Museum Monday 2025/37

 

a Serpent by Georges Antoine Baudouin, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Friday Photo 2025/37

 

random fruiting, Castro Valley, California

Museum Monday 2025/36

 

detail of The Golden Age by Sir John Edward Poynter, at the Art Institute of Chicago

Friday Photo 2025/36

 

end-of-summer grapes

Museum Monday 2025/35

 

detail of American Nude Series (Woman with Elbow on Raised Knee) by Viola Frey, now at the Oakland Museum of California

Friday Photo 2025/35

 

from a doorway to an apartment building on Lake Merritt, Oakland

Museum Monday 2025/34

 

detail of The Crowning of Mirtillo by Ferdinand Bol, now in the Legion of Honor

Mirtillo is a young shepherd disguised as a woman so he can be near his beloved Amarillis; he has won the kissing contest she suggested & she is crowning him/her victor

West Edge Opera: Wozzeck

The final opera in this year's West Edge Opera Festival was Alban Berg's Wozzeck, with Hadleigh Adams in the title role & Emma McNairy as Marie, conducted by Jonathan Khuner & directed by Elkanah Pulitzer. I am always glad for a chance to hear anything by the Second Viennese School composers, & this powerful, rich, & resonant score is always welcome, & though I had some reservations about some aspects of the production, on the whole this was a strong performance of a modernist classic.

My reservations mostly had to do with some aspects of the staging. The single set is a bank of chairs, with a clinical greenish look, as if we were in an operating theater or a lecture hall. You get a sense of surveillance, often with an educational veneer, & pedagogic techniques made omnipresent & intrusive – all very well, but the seats weren't actually used much. People rarely sat in them or watched from them, so it was more of a potential metaphor than an actual piece of stagecraft. There was a large drain in the center of the stage that was used for a number of things (the site of experiments on Wozzeck, when water is poured on him; the site of Marie's murder, when buckets of symbolic blood are emptied on her; the site of the pond in which Wozzeck dies) & it is, again, suggestive of lives going down the drain, of wasted resources & abilities, but it wasn't quite the centerpiece of the staging that I was expecting.

This brings us to the topic of what we've heard about a production before we see it & how it influences our viewing; I had been told that the drain was absolutely essential & that the use of it was the reason the opera was, against usual practice, performed with an intermission. Maybe I'm missing something (I say that sincerely) but I didn't see how its use made the intermission necessary, & though I was grateful for said intermission (the first time so I could move away from the people next to me – seriously, who brings a bag of crinkly snacks to Wozzeck? – & the second time so I could relieve the ache in my arthritic knees by standing & walking), it really does lower the dramatic temperature to have a break after only about half an hour.

We open of course with Wozzeck shaving his Captain (Spencer Hamlin), who berates him for pretty much anything he does, because he can, being a Captain & all, &  then Wozzeck goes to the Doctor (Philip Skinner) who pays him pennies (to Wozzeck, essential income) for participating in bizarre experiments, such as not urinating (the need to urinate is purely mental!). Both the Captain & the Doctor, strongly sung, very present, are absurdly, cruelly funny in their limited vision & their way of berating & controlling their social inferior. Then the Drum Major (C Michael Belle), with whom Marie will have an affair, comes on. He is plump & preening & very very pleased with himself. The absurdist, cruel-edged humor should continue. Instead, this staging has the Drum Major smack Marie around & then sexually assault her. It's a shame they went for this generic, not to say cliched, approach to this character, as it removes one element of the strange acerbic comedy of the piece by making the Drum Major just another violent abuser instead of a self-satisfied Maker of Cuckolds. Someone like him wouldn't feel that he has to abuse a woman to win her over. And why is Marie attracted to him if he treats her so brutally? Yes, that could & does happen, but that's a different story, not the one the music tells here. (I'm guessing this is a directorial choice & Belle could have provided a different vision of the character.)

The staging, though often evocative & poetic – I particularly liked having the chorus of children coming in on all fours, backs arched, like the feral animals children are, before straightening up & doing their thing – is, as I realized when discussing it with some audience members who maybe hadn't seen the opera as often as I have, perhaps a production that works best if you're already very familiar with the action. The staging of Marie's murder & the discovery of her body is particularly confusing, as she gets moved away from the drain/lake but is still supposed to be in the forest so the children can go gawp at the dead woman – you really have to know the appropriate action already for the staging here to make sense.

McNairy is a commanding presence as Marie (making it even more puzzling that she would just continue accepting the Drum Major after he assaulted her), though it's believable that her life is so emotionally impoverished that the pompous Drum Major could win her with a few earrings. The handsome Hadleigh Adams is an affecting & unusually elegant Wozzeck, though perhaps a bit recessive. That's not an inappropriate choice for a character who is so dominated & beaten down by the world around him & its cagework of social systems, but when he breaks out in violence towards Marie at the climax it's undercut because we've already seen the Drum Major behaving the same way. It becomes just more of the same.

All that aside, any chance to hear this score (led with strength by Khuner) & to see these superb performers is a pleasure. Obviously I didn't agree with all the staging, but better a production that makes you ponder why you don't like something rather than one that makes you sit back & see just what you expect to see.

