Billy Budd.

Houston Grand Opera Music Director Patrick Summers tended to give the orchestra high-decibel free rein in Billy Budd (seen Apr. 27), strongly projecting the score's many moods and colors but often swamping the singers and their exemplary diction. The powerful voice of Manitoba bass Phillip Ens had the easiest time breaching the wall of instrumental sound, and he made a properly menacing John Claggart. Also making his HGO debut, British tenor Andrew Kennedy floated Captain Vere's high-lying lines gorgeously, and was a sympathetic dispenser of tragically blind naval justice.

HGO Studio graduate Daniel Belcher, the Novice's Friend in HGO's 1998 staging of Billy Budd opposite Bo Skovhus's protagonist, was essaying his first Billy. A boyishly hyperactive foretopman under a much-ridiculed wig (curly blond tresses that hung down his back), he sang with vigor, if less than ideal lyricism.

Britten's Melville-inspired yarn abounds in juicy supporting roles, and they were well taken by Ryan McKinny (Mr. Flint), Liam Bonner (Mr. Redburn), Jeremy Galyon (Lt. Ratcliffe), Joseph Evans (Red Whiskers), as well as, most vividly, Chad Freeburg as the tormented Novice, Philip Cutlip as the playful Donald and Gwynne Howell as tenderhearted Dansker. The men of the HGO Chorus, directed by Richard Bado, sang gorgeously whether roaring or whispering, and pantomimed the crew's sailor chores diligently.

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With direction by Neil Armfield, costumes by Carl Friedrich Oberle and lighting by Nigel Levings, BrianThomson's scenery for the Welsh National Opera and Opera Australia co-production featured an omnipresent storm-cloud backdrop and a giant hydraulically driven platform that (slowly) tilted, turned, lifted, dropped and bucked to suggest a frigate on a rough sea.