Santa Fe Takes On ‘Modern Painters’ : Opera review: The production and performance fail to give this remarkable work its due because it gets bogged down in Ruskinian conflicts about modern art.

SANTA FE, New Mexico —  At a time when Mao, Malcolm, Marilyn, Manson and even King Kong parade across our international opera stages, John Ruskin hardly seems a hip subject for a new American opera. Almost no one, except perhaps college students suffering through survey courses of Victorian literature, reads this once influential and highly peculiar art critic anymore.

Nor does anyone expect anything very hip from Santa Fe Opera, whose dutiful idea of the contemporary tends to be cumbersome German opera. Yet Saturday night, amid the turquoise and the tourists, the company unveiled an authentically daring opera, “Modern Painters,” by a young, important and certifiably hip composer from Los Angeles, David Lang.

Too little known in his hometown (the Los Angeles Philharmonic has shied away from his mordant orchestral works, such as “Eating Living Monkeys” and “International Business Machine”), Lang, who was born in 1957 and is now New York-based, writes in an aggressive, hard-driving, insistent, post-minimalist style that takes some of its energy from pop.

His music, moreover, is just the kind of feisty, irreverent art that Ruskin--who held himself up as a champion of high art and who once accused the modernist Whistler of having flung a pot of paint in the public’s face--would have simply hated. But a theme that seems to appear from time to time in Lang’s work has been the takeover of the mind by alien forces or actual aliens. And in “Modern Painters,” a title taken from Ruskin’s five-volume magnum opus, high art being held too high becomes that insidious alien force.

With an elegant, witty and moving libretto by Manuela Hoelterhoff, a former opera critic of the Wall Street Journal, “Modern Painters” demonstrates how the quest for perfect art destroyed Ruskin. Its seven scenes cleverly depict the practices--sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, obedience--that Ruskin commanded an artist to follow to create a perfect work of art.

The opera revolves around Ruskin’s weird, unconsummated marriage to his young cousin, Effie Gray. A touching wedding night scene shows Ruskin devastated by the discovery that a female body in the flesh cannot compare with the perfection of classical sculpture. An equally frustrated Effie turns, not surprisingly, to the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.

Ruskin suffers public humiliation, losing a much publicized libel suit brought by Whistler. He turns into a Victorian Humbert Humbert, obsessively pursuing a 13-year-old girl. He eventually slips into madness as he is absorbed into the black desert night of the open-air Santa Fe stage, in the most brilliant moment of Francesca Zambello’s production.

Unfortunately, by getting bogged down in Ruskinian conflicts about modern art, both the production and the performance failed to give this remarkable opera its due. Alison Chitty’s set of movable wood scaffolding, with some paint spattering, was used ingeniously to imply everything from cathedral to the bridges of Venice but turned so tiresome that one member of the audience applauded when it was momentarily covered up. Against this abstraction, Chitty dressed the singers in full Victorian costumes, which made them seem very antiquated.

The singers were all outstanding actors and all--even the marvelous Sheila Nadler, hilarious as Ruskin’s possessive mother--completely wrong. They are traditional opera singers who employ considerable vibrato and who favor a grand vocal manner that places tone above word (and few words were intelligible). Consequently, tenor Francois Le Roux offered a tragic Ruskin in the mold of the Pelleas he sang last season with Music Center Opera; soprano Ann Panagulias’ fragile Effie and Mark Thomsen’s blustery Millais were also from an antiquated vocal era.

What, of course, was needed were modern American singers, with a familiarity with pop and minimalism, and, dread the word, amplification. Using unamplified traditional opera singers also meant that the orchestra, where the real musical action of the opera takes place, had to be kept much too restrained. Lang’s orchestral writing is bold and elaborate, with rollicking brass, percolating winds, colorful synthesizer and some surprisingly tender string passages. Although conducted with fervor and precision by George Manahan, one wanted more, just as one wanted a production with a modern visual sophistication and flair that complemented, rather than fought, the music.

Possibly taking its cue from Ruskin, Santa Fe Opera included no biography of composer or librettist; they apparently didn’t fit in the thick, glossy program under the section headed “Artists.”