random previews: operatic

I’ll start off with what is sure to be a highlight: Ensemble Parallele is premiering a new chamber-opera reduction (prepared by Jacques Desjardin) of Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, 10-12 February 2012. I saw this opera at the Met and generally liked it quite a bit, though there was some major miscasting of the leads. So even without Ensemble Parallele’s dazzling track record, I’d be eager to see a different production.

San Francisco Opera made things easy for me this year by having a comparatively large number of operas I’ve never seen before, plus several I’ve seen too often, which made the choosing easy:

Heart of a Soldier, by Christopher Theofanidis (world premiere, so of course I haven’t seen it) – honestly I’m a bit dubious about the concept of a “9/11” opera, but we (meaning I) shall see.

Lucrezia Borgia by Donizetti, starring Renee Fleming.

Xerxes (Serse) by Handel: a lifetime of loving baroque opera, and I’ve never seen this one live! I missed last year’s production at West Edge Opera (formerly known as Berkeley Opera). I was busy with too many other performances, and then I lost the Internet and phone service for several days, making it difficult to buy tickets. Anyway the cast here is very good so I’d probably go again anyway: Susan Graham, Lisette Oropesa, David Daniels, Sonia Prina, Heidi Stober, Michael Sumuel.

Nixon in China by John Adams: I love this opera, and have never seen it live.

Attila, by Verdi.

As for SF Opera’s other offerings: the clear light of economic necessity restrained me, as it occasionally does, but of course I might get tickets if I hear a particular production is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or whatever the last great thing was.

Turandot is probably my favorite Puccini opera, but I’m tired of the Hockney production and I've seen too many weak casts in it; this Don Giovanni just doesn't spark me; Carmen has an intriguing cast (Kate Aldrich, Thiago Arancam, Sara Gartland, Paulo Szot) but, as with Turandot and Don Giovanni, I don’t know if I need to see another Carmen at this point.

I’m not sure what to do about The Magic Flute; as with the three operas I’ve just mentioned, I really have experienced it enough to last me for quite a while. Also, for some reason it will be sung in English; frankly it might be better to obscure some of this particular opera’s libretto. On the other hand, it does have Nathan Gunn as Papageno, one of his great roles, and I’ve never seen him in it live.

There’s also a Carmen for Families. The concept of a “family” Carmen has been making local opera fans (well, the ones I know) chuckle – personally, I’m holding out for the “family” Moses und Aron – and the squeaky-clean plot summary provided by the opera doesn’t help (“featuring the alluring Gypsy girl Carmen, the Spanish soldier who loves her and the brave bullfighter who wins her heart” – uh, I guess that all is, in some sense, accurate, but it does make it sound like a wholesome Danish ballet), but I think what’s really going on here – the dirty little secret at the heart of Carmen for Families – is that most nineteenth-century operas are simply too long for – I won’t say for modern taste, but for the exigencies of modern life.

The Unfamily Carmen runs about three and a half hours, which might be daunting for someone who isn’t already a devoted fan of the form, or even someone who just has to work for a living. (I mean, I love Carmen, and am particularly fond of the dawn music that opens the fourth act, but when considering whether to see it again I have to admit its length gave me pause; there are plenty of other new and unseen things going on to which I could give that chunk of time.) But in these days of restored cuts and scholarly revised editions, it really isn’t artistically respectable to say, “Look, we’re going to cut this because it drags and half of you have already seen it a dozen times anyway and you need to get to work tomorrow morning.” Carmen is done often enough so that it's safe to experiment with it, but the bulk of the San Francisco opera audience is clearly too dull and conservative for a radical re-imagining in the style of Peter Brooks’s Tragedie de Carmen. Hence we have Carmen for Families. That’s my take on it, anyway.

