getting the green light

Last night I was at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the second of Ensemble Parallele’s three performances of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, as reorchestrated (with the composer's approval) by Jacques Desjardin. Not surprisingly, given Ensemble Parallele’s track record, it was a success both musically and dramatically, much more so, in fact, than the Met production, which I saw in its final 2002 appearance. Harbison was there last night. I had brought a copy of the libretto (which he wrote) from the Met performances and asked him to sign it. “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said, looking at the bright red cover.


I did like the opera at the Met, but there were some problems, including badly miscast leads: Jerry Hadley was too emotionally open, not opaque enough, for Gatsby, the self-created American who tragically also tries to recreate his past love, Daisy, in his ideal image. And Dawn Upshaw is beloved for her down-to-earth qualities, her intelligence and adventurousness, which are not really qualities that suggest Daisy Buchanan, the golden child of privilege. And both of them were too old. Gatsby the novel is very much the story of people realizing their youth, their idealism and romanticism and hope, are all about to slip away from them. So it’s important for this particular story that the cast look, as last night’s cast did, like people entering their 30s.


Fidelity to the original source is always a tricky question in any adaptation. An adaptation needs to stand on its own, and fulfill the needs of its own form, but if it strays too far from the source, then why bother with an adaptation at all. In their program notes both Harbison and Brian Staufenbiel, the stage director and production designer, insist, perhaps a bit defensively, that the opera must be seen as separate from the novel. There are a few points in the Gatsby libretto that I think are perhaps a bit more compressed than they would ideally be, sometimes for practical reasons of staging (the scenes with Myrtle in particular), but on the whole I think Harbison’s Gatsby works very well on its own terms while also respecting the iconic novel, considering that seeing confrontations in the flesh is going to be inherently more melodramatic than hearing of them second-hand, framed by a particular point of view.

Tom Buchanan’s eugenics-style concern for the preservation of the white race is here made less specifically racial and more about general opposition to the socially innovative (such as the increasing social freedom of women, particularly his wife). The opera very effectively draws out the parallels between the marriages of Daisy and Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson, both of them in varying degrees disappointed in the man they’ve married. I think this adjustment of Tom’s views works very well. For a contemporary audience, the emphasis on eugenics/preservation-of-the-white-race’s-privileges tips the balance too much against Tom, changing him from a standard wealthy reactionary to someone actively evil. Making Tom’s outburst more about maintaining class barriers helps bring that major theme forward. (That leads me to a quibble: when Tom contemptuously allows Gatsby to drive Daisy back to East Egg, the libretto has him say, “He won’t annoy you. He knows his little flirtation is over.” I wish the libretto had retained the novel’s original version, which is “his presumptuous little flirtation” – “presumptuous” is just so perfect and so telling there.)


George Wilson is probably the character who differs the most from the novel, though some of that may be the casting of Bojan Knezevic, who is much more physically present than the original's wan dispirited spirit. He clearly feels anger and a need for revenge rather than an overwhelming and irrational grief. It's legitimate and effective. (And Knezevic’s very slight accent also works well, making him, who is the instrument of Tom’s revenge on Gatsby, seem like one of those immigrants Tom is so worried about. It adds another layer.)

Daniel Snyder as Tom has excellent physical presence; he looks like an athlete starting to go to seed, and carries himself with the assurance of the entitled. Marco Panuccio as Gatsby gives a subtle performance, calculatedly open at times, at others closed, glancing at Daisy with a mixture of nerves and blind romantic idealism. He is shorter than the other men, and carries himself slightly hunched over – this too works well. Susannah Biller is just wonderful as Daisy, with a voice as golden as her presence, almost making her the center of the show, from her conventional flirting to her anguish at being torn between Gatsby’s dreams and Tom’s assuring realities. The whole cast is excellent: Julienne Walker as a sporty Jordan Baker, Jason Detwiler as the reticent and observing Nick, and Erin Neff as Myrtle, who makes (as Myrtles must) a lively impression in a couple of brief scenes. With this cast I didn't feel the sense of vocal strain that occasionally showed up in the Met performance (what I mostly remember from that is Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's vital presence as Myrtle and how awkward Hadley sounded every time he said "old sport," though perhaps that was a deliberate choice).


