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By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 14, 2000; Page C01

SANTA FE, N.M. –– This city is typical of the small urban disasters that the Southwest, with its vast spaces and historical contempt for urban planning, has spawned from Texas to San Diego. On the historic adobe plaza, which dates back hundreds of years to the early Spanish settlers, small curio shops selling cheap junk jostle with up-market boutiques selling pricey junk. The narrow, dusty streets are choked with cars and exhaust, parking is a chore, and locals, if they can, avoid the place altogether. The surrounding areas are worse: Wide modern streets play out like tape loops, strip mall after strip mall, burger joint after burger joint.

Until, that is, you pass the last stoplight heading north out of town, where the sad spectacle of commercial sprawl ends and, over the sharp rise of a hill that seems to confine the city like a dam holding back flood water, the desert begins. A few miles into this sea of sage, sand and pine scrub is the Santa Fe Opera, its wing-shaped roof just visible on the edge of the hill where, for more than four decades, founder and outgoing General Director John Crosby has been presenting opera of extraordinary quality and diversity.

"Our defensive perimeter exists on both sides of the highway," says Crosby, with a measured flash of droll humor.

The opera sits on some 200 acres of land Crosby purchased in the early 1950s. Nearly half a century ago, when he was a young man with a fondness for the strangely hospitable high New Mexico desert, this was a guest ranch; but in a small natural declivity, where firing pistols suggested good acoustic possibilities, Crosby saw the future of American opera. He built a theater and, with remarkable prescience, maintained the natural integrity of the surroundings even as highways and developers brutalized the city to the south.

Almost everything about Crosby's plan for the Santa Fe Opera--its development program for young singers, its carefully balanced season, its cultivation of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan audience--has turned out to be farsighted, a gift that comes into sharp focus this season as America's longest-tenured opera general director prepares to step down. His retirement this month comes close upon several more publicized recent or upcoming retirements--Peter Hemmings from the Los Angeles Opera, Lotfi Mansouri from the San Francisco--but it may be the more significant milestone.

Crosby's Santa Fe Opera has not only set the standard for summer opera in this country, but it has also loped along several horse-lengths ahead of most other companies in artistic adventurousness.

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This season, which looks on paper like a typical Santa Fe season--two popular works, a virtually unknown Rossini gem, a Strauss opera and an American premiere by Hans Werner Henze--has had uncommon flair.

The moneymaking productions that attract the largest crowds and help offset the cost of the opera's more risky ventures are being performed with a musical rigor and total commitment that one rarely finds in the large repertory opera houses of this country. Mikael Melbye's staging of Verdi's "Rigoletto," with costumes borrowed from the Washington Opera, looks nothing like last season's disastrous staging at the Kennedy Center; the Santa Fe "Rigoletto" is filled with full-bore singing (including a sharply etched performance from soprano Elizabeth Futral), smart conducting by Richard Buckley and gutsy self-confidence in the drama.

The musical rarities that have kept Santa Fe in the critical forefront since it was founded also have uncommon edge in this valedictory season.

Crosby has been a lifelong champion of the operas of Richard Strauss--almost every season has featured a Strauss entree and almost the entire Strauss canon has been performed. Although bedeviled by critics for his sometimes dry conducting style, this season Crosby is leading a chilling performance of "Elektra" that takes the breath away.

Starring soprano Mary Jane Johnson, the new "Elektra" is supported by an orchestra almost as big as the 108-strong complement first used by Strauss, testament to the potential of the newly expanded theater, rebuilt in 1998 with a full-size orchestra pit. Although it can be uneven, especially the strings, the orchestra is performing for Crosby with an almost feral intensity. Reinforced by the music's quicksilver changes in violence and luminosity, director John Copley's staging is filled with moments that cleave to the memory: Klytemnestra's entrance is blood-curdling, Elektra's embrace of her brother Orestes has an almost erotic tenderness, the death-cries of Aegisth and his queen are creepy in the extreme.

But it is a performance of Henze's "Venus and Adonis," the sixth Henze opera given its American premiere by Santa Fe, that crystallizes the contribution of Crosby over the years. Henze, a German composer in his seventies whose modernist music is dense but never obscure, has produced an old man's rumination on the perennial subjects of opera: love and jealousy, youth and beauty, the miserable gap between ideals and reality. Confronting one of the hard realities of opera head-on--that opera singers rarely look like the heroes and nymphs they impersonate--Henze enacts the story of Venus and Adonis in two separate realms: with opera singers preparing for a performance within the performance, and with dancers depicting erotic passion with pure physical abandon and sensuality. The result is an interplay of the world as we might hope it to be, and the world as we create it; and the final image, which offers the ancient consolation of Ovid/Adonis's transformation into a star, is startling in its appeal to the primitive emotions.

