San Francisco Opera: Rigoletto

Yesterday was my first visit to the San Francisco Opera this season, midway through the run of Rigoletto, a magnificent production of this magnificent opera. It's wonderful to see a standard war-horse of an opera (meaning one considered sure-fire at the box office) not being taken for granted but instead lavished with care & consideration, reminding us why it became a classic in the first place. Conductor Eun Sun Kim produced sounds that were lush yet propulsive; the soloists & chorus were fully committed to their roles, & included sharp stage business I didn't remember from previous productions; the singers held notes just a bit longer, pianissimos floated just a bit more ethereally, than expected; so much beauty & skill to examine the complexities & highlight the sordid tragedies of this work.

This production uses the de Chirico-inspired sets (designed by Michael Yeargan) familiar from previous stagings here of Rigoletto; this was a good as well as probably economical decision, as the sets are striking & effective, setting the stage, literally, for this world that is beautiful & empty. The buildings, often an undifferentiated black, lean in at odd angles, like a German Expressionist film set; the windows glow with strange bright colors: acid greens, icy deep blues, a burning red (the interior of Rigoletto's house, where he hides his beloved daughter Gilda, glows with this red, the color of passion &, since this is Catholic Italy, martyrdom). The buildings are crowded in, leaning over the action, but empty of human life (the action all takes place in front of them, or in the one large room off to the side which converts from Rigoletto's house to the "inn" of Sparafucile & his sister Maddalena, the hired killer & his sex worker/accomplice sister representing  a grotesque inversion of the loving family represented by the jester & his daughter). The buildings of the se are omnipresent, looming, a bit threatening beneath the aesthetic veneer, but ultimately empty of human life or warmth: in short, an apt summation of the swirling & glittering world of the Duke's cruel & superficial court.

The slight air of unreality, of representation poised right above the "realistic", helps propel us into the very foreign world of this opera, a world in which family honor is a matter of utmost importance & in which a curse can have actual meaning. (Who these days, coming in off the street, really believes in either of those things?) Rigoletto is unnerved by the thunderous curse of Count Monterone, &, of course, ultimately the curse does land on his head. But Monterone has also, simultaneously, cursed the Duke, who blithely escapes all punishment – vengeance does not alight on the strong & powerful, or perhaps it's really the seductive & charming, the sexy, who escape (it's the Duke's handsome figure & winning ways that lead Maddalena to plead with her brother to kill a substitute instead).

The substitute, of course, is Gilda, seduced & abandoned by the Duke, who nonetheless acts to save his life by giving up her own (apparently agreeing with the poet that Love is not Love that alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove). I know a lot of people who have problems with her. I find her an original & even unsettling character; raised in isolation, she knows little of the world she is naively eager to join, but isolation has not left her fearful, & has given her some startlingly bold ideas: here we are, in conservative Catholic Italy, in a world where family honor & prestige count for everything, in which women are seen mostly in relation to the men who protect or possess them, & yet she has sex outside marriage with the Duke, chooses him over her family, commits what is essentially suicide (a grave sin), & while dying not only doesn't repent: she (with breath-taking audacity) assures her father that she is going right up to Heaven. Her isolation may be what protected her from the conventional social pieties, but she clearly has worked through to some original ideas of her own; her idealism, & her generous (& wasted) love ultimately seem both innocent & perverse. She removes herself from the constrictions of her world, landing simultaneously below & above them, & this is what makes her the epitome of a certain style of the High Romantic: alone & superior, the bold individual outcast against a corrupt & superficial world, a rebuke, by the purity of her soiled existence, to the the humdrum tawdriness of the life around her.

And here I will look at Rigoletto in the light of The Music Man, which I think, probably vainly, might be a first. I first saw the classic 1962 film just a few years ago (I have never seen it on stage), & contrary to what I had heard & assumed, Marian the Librarian was not a naïve, hopeful young woman whose very innocence is what converts con man Harold Hill to honesty: she was, instead, a restless, intelligent woman who understood perfectly well that Hill was very likely a con man who would bring her heartache instead of happiness: but to her the risk was worth it, to have a life that expanded beyond the narrow confines she was trapped in, even if the expansion led to grief & not joy.

Similarly, Gilda ultimately understands what the Duke is worth. Even his brief moment of genuine feeling for her at the beginning of Act 2 (Ella mi fu rapita!) is self-deluding, though sincere: even if we didn't have the little shock of finding out shortly, via a page sent to look for him, that there is, in fact, already a Duchess married to him, it is inconceivable that a Duke would marry the daughter of his jester. But Gilda chooses an impossible love. She chooses to choose, for herself. I think a lot of contemporary audiences end up angry with the social system that led to this situation, & I would agree with their anger, but they also often seem angry with Gilda for making this decision, & I guess that's where I would disagree: what is the freedom to love if it does not include the freedom to be perverse & self-defeating? As with Cio-Cio San, another woman who chooses to reject her family & create her own identity, we may not approve (for whatever our approval is worth) of the identify she has chosen, but it's the essence of her self-creation that she is free to choose what she thinks is right, not what we'd like her to choose, in some ideal world.

That's a lot to lay on one soprano, but Adela Zaharia carries it off. A tall, striking woman with a strong presence, she conveyed Gilda's strength as well as her sorrow. When she is kidnapped, & then when she is re-united with her father, she is wearing a long, angelically floating white robe. As Rigoletto orders the courtiers out & tries to comfort her, he picks up the nearest cloak to wrap her in, meaning to cover & protect her. It is a deep red (again, the color of passion, of sexual shame, & of martyrdom). She soon lets it drop, reverting to her angelic white: she feels she has done no real wrong. The father/daughter duets in this work (& in Verdi's works in general) are justly famous, & the melting Gilda was matched by the volcanic Rigoletto of Amartuvshin Enkhbat. Depths of gorgeous sound issued from him when he was alone with his beloved daughter, but his scorn for the courtiers came from a different place. He constantly prowled around the court, gesturing rudely with his bauble, actively engaged in his satirical (& therefore judgmental) role. Even when he is pleading for help from a courtier who he hopes is sympathetic, he can't resist an alienating, self-defeating jab, noting that it would "cost nothing" for the courtier to help him. Perhaps the daughter inherited some of the father's perversity.

Yongzhao Yu as the Duke floated through his court, projecting the character's easy heedless charm, tossing off his famous aria on the fickleness of women with aplomb. Aleksey Bogdanov thundered authoritatively as Monterone; Peixin Chen made a foreboding Sparafucile (I love the character's flat refusal to cheat a customer by killing him & just taking the money, like a common thief; you can see the bones of Hugo's romantic drama beneath the libretto). J'Nai Bridges is an enticing, complex Maddalena, & I think this is where phrases like "luxury casting" come to mind. All the performers are at a very high level, & that includes the chorus, singing with point & passion. There were staging moments with them that I don't remember from earlier productions: a campy, rather catty re-enactment for the Duke of the kidnapping of Gilda, some coordinated, dance-like movements that looked frivolous & decadent.

I'm kind of sorry to bring down the tone here by mentioning some audience giggles at some of the plot mechanisms – yes, nineteenth century opera / Romantic drama have conventions that now seem outdated to us! Who knew! It's always seemed to me that openness to theatrical conventions, even outmoded ones – openness to the artificial, to the foreign – is the true sign of sophistication, not giggling at plot devices from an obviously different time & place. On the train after the performance, I ended up talking with two young women who asked about Rigoletto. (They were coming from Ray of Light's production of the musical Nine to Five, which they said was really good.) One of them mentioned a man I've often seen around Civic Center after opera performances (he was there again last night). He clearly has a trained operatic voice. He also clearly has fallen on hard times, for the usual reasons, & is now trying to create an acceptable life for himself. The woman who brought up this man said she wished someone would write an opera about him & his struggles, titling it with whatever the masculine equivalent of La Traviata would be. She saw the connection between the world of Romantic opera & the streets around us: beyond the theatrical styles of another time, beyond the outdated concerns for family honor & suchlike, those are our contemporaries on stage: the bitter joker, the heedless, privileged man of power, the young woman who loves not wisely but too well, the sneering, shallow crowds the circulate around the powerful, mocking the weak, the person whose anger ends up destroying himself: this is news from our own time. With this production, San Francisco Opera has done justice to the truth of Verdi[s vision.