The party scenes and the dancing are fun to watch, just as they were at the Met. Another interesting change from the novel: at Gatsby’s party, when he points out the famous movie star and her director, instead of the vision of romantic glamour we see in the novel, here we see a beautiful woman with a director who is a funny little Chaplin-like man – another indication of the manufactured, dreamed, or willed quality of romance, rather than a vision of the thing itself.

We inevitably lose almost all of Nick Carraway’s first-person narration, his poetic and sometimes perfumed and nostalgic recounting of that summer’s events. Instead we get a complex layering of times and places and musical styles; even with the reduction of the orchestra from 80 to 30, an on-stage band still appears at Gatsby’s parties, and we hear, at the parties or on the radio, pasticcio 1920’s-style songs that sound convincingly authentic (our own cultural expectations of Jazz Age New York are brought to bear on the story, and provide a different source of nostalgia, for a remembered past none of us actually experienced). The songs are fun to hear (and extremely catchy) and also comment, in the style of Pennies from Heaven or Cabaret, on the on-going action. Class and social divisions are so much a part of this story. I think it was brilliant to comment on those divisions by using such contrasting "high" and "low" musical styles. This is, I should say, a very rich and fascinating score, that I think will only deepen the more one hears it. The orchestra(s) under EP Artistic Director NicolePaiement made the music sound as powerful as my memory of the Met’s performance.


Staufenbiel provided a fast and fluid staging (about half an hour was cut from the opera, with Harbison’s consent), which reflects the layering in the music. Through the clever use of projections, scrims, and a few moveable elements (including Gatsby’s lovely shirts that make Daisy cry, which come down from above, laid out on a rack in rows in a rainbow splendor of pattern and soft color), all the fundamentals of the novel appear: Tom and Daisy’s place, Gatsby’s place, the water in between them, the distant green light at the end of the Buchanan dock, George Wilson’s garage in the Valley of Ashes, the dispassionate stare of the eyes of Dr Eckleburg.

I did find the staging surprisingly awkward in one key moment: after Gatsby is shot, a coffin is wheeled out and the dead Gatsby simply stands up and walks into it – not in a slow stylized way, but more in a “can't figure out what to do here to get the corpose off the stage so just do it quickly” kind of way. Not sure what was going on there.

When the performance at the Met ended, Harbison came out to take a bow and the woman sitting to my left said, in fairly indignant tones, “Who is that? Who is that?” I told her it was the composer, John Harbison. “Oh!” she said, sounding very impressed. It must have been the only time at the Met she had ever seen a living composer. Harbison took a bow last night, too, but everyone seemed to know who he was.


OK, at this point Ensemble Parallele’s annual production is a high point of the year for opera-lovers. So I was glad to hear that next February we are getting Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata, which I am eager to hear.

North and South out west

Last Saturday I was at the first concert of BluePrint’s season. BluePrint, the new music ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is headed up by ever-chic and adventurous Nicole Paiement, who also directs Ensemble Parallele; this very enjoyable concert offered (among other things) a preview of their February 2012 chamber-opera version of Harbison’s Great Gatsby. I was given a ticket to this concert, so thanks to whoever thought to include me. The box office was very nice about letting me switch the seat to one I preferred.

First up was another Harbison piece, North and South, a setting of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop (some of the poems were ones Bishop did not publish in her lifetime). On Saturday it seemed to me that I had lost whatever vague count of the songs I was keeping, but I see in the program that indeed the last song is not listed and was apparently dropped. I had heard the piece a few times in the recording by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (to whom the first three songs are dedicated; the second three are dedicated to Janice Felty). This was my first time hearing the piece live.

