Friday Photo 2022/39

 

Oakland, California: sunny September morning

Another Opening, Another Show: October 2022

There seem to be fewer COVID-related cancellations & postponements these days, but as we head into the colder months that may change. As usual observe all sensible precautions & check current masking/vaccination requirements before you buy tickets. Stay healthy, everyone!

Theatrical

TheatreFIRST, along with 3GT, presents The Music of Mothers, written & directed by Victoria Evans Erville, exploring the sometimes fraught friendship between two women, one black & one white, as they raise their sons, & that's at the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley from 7 to 23 October.

Golden Thread Productions presents the US premiere of The Language of Wild Berries by Naghmeh Samini, translated and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian, in which a married couple on a wedding anniversary trip to the sea realize a mysterious young man is shadowing them; that's at the Potrero Stage from 14 October to 6 November.

Cutting Ball Theater presents Sylvan Oswald's Pony, directed by Kieran Beccia, from 15 October to 13 November; their website currently doesn't give much information beyond that, but the playwright's website tells us that "[s]et near the location of the famous murder scene in Woyzeck, Pony is a tale of shifting gender roles and the dangers of obsessive love: the characters are '2 femme women, 1 butch woman, 1 gender nonconforming person (assigned female, passing as male), and 1 trans man'".

From 14 to 23 October, the EXIT Theater presents Waking Sam Beckett, written by & featuring Marc Gabriel as well as Christina Augello with directorial support from Patricia Hume; the show is "a Godot inspired reverie[;] Imagine Samuel Beckett’s characters burying their creator and questioning what does this mean? - do they have to keep waiting?"

If you understandably want more Beckett, you can go to the source with On Beckett, conceived & performed by Bill Irwin, at ACT's Geary Theater (now renamed the Toni Rembe Theater) from 19 to 23 October. 

New Conservatory Theater Center presents the world premiere of A Picture of Two Boys by Nick Malakhow, directed by Richard Mosqueda, about two boys trying to escape their rural Pennsylvania town & then re-uniting ten years later; the show runs 21 October through 27 November.

The Oakland Theater Project presents the world premiere of Book of Sand (A Fairytale) by Lisa Ramirez, directed by Susannah Martin, based on a short story by Borges; you can experience it from 28 October through 20 November.

Operatic

At the San Francisco Opera, both the world premiere run of John Adams's Antony & Cleopatra & a revival of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin continue into this month (respectively on 2 & 5 October & on 1, 6, 9, 11, & 14 October); Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, which SFO gave the American premiere of in 1957, joins the rotation on 15 October and continues on 18, 21, 26, & 30 October. There will also be a Community Open  House on 23 October, for a back-stage look at the Opera House (you must register in advance for the Open House).

The Great Star Theater in Chinatown is bringing in "two new traditional Chinese opera groups" on 9 & 21 - 23 October, but their website currently has no other details, like the names of the operas or the performers, but this theater is where Lou Harrison used to go to hear Chinese Opera so that might be all the information you really need.

We are fortunate to have Ars Minerva in our midst, & their latest revival of an unjustly ignored work of the baroque is Leonardo Vinci's Astianatte, based on the story of the post-Fall of Troy Andromache; company Founder & Executive Artistic Director Céline Ricci will stage the piece & Matthew Dirst will conduct from the harpsichord, & you can experience it on 21, 22, & 23 October at the ODC Theater in San Francisco.

Vocalists

On 2 October, Lieder Alive presents soprano Heidi Moss Erickson & pianist John Parr performing works by Richard Strauss, Nadia Boulanger, Anton Webern, & Kurt Erickson, along with settings of Emily Dickinson from Aaron Copland, George Walker, & Lori Laitman, & the world premiere of Tarik O’Regan's Seen and Unseen.

Ranchera music performer Aida Cuevas, with Mariachi Aztlán & special guests, will perform at the SF Jazz Center from 6 to 9 October.

Fado Singer Mariza will sing at the SF Jazz Center from 13 to 16 October.