San Francisco Opera: Un Ballo in Maschera

I was at the opera house last night for the second-to-the-last performance of the San Francisco Opera's season opener, Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. I love this opera & the production was superb. Even with two intermissions & a couple of those disruptive pauses between scenes ("Please stay in your seats during this brief pause" but of course some people can't resist pulling out their phones, because . . . they're so very important that 30 minutes can't go by without checking for all those very important messages?), the three-hour performance time flew by, thanks to the vigorous cast & the propulsive yet sensitive conducting of Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

The production (directed by Leo Muscato, set design by Federica Parolini, costumes by Silvia Aymonino, & lighting by Alessandro Verazzi) is both gorgeous & psychologically apt. Without going full-on Fritz Lang, the stage & the shadowy, jagged lighting seem influenced by German Expressionism: the sets are often soaring yet cramped, pushing people close to the front of the stage (which has the additional musical charm of helping project their voices outward into the auditorium); the costumes are colorful & aristocratically elegant but the surroundings are dark; the second-act setting near the gallows spot, with black trees jutting irregularly across the stage, is made vivid by swirling mist in changing colors, some of which (red) are cued to the emotional moment, others of which are just strange & shifting (I loved the effect but will note that a friend of mine found it distracting).

The court world portrayed here is frivolous & shallow, though with dark currents of treachery & resentment simmering underneath; Gustavo/Riccardo seemed a close cousin to the charming & heedless Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. When he, urged by his page Oscar, decides to check into the soothsayer Ulrica's trade personally before agreeing with the Chief Magistrate's degree of banishment, he suggests the party visit her with music that is irresistibly lively, & indeed most of the courtiers start bobbing up & down to the music, moving their arms in rhythm, ready to dance at what is clearly another goofy escapade in the light atmosphere of the court – except the conspirators don't dance along; they stand, a solid & noticeable mass, glowering off on one side of the stage. It was a wonderful moment, as the audience (OK, maybe just me) can hardly keep from dancing along in their seats to this music. Movement of the stage pictures is used well throughout; when we come to the climactic masked ball, the set rotates, startlingly, for the first time all evening, & the stage is suddenly much brighter & deeper than at any other time during the show. (The climactic masked ball, but hasn't the whole show been a masked ball? No one here is without disguise, or masked motives.)

It doesn't do this performance justice to say this is what we want in Italian opera; it's what we dream of: the passion, the precision, the wild strength. The main conspirators, Adam Lau as Samuel/Count Ribbing & Jongwon Han as Tom/Count Horn. are, beneath their murmuring, their suspicions & their suspiciousness, implacable in their pursuit of vengeance, the granite rocks on which the swells of the frivolous court smash & break. Mei Gui Zhang as Oscar is gorgeously attired in black & white, with stylish juxtapositions of various stripes & checks, & a hat with a very tall plume, like an exotic bird that is also a faithful reader of Vogue. His exquisitely spritely music embodies the surface light-heartedness of the court, floating beside, reflecting on but never quite comprehending the darker contrasting currents.

As Gustavo/Riccardo, Michael Fabiano is all strength & careless charm. You can see why the people say they love him, but also how he could have created some dangerous enemies. The silver spangles rain down on the ball-goers as he expires. (There were some extra-musical groans & exhalations during his death that I would have preferred not be there, but that's a matter of personal taste.) Lianna Haroutounian is a compelling & sympathetic Amelia, & Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Renato/Count Anckarström is powerful as a good man redirected into enmity by perceived betrayal; both he & Amelia seem so much more thoughtful & conscience-stricken than the king that you can see why they belong together. Gustavo/Riccardo ultimately does the noble, Brief Encounter-type thing, but it takes him a while to get there (& you can see why such insouciance has its appeal to Amelia).

Judit Kutasi, so memorable as Ortrud in last season's Lohengrin, is similarly towering in the somewhat similar role of Ulrica/Madame Arvidson, the fortune-teller in touch, or so she claims, & so some of the authorities believe, with Satanic powers. She brought an interesting theatricality to the role that made it seem that whether or not Ulrica was actually communicating with unearthly powers, she was certainly aware of how to impress upon her audience that she was well worth the money they gave her. (She makes a brief & striking appearance in the finale of the masked ball, once it is clear that her prophecies have all, in the way of stage prophecies, come true.) The smaller roles – Christopher Oglesby as the Chief Magistrate, Samuel Kidd as the vivid sailor whose questions to Ulrica about his ultimate rewards are instantly answered by the disguised king, & Thomas Kinch as Amelia's Servant – are all strong. (As you can tell from the character names, this production uses the Swedish rather than the colonial Boston setting, though honestly . . . to me it doesn't really matter much.)

As usual before the opera began, we heard the recorded voice of company director Matthew Shilvock welcoming all those people who are attending the opera for the first time. This always attracts a big round of applause; I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps it's a case of more rejoicing in Heaven over the one straying sheep that is rescued rather than the 99 that have been there grazing all along, but maybe some day he will also thank those of us who keep coming show after show.

The woman who checked her phone during the first pause (she & her husband also spoke a bit during the performance) left at the first intermission, which was fine with me (& also with the woman on the other side of them, who moved over into their vacated seats, to get a better view of the stage). Speaking of views from the stage (I was in Orchestra A1), I usually pay more attention to the stage than the pit, even in the front row, but it was wonderful to notice how much the harp adds to both the playful music associated with the Court & with Oscar in particular & also to what I'll call the heavenly apotheosis music as Riccardo lies dying (according to the program, Annabelle Taubl is the Acting Principal Harp, but I'm not sure she's the woman who was playing last night).

During the second act, a woman a few rows behind me started an endless rustling with some sort of plastic bag (I will never understand why people wait until the music starts to do things like that – take out what needs to be taken out during intermission, people!). The woman behind me swiftly & unobtrusively went over & whispered something & the noise (mostly) stopped. During the second intermission I thanked the woman for doing this. "Oh, I'm hardcore," she replied. "You know what the problem is? It's these stupid women with all of their shit. You can check it for free, I don't know what's going on! The woman behind me is doing the same thing" – & she turned around &, murder rising blood-red in her eyes, glared at the woman. I'm not sure the other woman noticed, but maybe the message got through. Such is life in Operaland.

Burn Baby Burn: Il Trovatore at the San Francisco Opera

Once the opening concert was out of the way (I did not attend; I never go to such things) the San Francisco Opera launched its 101st season with Verdi's ever-popular Il Trovatore. I saw the fourth of its six performances.

Ever-popular, yet ever-mocked: certain opinions inevitably get brought up with certain works, & Trovatore is, inevitably, described as having a one of the most absurd plots in opera (this despite my repeated defense of its brilliance!). So let me ask this about the plot's alleged absurdity: why do people assume that's not intentional?

I think this is not a case of a previous era's plots looking silly to a later generation; for every Mysteries of Udolpho there is a Northanger Abbey, & where would Gilbert & Sullivan have been without parodic variations on the baby-snatching & -swapping plot? (But if the story is so ridiculous, why does the opera continue to hold the stage? Weber's Oberon is, inevitably, described as an opera with wonderful music that is sunk by its libretto; why hasn't this happened to the allegedly ridiculous Trovatore?)

I think the absurdity – a word I keep using here because of its connections with Theater of the Absurd – is in service of a philosophical point about the nature of the Universe that holds us captive: it is arbitrary, cruel (or is it indifferent?), &, yes, absurd. Trovatore, with its malleability of identity, its obsessive, fragmentary narratives, & its dreamlike suddenness, is where high Romanticism meets the high Modern. I find this opera much more powerful & convincing, philosophically, than Iago's Credo from Verdi's Otello, which I generally hear spoken of with respect & even awe as a powerful statement of belief in a nihilistic universe. To me that aria seems, whatever its musical power, a crudely reductive explication of meanings & motives that Shakespeare left more profoundly hidden. It is also only one person's (one twisted, miserable person's) view of things. Trovatore, by contrast, gives us that meaningless world brought to vivid life, the trap in which is held our main quartet of characters, who, guided by love, honor, duty, & all sorts of noble human constructs, struggle in vain against the vast & ridiculous twists of life, trapped in their attempts to find meaning, or at least some contentment, in this whirling world.

Sir David McVicar's production relies heavily on a rotating set, which helps keep the action moving, which is important in this work (though there are always some moments when the physical requirements of opera mean actions don't take place as quickly as they really would; I think it would be interesting to see a Robert Wilson-style production, in which the character's trapped existence is personified by their regulated, controlled movements). The action is set in the nineteenth century, so we get some suitable Goyaesque tableaux. There are moments when McVicar overdoes things: I think a Spanish aristocrat like the Count di Luna would not manhandle a court lady, particularly one he's in love with, the way he does Leonora (a Roma woman & accused witch like Azucena is a different matter); & when Manrico is lamenting at the end that Leonora has betrayed him, she should not already be lying on the ground clutching her stomach due to the poison she's taken – you'd think he'd notice that & react, instead of repeating his lines about how she's betrayed him.

