By Mort Levine

Opera review

Witness a well-done performance of West Bay Opera’s “Faust,” perhaps the most romantically melodic of all French operas, and the tunes will follow you for weeks.

These hauntingly beautiful arias and ensembles are lasting just as this work has lasted.

The Camille Saint Saens masterpiece has had more than 3,000 performances worldwide since its inception in Paris in 1859. Despite some fading of interest in much of the 20th century, it appears now to be coming back.

For its debut at the Lucie Stern Theater in Palo Alto, West Bay’s production (Oct. 12-21) assembled an unusually talented group of principals who gave forth with some spectacular singing.

Particularly outstanding was the bass Michael Morris, a veteran of 17 previous leading (and usually villainous) roles at West Bay, who sang the satanic role. The velvety soprano vocalizing of Karen Frankenstein as the tragic heroine Marguerite convincingly makes the case that the opera only skims the surface of the Goethe work, which contains much philosophizing debate.

Faust, sung by tenor Benoit Gendron, starts out as an aging philosopher who feels all his knowledge has come down to nothing and is about to poison himself when the devil appears with a proposition: swap your soul for a return to youth and the caresses of a loving woman. The deal is done and soon he seduces village orphan Marguerite, then joins in the murder of her brother, who didn’t like the goings on.

Marguerite winds up imprisoned awaiting execution for having killed the child she has borne to Faust. He attempts to rescue her, but she’s lost her mind and refuses to go. In dying, she mounts a stairway to Paradise, rescued by the angels who thus triumph over Mephistopheles.

In the title role, Gendron displayed a pleasing tenor in the mid-ranges but strained to take some of the demanding high notes. Gendron’s Prince Valiant hairstyle seemed to get in the way and was a bit of a distraction.

By contrast, the romantic hero could well have been the murdered brother, Valentin, sung in a strong, energetic baritone voice by Michael Taylor. But then opera convention calls for the lovers to be tenors.

Conductor Henry Mollicone maintained an excellent rapport with the singers and drew from his 27 instrumentalists a full range of gorgeous sound.

Stage director Christopher Harlan managed the complex forces well, given the size constraints of the stage.

Jean-Francois Revon’s sets presented a near constant reminder of the good-and-evil theme by using a massive baroque angel and a contrasting dragonlike head whose mouth emitted smoke. Moving these around in full view of the audience showed their light weight and could well have been done behind a curtain.