On 23 October at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, American Bach Soloists presents bass-baritone Christian Pursell & pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg in Bachtoberfest, a celebration of German song & beer; the "song" portion of the afternoon will include pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, & Wolf, 

Orchestral

One Found Sound opens its season on 8 October at Heron Arts in San Francisco with Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks concerto, Hannah Kendall's Vera, Bartók's Divertimento for Strings, & Eleanor Alberga's Sun Warrior.

On 16 October, the San Francisco Symphony presents the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, led by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, playing Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Elgar's Cello Concerto (with soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason), Adès's The Exterminating Angel Symphony, & Debussy's La Mer.

Under the auspices of Cal Performances, Esa-Pekka Salonen & the San Francisco Symphony cross the bay on 21 October to Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley with a spooky-season concert featuring Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Liszt's Totentanz (with piano soloist Bertrand Chamayou), & the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique; at first I thought this cross-bay visit was odd, as Salonen & the Symphony are readily accessible to East Bay residents, but I've come to realize how many people are reluctant to cross over from one side of the bay to the other, & besides, it's not as if either hall (Davies or Zellerbach) is much better than the other.

Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen is very busy at Davies Hall with his San Francisco Symphony: on 29 September & 1 - 2 October, they're performing the world premiere of Trevor Weston's Push along with the Mahler 2 (with soloists Golda Schultz (soprano) & Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano)); on 7 - 9 October, you can hear the American premiere of a Symphony commission, Sun Poem by Daniel Kidane, followed by Sibelius's Luonnotar (with soprano soloist Golda Schultz), & Stravinsky's complete score for The Firebird; on 13 - 15 October, there's Nielsen's Helios Overture, the world premiere of a Symphony-commissioned work for piano & orchestra by Magnus Lindberg (with soloist Yuja Wang), & Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra; on 20 & 22 October, you can hear the Mussorgsky / Liszt / Berlioz program listed above under Cal Performances; & you can close out the month in the Halloween spirit on 27 - 29 October with HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! (with baritone soloist Christopher Purves), Bernard Herrmann's Suite from Psycho, & Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin.

The Oakland Symphony kicks off its season on 14 October at the Paramount with Ankush Kumar Bahl leading Carlos Simon's Fate Now Conquers, Chen Yi's Golden Flute (with soloist Demarre McGill), & the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique.

The Berkeley Symphony opens its season on 16 October in Zellerbach Hall as Music Director Joseph Young conducts the world premiere of Upon Daybreak by Brian Raphael Nabors, Florence Price's Violin Concerto #2 (with soloist Rachel Barton Pine), & the Tchaikovsky 5.

Music Director Ben Simon opens his final season with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra with Copland's Appalachian Spring, Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 (with soprano soloist Ann Moss), & Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (as arranged for chamber orchestra by the SFCO’s Incredible Shrinking Orchestra Project), & you can hear all this on 21 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 22 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, & 23 October at First Presbyterian in Berkeley.

On 22 October, Edwin Outwater leads the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in the world premiere of Lukas Janata's Catch  (winner of the Conservatory's Highsmith competition), Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande Suite (this piece will be conducted by David Baker), & the Brahms 4.

Music Director Dawn Harms opens the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony season on 29 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Verdi's Triumphal March from Aida, Italian arias sung by soprano Melody Moore in centennial tribute to Renata Tebaldi, Jessie Montgomery's Strum, & the Dvořák 6.

Chamber Music

On 2 October at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Symphony offers some chamber works by composers featured in its 16 October season opener: 7 Dances for Flute, Clarinet, Cello by Brian Raphael Nabors, Five Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet by Florence Price, & Tchaikovsky's String Quartet #1.

San Francisco Performances opens its new season on 7 October at Herbst Theater with pianist Garrick Ohlsson & the Apollon Musagète Quartet performing works by Bach, Dvořák, & Shostakovich.

