The current COC Fidelio, running until Feb. 24 at the Four Seasons Centre, is a co-production with two minor European companies, one French, the other German. Like those sitting around me at last night's performance, I am certain this is not what we envisioned for the company's new Fidelio. Nor that our splendid new house would be home to such an ill-planned production with heavy emphasis on lecturing the ignorant Canadian public.

Beethoven's only opera has its natural faults. Set in 18^th century Spain, "his Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it," conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler once stated. Through it run deep stylistic fissures that need to be skillfully bridged. Good stage direction and a co-operative music director can overcome what separates heroic drama, comic opera, and scenes more suited to oratorio than opera. In addition, sets and costumes can help to hold together such a complex piece. Or so one believes.

There are moments in the current production that achieve the hoped for heights, but they are solely produced by the strength of performance of the cast. Adrianne Pieczonka, featured as Leonore in the guise of the youth Fidelio, gave a stellar performance as the wife risking all to free her husband from wrongful imprisonment. Self-assured in her vocal presentation, Pieczonka knows how to assert herself despite an apparent lack of understanding of the role's musical needs by German guest conductor Gregor Bühl.

This conductor's stubborn adherence to a narrowly set tempo—at times bordering on frenzy—may well be behind the sudden departure just days before opening night of tenor Jon Villars, who had been pecked to sing the prisoner, Florestan, Leonore's husband. He has been replaced by Icelandic tenor Jon Ketilsson and our own Richard Margison, but more of that later.

Swedish bass Mats Almgren, who gave such a stellar performance as Hagen in the COC's Götterdämmerung, sings the role of Rocco, the jailer. This man is torn between a desire to gain riches and to be humane to the prisoners in his charge. Once again Almgren steps up to the plate to do justice to the part. His is perhaps one of the best bass voices that have graced the COC stage, and he knows how to overcome the musical foul balls thrown his way. Still, one wonders why he, as a jailer, is made to wear a white lab coat for most of the time? It looks rather out of place.

Ketilsson stepping into the role just days before opening is not to be envied. He does a fair job, but his is not a strong voice and so the orchestra at times obliterates his performance not so much through overpowering him with sound, but by allowing him no grace to develop the part. Those who will hear Margison in the final five performances may well get a better performance, that is if he manages to overcome the more than strange staging of the role.

There is a forewarning to the audience that all may not be well with this production of Beethoven's only opera, one that offers not only a happy ending, but hope for a brighter future. The audience, awaiting the curtain to rise, faces a despairing quote from Franz Kafka projected onto the fire curtain. This writer is not exactly known for uplifting messages. His work is permeated with a sense of hopelessness and black absurdity that stand in opposition to Beethoven's many symphonic works, which echo the hope expressed in Fidelio.

German set designer Andreas Wilkens offered up a claustrophobic monstrosity consisting of hundreds of wooden filing cabinets stacked high into the 'sky', while small desks and ancient phones and antique Adler typewriters suggest a late 1930s to mid-40s period. At the same time filing clerks and stenographers clutter the stage, distracting the eye away from Jaquino's wooing of Rocco's daughter Marzelline. She, in turn, sorts laundry amidst this Stasi-type bureaucratic setting, dreaming about Fidelio. Fortunately, Canadian tenor Adam Luther and soprano Virginia Hatfield, whose voices are well suited to the parts, managed to survive this misguided staging by German director Andreas Baesler. It is only when military guards appear with prisoners that one surmises that this is perhaps to be 1940s Franco Spain. But, the mind enters a state of rejection here because Franco kept few if any records of those whom he eliminated. What a strange admix, so totally contrary to history. If we are to be political, let us be reminded that Argentine's junta learned well from Franco in the case of the many "Disappeared".

Worse is to come after intermission when Florestan appears in a highly unusual underground dungeon-cum-prison-laundry depository in which two high-powered lights are shone directly into the eyes of the audience, forcing many to shield themselves with their programs. Swiss lighting designer Max Keller, said to be a man of great stature in his field, certainly failed to impress, and instead irritated a considerable number of COC patrons with this aggressive creation. Only after most of Florestan's great aria is finished does the lighting change enough to allow one to see that the prisoner is ludicrously tied to a swivel chair amidst various items of discarded clothing. Sadly, by that time, the impact of this important aria has been lost on the listener.

The evil prison governor, Don Pizarro, who orders the murder of his enemy, Florestan, is sung by bass-baritone Gidon Saks, a frequent performer on the COC stage. His voice captures the sinister intent of this character to great effect, but his strutting fails to elicit the Spanish nature of the man and instead displays a Germanic arrogance tinged with homo-eroticism in the way he wields his silver-topped walking stick-cum-dagger. When he throws off his cape he looks like a stuffed sausage because it appears that German costume designer Grabrielle Heimann is unaware that a gentleman unbuttons the last button on a well-designed suit vest.

Generally, her costumes are featureless in that they appear to be of no particular period. In the final scene, however, when in the original opera the villagers are supposed to celebrate the triumph of good over evil, they and the released prisoners are all dressed in dormouse-grey. This looks particularly comical on the females in the chorus, who remind one of Beatrice Potter's dormice here set ready to march into an Olympic stadium. The saddest part of this production, though, is that the set in this final scene, underscored by the ludicrous costumes, implies that there is no hope for mankind. Freedom is not to be found.