"A brilliant piece," says Crosby, and it is. It's also the kind of opera, by the kind of composer, that Crosby has long championed, in defiance of American musical conventions.

In its 44 years, the Santa Fe Opera has given nine world premieres; more important, though, may be the company's 39 American premieres. Critics tend to fetishize world premieres, in part because they're rare and risky, in part because they seem to represent progress and good health in the musical world. But Santa Fe's tradition of American premieres has provided a rare window on the music of Europe in a country that has become increasingly, and perhaps exceedingly, preoccupied with parochial devotion to a supposedly "American" operatic canon.

The company's import coups are legendary. In 1963 Santa Fe presented the first two acts of Alban Berg's "Lulu"--a giant obelisk in the field of 20th-century opera--for the first time in America; in 1979 it presented the full, three-act version, also an American premiere. Strauss's unknown masterpiece "Daphne" was also an American premiere, as were two operas by the Polish composer Penderecki, the six by Henze and one each by Nino Rota, Shostakovich, Aulis Sallinen, Gian Carlo Menotti and Wolfgang Rihm (and this is only a partial list).

All of this makes the Santa Fe profile look very different from those of other American companies. Minimalism, especially the operas of Philip Glass, has not had a hearing here; nor have the operas of John Adams, or any of the fashionable and flimsy "recent-history" operas based on the lives of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O.

"Musically, many American operas seem to be more or less a reinterpretation of the music of Gian Carlo Menotti or Douglas Moore or whoever we heard 50 years ago," says Crosby, mentioning two composers--both performed at Santa Fe in the 1960s--noted for their conservative, tonal idiom.

"In some cases, [new American] musical scores are constructed not with a sense of musical architecture but more as one would approach the composition of background music for a motion picture, with the setting of vocal lines somewhat arbitrary, relating musical pitches to inflections of words," he says, without naming names. "That personally leaves me forgetting the music after I've left the theater."

That goes to the heart of the failure of several recent works: the barky, chatty and mostly monotonous vocal style one heard, for example, in John Harbison's "The Great Gatsby" at New York's Metropolitan Opera last season. Santa Fe hasn't been entirely immune to this kind of work--Tobias Picker's "Emmeline," premiered in 1996 as part of a three-opera American commissioning project, had acres of forgettable vocal chatter as well. But Santa Fe has returned, again and again over the years, to exactly the sort of music that American impresarios have attempted to banish: music that is foreign, music that is complex, music that is sometimes confrontational and usually enlightening.

"I have a problem when we say American versus everything else," says Crosby. "I think we should look at the total, and ask: Who is really composing music that has some vital force in it that captures our intellect?"

There is a literary sophistication and musical intelligence in Henze's new "Venus and Adonis" that captures more than the intellect. The composer has framed his multilevel narrative with a series of madrigals, sung by shepherds in baggy-white commedia dell'arte costumes. The madrigals have a sinuous lyrical beauty; each of the historically self-conscious musical lines is inviting in itself and then combined into close, snug-fitting and piquantly dissonant harmonies. Shakespeare's original haunts the text of the work--written by Hans-Ulrich Treichel--and although Alfred Kirchner's setting places the opera in a bleak, warehouse-like backstage rehearsal space, a sense of Shakespeare's formality, explosive emotionality and latent irony pervades the work.

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On the desk of Crosby's small office are the realities of presenting operas such as "Venus and Adonis." Spreadsheets and charts with attendance figures are ready at hand, and he pores over them to put hard numbers to the obvious: The audience for new opera is small. Only about 6 percent of those who come to the Santa Fe Opera will pay to see the Henze. The rest will come for "Rigoletto" and Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"; some lucky newcomers will stumble into Rossini's "Ermione," a bel canto tragedy enlivened by driving, motoric orchestral accompaniments and stunning singing from contralto Sara Mingardo and soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska.

But Santa Fe has always built an audience for its works, rather than pandered to what the company assumed audiences may want. Culture tourists who find themselves here during the summer have a hard time not going, no matter what is playing. Last Friday, a security detail with dogs swept the theater to prepare for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's attendance at the last performance of the Henze; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is expected before the season ends on Aug. 26.

On Aug. 24, Crosby conducts the last "Elektra," and although he will return next season to conduct Strauss's "Egyptian Helen," the "Elektra" will be his final night in the pit as general director. He expects the company's devotion to the best of new opera--regardless of national provenance--to continue under his successor, Richard Gaddes. He has left the company healthy, with a new theater and a prominent international reputation; plans for the near future, including the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho's "L'amour de Loin" ("Love From Afar") in 2002, and the commissioning of a new opera from Bright Sheng, are promising.

"Opera always has two balance sheets," says Crosby, "an artistic balance sheet and a financial balance sheet. If you attend to the former, the financial will usually take care of itself." Sound advice from the dean of American opera impresarios.