The third & final recital of this season's Schwabacher series took place last Tuesday, & it was all mostly marvelous (except for the venue, the Conservatory of Music's Barbro Osher Hall, which I will complain about below). The featured players were bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, currently slaying across the street as Orest in Richard Strauss's Elektra, & pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson (who is also Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, co-presenters with the Merola program of this recital series). Ketelsen & Matheson were joined by several participants in this year's Merola program. Before the music started, Matheson gave us the key to the eclectic program: invitations, a theme malleable & capacious enough to provide a program of surprises & satisfactions. Surtitles were used for the songs as well as the opera excerpts, & I wish every recital did this.
The first piece was Là ci darem la mano, from Don Giovanni; as the recital took place on Bloomsday, this was a lovely but perhaps inadvertent homage to the day, as that duet is one of the musical notes ripping through Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin. Ketelsen was joined by soprano Shannon Crowley & they were accompanied by pianist Deven Shah. (stage director Claire Choquette supplied minimalist but effective movements for the dramatic pieces). Ketelsen as Giovanni (& later as Scarpia) is sexy & seductive; the commanding but nuanced authority of his voice is familiar but what struck me, seeing him at relatively close range, is how good an actor he is: convincing, insightful, nothing overdone; he could hold the stage even without his distinguished singing. Crowley was charmingly conflicted as Zerlina, & the next two numbers, L'invito by Rossini & Stornello by Verdi, for which she was accompanied by Matheson, confirmed her strength in the pert/perky/winsome repertoire; I'm sure there are sassy servant girls & clever peasant sweethearts in her future.
The next set had Matheson accompanying tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson in three Duparc songs: L'invitation au voyage, Chanson Triste, & Phidylé. He took these dreamy songs from a convincing ardent angle, which worked very well; there was a lot of youthful yearning there in songs that don't always sound as youthful as they should. There were lots of passionate, big voices on this program. After the Duparc, Ketelsen & Shah returned to the stage for Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a loose cycle of three songs: Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire. In the latter Ketelsen gave clear but subtle, insofar as a drunk can be subtle, indications of the singer's inebriation; it was another demonstration of his skill in inhabiting the persona of a song, something also revealed by the switches in mood among these three very different pieces. Shah is a strong accompanist.
Two sets, both accompanied by Matheson, closed out the first half: a trio of Italian songs (Sognai by Schira, Il poveretto by Verdi, & Nebbie by Respighi) sung by tenor Chester Seungyup Han & a trio of Korean songs (San A / O Mountain by Dong Soo Shin, Ma Joong / Welcome by Hak Joon Yoon), & Mot I Jeo / Unable to forget by Hye-Young Cho) sung by baritone Paul Jang: powerhouse passions to send us into intermission. Han's rendition of Il poveretto was for me the highlight of his set, a song about an old soldier begging for any small coin so he could buy some sort of meal that turned out to be surprisingly touching. It made me think of beggars I had passed that day, particularly one lying on the sidewalk moaning that he couldn't even buy a cup of coffee. The three Italian songs were not ones I had heard before, but the Korean songs seemed a greater rarity & were a real treat; recitals so seldom step off the German-French-Italian-OK-maybe-some-English song path. Musically they sounded to my ears like American folk songs. The song to the mountain was particularly moving. Both Han & Jang really let it rip in their sets.
The entire second half was an excerpt from Tosca, with Ketelsen as Scarpia, soprano Charlotte Kelso as Tosca, Chester Seungyup Han as Cavaradossi, Paul Jang as Sciarrone, & Ryan Bryce Johnson as Spoletta, with Carrie-Ann Matheson as a fluid & evocative accompanist. Matheson started off by giving us a plot summary of what was happening. I'm not sure this crowd needed such a summary, but Matheson knows her audience better than I do.