The musical side of things is where this performance really shone. Music Director Eun Sun Kim is launching her Verdi/Wagner project with Trovatore & the upcoming Lohengrin; & I think her fluid, propulsive guidance got things off to a great start. Company Director Matthew Shilvock had come out before the opera started to tell us that our Manrico, Arturo Chacón Cruz, was suffering from the effects of the wild-fire smoke that had been dirtying the air for days, & he would perform but begged our indulgence. There were some moments when he was holding back a bit, or marshalling his forces more than maybe he normally would, but on the whole he gave a convincing & impassioned portrayal of our troubadour; not much indulgence needed to be extended. Ekaterina Semanchuk as Azucena & George Petean as the Count di Luna both were powerful. But the star was Angel Blue as Leonora, giving a sumptuous & surprisingly warm portrayal of the trapped Leonora; there were moments when she smiled & floated a tone & you could imagine, or hope for, a very different life for this woman.

Hey Hun

Tuesday night I was at the opening of Attila at the San Francisco Opera. This early Verdi opera, despite its relative rarity, has kind of slipped into the season (rather demurely for a Hun), overshadowed by both the eagerly awaited local stage premiere of Nixon in China and a new production of the ever-popular Magic Flute, which is rapidly replacing La Boheme as the beloved masterpiece I am most tired of seeing revived (nonetheless, I am going; since I’ve never seen Nathan Gunn as Papageno, it seemed a little silly not to).

Attila was first performed here in 1991, which was right before I moved back to this area, so Tuesday was the first time I’ve seen it live. I can’t say I was surprised it hadn’t been revived since; about every twenty years seems about right for this opera. Well, maybe that’s overly harsh – maybe ten years? As with Lucrezia Borgia earlier this season, it kept reminding me of other works (chiefly Nabucco and Macbeth, composed around the same time). The basic material is interesting enough, but it kept threatening to turn into something more gripping and deeper than it was, and though the music is striking and effective it’s just not as memorable as so much of Verdi is – this is one of those works that would probably be valued more highly if the artist hadn’t gone on to write greater works exploring similar themes.

There are some wonderful musical effects, like the sombre gray dawn music that opens the opera; or a rousing soldier chorus that suddenly drops out, leaving an ethereal offstage chorus. The character of Attila is an interesting precursor to Macbeth; both are driven, power-hungry, and ruthless killers who are also plagued by internal doubts and terrors. Attila is also a man of integrity; when the Roman general Ezio suggests they join forces, with Ezio ruling Italy and Attila the rest, he rejects the suggestion because he couldn’t join forces with any man dishonorable enough to betray his country. Ezio has one of those patriotic arias (“take the rest of the world, as long as I have Italy!”), which leave me pretty cold, no matter how beautifully they are sung. I understand why the Risorgimento audience went crazy for them, but I’m just not tribal that way. I was intrigued by the thought of these pitiless killers and their anger at the corrupt, controlling Empire – it occurred to me this might have made a more provocative 9/11 opera than the feeble Heart of a Soldier.

Another interesting feature of the music is that there are very few female voices – in the opening there’s a chorus of Roman women, but they soon drop away and their leader Odabella is the only woman around. No wonder everyone loves her! She and Attila meet cute on the battlefield. He likes her spunk. She also has a boyfriend, Foresto, who joins them later. When he realizes she is in Attila’s camp, he assumes she has betrayed him (during the pause after that scene the elegant woman next to me exclaimed, “I love the jealousy! You can tell they’re Italians!”). The previously martial Odabella responds with surprising meekness – her anger is reserved only for Attila, it seems, though she seems a bit attracted to him (a theme which is not developed as much as it should be; in the second half in particular events move so rapidly that they leave little time for ambiguity or nuance; I know Verdi often liked theatrical moments that flash and strike like lightning and thunder, but I think he misjudged the speed a bit in this one). I was waiting for her to rip the doubting lover, so that was a bit disappointing for me, if not Foresto. (The fault there belongs to Verdi and his librettists, not singer Lucrecia Garcia.)

The first half is climaxed by the appearance of a stately sacerdotal procession, headed by the Pope, telling Attila to turn away from the Church’s holy ground. He does so, having been terrified the night before by a dream-vision of this same old man saying the same words. The Pope (St Leo the Great) is played by Samuel Ramey. This artist's many long-time admirers already know the shaky quality of his current vocal state, so I don’t really want or need to dwell on it. He brings an extremely effective stage presence to the role, along with an ineffable Samuel Rameyness, and he could probably give lessons in appropriate papal deportment to Benedict XVI.

The rest of the cast is, vocally, quite strong and appealing, despite the occasional rough patch (not surprising at a first performance) here and there. Ferruccio Furlanetto is particularly fine in the title role. In addition to the aforementioned Lucrecia Garcia as Odabella, Diego Torre is Foresto, Quinn Kelsey is Ezio, and Nathaniel Peake is Uldino, Attila’s attendant. The chorus is a major element (I was reminded several times of Boris Godunov), and they are suitably strong and vigorous.

After the Pope appears for a smashing Act 1 finale (as my mother says, the Church always knew how to put on a good show), the action switches to the complications, political and amorous, of Odabella, Foresto, Ezio, and Attila – basically, the first three gang up in various ways to kill the fourth. This material all moves so quickly that it seems a bit sketchy. The story-telling really was not helped by the production’s few and mostly ill-advised fancy touches: after a straightforward first act, the second act set is backed by horseshoe-style opera boxes of the sort you rarely see in the United States, with a few supers in the semi-ruined boxes wearing the sort of evening clothes almost no one in the United States wears to the opera (or anywhere else outside of the senior prom). That's such a staging cliche by now that it barely registers. The egregious error is in the third act: while all the plotting and killing is going on, there’s a cheeseball 1960s Italian epic on Attila playing (silently) in the background. It’s very distracting and I think confusing to anyone who hadn’t happened to see the explanation in the program – it turns out this is supposed to represent changing images of Attila or something tangential like that.

The film and the opera boxes were not only irrelevant but odd, because almost every other aspect of the production is completely traditional, stand-and-deliver stuff: The singers may circle the stage, but inevitably, as moth to flame or iron filings to a magnet, they would end up heading out to the lip of the stage, dead center, facing the audience. For duets the singers would again circle but inevitably hit the center, standing side by side, facing not each other but the audience. There was the occasional moment of obviously manufactured stage business, such as Attila picking out a random soldier from his troupe and challenging him to a sword fight, but the singers were actually much more effective when they simply stood there and sang. During the intermission, before the zany cinematics, the woman to my right, the one who loved the jealousy of the Italians, told me that “some of the regulars” were disappointed by such a tame, traditional production. Given her generally elegant demeanor, I gathered that the regulars she referred to were the sort of society types that, according to unchanging stereotype, make up the opera audience. I was amused that the swells were clamoring for regie madness – a sure sign that that style has passed, so traditionalists can take heart. Personally I am all in favor of wild inventive productions, as long as it seems some thought has been put into them. But in this case it was the more staid elements of the production that were most effective, and seemed most in tune with the opera.

if this is how the world ends, I hope the Mayans were right about 2012

I was at last night's magnificent and thrilling San Francisco Symphony performance of the Verdi Requiem, the mightiest of all requiem masses. Sure, I could quibble about a thing or two, but don't want to; this was as good as it gets. Thanks to conductor James Conlon, soloists Sondra Radvanovksy, Dolora Zajick, Frank Lopardo, and Ain Anger, and most definitely to the SF Symphony Chorus and the Symphony itself, for a rendition that was awesome in both the slang and the strict senses of the word.

(The jaunty joints of this tall fellow were suspended above the staircase last night, but I suspect the Requiem was a coincidence and he is actually waiting for Halloween/the Day of the Dead.)

gypsies, tramps, & thieves

Last Tuesday was my first visit to the San Francisco Opera this season, for a mostly wonderful Il Trovatore, though I think I love that opera too much to be completely happy with any production. This performance was also my first experience with Sondra Radvanovsky, who as Leonora amazingly managed to live up to all the praise heaped on her the past few years. As with Swenson’s Lucia a few seasons back, it was just a voice that rang thrillingly in the War Memorial Opera House, like a huge sheet of water falling, pure and clear and strong.

Stephanie Blythe also has a powerful, beautiful voice, but I had wondered how she would be as Azucena, since the obsessive gypsy doesn’t seem simpatico with Blythe’s persona; some singers are beloved because they’re crazy, and some because they’re down-to-earth and sane, and Blythe is one of the latter. She’s not the possessed woman Dolora Zajick was, but she makes her normality work for her – you feel that Azucena would have led a relatively happy, regular life if she hadn’t been hit with the tragic, absurd deaths of her mother and baby. I did have the feeling she’s still working her way into the emotional rather than musical aspects of the character.

I had heard that Dmitri Hvorostovsky was having a somewhat rough time earlier in this run, but he seemed to be recovering from whatever it was he had; he sang powerfully throughout, though Il Balen was a bit leathery and he was breathing very audibly before each phrase. He gave a very convincing performance, showing the Count di Luna slipping inexorably from unrequited love into bitterness and sadism in a clearer way than I have ever seen.