West Edge Opera: David & Jonathan

For those who love baroque opera as I do this is a bit of a golden age, but even so works of the French baroque are still a bit rare, despite their great beauty, & I assume it's because staging works originally financed by an absolute monarchy are more demanding on modern budgets than those paid for by the fickle audiences of London, so I was excited to have the opportunity to see Marc-Antoine Charpentier's David & Jonathan at West Edge Opera, directed by company director Mark Streshinsky & led musically by Adam Perl.

I decided to prep by listening to the recording I was sure I had, though as I dug through the boxes & boxes & piles of CDs (if you saw the quantity you would understand why I was so sure I had a recording already) I realized that somehow I had missed this one. Of course I forthwith bought a couple of recordings, one of which came with a blu-ray of a production done in Versailles, which is musically beautiful & gorgeous to look at but frankly incoherent even for someone familiar with the Bible & Handel's Saul. So let me say right off that Streshinsky & Pearl have shaped the work into something that made sense, had dramatic & emotional flow, & was extremely moving, so well done West Edge.

The work's potential incoherence lies not only in the original libretto by the Jesuit priest François Bretonneau – as a work written by a priest for a Jesuit college, he doesn't need to spell out certain plot elements, such as the reason the Witch of Endor is startled & angry when she discovers Saul's identity – but also in its original performance circumstances, as it interlarded a spoken drama in Latin on the same subject that presumably clarified identities & relationships. To add to the confusion, Jonathan in our day is often played by a soprano, & though cross-gender casting is frequent in baroque opera, & even one of its appealing characteristics, it makes more sense to have a tenor play the role, as was done at West Edge (Aaron Sheehan was Jonathan & Derek Chester was David, & both performed with sweet sincerity & plangent beauty).

This version opens at the court of Saul, King of Israel (as everyone who knows the story knows, Saul is a plum dramatic role, intensely sung here by Matthew Worth). There is a celebration of David's victories; we start by seeing his defeat of Goliath re-enacted, to the delight of the court, by a giant puppet of the Philistine champion &, playing David, one of the four agile dancers prominently featured in this production (Marcos Vedoveto, Christopher Nachtrab, Max van der Sterre, & James Jared, & unfortunately I do not know which danced David; the choreography is by Benjamin Freedman & the puppet design by Paul Hayes). There is some initial comic by-play between the two combatants, including puppet Goliath literally knocking David over with his Big Swinging Dick, until the famous slingshot is produced & David beheads the puppet foe, to the delight of the court of Israel (& that of the West Edge audience).

This is a striking & clever opening, as it sets the tone for what we're going to see: a theatrical representation of a story that is already well known, played in a dramatic, stylish way in front of a court that is also theatrical & on display, with a cheerfully explicit sexuality. As David & Jonathan watch the battle, it is clear that they are in love with each other. This production is what would nowadays be termed joyfully queer. There is a certain element of fantasy to this approach – any dynastic power is going to demand at some point that its heir get together with someone who can produce a legitimate heir, & never in the history of royal favorites has any favorite, male or female, been greeted with the simple, clear, & genuine joy with which the court, as represented by the chorus, greets this pairing. But the approach makes basic emotional & dramatic sense & I went with it. (I heard some in the audience later criticizing what they felt were overly explicit moments in the staging but there was nothing that we haven't seen staged plenty of times with male/female couples.)

David & Jonathan go through a coupling ceremony, but David soon has to flee the court, as Saul's jealousy, suspicions, & instability grow. He goes incognito to see the Witch of Endor, who gives him an oracular & striking session (sung with smooth power by Laurel Semerdjian). I know this scene is supposed to take place at night, hidden away, but this was one of several moments when I wished the lighting had been a little brighter, if only so I could fully appreciate the wild black loops & Spanish-moss-like hangings of the Witch's outfit (Marina Polakoff designed the costumes). The Ghost of Samuel (Richard Mix) shows up in white, & gravely gives Saul the news he guesses & we already know: he has been jettisoned by Jehovah.

The helpful titles let us know that time has passed; David & Jonathan have been forced by circumstances to separate, & David has found refuge with the Philistines, now fighting for them & their king Achis (sung with easy presence by Wilford Kelly, & the queering of the story continues, as Achis is usually accompanied by handsome young men, in the shape of our dancers). Joabel (a strong Benjamin Pattison) of the Philistine court doesn't like or trust the arrangement with David, & works to incite a war that will end with the deaths of Jonathan  & Saul. From there the story unfolds with grace & sorrow, & many of the gorgeous laments beloved of the baroque period; as David is crowned King of Israel, he sobs over the loss of the man he has loved. The story & its ending are both known, but reframed here in a powerfully emotional way.

A little re-arranging, a little re-visioning, & we have a dramatically successful work, beautifully staged. This year's West Edge Festival really went from strength to strength. I'm already looking forward to next season, which will include Handel's Rinaldo.

Friday Photo 2025/34

 

a tree in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, summer 2025