Even without a full orchestra, & even in excerpt, Tosca is a musically & dramatically powerful opera. It's one I have mixed feelings about, though: the only interesting (& even, in a weird way, sympathetic) character, as far as I'm concerned, is Scarpia, the reactionary head of the secret police: not the choice the opera or my heart would really want a listener to make. Cavaradossi is passionate & romantic & mostly a cipher. As for Floria Tosca, let's look at her behavior just in this Act 2 excerpt: Cavaradossi is the one tied up & tortured, with blood running down his face, but she insists she's the one who is being tortured & she is just too sensitive to take it. That's why, against Cavaradossi's wishes, she betrays his compatriot (& also, by association, him). Her lover can keep quiet under torture but she, under the mere thought of torture, breaks his confidence & betrays his trust. Then, during her big aria, she insists that she has never harmed a single person – really? I just heard you sell out Angelotti – & she doesn't deserve any of this anyway because she has brought flowers & jewels to adorn the church. (Do I need Latin Catholic trigger warnings?) Yet, despite her efforts to bribe the Creator with His own creations, bad things have happened to her (of course to her; forget Angelotti & even Cavaradossi). There are just too many bitch, please! moments with her.
That aside: the opera is, as I said, musically & dramatically effective, & the excerpt was gripping. Ketelsen is a superb Scarpia. Again, he doesn't overdo it, but he makes very clear the sadism, the sexual tingle, underlying the police chief's machinations. He doesn't indulge in snarling & bellowing (genuinely powerful people don't need to bellow); he even amuses himself with his sadism. Kelso was compelling & even touching (at least, as touching as I will find this character) as Tosca. with lovely rich tones for Vissi d'arte. Han really belted out his Vittoria! Vitorria! triumphantly, which is pretty much Cavaradossi's business in this act. The smaller parts were well taken; Jang portrayed amusing confusion on Sciarrone's part at the start again / stop again orders of the seemingly capricious Scarpia (the torturer, being in the other room torturing, of course doesn't hear the conversation with Tosca). It was quite a show, received very enthusiastically by the full house. Ketelsen & Matheson followed it with an encore, Cole Porter's very funny Tale of an Oyster, made even more hilarious by Ketelsen's commanding tones & authoritative stage presence. He also nicely delineated the oyster's different emotions at each stage of its journey, from Oyster Bay to high-society meal to being upchucked back into the Bay, sadder but wiser for his social-climbing adventure.
Now I will complain about the venue. I have been to the Conservatory's Barbro Osher Hall several times. First something good: once you're up there, in a glass-encased room on the 11th floor of the Conservatory's new building, there are attractive views down Van Ness Avenue & across the street to Davies Hall & the Opera House, & it's very pretty at night, with all the lights of the city sparkling below you. When you see the room from the street, it glows like a jewel.
But: the room (it's not really a "hall") is described as "intimate", but I'd describe it as "small", which is not the same thing. The chairs, the cheap plastic kind that can be stacked up easily & moved out of the way, are not very comfortable. But the real problem is getting to & from the room. I've been to several concerts there & only once were people allowed up to wait when they arrived. Every other time, we have to collect in the lower lobby of the building, where there are not nearly enough seats, so concert-goers, who are often elderly, cranky people (& I include myself in that) have to stand, often for long periods, before we can get upstairs, where we have to stand waiting again. There is usually some sort of rough line that forms, with the policing that that involves (on Tuesday there was a man keenly invested in letting everyone know he was first in line; I had arrived at least 10 minutes before he did, but didn't bother disputing precedence with him, as I had taken one of the few seats available & preferred that to standing the whole time). And that line he was so intent on? It's just to get on the elevator! The audience has to be led up, one carload at a time, to the 11th floor. Once there, as I said, a line has to form again before we can get into the actual room (which, again, I'm not going to call a hall). There is lots of anxiety & fraying tempers, as seats are not reserved & so where you are when the doors open affects where you sit during the concert. And I am far from the only person who cares a lot about where he or she sits.
And then, after the concert, you have to do the same thing in reverse: line up by the elevators to be taken down one carload at a time. And if you need to use the restrooms before descending, because of course you do, you have to get through the crowd jammed up by the elevators, most of whom stand there staring like angry lumps even after you explain that you're not trying to cut ahead of them, you're trying to get past them to the restrooms. I don't really understand why a recital like this, which could have drawn a larger crowd, wasn't in a larger venue. Even if the size of the room weren't a problem, the logistics definitely are. Not sure what the Conservatory was thinking when they came up with this arrangement. But when I see the Osher Recital Hall as a venue, I definitely think twice about attending.