Speaking of radical operatic revisions and the clash between old art forms and modern needs, the afore-mentioned West Edge Opera has scheduled three productions centering on those tensions: Ariadne auf Naxos in late October-early November, a manga-style Magic Flute in March 2012, and in late July-early August 2012, the west coast premiere of Ezra Laderman’s Marilyn, which is about Ms Monroe, not Ms Horne.

I did have some thoughts about another trip to the mighty Met, but they’ve spaced out the things I’d like to see – basically, Satyagraha, Khovanshchina, The Enchanted Island (which sounds delightful), and Ernani – in a really inconvenient way. There’s also Nathan Gunn in Billy Budd, for only three performances, and Karita Mattila in The Makropolus Case, which she sang in San Francisco last year (blowing the rest of the season out of the water; my post is here).

Though I’ve seen both performers in these roles (Gunn sang Billy here in I think 2004; I tried to see him in Pittsburgh but he was sick for the performances I attended), they’d be worth seeing again – and can I just say I’m stunned that the Met hasn’t scheduled both these operas for livecasts? Both performers are approaching legendary in these roles, both are incredibly photogenic, both are fine actors, both operas are widely considered twentieth-century masterpieces and neither is well-represented on DVD, and . . . no plans to film either, apparently. I really don’t know who makes these decisions, and why. But then there are so many things veiled from me.

random previews: opera

The San Francisco Opera season is well underway, but the one genuinely exciting, do-not-miss production is coming up in a few weeks: Karita Mattila in The Makropulos Case. As for the rest of the season, it doesn’t exactly heat the blood. For a while I thought Gockley’s aim was to turn the local house into the Met Lite, but at this point I’m thinking we should be so lucky, given the Met’s more adventurous repertory and staging in the last few years. We’re eating their dust out here in the West, not that I think the majority of the local audience minds. They seem quite in tune with Gockley’s advocacy of – well, let’s try for something neutral between “beloved classics” and “exhausted warhorses” – the more familiar works in the repertory, sung by already well-established names.

Anyone in search of anything more adventurous or challenging than People You’ve Heard Of, In Works You’ve Already Heard (or even those just searching for novelty) is out of luck. Gockley and the bulk of the San Francisco audience seem perfectly suited to each other. That’s not a compliment. Any potential audience members intrigued by works like Le Grand Macabre or St Francois are once again left to fend for themselves out there in the avant-garde wilds. Thank goodness for DVDs! What we're getting here are brand-name works presented in a more or less plush and traditional way. Nothing here is going to frighten the horses. Going to the opera in San Francisco now isn’t like going to the Museum of Modern Art; it’s like going to Bloomingdale’s.

By the way, I don’t really buy the claims that what San Francisco Opera is currently doing is “all about the voice”; everyone says that these days casting the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works is difficult to impossible, whereas we’re living in a golden age for Handel and Rossini singing. So are we getting Radamisto or La Donna del Lago? We are not. We’re getting inadequate productions of the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works, because a large segment of the audience isn’t interested in anything unfamiliar and no one is interested in convincing them that new stuff can be fun and engaging.

Yes, Aida and Madama Butterfly are great works, and there’s no disgrace in presenting them, but for a veteran of the opera house there isn’t a lot of urgency in hearing them; that’s the thing about Top 40 programming – sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to get another chance to hear that piece. Yet opera is a strange and addictive drug: a few months ago I looked up the performance dates of Aida for a friend, and suddenly was strangely excited at the thought of hearing the opera – Aida, of all things, an opera that has never interested me much outside of Leontyne Price’s involvement with it.

I ended up feeling I didn’t really need to pay those prices for another Aida, though Zajick was definitely a temptation. It turns out to be just as well, since I could have written the reviews without seeing it: the Zandra Rhodes designs were eye-catching but didn’t always work well, and the cast was vocally uneven. (I had seen Zandra Rhodes’s production of the Pearl Fishers and though I loved the colors I thought the setting was too cartoony.) Sung drama is the most basic form of drama, and an art form that has survived in varying forms for centuries deserves an audience that thinks of it as something more than candy-colored camp.