San Francisco Performances will resume its Saturday morning lecture/performance series in Herbst Theater, featuring musicologist Robert Greenberg & the Alexander String Quartet; this year's theme is the political & social & musical upheavals of the early 20th century, & two of the five presentations will be this month: on 8 October the theme is France & the music the string quartets of Debussy & Ravel, & on 22 October the theme is Scandinavia & the music the Nielsen String Quartet 1 in G Minor & the Sibelius Voces Intimae.

On 23 September, the San Francisco Symphony presents a chamber music concert in that unchamber-like cavern, Davies Hall, featuring the Piano Trio #1 in D minor by Anton Arensky, Lera Auerbach's Piano Trio #2, Triptych: This Mirror Has Three Faces, & Mozart's Ein musikalischer Spass / A Musical Joke.

San Francisco Performances presents the Danish String Quartet performing music by Mozart, Britten, & Schumann, on 26 October in Herbst Theater.

Instrumentalists

On 2 October at Old First Concerts, pianist Jason Chiu will perform works by Bach-Busoni, Maria Szymanowska, Fanny Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade, Ravel, & Beethoven.

San Francisco Performances presents pianist András Schiff in Herbst Theater on 14 October, performing works by Mozart, Beethoven, & Schubert.

Cal Performances presents violinist Maxim Vengerov & pianist Polina Osetinskaya on 14 October in Zellerbach Hall, where they will perform pieces by Bach, Beethoven (the Kreutzer Sonata), Shostakovich (as arranged by Dreznin), & Tchaikovsky.

On 23 October at Old First Concerts, pianist Stephen Porter examines Beethoven and Buddhism: The Final Piano Sonatas, in a performance of the Sonatas 30, 31, & 32, interspersed with entries from the composer's diary, expressing his interest in Indian religion & philosophy.

On 30 October, Cal Performances presents Kristian Bezuidenhout in Hertz Hall, where he will play, on harpsichord & fortepiano. music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Clara Schumann, & Mendelssohn (there will also be a post-performance Q&A).

Early / Baroque Music

Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in Plaisirs Baroques, featuring choral works by Charpentier, Mondonville, & Telemann, with performances on 14 October at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 15 October at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Palo Alto, & 16 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.

Richard Egarr leads Philharmonia Baroque in Theodora, Handel's great oratorio of Christian martyrdom, on 20 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 21 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, & 22 - 23 October at First Church in Berkeley.

Baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, along with cellist Coleman Itzkoff & harpsichordist David Belkovski, come to Cal Performances & Hertz Hall on 23 October with The Grand Tour, as expressed in music by Biber, Bach, Veracini, Tartini, Royer, Leclair, & Corelli.

Modern / Contemporary Music

At Old First Concerts on 7 October, you can enjoy Story and Song, a program featuring soprano Winnie Nieh, mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz, & bass-baritone Sidney Chen, along with Doug Machiz on cello & Monica Chew & Chesley Mok on piano, in an all-world-premiere set of short operatic/vocal works by Davide Verotta, Monica Chew, & SA S. A. Workman.

On 7 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Nicole Paiement leads the SFCM New Music Ensemble in Rongron Chen's X Morceaux Mystérieux, David Conte's Sinfonietta, Kenji Oh's 3^(1+1) - Tsunami, & Jacques Desjardins's Songes d’une nuit d’hiver.

On 9 October at Old First Concerts, the Wooden Fish Ensemble will perform two works by Hyo-shin Na, including the world premiere of Quadrangle of Light for violin, viola, cello, and piano, along with Morton Feldman's final work, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello.

On 9 October at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, as part of the Full series programmed by Sean Carson & in conjunction with their current retrospective exhibit by Alison Knowles, UC Berkeley students from the course Creativity in Practice will perform several of Fluxus artist Knowles's event scores.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players notes that "[t]his season, we embrace the Contemporary Players’ roots as a performing presence in the museums and gallery spaces of San Francisco, by highlighting the individual artistry of our musicians in a space surrounded by contemporary visual art" & I am very happy they're doing this – I've long wondered why SFMOMA, our local flagship for the new in arts, so resolutely ignores almost all modern music – so SFCMP is leading the way on 10 October at The Lab on 16th Street in San Francisco with Image & Memory, featuring Susan Freier on violin & Stephen Harrison on cello, & including music by August Read Thomas, Gabriela Lena Frank, Sofia Gubaidulina, Libby Larsen, Julia Adolphe, & Erwin Schulhoff.

