Uptown Opera Singers Stage First-Rate Production

Uptown Opera Friday at The Met

“The Ballad of Baby Doe” doesn’t seem like an opera at all, least of all like one of those strident, dissonant “modern operas.” It is, though, a great show with tuneful music and as full of passion as a soap opera.

And Uptown Opera has mounted a handsome, fine-sounding production of Douglas Moore’s 1956 masterpiece.

This opera is not easy to stage or easy to cast. Elizabeth McCourt Doe Tabor (“Baby Doe”) was an authentic historical character - and a real beauty besides. Her husband, Horace Tabor, was an honest-to-gosh, self-made, back-slapping Colorado millionaire - charming, but a swaggering dandy and a braggart. Both romantic leads have a lot of difficult singing to do.

Uptown Opera’s principals, soprano Camille Kowash as Baby and baritone Robert Newman as Horace, looked and sounded great.

Kowash, a recent graduate of Boston’s New England Conservatory, is a real beauty, and she has both the vocal tenderness and the technique required for her role. She was especially fine in the florid “Silver” aria in Act I and in the pathos of her farewell to the dying Horace.

Newman, a dependable veteran with Uptown, always can be counted on for solid singing and impeccable diction all too rare in opera singers.

The most powerful scene was sung by mezzo-soprano JoAnne Bouma, another Uptown Opera regular, as Augusta, Tabor’s unbending, embittered first wife. There was stunning intensity in Bouma’s aria of self-rebuke when she could not bring herself to come to Tabor’s rescue when he and Baby were wiped out by the silver crash of 1896.

Other excellent characterizations included mezzo-soprano Karen Noble, appropriately flighty and naive as Baby’s empty-headed mother, Mama McCourt, and bass John Frankhauser as presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

The ensembles and choruses, which included a number of inexperienced student performers, were not as well-coordinated or as accurately sung in the two performances I saw Friday and Saturday as they, perhaps, will be in this week’s performances.

The sensitive conducting of Scott Rednour provided a well-paced production.

The opera’s 11 scenes range from the sumptuous interior of a posh Washington hotel to the stark exterior of Tabor’s Matchless silver mine. George Caldwell’s sets, built like a collection of huge building blocks, made the settings effective and set changes easy and, in most cases, speedy.

, DataTimes MEMO: Remaining performances of “The Ballad of Baby Doe” will be given at The Met Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday at 8. Tickets are available at G&B outlets.