Music Review: ‘Prima Donna,’ by Rufus Wainwright, Makes American Debut

The aim seems to have been identical in Mr. Wainwright’s initial opera, “Prima Donna,” that had a American premiere on Sunday afternoon during a Brooklyn Academy of Music as partial of New York City Opera’s shortened season. The story of an aging diva shuffling around her grand, unfair Paris unit as she skeleton her comeback, it is an try to make a unconditional lyricism of Gounod and Puccini sing to us in a uninformed way.

But “Prima Donna” is so bustling being a loyalty that it has lost to be an opera. It is a tasteful, well-intentioned, eventually obscure failure: obscure because, after years of growth and performances in Manchester, England; London; Melbourne, Australia; and Toronto, no one has seen fit to give it a plot.

Amid a sensuous strings and blazing horns, here conducted by Jayce Ogren, that exclaim in repeated unanimity during each uncover of emotion, a few sum eventually emerge. Surrounded by a pleasantly lassie and an earnest butler, a venerable soprano Régine Saint Laurent forever dithers about either to sing a pretension purpose in an uncover called “Aliénor d’Aquitaine,” in that she done her final opening 6 years before.

It was apparently a dire night, yet we are never told accurately why. She competence have depressed in adore with her co-star, who coincidentally resembles Andre, a immature publisher who has come to talk her. Intergenerational lust froth quickly before it is suggested that a publisher has a fiancée, named, in a lovable curtsy to Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier,” Sophie. Régine, after she imagines singing conflicting Andre in a long, prolonged theatre from “Aliénor,” decides to retire for good.

This anticlimactic finish competence have been some-more effective if Régine’s song had been stronger and some-more varied, though it is frustratingly prosy throughout. In all of her arias a accompaniment is low and plush, with a outspoken line rising generically above.

The purpose sits easily in a musical center of Melody Moore’s clear, perspicacious voice. But while Ms. Moore is a sweet, supportive artist, she doesn’t have a spirit or participation to authority a stage. And she doesn’t have most to gnaw on in a show, destined willingly here by Tim Albery, in that she plays maybe a blandest diva in operatic history.

The soprano Kathryn Guthrie Demos, as a maid, and a effort Taylor Stayton, as Andre, are stretched by rude high outspoken lines. The baritone Randal Turner hams it adult as a vain butler, who angrily leaves Régine nearby a end.

That scene, like a rest of “Prima Donna,” is sung in French, an aspect that Mr. Wainwright bizarrely insisted on, during a responsibility of losing as a co-operator a Metropolitan Opera, that creatively consecrated a work and wanted it in English. It is a choice that speaks for “Prima Donna” as a whole: stylish and pointless.

“Prima Donna” will be achieved on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday during a Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, during Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org, nycopera.com.