I’m guessing this is Hvorostovsky’s take on the character, since the direction by David McVicar (or possibly the revival director, Walter Sutcliffe) didn’t help him much; for every lovely touch (di Luna intentionally cutting himself with his sword right after Il balen; Manrico gently covering Leonora with his large coat, which di Luna takes off of her and throws aside once he thinks she is giving herself to him; the poisoned Leonora’s fingers inching up Manrico’s shoulder to his neck and then sliding down as death takes hold of her) there was one of those “was that really necessary” moments: overacting whores and their generic bawdiness during the soldiers’ chorus; di Luna manhandling Leonora during the first scene (even if you believe a Spanish aristocrat would treat the woman he loves that way – and this is before he realizes he has no chance with her – it’s implausible that he would do it in front of Manrico without the troubadour defending the woman, and putting his hand on his sword hilt and trying to glare don’t count); di Luna gratuitously pushing a nun onto the ground – again, I can believe a Spanish aristocrat would abduct a woman from the convent before she’s taken vows, but shoving an old nun so that she goes flying – sorry, even if you think this is plausible, it’s an unnecessary piece of stage villainy, like kicking a puppy. I get it, he’s a bad guy, but il balen shows us some of his tormented interior; he’s not a bully or a coward. It’s his destiny as an operatic baritone to be unlucky in love, but you should be able to see that his character is not all that dissimilar from (spoiler alert!) his brother the tenor.

I guess that brings me to Marco Berti as Manrico. I feel a little bad saying this about someone who’s working hard, and who wasn’t exactly bad in the role, but I found him completely generic, and he doesn’t bring much dash or stage presence to the part (certainly nothing to compare with the silver-haired Siberian; this is not the first time the realities of casting have undercut the requirements of the storyline).

Nicola Luisotti conducted his first performance as music director; I had heard reports of eccentric tempi in earlier performances (again with the earlier reports! that's the problem with talking about operas; no one sees the same performance), but I didn’t hear any. I did notice lots of beautiful orchestral details in the fourth act of an opera I’ve heard plenty of times, and there seemed to be some interpolated notes in the traditional nineteenth-century style and he seemed attentive to the singers. To me it seems like a compliment to Luisotti that I have to remind myself to describe his contribution; that means nothing obviously failed or was willfully eccentric.

The staging is quite smooth, with good use made of a rotating set (Charles Edwards is the set designer), though as I’ve mentioned there was too much action of the sort that’s only supposed to fool you into thinking something is happening besides singers standing there belting it out. It’s a very solid production, but it’s the singers (mostly the women) who have made it the talk of the town. Personally, I liked the last production SF Opera did; I thought the weird bursts of flame and the suspended horse heads and the shiny creepy walls like black tar captured something of the opera’s surreal and absurdist cast. At least it looks as if the conventional wisdom is slowly moving away from considering Trovatore’s brilliant libretto the height of absurdity; my feeling towards that is why do people assume it’s not meant to be absurd? Absurd like Waiting for Godot or Oedipus the King.

The gentleman next to me didn’t seem to have gotten that particular message, since he chuckled at every plot twist, flipped through his program for entire scenes, and chatted with his egregiously silly wife not only between each scene but increasingly during scenes until I leaned in and told them to shut up. I’m surprised Luisotti didn’t say it himself; we were close enough. I didn’t hear a sound from a single other person in the section. Why are these people always right next to me? During the intermission he angrily informed me that “there’s a nice way to say things.”

Well, thank goodness someone is standing up for civilized values. I love it when inconsiderate people froth indignantly when they’re called on their rudeness. He clearly considered himself a cultured, even refined person, pausing his program-flipping to applaud each aria loudly, announcing “Well done Andrew” to show he knew Adler Fellow Andrew Bidlack was singing Ruiz (yes, I agree: well done, Andrew! he’s been good in everything I’ve heard him in), yet he wasn’t even aware of the boorishness of his behavior.

We had a brief exchange during which I considered telling him that “shut up” is, in fact, my nice way of expressing that particular sentiment. Instead I pointed out that the rudeness was his first in talking during a performance so maybe we could call it a draw. That seemed to mollify him, but I knew full well that after intermission he was going to force me to engage in chat about the production to demonstrate that he was gracious enough to overlook my crudity and sheer uppityness in demanding silence during a performance for which I had shelled out a substantial pile of cash (well, credit – future cash – but you see my point). Those people on stage carry on, but sweet Jesus on Sunday morning, if you ask me I’m really the one who’s suffering for art.

I'll sit and watch the sea, Till you come back to me

My truncated-by-choice season at San Francisco Opera got off to a good start last Tuesday with Simon Boccanegra, but then I figured any chance to see this opera would be a good start, and this production is better than solid.

While reading the program beforehand, I noted that the Message from the Chairman of the Board and President of the SF Opera Association claimed that this season “exemplifies the vitality and spirit of innovation at the core of San Francisco Opera.” What the hell are they drinking over there, and will they share it with the rest of us? If a season almost half of which is made up of L’Elisir d’Amore, Tosca, Boheme, and Traviata exemplifies innovation, I can’t even imagine what we will get if reaction sets in. I’d just like to point out, once again, that you shouldn’t put old wine in new skins, and technological innovation is not the same thing as artistic innovation.

This production of Boccanegra had been seen here before; shorn of a few oddities (like having Verdi wander solo and inexplicably across the stage before the action started) it is a sturdy if not particularly daring or illuminating production. I thought this go-round was more consistent than the last one. Of course, last time, I saw the performance in which Boccanegra had to drop out at intermission due to vocal difficulties, and one of his enemies now became him, and someone else had to be bumped up to that now vacant role, which couldn’t have helped anyone having trouble following the famously convoluted plot.

As for the plot, several weeks ago I took Budden on Boccanegra down from the shelf where all three volumes are patiently waiting to be read, but haven’t had a chance to read it. I understand it clears up a lot of the background of what happens and why. I do feel, though, that an attentive viewer (that would be me, in case you were wondering) should be able to wander in blank and follow the proceedings. And as with the libretto of The Mother of Us All, it all makes sense if you pay close attention to the dialogue; you can find the line or two that will explain away whatever confusion is vexing you. But if there’s one that explains why Boccanegra and his rediscovered daughter persist in keeping their relationship a secret with dire consequences, then I missed it, so Budden on Boccanegra is not going back on the shelf until I can read it and see if I missed something.

As with baroque opera or film noir, the action – on stage if not on the page – is actually pretty easy to follow, and the murkiness may be the point. It’s not the plot mechanics themselves that are of paramount importance, but the mood and characterization, and that’s why a huge mystery or gap in motivation is a greater obstacle than the complicated familial and political relationships. But the complexity of the plot has become a received notion, which means audiences are filled with those who feel the need to make little jokes or observations about the plot during the performance, to show that they are conversant with the howling complexities. There wasn’t an excessive amount of that at my performance, but a little is still too much. Though I had been warned that the Tuesday audiences were dead, and I was relieved to find that to be somewhat true.

I liked Dimitri Hvorostovsky in the lead quite a lot, though I did feel that there were some moments, including part of the Council Chamber scene, where he lacked power and volume (there was also some clumsily slow crowd fights in this scene that should be sharpened). But as I noticed when he performed Don Giovanni here a few years back, he excels at saturnine brooding and melancholy. My disappointment at missing Barbara Frittoli’s debut was mitigated by my pleasure in hearing Ana Maria Martinez again after her memorable Micaela a few seasons back. She had some choppy lines in her opening aria (but then I hear so did Frittoli, and so do most other Amelias) but soon got over her nerves or breathe problems or whatever and sang with beauty of line and total commitment for the rest of the night. During the intermission the man next to me asked which of the Amelias we were hearing. He and his wife had been discussing this, although the two sopranos don’t really look alike. I told him it was Martinez and pointed out that her name on the cast page listed the dates she was singing. He thanked me and said he thought she was excellent. I agreed and pointed out that she also looked the part, which always helps. “Yes,” he said, “and she has great eyebrows.” Since I know someone else with an eyebrow thing, this amused me.

The whole cast was pretty consistent, I thought, with the disturbingly ratlike Paolo of Patrick Carfizzi contrasting nicely with his tall and handsome co-conspirator, Kenneth Kellogg; Vitalij Kowaljow was a somber Fiesco and brought emotional gravitas to what could be a one-dimensionally heavy role; Marcus Haddock was the ardent Garbriele Adorno, which is a bit of a thankless role, since the main love affair is clearly that of the father and his long-lost daughter. I thought the applause at the end was a bit subdued considering that this performance was apparently and unsurprisingly superior to Opening Night (check here for a link to Lisa Hirsch’s review; she also links to Joshua Kosman’s in the Chronicle and sfmike’s at Civic Center), but the eyebrow man next to me said, “Wow! Not bad for a Tuesday night!” So I guess the audience was appropriately appreciative after all, in its own fashion.

