Classical Music : Houston finds a hero for our times

OPERA needs heroes, preferably flawed to give them texture, but essentially with a largesse of spirit to fill out the grand frame of sung emotions. And the challenge of late-20th-century opera has been to find late-20th-century heroes. In Europe we've tended to duck the issue, relegating narratives to the historic past or the fantastic future. But in America, where people aren't so squeamish about the mythologising of recent experience, pieces like John Adams's Nixon in China have very successfully recreated straight-off-the-newsreels characters on a scale fit for singing. And now a new, unlikely, controversial but profoundly fascinating hero along those lines makes it to the stage with the world premiere of Harvey Milk at the Houston Grand Opera.

Houston is one of the main forcing houses of American opera, responsible for Nixon in China, Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place and Philip Glass's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (nobody's perfect), as well as Michael Tippett's New Year, which premiered there before it came to Glyndebourne. So it has a culture of innovation and experiment to cushion the blow of Harvey Milk. But Houston is in Texas, home of cowboys, oil execs and southern fundamentalism - none of which are obviously congenial to an opera which polemically and joyously promotes gay rights. If such an opera has ever been written before, it has certainly never been commissioned and staged by a major company. So Harvey Milk is at the very least a cultural landmark; and its subject is the landmark event that finally brought homosexual equality into the broader civil-rights agenda.

Harvey Milk was real: a white, middle-class, closeted gay stockbroker who in mid-life found the courage to swap Wall Street, New York, for Castro Street, San Francisco, and to campaign for public office on an openly gay ticket. Against all the odds he won, achieving enormous popularity and becoming the Martin Luther King of American gays - and was accordingly assassinated in November 1978.News of his death brought every minority group in San Francisco onto the streets in protest.

Harvey Milk is as much about what was happening on the streets as about Milk himself. This is good for the chorus (plenty of big ensemble spectacle), less good for dramatic tension (not enough focused, one-to-one conflict). But there is the compensating tension of actual people, still in some cases alive, and actual events, still in common memory, translated into art. Milk's lover, who "appears" on stage, was in the first-night audience (the current mayor of San Francisco, who also appears, declined to come). And I can't help wondering what Milk himself would say about the way the librettist Michael Korie reinvents him, packaging his whole life as a grooming exercise for martyrdom. The hand, perhaps, is overplayed here.

But Korie does fulfill the difficult double-requirement of giving Harvey scale and depth. Magnificently undertaken by the baritone Robert Orth as a study of messianic dynamism taking root in the soul of an ordinary man, Harvey's hero-status is more than comic strip. It comes fleshed out with the unflattering truth that he was an operator, an activist who got high on activism. And Korie gives space to the opposition: the assassin who (with reason) sees the gay-rights movement as a threat to traditional values is in fact the tenor lead, with attractive music beautifully sung by Ray Very.

But even so, the loyalty of the piece is clear - and it's from the polemic that the director Christopher Alden gathers the drive and energy of his staging. The pity is that not much energy comes from the music. Stewart Wallace's score is a soft amalgam of off-Broadway lyricism, minimalist vamps and cautious European high art, vaguely Brittenesque. Slow to get going, it blossoms into big numbers that never quite take off. And it doesn't know when to stop after Harvey's death. I came out thinking - like most of America - that Harvey Milk is truly a significant event in cultural terms. A piece that, curiously, lends itself to lyric theatre and that needed writing. But by someone with more imagination, better timing and a sharp-er pen. Like Stephen Sondheim?

Back in London, Covent Garden has revived its sumptuous John Schlesinger production of Der Rosenkavalier with three singers who are the world's choice Rosenkavalier package: Felicity Lott (the Marschallin), Anne Sofie von Otter (Octavian) and Barbara Bonney (Sophie). Von Otter missed the first night through illness, and although she was back for the second she wasn't at full strength: her light, normally lovely lyric mezzo failed to penetrate the orchestra, especially at higher pitches. Lott was gracious but a little cool. Only Bonney shone, taking her role beyond its standard porcelain cuteness. Nor was it a great night for the orchestra, who made a scruffily unpolished sound for Andrew Davis: a distinguished Straussian at Glyndebourne with the LPO but not getting what he wanted here. Bad chemistry, I guess.

`Rosenkavalier': ROH, WC2, 071-304 4000,continues Wed.