The Center for New Music schedule is more extensive for October than it has been, which I take as a sign of recovery from the pandemic, & it kicks off 1 October with a celebration of their 10th anniversary (& many happy returns!); followed on 8 October with performances & memories celebrating the life of Tom Nunn; on 9 October we have Surround Sound Salon Series #7, featuring electronic music; on 13 October Thomas Dimuzio, Scot Jenerik, & Scott Arford do their thing at Noise by Noise West 2022; on 15 October, we have Jeonghyeon Joo's The Art of Bowing, featuring Ben Sabey, featuring Joo's works for haegeum with some electronic additions from Sabey; the Nathan Clevenger Trio along with Kasey Knudsen & Crystal Pascucci perform on 22 October; & pianist Thomas Schultz closes out the month on 30 October, performing works by Bach/Busoni, Rzewski, Galina Ustvolskaya, & Hyo-shin Na.

The Other Minds Festival will be held this year on 13 - 15 October at The Great Star Theater in San Francisco; the first evening will feature performances by Raven Chacon with Guillermo Galindo, an electroacoustic violin performance by Mari Kimura, & music for voice and cello by Theresa Wong; the second evening features bassist Joëlle Léandre with vocalist Lauren Newton & sound artist Hanna Hartman, concluding with the American premiere of Other Minds Executive & Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian’s Rachet Attach It for ten percussionists & altered recordings of player piano rolls (performed by Rex Lawson); the final evening will include the world premiere of a work by Lars Petter Hagen for the piano duo of Kate Stenberg & Sarah Cahill as well as a piece for moving marimbas by Kui Dong, concluding with the American premiere of Dominic Murcott’s The Harmonic Canon, performed by the arx duo on a half-ton bell designed specifically for this work.

Strobe, the only dedicated oboe quartet in the United States, will perform Double Fantasy, a program featuring music by Britten, Ernest John Moeran, Vincent Russo, & Neal Desby, on 16 October at Old First Concerts.

Earplay will celebrate Andrew Imbrie's centennial on 17 October at Old First Concerts with his Dream Sequence, along with works by Hyo-shin Na, Tyshawn Sorey, & Fred Lerdahl.

On 21 October at Old First Concerts, Ensemble for These Times performs CelesTrios, a celebration of music for three instruments, that will include works by Elena Ruehr, Jonathan Bailey, Martinů, Yaz Lancaster, Arthur Gottschalk, Tina Davidson, & David Garner.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continues its season with Sounds Divine, an exploration of spiritual experiences through music by Eric Nathan, Ravel, TJ Anderson, Arvo Pärt, Errollyn Wallen, & Messiaen, & that's on 23 October at the Berkeley Piano Club & 24 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Jazz

The SF Jazz Center has a Thelonious Monk Festival from 5 to 10 October (the latter date is Monk's birthday): on 5 October there is a Thelonious Monk Listening Party with Robin DG Kelley (whose excellent biography of Monk I recommend highly), in conversation with SF Jazz Founder & Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline; on 6 October, students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Roots, Jazz, & American Music (RJAM) program will perform; on 7 October, Gregory Lewis plays Monk for solo organ; on 8 October, Miles Okazaki will perform Monk for solo guitar; on 9 October, pianist Edward Simon, along with unnamed special guests, will play some more Monk; & the festival closes out on 10 October with the Kenny Barron Trio.

On 21 October at the SF Jazz Center, trumpeter Marquis Hill revisits music from his decade-old debut, New Gospel.