Every time I encounter this opera I have a deeper impression of its greatness. One of the things that struck me this time is how Shakespearean it is, which might be the ultimate compliment; not only in its complexity of characterization and its intermingling of the personal and the political, and its contempt for mobs, but in the way that Verdi, just like Shakespeare in some of his late plays, revisits themes that have appeared earlier in his work: the abducted daughter, the accusation of infidelity which is emotionally if not technically true, the betrayal by trusted subordinates. You feel an artist revisiting past terrain as he makes ready to move forward.

enemies of the people

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek offered me tickets to last night's opening of Il Trovatore, an opera I love. For years I happily sailed along with one recording – the celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version – and then one day out of the blue I was hit by Trovatore fever, and when I came to I had fifteen or twenty versions; my favorite, by the way, is still the justly celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version. Any performance of an opera you love produces an odd mixture of gratitude for any live experience of it competing with impossibly high and probably unreachable standards. I’d love to prove my integrity and independence by trashing Festival Opera despite the lovely seats, but, alas for my reputation, I’m instead going to urge you strongly to head on over for one of the remaining performances (July 15, 18, or 20) at the Dean Lesher Center.

Even the Walnut Creek audience was not as egregiously bad as usual (I still wake up screaming at the thought of Rigoletto a few years ago, and the steady, incessant, three-hours-long fortissimo gum-chewing of a woman four rows behind me). Last night we did have the usual number of loud coughers, and an unusual number of ringing cell phones, as if the audience had never conceived of the possibility of turning them off during certain activities. (We even had a dramatic leap out from a seat and into the lobby with much door opening-and-shutting while Leonora is contemplating death.) There was also an annoyance fresh to me (it's so hard to keep up with the irritations of new technology) – little flashlights with which audience members can check I don’t know quite what, but something so important it couldn't wait until the house lights went up.

Maybe the folks with the little lights were checking plot summaries. Quite a few people seem to be oddly unfamiliar with Trovatore, because the absolutely brilliant libretto by Salvatore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare is frequently described as the ultimate in operatic absurdity. These people might be thinking of the tedious finale to the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which is really more about social snobbery associated with opera than about the actual opera, and is almost spectacularly unfunny in either case (I say this as a Marx Brothers fan – but stick to their Paramount films; Harpo in particular suffers from being turned from an anarchist Nature god into a twee and benevolent little Cupid; their decline is usually dated after A Day at the Races, but I respectfully disagree and date it from the beginning of their alliance with MGM – Eric von Stroheim and I will both tell you that Irving Thalberg was in league with Satan).

What Cammarano and Bardare (no doubt under Verdi’s direction) came up with is a concise telling of a complicated story, whose every moment resonates thematically. Is it absurd? Perhaps, but I think that’s intentional. All plots, being more-or-less arbitrary impositions of meaning on life, are absurd. I don’t think this is even a case of one era’s conventions striking another era as ridiculous; even in the nineteenth century the baby-swapping mix-ups came in for their share of ribbing (Gilbert and Sullivan, or at least Gilbert, basically wouldn’t exist without Trovatore to play off of). Is Trovatore absurd and meaningless? Is life? Gloucester leaping off a non-existent cliff, Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave, Oedipus marrying his mother, Vladimir and Estragon waiting day after day for a man who never shows up – these are also absurd, and their absurdity is part of their meaning. Every action in Trovatore is interrupted, every narrative is fragmented and obsessively repeated; personal tragedy becomes a haunting camp fire ballad becomes a story of supernatural frights; parents do not know their own children, lovers mistake each other, the usual duels and battles and kidnappings are all cut off abruptly and the action turns elsewhere with the arbitrary and terrifyingly inevitable logic of dreams. Trovatore is an example of high Romantic storytelling, kin to Hugo and Donizetti, but this is where the Romantic movement interest in the fragmentary, bizarre, and unreal aligns with the Modernist theater of Beckett , Ionesco, and Brecht.

San Francisco Opera’s last outing with Trovatore played up the link with a modern staging, which on the whole I liked (black, boxlike setting, bursts of fire, large fragmentary objects floating in space); Festival Opera goes for a more traditional approach (pretty much what you would get at San Francisco Opera these days; there was a lot of stand-and-deliver in the style of SFO’s recent Lucia, though often more subtly handled). Giulio Cesare Perrone’s direction was solid and efficient, with the occasional misstep (though I did particularly like the point when the Count di Luna makes Leonora swear she will be his: he stretches out his hand, and Leonora first raises her hand papal-blessing-style to Heaven as she swears, and then lowers it onto his hand so that only the tips of her fingers condescend to touch his flesh). The same was true for the sets, lighting, and costumes. Perrone had also designed the set, an efficient arrangement of columns raised on a few steps that was varied with the additions of branches, prison bars, or cathedral arches, an arrangement which not only made for suitably rapid scene changes but emphasized the underlying similarities among soldiers’ camp, gypsy camp, church, court, and prison. The costumes are basically handsome and traditional, but someone needs to get the Grace Jones headdress off of Manrico, and those shiny dangly things under the headdress need to go too. Other than that the differences between Manrico’s followers and di Luna’s were nicely emphasized by the use of vests and turbans for the former and traditional court or military gear for the latter. Matthew Antaky and Patrick Hajduk are both listed as the lighting designers, and again their design was efficient with some nice flickering touches, and a couple of strange moments (the lighting in the dungeon varied over the course of the scene from way too bright to bright to gloomy).

Michael Morgan conducted a nice performance and seemed very attuned to the singers. And the singers are where the Festival Opera production has it all over SFO’s last Trovatore (Dolora Zajick’s Azucena is the only singer I can recollect from that production, because she so overshadowed the rest). I knew the evening was promising when Kirk Eichelberger opened with a vivid, detailed and powerful account of Ferrando’s campfire story (but confidential to Kirk: get a different headshot; the one in the program does not do you justice). In a smaller role, I also really liked Jessica Mariko Deardorff as Leonora’s oddly unsettling attendant, Ines. I was not as happy with Scott Bearden’s Count Di Luna; “Il Balen” in particular seemed choppy and lacking in style and beauty. Perhaps he was having an off night. Patrice Houston’s Azucena didn’t push Zajick’s sound from my memory, but she was solid; perhaps a bit too much so to be necessarily sympathetic. Azucena is one of the great examples of Verdi’s compassionate understanding of the disenfranchised; she could so easily have been a stock character (evil Gypsy child-killer!) instead of one who sometimes steals the show. But she should seem more distracted and perhaps more fragile. Houston seemed too sensible. She also seemed to lose a bit of power at the end; her final cry was not as piercing as it should have been, and the supertitles didn’t help by stopping with “He was your brother!” and omitting “Mother, you are avenged!” and di Luna’s cry “And I still live!”

But on the whole I found the ensemble effective, and the two leads outstanding. Noah Stewart as Manrico was strong and ardent throughout, with (to my hearing) only a few occasional moments of strain or exhaustion. Hope Briggs as Leonora just seemed to go from strength to strength. She was committed, radiant and beautiful throughout, and her rich and lovely voice was possibly more powerful at the end than at the beginning. My guest for the evening was a singer who basically agreed with my reactions. But he, with his concern for long-term vocal health, was also worried that the singers were perhaps too young to be taking on such heavy roles, and that given the small size of the house they were singing louder than need be. Perhaps, but I found the sound viscerally, physically thrilling. Despite my reservations about Bearden and to a lesser extent Houston, here is an evenly matched, beautiful ensemble of youthful voices. Let’s see if San Francisco can do as well on its next outing.

confusion now hath made his masterpiece

Back to David Poutney’s Macbeth, and I’ll start off by saying something nice. I really liked the sickly radioactive-green slime in place of blood. It’s startling, it’s unearthly, it’s viscerally disgusting in a way that stage blood usually isn’t. (And there’s Shakespearean precedent for using the blood’s color as a metaphor: “his [Duncan’s] silver skin laced with his golden blood”.) The green is unfortunately less effective when shining on the typewriter after Banquo’s murder (see my previous entry). Green slime works as blood, but the color itself has too many positive and soothing connotations to be effective as a general symbol of death and horror.

