World-class entertainment came to the Liberty

By STEVE FORRESTER. The Daily Astorian

When a group of Astorians in 1992 began a conversation that led to restoration of the Liberty Theater some 13 years later, there was a sense of "If they build it, they will come." But none of us anticipated what happened last weekend.

The performance of the 17th- century opera The Fairy Queen to a near-capacity audience was one proof, I suppose, that if you set something in motion, you don't know where it will go. This was not the first opera in the Liberty. But it was special for many reasons.

The work has not been performed in Portland or Seattle. Conductor Keith Clark said that it's not performed in San Francisco or Los Angeles. But the quality of the performance was as good as you will find in those urban centers. And the same could be said of Sunday's festival finale.

Except for knowing the title of this 1692 opera by the Englishman Henry Purcell, it is a safe bet that perhaps five people in the audience had ever heard its music. No matter. The singing was beautiful. The local favorite Deac Guidi gets better with each performance. His voice seems to have deepened and grown more robust. The baritone Richard Zeller was magnificent, filling the acoustically resonant Liberty Theater with his sound.

Dancers from the Maddox Studio were a very special aspect of this show. They were the fairies and the monkeys. Seeing baroque dancers from a New York company was an extraordinary gift.

Every aspect of the production was finished and well rehearsed.

Sunday afternoon's Astoria Music Festival finale offered a variety of singing, dancing and orchestral works that filled the eye and delighted the ear. Mark Panuccio, who made his first Liberty appearance in the last performance before the theater's restoration, wowed the audience twice: doing Puccini's "Nessun dorma" from Turandot and matching his tenor against baritone Richard Zeller in a duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.