As for the rest of the season, I enjoyed Werther; and though Nozze di Figaro is one of my favorite operas, I loathe this production, which I’ve already seen in two different revivals (my mostly negative thoughts on that 2006 revival are here, and it was actually less vulgar than the first); I love Madama Butterfly, but feel I’ve seen it enough for a while. I did spring for a ticket to Cyrano, because I’ve always admired Domingo and the only other time I’ve heard him live was in Herodiade. And then there’s the Janacek; I assume we have Mattila’s star power to thank for bringing us one of this great composer’s fascinating works. I honestly don’t understand why he isn’t as popular as Puccini – to me he has that same kind of emotional directness and melodic richness. And Jenufa has one of the few happy endings I find convincing, even inspiring. So that’s the one can’t-miss for me this season.

I’m not excluding the upcoming June Ring Cycle from that assessment, either; I hoped that Walkure last June would guide and convince me one way or the other, but apparently I got the vocal off-night, which seems to be how these things go for me (so if I end up not buying tickets, you can be assured you’re in for a treat!). The production itself is not very interesting (my thoughts on Walkure are here, and in there is a link to my thoughts on the Rheingold, which I saw in both DC and here).

Fortunately other local groups are taking up the operatic slack for those who maybe don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for their hundredth Butterfly:

On October 30 and 31, Urban Opera is presenting a Purcell pasticcio, the Witch of Endor. They’re a new group and though I missed their previous presentation, Dido and Aeneas, it was highly praised.

Cal Performances is presenting Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival Opera in two Britten works, The Rape of Lucretia on March 24 and 25 and Albert Herring on March 26 and 27.

Ensemble Parallele is presenting Philip Glass’s Orphee, one of his Cocteau operas, on February 26 and 27, as a follow-up to their kick-ass Wozzeck.

Berkeley West Edge Opera is in a nifty new space in El Cerrito and has some interesting programs, starting with Handel’s Xerxes on November 13, 19, and 21, followed by an adaptation of Carmen called the Carmen Fixation and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody called Caliban’s Dreams.

Festival Opera hasn’t announced its 2011 productions as far as I know. For a while they were doing one warhorse and one more unusual work (like Rorem’s Our Town or Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) but lately it’s been two warhorses. I hope they resume their more adventurous ways. But even if they don’t, they present solid productions in a nice smaller theater, at a much lower cost than San Francisco Opera.

The other big opera excitement for me is the James Levine 40th anniversary CD and DVD sets. Cumulatively the sets are expensive, though the per-disc price is quite low. (And by not buying tickets to Aida, Butterfly, and Figaro, I more than covered the expense.) And click on those links and look at what you get! What I really love and admire here is the commitment to new or “difficult” works (there was a time when Mozart and Wagner were considered difficult. . . ). Two recordings each of Wozzeck and Lulu, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens and The Great Gatsby. . . everyone will have his or her particular jewels here, but anyone who doesn't find this collection thrilling . . . uh, is probably a big fan of the current programming at San Francisco Opera. I haven’t watched any of the DVDs yet, and have only listened to about half of the CDs, but I’m thrilled with the set and can’t recommend it too highly. My one complaint so far: the packaging is flimsy and difficult to use. I almost wrecked the DVD box trying to get the tray of discs out, and removing the CDs means reaching into the cardboard envelope and sliding them out by touching the disc – so a fail on the packaging, but the recordings are sheer gold.

What Becomes a Legend Most, part 2

Yesterday I saw Berkeley Opera's final performance of The Legend of the Ring, their revival of David Seaman’s abbreviated adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen. On the whole I enjoyed it, particularly the singing, and the abridgement is quite skillfully done. I can see why a small but very adventurous company like Berkeley Opera would enjoy adding the Ring to their series of operatic adaptations, and it’s great for the singers to get a chance at these roles in a small house, but honestly I’m a bit uncertain who the intended audience is.

