WNO's "Force of Destiny" lets down vocal standards, and Verdi Before I talk about the Washington National Opera's new production of Verdi's "La forza del destino" ("The force of destiny"), which opened Saturday night, I ask you to think back to September, when the star soprano Deborah Voigt stepped down from the company's season-opening "Tristan und Isolde." After a conversation with WNO's artistic director, Francesca Zambello, there was a mutual sense that Voigt, although she could get through the role of Isolde, wasn't singing it at the level WNO needed. But if you're going to send the message that your company has high vocal standards, you have to be consistent. Voigt may not be an ideal Isolde, especially at this point in her career. But I promise you she can sing Isolde at least as well as, or even much better than, Giancarlo Monsalve sang Alvaro, Mark Delavan sang Carlo, and Ketevan Kemoklidze sang Preziosilla in "La forza del destino" Saturday. I might have actually preferred hearing Voigt sing Preziosilla. To be sure, the role is completely outside her voice type, but at least she could have hit the right notes. I'm sure I'll be hearing from audience members who were outraged by Zambello's production. Let me say clearly, then, that I had no problem with the production. Yes, it's updated to the present. Yes, the inn scene is set in a raunchy bar, complete with pole dancers, with Preziosilla as a kind of Madonna type (opera's pop references tend to skew a couple of decades old). Of course this is deliberately provocative, but it's also a way to give some dramatic muscle to crowd scenes that most directors are hard put to bring to life. In a later scene, the crowd taunted and abused prisoners of war who were led on wearing Abu-Ghraib-style black blindfolds, which was certainly a telling way to convey the chorus's continued and perverse obsession with war in this opera ("Evviva la guerra!"). Profound it's not, but it does no violence to Verdi's concept, and as reinterpretations go, it's pretty innocuous. And there were some nice ideas. The monastery was in a run-down inner-city area, with an image of an angel succoring an anonymous saint painted among the graffiti on a corrugated metal gate (the sets are by Peter J. Davison). The gate lifted, in the final scene of the first act, to reveal stacks of shipping containers between which the monks lay across the floor, their voices rising softly from their white-robed forms, like the smoke from dry ice; and Adina Aaron, as Leonora, did some of her finest singing of the night. The single thing that bothered me most about the production was the overture: both having the actors pantomime rudimentary action while it played and choosing to perform it after the first scene, rather than at the start of the evening. However, there are years of precedent for playing the overture in this position; the Metropolitan Opera, for one, often did it this way, from the 1950s on. Verdi himself tinkered restlessly with the dramatic flow and scene order of this ostensibly problematic opera, and producers have followed his lead virtually ever since. Usually I like to hear as much of the opera as possible, but the advantage of WNO's having chosen to stage one of the shorter versions is that one didn't have to sit through any more of it.