Julienne Walker, a tall, striking mezzo with short dark hair wearing a black ‘20’s style dress, was our soloist. She started off by dedicating her performance to her mother, who was in the audience, which was pretty disarming, not that her very fine performance needed the audience to disarm. Her diction was perfectly clear; I could make out every word of the poems without reference to the program. The first song in each half of the piece is from Bishop’s “Songs for a Colored Singer,” which she wrote thinking of Billie Holiday. These are by no means minstrel pieces, but when they’re sung as opposed to read on the page they do bring up the dicey question of how far a singer should go in imitating a “black” sound. Harbison’s music for those pieces doesn’t sound like a blues song, but the blues are clearly in evidence. On the recording Hunt Lieberson goes farther than Walker did in performance; each choice is defensible. Hunt Lieberson was, to say the least, a naturally soulful singer, and that keeps her performance from caricature; Walker sang them in a way more in line with how she sang the rest of the set, and I thought it worked very well. Her mother must have been proud.

That was followed by Kurt Rohde’s Concertino for Solo Violin and Small Ensemble, which is from last year, about twenty minutes long, and in three movements; Axel Strauss was the violin soloist. The words that occurred to me were charmingly mysterioso – charming not just in the sense of delightful but in the sense of putting us under a spell; in his program note Rohde describes it as “intricate,” which is an apt word, as if it were a very elaborately patterned knot garden, which means it wouldn’t wear out after a few listens but keep growing.

After the intermission we had Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, Op. 43, which seemed quite glittery and abrupt but honestly though I enjoyed the piece I’m not sure I have anything to say about it since my mind was kind of zapping around as is its occasionally overstimulated sometime wont and I found myself going in and out of the moment – no reflection on the performance by the ensemble or soloist Keisuke Nakagoshi. These things happen, especially right after intermissions. Ah, poor Schulhoff! It was your moment, but I failed to pull myself into the moment.

The final piece was an excerpt from The Great Gatsby, in the new chamber orchestration by Jacques Desjardins: the quarrel between Myrtle (Erin Neff) and Wilson (Bojan Knezevic) that leads up to her death. (Interestingly, Myrtle was the role sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the original production, so both vocal pieces on the program were ones written for the late mezzo.) It was very dramatic and exciting (and well sung), and the orchestration sounded rich and vivid and you don’t really need me to tell you to buy a ticket to this, do you?

The next BluePrint concert is November 19 and features the work of Parisian composer Philippe Hersant, who will be there in person. I am planning on being there in person as well.

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.

farewell, my lovelies

Above are postcards of Matisse's Femme au Chapeau and Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, just two among the many riches of The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, which closes tomorrow (Tuesday September 6) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling on to New York and Paris. Tomorrow is also "free first Tuesday" at the museum, which is always a horrible mob scene, so consider yourself warned.

Forget Labor Day: the closing of this exhibit marks the end of my summer. (Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, the excellent exhibit down the street from SFMOMA at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, also closes September 6.) I've framed the cards with some of the admission tickets from my 21 visits. That membership sure paid for itself this year, and for a few more years besides. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my lunch hours now. Just eat lunch, I guess.

My post about the exhibit is here, my background post on the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts is here, and my post on Ensemble Parallele's performance of a shortened version of 4 Saints, held in conjunction with this exhibit, is here.

Thus ends the summer of Stein. @Gertrude: We'll always have Paris.

when this you see remember me

I was at the Thursday and Saturday night performances of 4 Saints in 3 Acts, sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (in conjunction with their exhibit The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde), held at the attractive small theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts right across the street, and performed by the fabulous Ensemble Parallele.

It’s a bit misleading to describe the evening as a performance of 4 Saints in 3 Acts; this was an “Opera Installation” (I’m only surprised that its art-museum origin didn’t result in its being called “The 4 Saints Project”) so what we actually had was an abbreviated version of 4 Saints, preceded by a new composition called A Heavenly Act, a setting by Luciano Chessa of parts of Stein’s text cut from the reduced Saints. The idea of continuing the avant-garde performance tradition association with 4 Saints is not in itself a bad one, but they would have been better off leaving 4 Saints alone – Ensemble Parallele’s performance being, as expected given their track record, of such quality that I wished they were performing the entire opera – and maybe commissioning a new setting of some of Stein’s other texts.