Red was reserved for the witches. You’d think this would be effective, but it’s not. The witches in the Washington National Opera production (directed by Paolo Micciche) I saw last spring were also color-coordinated; they were all in white, and, like these red witches, some of them carried hula hoops. The white gave them an unearthly apparitional look, and they reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos. The red chorus, I’m sorry to say, kept reminding me of the ladies of the Red Hat Society, who are frightening in a very different way. I did like the one who kept turning the crank on her manual eggbeater, thereby adding an eerie touch to the orchestration, one that Verdi had sadly neglected. It reminded me of hearing Henze’s Fifth Symphony many years ago; as I was reading down the list of instruments, I came upon "bullwhip". I think it got cracking in the third movement. One witch in particular, wearing a going-to-church-extravagant red chapeau and strolling around with a red walking stick, made me think, The Red Brigade of Women present . . . Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience! You see how the mind wanders when the staging is ineffective. The sisters were indeed weird, but they were weird in the same way as the rest of the staging. It’s important that they be strange in a different way. Otherwise they seem like more of the same rather than an eruption from either another world or the subconscious.

I will mildly disagree with those who were horrified that the Opera bought this production, meaning we’re going to have to see it again. I thought the sets were OK. It’s what happens on and around them that is a mess, and that can be changed. There’s the big box with one or two glass sides that gets moved around and represents various things, from Macbeth’s castle to his isolation, and it’s set under a curved dome with a big cracked hole in it. It’s banal to put it into words – see, the natural order has been damaged! – but visually it’s quite effective, though perhaps not enough so to last for the entire opera.

Just about every scene cries out for change. Let me use the sleepwalking scene as an example. Jeremy Galyon, valiantly playing the doctor, is led in blindfolded by Elza van den Heever’s admirably committed Lady-in-Waiting. I assume the blindfold is because Lady Macbeth is sequestered and he’s not supposed to know where she is. But she’s not supposed to be that gaga. They have her already acting crazy by the banquet scene, so her attempts to force Macbeth to behave normally when he sees Banquo’s ghost no longer make any sense. The Macbeths present a façade of normal kingship that hides an increasingly sinister world of fear and surveillance, an effect that is completely lost when you turn Lady Macbeth into the madwoman in the attic. So she does her handwashing thing and the doctor takes notes. The only reason the doctor should be taking notes in this scene is so that he can be shown stopping his note-taking when he realizes what exactly is making Lady Macbeth feel so guilty. In this production, it’s probably needless to say, he writes the whole time, which makes even less sense than you might think because the Lady-in-waiting angrily snatches the paper from him when he finishes and either tears it or hides it away in her pocket (I forget which and it probably doesn't really matter). Maybe it’s meant to be a prescription, because she then produces a huge hypodermic needle, and the two of them run off stage, presumably to give Lady Macbeth the injection that causes her death. It’s hard to tell because they aren’t shown actually doing anything with the needle. But the death of Lady Macbeth is rumored to be at her own hand – again, under the façade of a normal, natural occurrence, bloodthirsty ambition causes its own destruction, a point that is lost completely if she dies through a lethal injection given by her servants.

I know lots of people found Hampson’s Macbeth riveting. I thought he initially was disengaged and not nuanced enough, which surprised me in an artist noted for his commitment and intelligence. He has a beautiful voice, and it’s one that carries especially well in the War Memorial Opera House. He has great stage presence: if he were a scholarly book, he would not only be regularly referred to as a tome, but inevitably as a magisterial tome. So I might just have heard him on an off night, possibly for both of us. At one point I thought, there’s no erotic charge between him and Lady Macbeth; you don’t get the feeling that their ambition and their guilty complicity excite them in any way. Right after that we got to see a flash of him humping her during Banquo’s murder, but that’s the sort of thing that is better conveyed in nuanced gestures during the performance rather than in an over-obvious tableau.

Georgina Lukacs as Lady Macbeth seemed like a wildly variable performer. I gather she was much better the night I heard her than in earlier performances. I sometimes wonder how much what I expect from voices has been affected by beginning to listen seriously in the early white-sound days of the first generation of HIP singers (long before they were called that). So after this performance I listened to recordings of Verrett and Rysanek in the role. Nope, it’s not me. Lukacs has a wildly undulating wobble, which she managed to control better in some of the later scenes. Just as I wish opera directors didn’t know about La Mere Coupable, knowledge of which has coarsened and distorted many a staging of Nozze di Figaro, I also wish they didn’t know about Verdi’s letter stating that Lady Macbeth needs an ugly voice. Whatever his motive in writing that, it’s clear what he meant: he wanted a striking and unusual type of character, from a singer who could give an actual performance, one that went beyond making the pretty canary-bird sounds. But too much that is inartistic is covered over by the whole “ugly voice” excuse.

Even the orchestra disappointed me. When I went to the WNO production last spring it was mainly because that happened to be what they were doing when I was in town (I was more focused on Titus at the Shakespeare Theater and on hearing Racette in Jenufa later that week), and I walked in wondering if I should have gone to the Nationals game instead. (If you’ve been to RFK Stadium, or seen the Nationals play lately, this is a pretty big indication that I was not that excited about Macbeth.) I walked out so glad that I had gone, and thinking that I had really underestimated the fascinations and effectiveness of the score. I took that to be because I hadn’t heard the piece in a while, but now I’m giving lots of credit to the magic stick of conductor Renato Palumbo. Massimo Zanetti conducted the San Francisco performance. We started off with a slack, enervated prologue, and I hoped for improvement that never came. There was no tension or forward drive, and the weird parts sounded pretty much like all the rest. Zanetti did have great conductor hair, though, a poufy backward sweep of silvery gray that bobbed up and down as his arms waved energetically about. I should point out that from my seat I normally can barely see the conductor.

So I walked out of this performance with renewed retrospective admiration for the one I heard last spring. Eventually the BART train showed up, and as usual I had to move at least once because someone was blasting her iPod at an ever-increasing volume. It amazes me when I think how much reading I used to get done on the trains, before the invasion of the inadequately silenced electronic devices. Since it was a short train, there was little choice where to go. I ended up in a seat near two spherical sisters. As teenage drunks go they were fairly innocuous, and I would salute them for not driving in that condition except I suspect it was just because they didn’t have a car. I was only about a stop and a half away from home by this time so I didn’t bother moving again (where would I go anyway on a short train?) when the younger one started vomiting, choking out apologies while splattering the window near her and the floor under her seat. “It’s OK, bitch,” her sister kept murmuring. “Bitch, it’s OK. We’ve all been there.” That might have been the truest performance I heard all night.

Is this a typewriter which I see before me, its carriage return towards my hand?

I have more to say about David Pountney’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth, but I felt that the much ballyhooed typewriter, as the true star of the show, deserved its own contemplative entry. First let me point out the extremely obvious: if you stage Macbeth (either Shakespeare or Verdi) and the audience, critics, and blogosphere are all abuzz over a prop – literally the first thing I heard when the curtain fell was, “Now, what about that typewriter?”, and that may well have been cued by its prominent mention in every single review – then you have done something way wrong, and should probably head right back to the design board, or possibly just into a different profession. The very thought of a typewriter in Macbeth might lead you to expect all kinds of epater-les-bourgeoisie craziness, and generally I’m OK with wacky whatthefuckery (though I’d like to suggest that Macbeth is maybe not really the best vehicle for such a display), but in fact there’s very little of that going on – as distinct from inept or inappropriate staging, of which there is plenty – which might be why the typewriter, mysterious in its isolation, has become the defining symbol of the production.


First I really should thank San Francisco Opera for giving me this opportunity to show that I actually have some critical standards and am not prepared to drop my pants and bend over for just any modern staging. Even if I were tempted to step off my (Dada-surrealist) swan boat, armored in the avant-garde, to defend the virtue of non-traditional staging, this one would send me slinking back downstream, though perhaps not until after I gave a few swift kicks with my shiny metal armor booties. I will proudly state that the Stuttgart production of Alcina was one of my all-time favorite evenings in the theater, an opinion I appear to share with Pamela Rosenberg and no one else. I have already defended Graham Vick’s Tannhauser. But this Macbeth only deepened my appreciation for what Vick did – the appearance of the children in Tannhauser moved me, but here their use as the entire army annoyed me; I found the use of one set for Tannhauser expanded my sense of the work, and here I found it limiting.


The typewriter, a regular manual machine of a now antique sort, makes its first appearance lugged by Fleance as he follows his father Banquo, who is hanging up Wanted posters, which feature two pictures that don’t look anything like the singers playing the King’s sons. Banquo is the only one besides Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who knows what the weird sisters said. After the murder of King Duncan, he doesn’t expose Macbeth, or confront him, or conspire with him. Instead he very deliberately distances himself from Macbeth. He acts a neutral part, which is why his murder, due to Macbeth’s paranoid fear of what he might possibly say, and his bitter jealousy that the murder of King Duncan will only end up benefiting Banquo’s offspring, is a significant marker in Macbeth’s descent into tyrannical paranoia and bloodthirstiness. If Banquo isn’t neutral, Macbeth is, from the standpoint of practicality, justified in having him eliminated. Having Banquo hang up Wanted posters compromises his neutrality by making him an accessory to the cover-up, and that makes it absolutely the last thing he should be shown doing.