On 30 October, the Larry Vuckovich International Trio (pianist Vuckovich, bassist Ken Okada, & drummer Akira Tana) will play standards from the Great American Songbook at the SF Jazz Center.

Dance

Alonzo King's LINES Ballet continues its 40th season with a celebration of the long collaboration between King & tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, & that's at the Yerba Buena Center on 12 - 16 October.

On 29 - 30 October in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 13 Tongues. an exploration by the group's new artistic director Cheng Tsung-lung of his childhood vision of Taipei street life, set to an eclectic score by Lim Giong.

Visual Arts

Angela Davis – Seize The Time, an examination of the construction & use of Davis's image over the decades, opens on 7 October at the Oakland Museum & runs until 11 June.

Cinematic

Several film series launch at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive this month: In Dialogue with China: Family, Memory, Resistance, and Change, featuring contemporary films from mainland China, starts on 6 October; a centennial celebration of Pier Paolo Pasolini begins on 22 October; & starting on 29 October "rare & distinctive" films from Soviet-era & post-Soviet Georgia will be shown as part of Georgian Cinema: Highlights from the BAMPFA Collection.

You could do worse than spending Halloween at Grace Cathedral watching the SF Jazz Center's presentation of the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame, with organ accompanist by Dorothy Papadakos.

Museum Monday 2022/39

 

detail of a star-shaped tile with phoenix design from thirteenth century Iran, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2022/38

 

autumn beets

Museum Monday 2022/38

 

detail of a court robe with a dragon design, from the reign of the Guangxu Emperor of China, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2022/37

 

not quite the last roses of summer: the variety is Fragrant Plum

Antony & Cleopatra at San Francisco Opera

Last Saturday I was at the San Francisco Opera for the first time since December 2019, when I saw a disappointing production of Hansel & Gretel; my first post-lockdown visit was a happier occasion: the kick-off to SFO's centennial season with the world premiere of the new John Adams opera, Antony & Cleopatra, based mostly on Shakespeare (thanks to Lisa Hirsch for inviting me along).

I was one of the many disappointed in Adams's previous opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I found simultaneously meandering & inert, &, as with Doctor Atomic, I felt the libretto, a patchwork by Peter Sellars, was a large part of the problem. I'll admit I was one of those making the easy joke that Shakespeare would be a better librettist than Sellars, but honestly, that's not necessarily the case: any one trying to set Shakespeare's plays as operas is running up against a giant mountain of marble: not only do you have a long performance/reading history of these masterpieces of the stage (to go along with the operatic masterpieces any new opera is, however consciously or unconsciously, compared against), you have the sheer power (as well as familiarity) of Shakespeare's words, which have sunk into & shaped our own language, centuries later. There are very few Shakespeare operas that I think can stand up with their source; I can muster only a cold admiration for Verdi's Otello, as I prefer the messier, grimier original to the neatly wrapped nobility of Boito's adaptation. Of the Shakespeare-based operas I've heard, my short list of true successes are Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream & Verdi's Falstaff (which, really, outpaces Merry Wives by miles). (I will also gladly concede that The Boys from Syracuse is an improvement on The Comedy of Errors.)

So I'm happy to report that Antony & Cleopatra looks likely to join that company for me; kudos to Adams, who prepared the libretto himself (with some additions from Virgil, Plutarch & other classical writers), in consultation with dramaturg Lucia Scheckner & director Elkanah Pulitzer. As was to be expected, the focus of this rich, sprawling play, with its multitude of people, places, & themes (both poetic & political), had to be narrowed. Many favorite moments are, inevitably, lost. Some story lines (particularly Enobarbus's) suffer a bit. But adjusting to that is part of taking in what is, although based on a familiar work, also an entirely new one that needs to stand independently. The central relationships among Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian (the nascent Caesar Augustus), & his sister Octavia (married off to Marc Antony in a failed attempt to cement a peace between the two rivals) are fully present. The additional texts also work well: the most prominent of these is a passage, used towards the end of the opera, from the Aeneid about the future imperial glory of Rome, given to Octavian & chorus (one of the few big choral numbers in the opera, which is an interesting change for Adams, whose earlier operas, particularly The Death of Klinghoffer, tend to be chorus-rich): it's the Leader & his multitudes, an accurate reflection of the new political order Octavian is ushering in, replacing the multiple personality cults of his Egyptian rivals with a single one of his own. The use of Dryden's translation is particularly astute, as the regularity of his rhyming couplets gives a sense of conformity & control to the passage, in contrast to the freer, more fluid blank verse of Shakespeare.