On Thursday we were allowed to go directly into the event we had paid for; last night, however, we had to start with not one but two (one for Yerba Buena and one for SFMOMA) pointless and boring speeches from museum functionaries. They blathered on and on about their “installations” and “projects” and “background” for the piece, all of which (and more) is already easily available on-line or in the program. Gentlemen, let me tell you about a wonderful invention called the Internet. Anyone who is interested in what your organizations are doing, based on their viewing of the performance you are delaying for your own ego-gratification, can look it up later on the Internet. If we’ve spent up to $85 on tickets, there’s a good chance we already know what we’re going to be seeing, and if we don’t, that’s a deliberate choice that should be respected.

These tedious speeches were not only exasperating. I think the one from the SFMOMA guy was actually destructive, since he announced at one point that it was “OK to laugh” (then he added, as a condescending afterthought, that it was “OK to cry” as well; thanks, but I really don’t need to be told what makes me laugh or cry), which a large portion of the audience took as official permission to regard the opera as just silliness and hijinks; no matter what the words and music and movement evoked of beauty or passion or melancholy delicate poetry, there was continuing inane laughter that had not been there Thursday night when we had no little speeches. (And even the comic parts of the opera are really more evocative of witty smiles than guffaws; this isn’t Deputy Dawg.) Since the newly created scenario for 4 Saints involved the mercy killing (of St Teresa 1 by St Ignatius), a major operation (St Ignatius as the doctor), a trial for the life of St Ignatius, and his execution in an electric chair (the silly old women behind me chortling constantly throughout), the laughter was a pretty clear indication that people weren’t open to what they were seeing, but to what they had been told they should see. Why is a curator of modern art trying to direct our responses anyway? Why not trust the work of art and trust the audience and let us have our own reactions and our own opinions?

I liked Chessa’s music even more on the second hearing, though I would have preferred to hear it when I wasn’t waiting for 4 Saints. His piece opens with mistier shadier slow undulations, which contrast nicely with Thomson’s crisper tunes, and he elegantly references Thomson’s music, and though it’s beautifully done (as if he were an architect incorporating echoes of an attached older building into a new one), the very fact of doing so means this work is not in the tradition of 4 Saints, which was (and, wonderfully, remains) bold and eccentric and original.

There is a video projection by Kalup Linzy, consisting mostly of clouds and gauzy angels in smoky black-and-white, which was all quite lovely but not at all original or challenging in the way of the original. Linzy is black, and the program connects his role in this production with the famous use of an all-black cast in the original 4 Saints, but audience expectations are no longer challenged by seeing black singers in an opera; this is a good thing for both art and society, but it’s another way in which this production does not – could not – generate the frisson of the original. In fact it’s difficult to think of a more universal symbol of The Lovely than soft-focus angels and clouds. Nothing wrong with that, but just another source of frustration when I’m waiting for 4 Saints.

A Heavenly Act is very dark, at least on stage; the music covers a wider spectrum. The chorus mostly wears black cowls, and the lighting is low. The music suddenly changes to a stylish waltz, which evoked a raffish but elegant hotel ballroom of the 1920s with potted palms; the waltz grows increasingly frantic and moves towards a gospel number, sung by Linzy with angel wings (and a microphone) and in dark robes of the sort of black that looks green, but unfortunately he doesn’t have the voice or presence to carry off a gospel number – you can hear in the music that it was meant to be an exuberant explosion, but you can’t hear it in the performance. (And, again, gospel numbers on stage are not only not novelties, they’ve become a bit of a Broadway cliché.)