Not only is he actively implicating the King’s sons when he knows better, the typewriter seems to be the instrument of this implication, so you'd think Macbeth wouldn't mind. But possibly, since Fleance is carrying it, it’s meant to show that Banquo might publicize (or already has publicized) his knowledge of Macbeth’s probable guilt in the murder of King Duncan in order to benefit his son (yet if that is the case, why doesn't Banquo also mull over the same philosophical dilemma as Macbeth: if fate has decreed something will happen, does he need to do anything to make it happen?). The chorus kills Banquo; Fleance runs off, but not before setting the typewriter down front and center on the stage where a green spotlight illuminates it. Highlighting a means of spreading news might seem like an ideal occasion for the sort of camera/big video screen technology that usually appears as faithfully as fedoras in this type of staging, but instead we get the typewriter, apparently because, despite the modern/archaic look of the production, it’s actually 1949, and typewriters are how we get the news out (Hildy! It’s Walter! Stop the presses – I have breaking stuff on the big Duncan murder case!).


The typewriter appears again at the end. I have to admit I kind of lost track of when it disappeared from the stage; possibly it’s removed at the intermission. Presumably its reappearance signals that free communication has now been restored with Macbeth’s downfall, but it’s hard to tell because of the goose-stepping soldiers entering from the back of the stage. I realize that goose-stepping is a traditional military march, but to Americans it means only one thing: the Nazis are here! So I’m flummoxed by its appearance when a just order has been restored. But that might only be an example of this originally Swiss production not quite translating, sometimes literally: early on there is a banner written in German, and later there are projections of Italian words, which I assume are from the libretto. It seems odd not to translate these effects into English for an American audience, especially given the work’s inspiration in an English classic, but all things considered in this production, those are peccadilloes.

our old robes sit easier than our new

With the exceptions of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Verdi’s Falstaff, I find most Shakespeare-based operas disappointing, though also always of some interest; but it was with fairly minimal expectations that I went to Macbeth at the National Opera. It turned out to be a pretty enthralling evening, and it helps that, whatever else is mismanaged in our nation’s capital, they start shows at a reasonable hour and have decent public transportation (I think I took two metro trains, wait-time included, and walked several blocks to Ms S’s apartment in the time I would have spent waiting for one BART train to show up at that hour). DC has been having a big Shakespeare festival all year, with some interesting-looking stuff. Staging any of the tragedies and histories, but particularly Macbeth (it’s been several years since I could think of Ronald and Nancy Reagan without hearing in my head “this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”), in Washington seems almost too obvious, but then it’s not always wise to avoid the obvious. I saw the “Shakespeare in America” exhibit at the Folger Library and was sorry I had missed some of the theater, but Shakespeare is so essential, and everyone so knows that, that this festival seemed like the “Verdi festivals” for the centennial of his death a few years back: pretty much programming as usual. But I’m not going to complain. Too much.

The production used lots of shadows and projections. Sometimes this can look cheap, but in this case I thought it fit in well with the hallucinatory quality of the play. The staging was not period-specific, but much use was made in the projections of stained-glass windows that would appear, break apart, swirl around, and behave in a generally kaleidoscopic manner. Scenes flowed fluidly from one to the other. Last time I saw Verdi’s Macbeth, at SF Opera several years ago, the witches were in black and bounced up and down, suspended to slightly comic effect; here they were all dressed in white (and bearded, as required by bard and composer alike) and carried large white hoops (one was even used as a hula-hoop at one point), fluttering white ribbon-banners of the sort used in rhythmic gymnastics, and large white balls, which they tossed playfully as they circled around; it looked like a moonlit May night wedding party with a huge goat as groom as etched by Goya, and provided a perfect visual counterpoint to the weirdly spritely music Verdi wrote for the witches.

Lado Ataneli was Macbeth and Paoletta Marrocu was his lady, and suitably enough for this couple she was stronger than he was. Ataneli was fine; he sang well and generally acted well, but I wouldn’t call him haunted or driven. His vocal highpoint was towards the end, in the opera’s equivalent of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” though the final effect would have been finer if he had managed to suppress his pleased smile at the well-deserved applause. Marrocu had a beautiful, steel-like voice and gave kind of a risky mannered performance. Her hands and arms were always assuming positions that were striking and stopped just short of overdone. For the sleepwalking scene she bugged her eyes, stared wildly, and increased her anguished poses in a way that earned her a few giggles from the silly but admiration from those who know why a certain type of eccentric grandeur gets called “operatic.” The rest of the cast was solid; I was particularly impressed by the young tenor Yingxi Zhang as Malcolm.

So on the whole, a slightly surprising success. In fact, after this performance, I felt that for me personally Verdi’s Macbeth is a greater artistic success than his Otello: for Macbeth he matched a weird vivid play with weird vivid music, but he set Othello, a play that ranges from the highest, most-heartbreaking nobility to the strangest, slimiest cistern bottoms, to music purely noble and grand.

Don Carlo/s (rainy day fun)

I’ve always thought there are two types of food, the ones that need chocolate and the ones that need garlic. Yesterday, under the influence of spending a rainy Saturday making soup stock and watching back-to-back versions of the same (or same-ish) opera, Don Carlo/s, I started to wonder if rich versus pungent might be a universal method of classification. First was a Don Carlo in Italian from the Met, sumptuous, sensuous, and luxuriant throughout, and next up was Don Carlos in French from the Chatelet in Paris, vibrant, invigorating, and austerely beautiful. My theory broke down on closer examination, since much chocolate also has a bitter bite and garlic can mellow into roasted sweetness, so perhaps my theory is all about the oneness of all things, or the folly of pursuing theories too far.

The differences in the productions might be due to changing tastes in staging, since the Met production is from 1983 and the Chatelet from 1996; both dates are longer ago than I like to think they are. They might also be due to local preference. There’s clearly a lot of money and historical research tastefully lavished on the New York stage (no overdone Zeffirelli vulgarity here), though of course I didn’t have to sit there waiting while they shifted those elaborate sets around. But the simpler sets in Paris, with broad blocks of subtly varied single colors and the cast mostly in black, white, or crimson, struck me as more beautiful, like a painting in which you could stare at a patch of color for hours. I could be happy with either version. The Paris cast tends in the current way to move (and push and wrestle and clasp) a lot more, but that’s not quite the same thing as being better actors. I have mixed feelings about all the movement – these people are aristocrats, and that’s not how aristocrats moved. This is not the same thing as saying that I need to have elaborately embroidered pillows and whatnot in every scene in order to believe; it’s a way of saying that their movement should convey their restricted lives. It reminds me of Branagh’s film of Much Ado About Nothing, which, despite some virtues (Keanu is Don John), completely misses the distinction between court life and village life, opening as it does with a scene of the court lounging in golden fields wearing open-necked shirts, kind of like peasants only cleaner. That’s very much a contemporary view of privilege and ease. Perhaps it’s just the consistency of their internal logic that makes each of these productions work.

Despite recent panic that fashion model looks will supplant the glorious history of waddling middle-aged sopranos pretending to be consumptive girls, both these casts are pretty evenly matched when it comes to acting and physical verisimilitude. I preferred New York’s Nicolai Ghiaurov, carefully costumed to look like portraits of Philip II, to Paris’s Jose van Dam; great as he is, his more authoritarian portrayal seemed more one-dimensional. You could understand how Ghiaurov’s more conflicted king is both the burner of heretics and the defender of the liberal Posa, which made his “she never loved me” aria more heart-breaking than van Dam’s more sombre and bitter rendition, which was in any case marred by some strange staging: he sings the aria while the Queen (in case we didn’t realize she was the one he was singing about) lies fully clothed but presumably asleep in what is apparently their shared bedroom; halfway through she stands and walks (sleepwalks?) out of the room to allow him to finish up his lamentations before his meeting with the Grand Inquisitor, which also takes place in the King’s personal bedroom, thereby conflating the distinctions among the King’s personal anguish, his secret statecraft, and his public persona. The Inquisitor himself hobbles in to weird and absurd flashes of flame, eventually throwing back his cowl to look as green and amphibious as any Alberich. Even without his threatening music it’s pretty clear we’re not going to be rooting for the Grand Inquisitor, but his music is also dignified and somber, and that’s the quality that needs to be presented in order to keep him from being a cartoon villain. To complete the bizarre staging of the scene, he is almost knocked over as he leaves by the Queen, who apparently woke up in some other room and then rushed back in to the bedroom to complain to the King about her stolen jewel box. It seems unlikely that anyone, let alone an aristocratic French woman in the very Catholic Spanish court, would barrel into an elderly crippled priest without an apology or even a glance in his direction.

