A Reminder: It’s the Music, Singing That Really Count

We’re lucky in Los Angeles to have a music critic as witty, as insightful and as erudite as is Martin Bernheimer. Still, his reviews contain barrages of heat-seeking criticism that can infuriate as often as they illuminate.

And many times, often times, maybe most times, Bernheimer goes too far in chastising the artists who don’t achieve his lofty, impossible standards of excellence.

In Bernheimer’s review of “Lucia di Lammermoor� (“A Not-So-Fine Madness,� Calendar, June 1), he launched especially sharp verbal missiles at the director, Andrei Serban, for infusing the production with “modernist silliness,� whatever that is. Then, in a description of the opera’s set, Bernheimer employed his usual verbal hyperbole, calling it “a grim network of massive, gunk-encrusted, picturesquely pockmarked slabs.�

Yet not until the 11th paragraph of his stinging review does the reader get one word about the singing. And only near the end does Bernheimer get around to complimenting soprano June Anderson: “She gave an astonishingly intelligent, poignant, tireless, virtuosic performance, against the odds.�

As an opera-goer, I want a critic to tell me things about a performance that I might not have noticed. I want a review to enlighten the artistic motivations driving creators and performers. I don’t need a well-written review that tucks in the most important fact about an operatic performance, the quality of the singing, almost as an afterthought.

William Dudley’s semi-abstract set was, well, unconventional. OK, silly. But I think it’s a real stretch to call it a “petrified dung heap.�

More important things were happening on stage than the awkward gyrations of the set and the often idiosyncratic movements of the singers. Donizetti’s blissful music electrified the audience while Anderson gave a fabulous performance as a very mad Lucia di Lammermoor. “Bravas� exploded spontaneously from the audience. Sure Anderson had to roll over on stage a couple of times and then wind her unsteady way down a very narrow staircase. So the singers peeked out of strange doors and often looked lost. And so what if the performers sometimes jumped unsteadily onto the “rickety toy� set? Anderson and her companions sang wonderfully through it all.

While I haven’t attended as many operas performances as Bernheimer has, as an avid opera-goer I’ve probably seen a couple hundred. This production of “Lucia� contained the finest singing performance I’ve ever heard.

And music and singing are what I, as an opera-goer, love most. Farther down on the list of concerns are the aesthetics of the set design.

We won’t keep opera alive in Los Angeles if we don’t encourage audiences to attend performances. I can understand Bernheimer wanting to lampoon a set that seemed to his eyes “a petrified dung heap.� But if he truly cares about opera and wishes to inform, perhaps expand a potential audience, he might well have found a way to describe the breathtaking sweetness of the singing as being at least as important as the “grim network� of a set.

Bernheimer’s description of the entire production as a “laff riot� might have convinced me to stay home if I hadn’t already bought tickets.

If so, I would have missed the most memorable night at the opera of my life.

I applaud Bernheimer for lighting up the sometimes dark hallways of opera but though they may be filled with sets that look like “dung heaps,� he doesn’t have to torch them.