Throughout the first act, the words are mostly unintelligible. Stein, careful guardian of her own genius, would not like this. And I don’t think Thomson would either; famously (or notoriously, since people now tend to find his attitude patronizing), he decided to use black singers because of the clarity and beauty of their elocution. The libretto of 4 Saints is one of Stein’s, uh, more deeply hermetic texts (which means you’ll either find it evocative and poetic, as I do, or incoherent gibberish; personally, I admire Stein for continuing to walk the far edge; her difficulties remain difficult, which is part of their point; they haven’t been glossed and smoothed into a standard reading), but – and this is part of Thomson’s genius – it really does make sense, certainly poetic and emotional sense, when it’s sung. The form and shape of the music help form and shape the words and their possible meanings and echoes (and they build, which is why it's problematic to perform only part of this opera). Things live on the stage in a way they don’t on the page (which is why theater, despite its inconveniences and never-ending problems, and stupid giggling audiences, lasts).

Surtitles were not used for either part. I think this is a defensible idea for several reasons: the lack of surtitles has the effect of both forcing you to pay closer attention to the words and relieving you from needing to follow the libretto word by word. (I realize these two effects sound contradictory, but the dual effect is true; and if you dislike paradox and obscurity, 4 Saints is not the opera for you.) The opera is a balancing act between words and music and they need to join in performance; surtitles can emphasize the words in a way that obscures the emotional clarity provided by music and action (as when you buy a used book and any underlined or highlighted words jump out at you, even if you have no idea why they were underlined or highlighted).

As I said, I would have enjoyed A Heavenly Act on its own; as it was, I found it much too long (almost 40 minutes of a 90-minute performance), since I was eager for 4 Saints. I would happily buy a ticket if someone wanted to do a similar “installation” to one of the over-produced staples of the repertory, but 4 Saints is done so rarely that the evening led to a sense of frustration rather than adventure. The original is itself only around 90 minutes, and performing the whole thing doesn’t require anything that isn’t also needed for the short version (which, by the way, was never intended as a substitute performing version or final revision, no matter what SFMOMA is implying; Thomson made a short version, based on the hour he was given for a radio broadcast, and a record executive told him he would record that hour; Thomson refers to the recording in a letter to Alice B Toklas after Stein's death as "excerpts" of the opera).

As previously noted, 4 Saints is one of my all-time favorite operas, and I have never had the chance to see a full-length production; given that, my frustration with this evening was maybe to be expected, but it was a bit of a perverse tease to sell me a ticket for 4 Saints and then spend so much time on something which, while quite lovely, is not 4 Saints.

The overall excellence of Ensemble Parallele’s performance added to the frustration (especially since I felt on Thursday night that a few moments, particularly in the beginning, would have benefited from some of the rehearsal time that was no doubt spent on A Heavenly Act; there were some glitches on Saturday but on the whole the performance seemed more confident, though I shouldn't leave the impression that either night was overall anything but superb). I’ve sketched out their new scenario above, and director Brian Staufenbiel did a wonderful job staging the opera, using the words and music as the key to the action, so that sometimes it all made excellent (and even surprising and new) sense, and other times it created a wonderful disjunction between sense and scene (as in the trial, when the arbitrary-seeming phrases made a satirical point about the workings of earthly justice versus the higher morality of St Ignatius’s actions). There are elegant and witty dances (choreography by Michael Mohammed) when the music calls for them.

The set is also elegant and witty, with a bed, tables, and some chairs, all in white and on wheels, with touches of silver (as in the silver masks that line the top part of the bed, where a canopy would hang, which echo the silver faces of the white-clad cast). There are some touches of yellow and pale blue; St Teresa 1 is all in buttery yellow, and St Ignatius in brilliant red. (Set design by Staufenbiel and costumes by Christine Cook.) As noted, the rest of the cast is in white, except for the non-singing supernumaries, who are silver-faced policemen (click here for photos and a backstage report from evil supernumary SFMike), and the Compere and Commere (respectively John Bischoff and Wendy Hillhouse), who are in grand and slightly tatty Napoleonic finery, a witty reference to the Parisian milieu of Stein and Thomson.