At nearly four hours, it’s much too long for most children, and it was left in German (with English surtitles), and while four hours of German opera may be less daunting than the sixteen or so of the full cycle, I pretty much believe that anyone who is interested in the Ring Cycle should just jump into the deep end of the pool – I’m not saying you should get tickets to Bayreuth without hearing a note, but CDs of the operas are as the sands on the shore, and every few months it seems there’s a new staging available on DVD, and the number of books on Wagner is by no means decreasing (my usual recommendation for anyone interested in embarking on the Ring is a combo platter of Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, for a social and economic interpretation, and M. Owen Lee’s Turning the Sky Round, for a more psychological approach, or you could even hunt down a copy of the graphic novel), and individual operas, particularly Die Walkure, are staged on their own fairly often, and why wouldn’t you pick one of those more obvious starting places, one that gives you a better sense of what Wagner is about?

This adaptation reminded me of seeing a great novel (particularly something long and Victorian) made into a movie – much of the texture and oddity and the little moments of characterization that made the novel great and worth the time are pared away in the interests of moving the plot from point A to point B. Many of the missing moments here – Erda’s shocking and abrupt entrance to warn Wotan to surrender the Ring, the Rhine Daughters’ cry from the watery depths as the gods ascend to Valhalla, the Wanderer’s game of riddles with Mime – are not only there to make philosophical or psychological points: they’re also stunning, exciting moments of pure theater. The adaptation unrolls the plotline smoothly from beginning to end, but who goes to the Ring Cycle for the plot?

And Wagner wasn’t really interested in the story for its own sake. And he wasn’t interested in people who weren’t willing to commit themselves to his vision. Music Director Jonathan Khuner wrote in the programbook that the Ring “does scare away the faint-hearted.” But it’s supposed to. Like the fire around Brunnhilde’s rock, the Ring’s reputation – for length, among other things – ensures an audience of heroes. (For the purposes of this discussion, I’m defining “hero” as “someone who can spare a week and several thousand dollars to sit in a theater”). You either have the experience of the Ring that Wagner intended, or you don’t. Training versions really don't convey what it's like being immersed in that experience.

Here’s one thing you miss: the sense of Time. Not just the sense of having gone through something that is distinctly an event, but the wonderful way in which, as the story moves forward, the stories we are told also move backwards, so that as we near the destruction of Valhalla, we see the Norns and hear about the World Ash Tree at the beginning of creation. Nature in general gets short shrift here, which further reduces the richness of this universe and its meanings. Erda is gone, and Spring barely glances in the window of Hunding’s hut (let alone throws open the door), and there are no forest murmurs and no Rhine journey. Maybe that was why the portrayal of the Forest Bird as a silly woman chatting on a cell phone annoyed me; it was one of the few chances to add in the natural world, and I didn't want it played for cheap laughs (and if they were going to go there, wouldn’t a bird be tweeting anyway?).

I was considering the Forest Bird and her cell phone the major directorial miscalculation until Gunther showed up – hunched over, blinking, afraid to touch a weapon – played, in fact, the way Mime is usually played. This is just wrong. Gunther is a king and a warrior, and his music tells you that – yet he still falls short of the hero Siegfried. That’s the point. You don’t get that if you play him as an obvious coward. And if he were the nebbish portrayed here, it’s unlikely that Siegfried would have heard the fame of “Gibich’s stalwart son” up and down the Rhine, or would want to be his bloodbrother.

Other than those unfortunate decisions, the staging (by Mark Streshinsky) ranged from effective to outstanding, particularly in the use of shadow (to the left and right of the open center stage were screens, on which location shots could be projected, or which could be backlit to show the action in striking silhouette). There was one directorial innovation I loved (or, as the old man behind me exclaimed loudly, “They changed it!”): at the end, when Brunnhilde has lit the funeral pyre, Loge the fire god returns, retrieves the Ring from Brunnhilde, and hands it back to the Rhine Daughters as the waters rise. One kisses him in thanks, and even though his “gosh, she kissed me!” expression was a little cartoony, the exchange nicely captured the theme of love and power as Loge fulfills his promise to the water sprites. It would have been even better if the adaptation had made more of a point at the beginning that Loge had made this promise, but still it was very nicely done.

The orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Khuner, was a little ragged, particularly in the brass, and underpowered; there are moments (particularly, I noticed, when Siegmund is involved) when the music should swell and spill ecstatically, and that just wasn’t happening. The singers, each playing multiple roles, were the real prize and purpose of the afternoon. Of the women, Christine Springer (Wellgunde and Brunnhilde) and Valentina Osinski (Flosshilde and Fricka) were both solid, though Osinski’s voice has sort of a metallic edge, but my favorite was Marie Plette (Woglinde, Freia, Sieglinde, the Forest Bird, and Gutrune) whose strong and free voice was beautiful in a different way in each role.

Stephen Rumph, a singer new to me though not to Berkeley Opera audiences, brought a crisp stage presence and a clear bright voice to Loge and Mime (it was nice to hear Mime sung instead of snarled), and I hope to hear him again. Bojan Knezevic (Alberich and Fasolt), Dean Peterson (Fafner, Hunding, and Hagen), and Jay Hunter Morris (Froh, Siegmund, Siegfried) were all excellent in their varied roles, but Richard Paul Fink (Wotan and Gunter) was the dominant voice among the men, as a Wotan should be. As mentioned earlier, I didn’t care for the characterization of Gunter, though he sang it well, but it was as the half-blind god that he really came through: Fink is fairly short, but solid enough to be physically imposing, and he brought both power and nuance to the role – I’d like to hear him in it when he gets a chance to deliver the Walkure Act 2 monologue, and the complete farewell to Brunnhilde.

Berkeley Opera’s new theater is a vast improvement over the Julia Morgan, even though it’s clearly not designed for an elderly audience: there’s no center aisle in the auditorium, and the narrow aisles get clogged very easily with the slow-moving. It’s certainly an easy walk from the El Cerrito BART station, once you figure out which direction you’re going in (I had to ask seven people before one of them knew where Ashbury Avenue was; of course there was no attendant at the station I could ask). Since they, after renaming themselves in true Wagnerian style – they are now the Berkeley West Edge Opera – have an exciting season coming up,* it’s good to know where they are.

Perhaps I would have been a little less impatient with certain aspects of the show, which on the whole I enjoyed, if the seat to my right hadn’t been occupied by one of those squat old women about half my size who hog the armrest. The minute the music started her mouth flew open and every breath came out with a weird whistling snort that might have indicated sleep except her eyes, Hagen-like, seemed open. The snoring, if that’s what it was, was broken during the second half when she very loudly chewed the cookie she wasn’t supposed to bring into the auditorium. And yet none of that was as irritating as the old man's occasional comments. Snoring I can understand, but there's no excuse for talking in a theater.

* Their new season isn't on their website yet, but according to brochures available at the show, they are performing Handel's Xerxes, conducted by Alan Curtis, on November 13, 19, and 21; an adaptation of Carmen called The Carmen Fixation with Buffy Baggott on March 5, 9, 11, and 13 2011; and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody, Caliban Dreams, with John Duykers, on July 30 and August 5 and 7 2011.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: July & August

These are the doldrums months for theater, and as such perhaps a bit of a relief, though there’s always something tempting:

Here’s some long-running fun: at the Exit Stage Left on 156 Eddy Street, starting July 8 and running Thursday-Friday-Saturday for four weeks, No Nude Men Productions is presenting a series of twelve staged readings of new plays, each based on one of the classical Greek deities. The website is here but also check out Marissabidilla’s more detailed entry here.

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek (at the Dean Lesher Center, a short walk from the BART station) presents Madama Butterfly (July 10-18) and Lucia di Lammermoor (August 7-15).

