It turns out the requirements for operatic splendor are quite simple. Just put Anna Netrebko and Olga Borodina on the same stage and await developments.

In truth, the fascinating San Francisco Opera premiere of "The Tsar's Bride" on Monday night had plenty of other things going for it: Rimsky-Korsakov's opulent, melodic score, a series of strong secondary performances and a visually appealing production staged by general director Lotfi Mansouri.

But it was the presence of the two Russian divas, sharing the War Memorial Opera House stage for the first time, that made this an evening to remember. Just one display of singing this rich-hued and forceful would have been enough to make the production a success; two in a single night amounts to a minor miracle.

And Rimsky-Korsakov's 1898 opera is nothing if not a feast for singers. Written as a deliberate reversion to the classic "number" opera, it consists primarily of a series of self-contained arias and ensembles. Each of the characters -- and there are many -- gets at least one full-fledged aria (one of them inserted at the request of the original singer), and the remainder of the score is dotted with duets, choruses and popular songs of various kinds.

The effect strikes a Western listener as something of a hybrid, crossing the pageantry and historical setting of Mussorgsky's operas with the elegant classicism of Tchaikovsky.

Based on a play by Lev Alexandrovich Mey, "The Tsar's Bride" invents an explanation for a shadowy incident in the life of Ivan the Terrible, who married a commoner only to see her die unaccountably two weeks later.

In this telling, the Tsar himself has little to do with it (he appears briefly in a nonsinging role). Instead, poor Marfa has landed herself completely unawares in a romantic triangle, pursued by the brutish boyar Gryaznoy and therefore hated by his discarded mistress, Lyubasha.

But the conflicting machinations of these two villains -- which involve a love potion and poison, respectively -- take place in secrecy. All Marfa knows is that her long-awaited marriage to the handsome Ivan Sergeyevich Lykov goes awry when the Tsar decides to marry her himself; by the time the plots are sequentially confessed in a Perry Mason-style denouement, the combination of poison and emotional stress has already driven her bonkers.

Yet for an opera this packed with lurid melodrama, "The Tsar's Bride" seems inert in performance. The first act in particular is a strikingly static stretch of exposition, and the three later acts (the Opera has combined Acts 3 and 4 into one) tend to move by fits and starts.

The problem doesn't seem to be Mansouri's direction, which makes the most of the opera's darker undercurrents and inhabits Zack Brown's eye-catchingly beautiful, realistic sets (subtly lit by Thomas J. Munn) with cunning and ease.

No, it's the score itself, which pauses so frequently for a song, a dance or a splash of period color that it has a hard time building any momentum. There's a striking contrast with Verdi's "Luisa Miller," which works many of the same plot elements (love triangle, poison, an aristocrat's predatory lust) into a headlong dramatic juggernaut.

What the opera offers by way of compensation is a wealth of musical delights, shapely and expressive and, as always with Rimsky-Korsakov, scored with amazing vibrancy and inventiveness. Unfortunately, conductor Neeme Jarvi, in a belated and undistinguished company debut, made too little of these treasures, taking a prosaic approach to much of the score and often scrambling simply to maintain coordination.

But the cast, led by the two women at the top of their form, worked the requisite magic to bring out the score's inherent allure. Borodina, her velvety mezzo projecting with unearthly power and finesse, got there first -- between Lyubasha's mournful unaccompanied song and the impassioned concluding duet with Gryaznoy, Act 1 was all hers. But her Act 2 scene -- in which Lyubasha realizes how hopeless it will be to try to compete with Marfa for Gryaznoy's love and sells her body to the physician Bomelius for the poison -- was even more astounding, a wrenching musical embodiment of pure despair.

Netrebko, meanwhile, seems to have done the impossible by adding even more color, depth and range to an already prodigious vocal endowment. The throaty quality that has been slipping into her singing during the past year or two has not always sounded fully integrated with her silvery upper range.

But on Monday, it was all of a piece, with a thrillingly strong and complex tone informing fluid phrasing. In her Act 2 aria -- probably the score's single most inspired stretch of lyric writing -- and even more in her final mad scene, Netrebko turned out effortless and exquisitely expressive streams of sound.

The rest of the cast was nearly up to that exalted level. Dmitri Hvorostovsky's singing as Gryaznoy sounded a little thick and inflexible at times, but he managed to make that seem part of the characterization. Tenor Jay Hunter Morris lent bright, golden vocalism to the role of Lykov, and Kevin J. Langan was an authoritative presence as Marfa's father Sobakin, particularly in his eloquent fourth-act aria.

There were strong contributions too from Vladimir Ognovenko as Gryaznoy's comrade Malyuta, Nikolai Gassiev as Bomelius and Adler Fellows Elena Bocharova and Katia Escalera as Marfa's friend Dunyasha and her housekeeper Petrovna. Only Irina Bogacheva's squally singing as Dunyasha's mother proved a trial.


There's only one commercially available set, but it's the only one a listener needs. It's a characteristically splendid effort by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Opera (Philips) with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Olga Borodina (from the San Francisco cast) as well as Marina Shaguch (Marfa) and Evgeny Akimov (Lykov).


THE TSAR'S BRIDE: Rimsky-Korsakov's opera plays six more times through Sept. 29 at the War Memorial Opera House. Tickets: $23-$165. Call (415) 864-3330 or visit