Music: Sugar and Spice at the Center

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"Give me a laundry list, and I will set it to music," Rossini once bragged. Even for a fluttery comic opera, The Turk in Italy hangs upon the merest shred of a story. Composed in 1814, when Rossini was only 22, it uses the conventional husband-wife-lover triangle of opera buffa, but with an innovative twist. As in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the opera is being "written" by the poet Prosdocimo even as it unfolds onstage. The young Rossini's melodies are no match for his later, glittering The Barber of Seville, but The Turk's ensembles are as joyously light-hearted as its plot.

The New York City Opera does well enough with this engaging trifle. But despite a witty English translation by Critic Andrew Porter, the music and vocal lines — which should be at the center of operatic comedy — are often upstaged by the action. Commedia dell'arte harlequins race busily about, changing the flimsy, make-believe props. The chorus prances rather than walks. In the end, the slap stick softens the musical punch so much that the fizz almost fizzles.

Still, the bel canto bubbles to the top. Donald Gramm, as the visiting Turkish pasha who falls for Sills, projects a superbly comic, imperious air along with his bass coloratura. In one delightful scene, Gramm and Sills rattle then-cafe cups at each other in tune to a tete-a-tete of trills. Few others in the cast at tempt such demanding musical embellishments, but Baritone Alan Titus as the poet juggles the plot ingredients nicely. Beverly Sills, somewhat sharper of voice these days, is still a consummate singing actress, with an uncanny ability to focus the attention of a whole theater on a mere flutter of one hand. In the frothy first act she trips up and down the cascades of fioriture with ravishing ease, proving once again why she is the belle of bel canto.