The music, of course, fills in the missing spaces, creating layers & connections of its own. At Girls of the Golden West I was initially a little surprised at how comparatively spare the music seemed. I had been used to each new score from Adams growing in complexity & lushness, so I needed to adjust my expectations (I'm not sure the approach worked that well in that piece, but the composer apparently felt the need, for whatever reason, for a change in direction). The music for Antony, full of quicksilver transformations, struck me as rich, & even grand, without being overtly, opulently, operatic. The "Roman" music tends to use more brass, & the "Egyptian" music more harps & some relatively unusual percussion, such as celesta & cimbalom, & it uses them without sounding inappropriately or unfashionably "Oriental"/exotic in sound. (After all, though the cultures & personalities are very different, it's not all contrast between the two: Rome & Egypt are both empires run by a few powerful individuals).

Some musical moments that struck me: Octavia, married to Antony & resident in Athens, is lamenting to him that she is caught between her brother & her husband & the tensions rising between them; as she sings her long, yearning lines, we hear, faintly beneath her, the Egyptian instrumentation: you can actually hear the distracted Marc Antony, longing to return to Cleopatra, not listening to her. I think repeated listening will reveal other connections & subtleties like this. In the Adams style, there are also quotations from others: in the scene in which Cleopatra interrogates the messenger who tells her Antony is now married, I heard in her initial reaction a splash of Baba the Turk's "Scorned! Abused!" from The Rake's Progress, which sets the right tone for this scene – strong, dramatic, intense, but also a bit overblown & faintly comic – particularly as the follow-up in which she quizzes him about Octavia, which gives an overtly comic edge to the entire scene, is not included in the libretto. There is also an extended use or adaptation of what sounded to me like the Rhine theme from Das Rheingold, which I believe occurs when Rome declares war on Egypt: evoking a new world, or at least a new empire, rising based on gold connected with the abundant flowing waters of a great river, gold ready to be taken, shaped, & misused for ends both creative & destructive.

There's a lot to ponder with this score, & in particular the final scene. One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare's play is that half of the titular couple dies at the end of Act IV, in a fairly messy way, leaving Cleopatra center stage in Act V for an extended, exalted farewell  to life – given the heavy use of sexual slang in this act (die, come) & her elevation above mundane realities (reflected in her physical elevation on the stage, secured in her Monument), it is pretty much a Shakespearean Liebestod, & given Wagner's influence on Adams, I was expecting the ending to be treated that way. But it's not: I don't want to suggest that the music is a let-down, or not up to the tragic occasion; it continues to be complex & beautiful, but it doesn't soar the way the end of Tristan does, or even the end of Jenůfa. Again, listening to this new work meant adjusting what I was expecting. I was looking to the wrong operatic couple: the ending is more like that of Pelleas et Melisande (& in fact in his program note Adams cites the Debussy as a model for what he was trying to do in this opera).