Nicole Paiement, conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Parallele, had a wonderful touch with the music; hearing it after being so used to the recording was like seeing a familiar fresco cleaned and restored to its original fresh brilliance of color. The cast (many of them still students at, or newly graduated from, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music) was strong throughout. I particularly liked the purity of Heidi Moss’s St Teresa 1 and Kristen Choi’s St Teresa 2; Choi seemed to connect directly to the emotional truth and lyric beauty of each of her lines. The St Ignatius of Eugene Brancoveanu dominated the proceedings with his flowing baritone, large and deep; he was particularly fine – vibrant and sensitive and pointed – in Pigeons on the grass, alas, which is the Nessun Dorma of avant-garde opera.

What was there was all so good! Please, why not do the whole thing?

they wept because "they didn't know something so beautiful could be done in America"

In conjunction with their amazing reunion of the Stein collection this summer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is sponsoring a revival/restaging/partial revision of the Gertude Stein/Virgil Thomson modernist milestone, 4 Saints in 3 Acts, by the fabulous Ensemble Parallele. It runs this Thursday, 18 August, through Sunday, 21 August, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Get your tickets here.

4 Saints in 3 Acts, one of the few operas whose librettist is always given equal billing with the composer, has always been one of my all-time favorite operas. I have been fascinated by it since I first heard about it, probably when I was around 13 and reading something by or about Gertrude Stein. It was one of the first operas I bought (on cassette; this was before CDs) and listening to it is one of the few things that can reliably make me happy, even after all these years.

This is a somewhat arbitrary list of related materials, for anyone equally fascinated by this Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson collaboration:

Thomson, who was a music critic for many years at the New York Herald Tribune, is one of those musicians like Berlioz whose writing is almost as entertaining as his music. He wrote quite a lot about 4 Saints, its genesis and reception. His autobiography and his selected writings are vivid and provocative, though as with all autobiographies you might want to check what he says against a more disinterested source, particularly the Tommasini biography mentioned below. Actually, the Virgil Thomson Reader I have seems to be different from the one linked to above, and is now I guess out of print. I read the Reader and the autobiography so long ago that I should probably re-read them.

Stein wrote less about the aftermath of 4 Saints, perhaps because she and Thomson had been quarrelling at the time of the premiere and she didn't even see it until her tour of the USA, when it happened to be staged in Chicago when she was there. She mentions it in passing in several places in Everybody's Autobiography, the sort-of sequel to her surprise (and surprising) best-seller, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. She did enjoy the extra celebrity brought to her by the opera's unexpected success.

A few years ago I bought a used copy of the 1934 first printing of the text, which is the classic "slim volume of verse." It has an introduction by Stein's friend and defender, Carl van Vechten, who suggests that in both words and action 4 Saints is no more obscure and convoluted than Ponchielli's La Gioconda. Whoever owned this copy earlier wrote on the flyleaf in pencil "Nobody knows the Opera I seen, nobody knows but Gertrude" with the initials F.P.A. below, who is either the newspaperman Franklin P. Adams (how do I even know that name?) or the pencilling quipster him- or herself. You can find both the Autobiography and the text of 4 Saints in Volume 1 of the Library of America's two-volume Gertrude Stein collection.

About a year ago Oxford published the collected letters (to each other) of Stein and Thomson, under the title Composition as Conversation. It's thoroughly and helpfully annotated, and quite entertaining, though I'm only about half-way through it since letters, like lyric poetry, need space around them and do not benefit from cramming. It's always fascinating to see how much of a writer's style is simply a natural extension of personality and how much gets into the finished product. For some letters are a completely different thing from their "real" writing. Not surprisingly Stein is not one of these, though she can be fairly direct and matter-of-fact. Thomson usually resists the powerful rhythms of her style and manages to keep on sounding like himself.

Anthony Tommasini's biography of the composer (Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle) is affectionate but not uncritical, and pretty much indispensible if you're interested in Thomson and his times. The discussion of 4 Saints is particularly insightful on the work's staging and cultural milieu.

Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints is entirely about the first production of the opera. Some of the Amazon reviews seem particularly clueless about this book, commenting that it's full of gossip instead of whatever it was that reader was looking for; but it's not a literary study of the text or a musicological study of the opera; it's a cultural history, so, yeah, there's a lot of what you might call the higher gossip about who was quarrelling with whom and who was sleeping with whom and who snubbed whom and how somehow art gets produced while all the rest is going on. It's a thorough and very interesting book.

