NEWSDAY
February 9, 2002

PHILHARMONIC MAKES WAGNER OPPOSITES ATTRACT
By Justin Davidson

"TRISTAN UND ISOLDE" is an opera of impossibilities. Wagner's score strains the steeliest vocal cords, yet demands to be sung as a reverie and spun out in liquid lines. The opera requires the singers to be intensely physical and almost completely static: The lovers rush toward each other and then stand for hours, streaming words and channeling their fleshly desires into weightless, glimmering music. "Tristan" spans vast structural spaces with tiny moments of invention, uncoiling its colossal architecture the way Harold in the children's book erects a world with a purple crayon.

The New York Philharmonic's concert performance of "Tristan" - well, Act II, plus the Act I Prelude and Isolde's "Love-Death" - reconciled many of these clashes of delicacy and bulk. Deborah Voigt has just the huge but supple soprano needed for Isolde's weight-bearing raptures. This was her first time singing the role, yet she seemed to have it already streaming through her veins. Wagner's writing makes it a challenge to keep Isolde's love from sounding like wrath or severe distress, but Voigt sang even her potentially shrieky moments with tenderness and ease.

The advantage of performing this opera without set or pit is that it places the true protagonist - the orchestra - onstage with the nominal ones. And what an orchestra: The first note of the Prelude was an almost undetectable daub of sound, barely rising above the audience's harrumphing buzz. The orchestra demanded attention by approaching silence, and, for the rest of the evening, the most compelling moments were the sparest and most distant: the English horn solo, played by Thomas Stacy, and the offstage horns, which really did sound as though they came from a far ridge, not just in another room. Violeta Urmana, watching over the lovers as Brangaene, let her auburn voice down from an upper balcony like Rapunzel lowering her hair.

Kurt Masur, returning to the podium for the first time since his kidney transplant late last year, seemed energized by Wagner's coursing music. Daniel Barenboim conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the complete opera last fall at Carnegie Hall, a persuasive but hectoring performance in which the music spurted out in great, swelling whooshes of drama. The mellower Masur let the score spread, unforced, in intoxicating vapors, while he tended to orchestral hues and cleared spaces for a solo clarinet to comment or a cottony bass pizzicato to resonate.

The male side of the cast had a rougher time. Even a truncated "Tristan" was too much for the unhappy tenor, Stig Anderson, whose voice grew patchier and more gravelly as the evening wore on. The distinguished German bass-baritone Theo Adam brought an elder's wisdom and pathos to the betrayed King Mark, but also a creaky voice. Thomas Studebaker sang Melot, supplying the men with their only dose of strapping vigor.