So what's going on with the ending, besides my need to correct my expectations & listen to the work on its own terms? Part of it may be Adams's on-going resistance to the traditional trappings of Opera – although he must surely be considered at this point one of the most important living operatic composers, his works are, in style & substance, steadily resistant to, or subversive of, the traditionally operatic (some of this resistance may be why he insists on using amplification for the musicians, & yes, he uses it here as well). A resistance to the emotionally blatant – the operatic – may be part of this feeling. His works frequently lean towards the contemplative rather than the action-packed, closer to a Bach Passion than, say, Tosca (see, for example, The Death of Klinghoffer) & he does have a history of quieter, more meditative endings (see, for example, Act III of Nixon in China, after the coloratura fireworks that end Act II). Perhaps the Wagnerian key here is to be found not in Tristan but in the quotation from Rheingold: we've sat through an epic, but no matter how deeply moved we are, these characters will be swept from the stage, & the cycle starts all over again – in short, the lack of the expected musical soaring is an astute philosophical & political comment on the inevitable course of empires, as well as individual lives, however grand. I'm sure further exposure to this opera will lead to further contemplation; the dubious statement that familiarity breeds contempt is nowhere more convincingly refuted than in Operaland. (I will also admit that the long lock-down has left me unused to sitting for extended periods as well as to late hours; physical realities were making themselves known by the end of the three & a half hour running time, & those things also play a part in how spectators feel in the end.)

The production is mostly modern dress, except for the occasional cuirass or sword. I'm not wild about this, but it seems like a sensible solution to a staging problem: you can't count on people knowing how to read ancient outfits (would a purple toga convey status to contemporary audiences the way golden epaulettes do?) & attempts at putting suchlike on modern performers risks making them look uncomfortably & unaccountably draped in sheets & towels. The Romans are mostly in black & Antony's people mostly in white, which is perhaps a bit obvious (the Romans don't come off well here in general) but is also a helpful way to tell the two sides apart, especially if you're in the farther reaches of the opera house. Cleopatra is suitably glam in sparkly evening gowns. There's sort of a semi-contemporary look to the whole production: there are frequent projections conveying Rome or Egypt, but they're in black-&-white, showing buildings (in Rome, that is; Egypt's monuments were always ancient) that postdate, sometimes by centuries, the action of the opera. There are striking stage pictures, particularly a tableau of Antony & Cleopatra & their offspring posing as Osiris & Isis: lots of gold & sparkles.

The performers are all magnificent. It's no surprise at this point that Gerald Finley brings superb empathy & commitment to the aging, flailing, grand Antony, but Amina Edris as Cleopatra will be a revelation to many: in a role written for someone else (Julie Bullock, who withdrew a few months ago because of pregnancy) she gives a glorious, star-making performance as the mercurial queen, easily holding the stage at the end for her extended death scene. (She is also, unlike the historical Cleopatra, of Egyptian descent.) (There is a moment I could do without: when she first realizes Marc Antony is dead, the music stops & she screams; I've experienced effects like this before, & though Edris does it superbly, I find moments like these take me out of the opera. I have no idea if this is written in the score or was inserted by director or performer or what. [UPDATE: see the comments for the source of the scream.]) Paul Appleby provides equal weight as the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced, fanatically & frighteningly ambitious Octavian. The rest of the cast is also excellent: Taylor Raven as Charmian, Brenton Ryan as Eros, Alfred Walker as Enobarbus (he does get one of the work's few arias, a splendid setting of the famous description of Cleopatra floating down the river: "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne. . . ."), Hadleigh Adams as Agrippa, Philip Skinner as Lepidus, Elizabeth DeShong as Octavia, Timothy Murray as Scarus, Gabrielle Beteag as Iras, & Patrick Blackwell as Maecenas. This was my first time hearing the orchestra led by new Music Director Eun Sun Kim, who did, to my ears, a masterful job of leading the large forces through a completely new & obviously complex score.

This is definitely an opera that deserves frequent hearings, & I hope a recording will be forthcoming – I guess I should work in a variant of "custom cannot stale [its] infinite variety" as I think appreciation for it will only deepen as it takes form in our minds.

(my first steps into the War Memorial Opera House in nearly three years)

Museum Monday 2022/37

 

detail of Arrival of a Portuguese Ship, one of a pair of screens from Edo-era Japan, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2022/36

 

a grove on the UC-Berkeley campus, August 2022

Museum Monday 2022/36

 

a detail of A Change of Seasons by Alison Knowles, seen at the special exhibit by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

Friday Photo 2022/35

 

summer plums