‘La Boheme’ Changes----Dramatic or Just Tinkering?

Ian Campbell may not be superstitious, but San Diego Opera’s general director thought it would be propitious to open the company’s 25th season with a reprise of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” the opera that launched the local company in 1965. And, although San Diego Opera owns a respectable “Boheme” set--one hallowed by the 1980 performances of that larger-than-life Rodolfo, Luciano Pavarotti--Campbell decided that a new production was in order for the silver anniversary season.

Luckily, the late Stella Sharp, a former opera patron, left San Diego Opera a bequest to underwrite a new Puccini production (her husband, Fred C. Sharp, was treasurer of the San Diego Opera Guild when its 1965 “Boheme” turned the guild into a real production company). For the project, Campbell chose American designer John Conklin, who worked out the plan with the production’s British director, John Copley.

Conklin is well-known for his set designs at Santa Fe Opera and for his recent complete “Ring” cycle at San Francisco Opera.

Although he and Copley did not mount a trendy modernization of the piece, the designers decided to move the setting of the opera from Paris of the 1840s to Paris of the 1890s.

“Puccini and his librettists set the opera in the 1840s, following Murger, on whose novel (‘Scenes de la Vie de Boheme’) the opera is based. But we thought that Paris of the 1890s--the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec and the time when Puccini actually wrote the opera--would have more resonance,” Conklin said. He explained that it was more than the visual appeal of the vivid posters of Parisian night life in the Gay Nineties that drew him to this era.

Musetta, the opera’s other female character, “is a music-hall actress, so, for her big scene, the stage is filled with bright-colored theater posters and contemporary advertisements,” Conklin said. “All of the objects in the posters and advertisements symbolize the city life that both excites and traps the characters in the opera. The design also fits Copley’s directing style, since he has a wonderful sense of naturalistic detail.”

Over the last decade, critics have complained that some opera productions have become more identified by their designers and directors than by their composers, e.g. David Hockney’s “Tristan,” Franco Zefferelli’s “La Boheme” and Peter Sellars’ “Tannhauser.” Not surprisingly, Conklin does not think this is a fault.

“Hasn’t it always been that way?” he asked. “These things don’t have a Platonic existence. Doing a play or a composition ‘the way the author or composer wrote it’ sounds simple, but it doesn’t work that way. After all, we talk of Serkin’s Beethoven and Bernstein’s Mahler without apology. Someone has to be the medium for the audience, to work it through for performance. What is unfortunate is a production in which the director and designer have been so timid that the result is merely routine.”

Saturday’s San Diego Opera opening-nighters will be able to decide whether Conklin and Copley have been successful as visual and dramatic midwives or have simply redefined routine.

Return of Cardenes. The San Diego Mini-Concert Committee has announced that former San Diego Symphony concertmaster Andres Cardenes will return in March to perform the complete violin sonatas of Brahms and Schubert. Cardenes, now concertmaster for the Pittsburgh Symphony and faculty member of Carnegie-Mellon University, will be accompanied by San Diego State University pianist Karen Follingstad. The two programs, March 6 and 8, will be at La Jolla’s St. James Episcopal Church.

Another fiddler makes his mark. Frank Almond, the San Diego violinist who was a laureate of Moscow’s 1986 Tchaikovsky International Competition, made his Washington debut Jan. 7 with a recital in the Phillips Gallery. Washington Post reviewer Gordon Sparber praised Almond’s “beautifully large G-string sound, sure-fire trickery and unbelievably facile bow arm” in the recital’s bravura pieces, although he complained that the young performer’s energetic Brahms A Major Sonata lacked refinement.

Portions of this recital, as well as an interview with Almond, were broadcast on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today” program last week. Almond, who is a guest faculty member at SDSU this year, will perform in a chamber music program Feb. 3 at San Diego’s First Unitarian Church. In March, Almond will give recitals with pianist William Wolfram, his Washington accompanist, at the Cultural Center in Manila and in other Philippine cities.

Postscripts. Avant-garde mavens will not want to miss Friday’s UC San Diego performance by Richard Teitelbaum, pioneer in electronic music composition and improvisation. Teitelbaum had the honor--some might counter the dubious distinction--of introducing the Moog synthesizer to European audiences. The American composer also founded the live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome in 1966. This 8 p.m. concert in Mandeville Recital Hall will complete Teitelbaum’s two-week residency at the university. . . . Auditions for the 35th annual Young Artists Competition sponsored by the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus will be Feb. 3-4 at UCSD. The competition is open to instrumentalists and vocalists in San Diego County who are 30 or younger, and there is a junior division for instrumentalists 18 and younger. . . . If you’ve always harbored a secret desire to play the recorder, La Jolla’s Athenaeum begins an eight-week introductory course tomorrow night under the tutelage of music educator David McNair, for many years director of the Old Globe Consort. Bring your own flageolet.