Berkeley Opera presents Legend of the Ring, a revival of its much-praised one-evening condensation of the Ring Cycle.

Old First Concerts at 1751 Sacramento Street (that's Sacramento and Van Ness) continues its regular series of concerts; the one that jumps out at me is early music vocal ensemble EUOUAE performing the Messe de Tournai, which they describe as the oldest polyphonic setting of the Mass to have been collected under one cover. They are also doing several other interesting pieces; see the full description here.

The 15^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs from July 15 through July 18 at the Castro Theater. The big news here is Fritz Lang’s wild and wildly influential Metropolis, presented with 25 minutes of previously lost footage, but since Kino is releasing the new restoration on DVD this fall, I would rather see A Spray of Plum Blossoms (Yi jian mei), a 1930 Chinese version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or Rotaie, an Italian film from 1929 that sounds reminiscent of Murnau’s Sunrise; or L’Heureuse mort, a 1924 French comedy about a playwright whose alleged death makes him suddenly a valuable property. Oh, if I could stand the crowds I'd just stay in the theater from start to finish; all the films look enticing and they have some great live music from the Alloy Orchestra among others.

And the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is devoting its two top floors to its big summer show, Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection. Click here and here for SFMike’s two-part survey of Donald Fisher and his collection, complete with many lovely photos that give you a great sense of what's on view. I will say that since robber barons appear to be inevitable in our society, I’m grateful for any of them that direct their loot towards art, rather than running for political offices they don’t deserve to hold, and I'm talking about scum like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. You often hear it remarked (well, depending on the circles you travel in) that it’s puzzling that the public will resist modern music though not modern painting. I’ve wondered about that myself. There are a couple of points to consider though: one is that the audience for modern art need only be one person with enough extra cash, and live performance needs significantly more people for even a tiny audience, and all of them need to be available at the same time. The second is that if you want to establish your social credentials through art (or if you are in fact genuinely interested in it), the contemporary is often the only thing both available and affordable, whereas given the centuries of scores piled up, you have to be actively interested in contemporary music to choose to subsidize it rather than something less risky. Also, of course, it's easy enough to walk away from a painting on a wall, or to stare at it until you feel you "understand" it, which is a very different experience from being forced to sit quietly while strange sounds fleet by. Anyway here’s your chance to check out the new holdings even before SFMOMA builds its planned addition. There’s a beautiful room filled with paintings by Agnes Martin, though my favorite is still the one already in the collection (that’s the painting I’m looking at in my avatar up there).

I have no idea what's going on with the fonts in this entry, and why blogger won't let me fix them.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April

April 8, 10, 11, and 13, Nicholas McGegan leads Philharmonia Baroque in Handel’s great opera, Orlando (one of the first operas I ever saw!).

Berkeley Opera offers Copland’s The Tender Land on April 10, 16, and 18.

As always San Francisco Performances has a lot of exciting stuff going on: On April 2, Alice Coote, recently announced as the replacement Charlotte in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming Werther, gives a recital. I was looking forward to hearing Garanca, whom I’ve never heard, but frankly I think Coote, whom I have heard, is going to give the audience a more interesting evening. On April 6, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Lera Auerbach perform Shostokovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano (arranged for cello and piano by Auerbach) and Auerbach’s own 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. The brilliant young pianist Yuja Wang gives a recital on April 22 featuring Schumann, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson read and perform from The Rest Is Noise on Saturday morning, April 24, and Yevgeny Sudbin performs Chopin, Stevenson, Liszt, and Ravel on April 25.

The Aurora Theater offers a rare chance to see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. I’m already thrilled with this one – not only did my Tuesday night ticket cost me less than $40, but the play starts at the more rational weekday hour of 7:00, and not the standard 8:00. It can be a little tricky to call the box office, which has limited hours, but it’s worth it because the Aurora’s on-line system uses that horrible “best seat” system. I’ve decided I’ll only buy tickets on-line if the system shows me exactly which seats are available. I’ll decide which is the best seat available, thank you.

