloved; he sounded like he was working hard, occasionally to good effect.

Violeta Urmana had a thankless task as Odabella, a role that requires the range of a coloratura singer and the pipes of an Ethel Merman, and is therefore probably beyond the compass of any singer active at the moment. Urmana, a former mezzo who's moved up the staff, interestingly did her best in Odabella's most lyrical solo, the aria that opens Act I; in the heftier stuff, she offered a strong low but a top that sounded pale and squeezed.

The cameo role of the Roman bishop Leone brought to the stage the specter of Attilas past: Samuel Ramey, who has sung the role around the world, came as a pale and wobbly vocal shadow of his former self. This "Attila," certainly, was an opera in search of a character: Muti's dynamism and strength providing a firm foundation in the pit, Herzog & de Meuron's sets an interesting backdrop, and the voices very nearly negligible in the middle.