Susan Graham incandescent in Mozart’s ‘Lucio Silla'

The Santa Fe Opera’s first-ever mounting of Mozart’s Lucio Silla Saturday was the kind of edgy, exciting work the company can be so good at. It boasted excellent singing and acting from a powerful cast, sprightly and clean orchestral playing under the tasteful beat of Bernard Labadie and a provocative production concept that sometimes worked and sometimes flopped, but always was brave enough to take a chance.

Mozart was 16 when he wrote Lucio Silla for the 1773 Milan carnival season. It is an opera seria, the format and style that ruled 18th-century theaters all over Europe. The story is based on Plutarch’s life of Roman dictator Cornelius Sulla, and the characters deal with the choices and emotions evoked by a potentially fatal conflict. The story unfolds as inexorably as the cycle of the seasons or the dance of the planets.

In the title role, Gregory Kunde projected bluff menace mingled with the kind of foot-stomping tantrums you’d expect from a spoiled child or a thwarted adult dictator. He sang very well, but I wish he had added even more ornamentation to his arias. His tenor, the only lower male voice in a cast of two sopranos, a male soprano, and a mezzo-soprano, gave the part appropriate gravity.

Susan Graham’s Cecilio was absolutely world-class — poised, inspired by love, and capable of some of the most gorgeous soft singing I have ever heard. Not that her more bravura moments lacked anything. When Graham got going in a battle song, you wanted to enlist on the spot. She is not only an artist of splash, but of real substance. The famous aria Il tenero momento was ravishing, as was Graham’s first-act duet with Celena Shafer’s phenomenally good Giunia.

Shafer was just as good on her own. Her big arias were jaw-droppingly accurate, from the lowest notes to highest. Her coloratura was as precise as a flute, her soft notes as carrying as a chime. And her dramatic focus and physical control were like iron. This woman can sing.

Anna Christy’s Celia was a delight, especially her soft high singing and perfect staccato scales. How can something so hard sound so easy, and be projected with such confidence? Christy is also a graceful actress. Michael Maniaci was a persuasive Lucio Cinna; his male soprano has quite a distinctive sound, and he used it to fine effect. His expressive features and tightly focused eyes were major character definers.

Given opera seria’s static conventions, a modern audience might find it languid if traditionally staged. No doubt that’s why director Jonathan Kent and designers Paul Brown and Luis Carvalho chose to mingle elements ranging over thousands of years and several cultures. The concept blended audacity with the deepest self-indulgence. The odd thing was that one element worked in one context, yet was pointless in another, in this Alice-in-Wonderland theater of the absurd.

The conceits included contemporary fashion magazines torn up and strewn about, a few old tires, a wispy silver tree (had something from the last scene of Strauss’ Daphne gotten lost in ancient Rome?), giant busts of dead Roman heroes, a modern 8mm film projector whose reels turned even when nothing was being shown, and a white chair that gushed blood. (The Freudian implications are boggling.) The set consisted of two hollow, nesting, multi-piece cylinders that revolved to open up or close off scenes. They were effective, but had two drawbacks. Not all the kinks were worked out in terms of easy and noiseless movement. And since Kent staged the opera as if the center of the house counted, the round walls often blocked the view for people sitting at the far sides.

The complicated costumes were an eyeful, but must have been as heavy as original sin. The male characters wore formal, big, over-stylized Baroque court dress that made them look like a pack of cards come to life. The female characters wore immense pannier dresses, the kind the Spanish called guarda-infanta and the French grand habit. Such costumes tend to make a woman practically immobile, but Kent didn’t give his singers that luxury. They ripped around the stage, in response to the emotional storms, with skill and only a few awkward moments.

Duane Schuler’s lighting was clever, evocative, and apt, though some of the projected images made little sense — such as a field of crosses in pre-Christian Rome. Davis Berry, Kevin Gallacher, Charles Gamble, and Ronn Stewart were the splendid quartet of silent dancers-actors who observed, interpreted, and commented on the action through Peggy Hickey’s bold choreography. Their feet were bare, but they wore black suits and ties with white shirts in an over-obvious Everyman style.

Sometimes the four were perfect corollaries to the action, as when they forcefully dressed Shafer in Act II — an assault by means of clothing. At the end of the opera, when they removed the abdicated Silla’s costume to reveal a human being under all the froufrou, they were like light coming through parting clouds.

Some of the moments Hickey and Kent gave them were less fortunate — such as when Celia sang of the joys of love, and the men gradually covered the stricken, silent Giunia with red flowers they plucked at the rear of the stage. It was an interesting symbolic take on the idea of Giunia being smothered by Silla’s unwanted attentions, and also a suggestion of the forthcoming loss of her virginity. But as they buried her deeper in blossoms, her huge dress made it look like they were decorating a couch, and the audience tittered. To the dancers’, Shafer’s and Christy’s credit, everyone stayed completely in the moment and the concept.

The next performance of Lucio Silla is at 9 p.m. Wednesday. For more information and tickets, call 986-5900.