April 23-25 Magnificat performs Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (in a different location each day).

At the San Francisco Symphony, Edwin Outwater leads an interesting program April 7-11, featuring music from Whisper House, a new composition by Duncan Shiek (of Spring Awakening, which I haven’t seen or heard). Shiek’s piece replaces the previously announced Five Shakespeare Sonnets by Rufus Wainwright, which will allegedly happen next season. The program also offers Zipangu by Claude Vivier (I’ve heard a lot about the late composer and am very eager to hear this) as well as Gounod’s ballet music from Faust and Poulenc’s Suite from Les Biches. The wonderful Symphony Chorus gives its annual concert on Sunday April 11. On April 15-16 the symphony accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush. Me, I’d happily stay at home and watch the DVD, but if you don’t have the DVD and a big screen TV and can stand to watch movies in a crowd, then go and have a wonderful time. This is probably my favorite Chaplin film, though my favorite Chaplin moment remains the last scene in City Lights, which I can’t even describe because I break down and sob helplessly. Since the symphony is accompanying the film, I assume this is the original 1925 silent version, and not the inferior version Chaplin released in 1942 with some cuts and his overly fey narration replacing the intertitles. April 29-May 1, Christoph Eschenbach conducts Schumann’s Fourth and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, with wonderful soloists in Christine Schafer and Matthias Goerne, and that brings us into May.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: February

San Francisco Performances has an evening of modern music with Midori on February 6, and their annual subscriber concert on February 9, featuring 2009 Naumburg Competition winners Trio Cavatina.

Cal Performances presents Ragnar Bohlin conducting the Swedish Radio Choir on February 28.

It’s a big month for choral concerts: Volti performs new music on February 26-28 and Magnificat performs old music on February 12-14.

The San Francisco Symphony presents Schubert’s Mass No. 2 with A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s orchestration of the Ives sonata.

Berkeley Opera presents Eugene Brancoveanu as Don Giovanni in its new venue, which has got to be an improvement over the Julia Morgan Theater.

ACT presents Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new production directed by John Doyle, who did the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (you know the one: Patti Lupone plays the tuba!).

The San Francisco Ballet presents Program 2, a mixed program featuring works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, and Program 3, which is all Balanchine.

alien abduction

Last Friday I made my first trip to the Berkeley Opera, to see their version of The Abduction from the Seraglio, streamlined to the simpler “Seraglio.” My understanding is that Berkeley Opera freely updates the classics in ways that are meant to be true to the work’s spirit, which is an excellent niche; with San Francisco Opera looming across the bay, there doesn’t seem much point in just churning out cheaper, smaller facsimiles of the basics. This version is set in the post-apocalyptic future so beloved of set and costume designers, and most of the original relationships between the characters are retained right down to making the Selim character a non-singing part. But the effort to create a new ruined world consistently shifts the focus from the character’s emotions to the social structure around them, giving a final impression not of Mozart, or the Mozartean, but of some Mad Max/Bertolt Brecht hybrid, which would be quite enticing if it were more coherent.