The Chatelet’s queen, Karita Mattila, gives another finely detailed performance, full of moving little touches – burying her face in Carlos’s portrait in the Fontainebleu scene, touching a lock of his hair when she realizes she has been given to his father instead. The New York Elizabeth, Mirella Freni, is gentler and more melancholy. Both are excellent but my personal preference was for Mattila. Though, without bothering my pretty head about the opera’s complicated history or deconstructionist theories about the instability of text, I wish the Paris production had kept the opening New York used: the peasants gather in the forest, searching for food and firewood, complaining about the sufferings caused by the war. When Elizabeth arrives, she listens to them and dispenses charity, and her compassionate concern explains why she agrees to marry Philip rather than Carlo when she is offered the chance to refuse. Without this scene, it’s puzzling that Mattila’s much more vivacious Elizabeth agrees to the switch, especially since the cajoling crowds are not suffering peasants but elegantly dressed aristocrats. Instead of a tragedy of people caught in historical events they mistakenly think they’re controlling, we end up with the tragic consequences of being a girl who can’t say no.

Eboli is Grace Bumbry for the Met and Waltraud Meier for the Chatelet. With her eager assumption that Carlos loves her and her obvious attempts to eavesdrop and her rendition of the Veil Song, so pointedly about a King who doesn’t love his Queen, while oblivious to the uncomfortable shifting of the other women, Meier is oddly comic up until the end, which adds an interesting perspective to the self-involved turmoil that always surrounds her. Somewhere between 1983 and 1996 Eboli loses her eyepatch. I’m guessing the historical woman wore one, since otherwise it’s an odd detail but it shows up pretty consistently in productions. It actually would have helped in the Paris version, since the court is full of angular women with frizzy reddish hair in shoulder-baring long black dresses and the eyepatch would have singled out Eboli.

Thomas Hampson, the Chatelet’s Posa, had it all over the Met’s forgettable Louis Quilico in looks and style. Like Mattila, he gives a finely detailed performance, deepening his bromance with Carlos with every line. Much directorial ingenuity is expended in making it less obvious that Alagna as Carlos barely comes up to Hampson’s shoulder. Alagna himself is fine, but I have to give full honors to Placido Domingo, the Met’s haggard and unhinged Carlo. Here’s a singer who shows that the musical and the dramatic are not mutually exclusive.

Kitschy witches, sad clowns

One advantage of talking about performances several months after they happen is that you can see what has stuck with you and what has slipped away, so it’s pretty dispiriting to report that I have very little to say about the Opera’s opening Ballo, and even more dispiriting to report that the final performance, which I saw, was apparently much improved over opening night. (I tend to figure that audiences for the season openers deserve what they get, anyway. They should really just have a runway show while some CDs are playing) It would be a little unfair to judge Voigt’s Amelia since she had been sick enough to cancel a performance just a few days before. She was fine, but nowhere near the radiant Ariadne she sang a few seasons ago. The staging was stodgy and conventional. Over at The Standing Room M. C- had a witty write-up, which I would link to if my computer weren’t so slow and I weren’t so lazy, but if you go searching for it you’ll enjoy his other postings. I have to share his amazement that the peasants gathered around Ulrica had banners ready for waving in case a random petitioner turned out to be the King. That shows a certain party-ready Swedish extravagance for which the films of Ingmar Bergman had not prepared me. I prefer the Boston setting anyway, since I feel the spirit of Hawthorne hovering like a haunted Fate above the thwarted passions. The evening wasn’t disastrous, but it wasn’t particularly memorable, despite the hearty applause at the end. The woman next to me flailed her arms about and shouted “bravo!” for all the ladies and “brava!” for all the men. Perhaps she was confused by the excellent Oscar of Anna Christy.

The next foray into Verdi was their much-revived Rigoletto, with the di Chirico-style sets. (I once heard someone condemn this production because “it doesn’t look like fifteenth-century Mantua” – seriously.) I love Rigoletto but I can see that others who don’t love it as much as I do might be getting a little tired of it. The narrow repertory is less of a problem in New York, where the Met and City Opera and assorted other groups do about five times as many performances as any other American city, but when there are only nine or ten a season you get tired of seeing the same five over and over. But I suppose that’s our reality for the time being, so I’ll just be grateful at getting Rigoletto and not Traviata or Boheme. This time around I liked Paolo Gavanelli better than I had last time, but I still found him a little underpowered at the end of the first half and overly broad in his acting. But I really liked Mary Dunleavy’s Gilda – I had seen her in the Philly Pearl Fishers where she was a bit overshadowed by Nathan Gunn’s Zurga. It’s interesting to see what gets varied in these revivals – the opening party/orgy scene was triumphant proof of how powerful repression can be; this time around there were no bare breasts or disheveled gropings but an air of contempt and menace amid all the black, bird-like costumes that set you up for everything that happened at that court. But I’m still a little puzzled by the Opera’s approach to Verdi – he’s amazingly dramatic, and they do his works over and over, but they just end up not quite making it all the way.

Votes of Confidence; or, La Forza de Something

Cal Ripken was voted into the Hall of Fame with 98.5 percent of the vote, which raises the question in my mind: huh? If you don’t vote for Cal Ripken, why are you even in the Baseball Writers Association? I liked him a lot as a player and started following the Orioles when he and Brady Anderson and Mike Mussina were on the team (now – not so much). He always struck me as pretty admirable as a player and as a man, though of course there were those who claimed to find him “boring,” apparently because they feel straining for perversity makes them interesting. I enjoyed The Streak, though to be honest I always figured: (1) his job was playing baseball and (2) he got paid a lot for it. Anyway I always liked him and even went to Baltimore in 2001 just so I could see him play in his home park, because I suspected he was going to retire that year. Sure enough, he announced his retirement. I soon realized why I would never be rich: it did not occur to me to buy tickets to the last Orioles home game of the season as a speculative investment and then sell them for big bucks on eBay. Apparently it did occur to a lot of people, but then I suspect they’re not really rich either. Anyway, a three-month drought ended as soon as I stepped off the plane and the first game was rained out, though I was still in town for the rescheduled match and so I did get to see Ripken at Camden. It’s a nice park; it was the first in the new wave of well-designed parks and there were interesting touches (arm garters on the vendors’ striped shirts, a curlicued font for the lettering) that were meant to evoke “olde timey” baseball; Camden Yards was such a hit (of course, the O’s were also good then) that the later ballparks it inspired did not need such faux aging to establish credibility. Lots of people out here talk about Bonds dominating the Giants, but Ripken dominated Camden the way Lenin used to dominate Red Square, and that was on a team with other very popular and well-known players. (And Baltimore -- great city! Matisse at the art museum, crab cakes at the wharf, and a fantastic museum of outsider art.)

Anyway – why would you vote against Ripken? I wonder if someone is going to hunt down all of them and ask. I read there were two total abstentions as a protest against the “steroid era” which seems a little silly to me. Not to underestimate the problem, but what about the amphetamine era, and the beer and martini era, and before that the cocaine and morphine era? Not to mention the separate and unequal era. Why snub Gwynn and Ripken? But that’s what happens when baseball sells itself as the nostalgic game of America’s innocence: there’s an over-reaction when people realize that there is no innocence involved. And one writer didn’t vote for Ripken and Gwynn because he figured they were shoe-ins and he wanted to give his votes to others – fair enough, I can see the logic there. But if there’s someone who did it for some elaborate reason that will prove how special he is and different from everyone else, I hope he will keep that reason to himself.

The other big appointment is Nicola Luisotti to replace Donald Runnicles as the SF Opera’s music director. I enjoyed his Forza last year but I have to say it is one of my all-time favorite operas so any performance both pleases and displeases me. Gruber was fine, I thought, as Leonora, though she was not going to drive the memory of Leontyne Price’s voice out of my head. The tenor was loud. I’m not discounting that as a value, but I found no beauty of tone or depth of expression to go with the volume. And he kept his eyes on the conductor the entire time he sang. Even when the woman whose love changed his life had re-appeared as a hermit and is dying in his arms, he was looking not at her but at the man with the little stick. Couple that with a short stout build, and I just found him completely unsatisfying. (The scene in which Leonora tells the abbot that she will not go into a convent, but will wander aimlessly until wild beasts tear her apart if she can’t move into the hermit’s cave – it gets me every time. I know exactly how she felt.)

Luisotti seems like a good choice, but I have to echo the concern that this means the opera is moving back to a repertory of about ten operas, all by Verdi and Puccini. I love them, but even Tristan and Isolde needed some time apart. And I haven’t really been particularly impressed by many of the SF Opera's Verdi and Puccini performances through the years. I guess Gockley’s first season will be announced soon and will be eagerly scanned for significant moves, and I’m hoping for the best, but if either Boheme or Traviata is on the list I want subscribers to have an individual opera "I can't take it anymore" opt-out clause.