Technically, the program claims that Seraglio is set in a “post-petroleum world, [where] oil is over, money is over” but it’s really not; even if oil is over, and apparently alternative energy sources are also over, that doesn’t mean money would be over, even if our current system has collapsed. Pasha Selim is now “Gorgeous Jerome” (Armand Blasi) and he runs the titular brothel and a poppy-based drug empire. The drug side is run by Osmin, his belligerently nasty assistant (Roger McCracken, whose low notes were almost inaudible). Connie (Konstanze, played by Sheila Willey) is a reporter who has gone undercover in the Seraglio and become addicted to opium with remarkable speed, having been there only a few weeks. Her boss and boyfriend, Beau (Belmonte, Andrew Truett, whose high-note vowels take strange form; someone should also remind him to remove his wedding band before going on stage) comes to rescue her, with the aid of Pedrillo, an odd-jobber at the Seraglio, and Blondie, one of the Seraglio girls. Then there’s Osmin’s dog, which is invisible and sometimes seems to exist and sometimes doesn’t. According to the program this dog stands for love, which I would not have guessed if I had not read the program. There’s also a little girl darting in and out of scenes. According to the program she is a “cheeky avatar for hope” of the sort that inevitably turns up in post-apocalyptic plays, though I might have taken a snarky street-wise child, in tatters and without family and living near or in a brothel, as the final evidence of ruin and corruption. If you’re going to imagine a bleakly ruined landscape, you should have the courage of your vision. This need for some little sop of pretended hope is the same sort of impulse that rewrites King Lear so that Cordelia lives and marries Edgar.

Amanda Moody and Ross Halper, who did the adaptation, give most of their attention to the social and business structure they’ve created, but we end up with a lot of what Wagner called “effects without causes.” It’s unclear how Jerome can be, again according to the program, “exploiting a numbed population” if money is over – what are they giving in exchange? Where’s the exploitation? Under the desolate circumstances, someone who provides sex and drugs in one convenient location seems more like a benevolent friend to mankind than some sort of exploitative overlord needing investigation. Jerome himself makes this point when Beau claims that he and Connie need to let the people know what’s going on in the Seraglio: “They already know!” he explodes, which doesn’t seem to give them pause over whatever it is they think they’re doing.

Connie has resisted the blandishments of Jerome, if not of opium. He offers her a rose, claiming that seven men have died to bring it to him to give to her; again, I’m not sure why a post-oil world would be without roses – I would think the lack of pollution would help them flourish, erupting through now useless highways in extravagant bursts of color. And if roses are so rare, I don’t see how opium poppies can flourish. The whole opium angle is a bad idea anyway. I very much enjoyed Pedrillo’s hymn to Thunderbird (set to “Vivat Bacchus! Bacchus lebe!”) but I don’t see how Osmin, who has all those opium by-products on hand, can really succumb so readily to cheap wine. Making Connie an opium addict is another instance of taking the focus off her emotional struggles; a drug addict is her addiction. Beau, unable to wait until after marriage to cheat, eagerly succumbs to a couple of hookers on his way to rescue Connie. You might think fidelity doesn’t matter much to them, until it becomes the focus of a lengthy duet when they are reunited, which makes Beau simply a hypocrite, which makes it difficult to hope he and Connie get back together.

The ending is either richly ambiguous or incoherent. Osmin, who is simply nasty instead of comically nasty, declares himself an independent operator and kills Jerome, who shortly comes back to life. Beau and Connie decide to stay at the Seraglio, either to work with Jerome or to report on him, I wasn’t sure which. And Beau turns out to be, not the son of Jerome’s enemy, but his own son, a development I was expecting as soon as Beau mentions his mother rather than his father. Forgiving your own son, even if you’ve just met him, is a completely different thing from forgiving the son of your enemy, but the whole forgiveness scene, instead of forming the work’s climax, barely registers.

Abduction into servitude in the Muslim world was an actual if exotic danger, as every reader of Don Quixote knows. Those doing the adaptation make a good point about the problems of setting the work in the current violently roiling Mideast, but switching from reality to the hypothetical overshadows the characters with a putative and frankly decorative world. The whole post-apocalyptic thing can work quite well – and I know because I’ve seen it many, many times – but it needs to be thought through a little more deeply and carefully.

It may sound as if I was in misery the whole evening. On the contrary! Such is the perverse appeal of theater-going that even while I was noting holes in the plot and characterization I was enjoying the charming singers and the beautiful music and, despite the sometimes overly strenuous updating, the often clever words. I found the evening quite entertaining, but I have to say that an entertaining mess is still a mess.