Incidentally Watson is speaking at the Contemporary Jewish Museum about 4 Saints this Thursday before the premiere of the new production, but I see by their website that it's sold out. But the CJM's Gertude Stein exhibit is also worth a visit or two, and includes some brief footage of the Mark Morris Dance Group production of 4 Saints, last staged here around six years ago. (As far as I know a film of Mark Morris's production is not publicly available; I assume the footage they use is from the MMDG's archives.)

The name Chick Austin kept recurring in all these accounts; he was the director of the Hartford Atheneum who first managed to get the opera staged and who helped make it a sensation. He has his own excellent biography by Eugene Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. If you wonder how museums went from the personal fiefs of rich collectors and connoisseurs to public, academically-inclined institutions, or if you wonder how modern art (that is, modern painting, not necessarily modern music) became widely seen (whether you like it or not) as the major art of our time, then you should read this book. It made me regret that I never went down to Hartford in the years I lived in Boston. It's fascinating to see how influential were many of Austin's personal interests and tastes (in baroque art, in circuses and movies and other "low" forms of art, in Picasso and other modernists, and even in the museum as a place not just for paintings but also for theater and for parties). Gaddis's even-handed approach to Austin's bisexuality is a model for such discussions: he doesn't brush it aside, but he doesn't dwell on it at the expense of Austin's more important achievements, and he doesn't naively insist, as many would these days, that Austin was "really" gay. Austin was married with children but had a number of male companions both before and during his marriage; he seemed to value both types of relationship, though at the end of his life he abruptly dumped his long-time male companion and returned permanently to his wife, announcing he never wanted to see the friend again. (I've forgotten the man's name, which I guess is rather Chick Austin of me, but he ended up working in a men's clothing store in Florida.)

Well, sexuality is sort of an unavoidable undercurrent in discussions of 4 Saints, among other things. I think it was in Tommasini's biography that I read that the original cast used to refer to the creators among themselves as "Mr Stein and Miss Thomson." Since a number of the (male) performers were sleeping with various of the (male) collaborators, I assume this was a somewhat affectionate gesture, even if they didn't use the nicknames in front of Thomson. There's a provocative and intriguing discussion of sexuality and 4 Saints in Nadine Hubbs's The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. It's about how a small group of mostly gay (and mostly Jewish) modern composers helped create what we think of as the American sound, thereby making themselves the voices of a society that wasn't particularly sympathetic to gays, Jews, or modernists. Hubbs's style can be a bit heavy with the academic-ese, but she doesn't substitute theory for thought and observation, and the book is well worth the time if you're interested in the subject.

After all that reading and theorizing, let's not forget the music and singing:

Capital Capitals, a Stein/Thomson work which preceded 4 Saints and is a sort of dry-run experiment by Thomson in setting Stein, is available on a couple of recordings. You can find its premiere recording, with Thomson on piano, in one (Modern American Vocal Works) where it's paired with Thomson's Stabat Mater (with Jennie Tourel), along with classic recordings of Copland's Old American Songs (featuring William Warfield with Copland on piano) and Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 (with Eleanor Steber) and Hermit Songs (featuring Leontyne Price with Barber on the piano). Capital Capitals is also available on an all-Thomson disc (Mostly About Love, which features Anthony Tommasini on the piano) along with a number of shorter vocal selections, including some others with texts by Stein. It's been a while since I've listened to these recordings but I remember liking them a lot.

The famous final Stein/Thomson collaboration, The Mother of Us All, is available in a recording from Santa Fe, conducted by Raymond Leppard. Again, it's been a while since I've heard this one, and I suppose I should have given it another listen before bringing it up, but right now I'm kind of buried under newly-purchased yet unlistened-to CDs, among other things, and I've always preferred 4 Saints as more poetical anyway, so I didn't. You get to have the joy of discovery, and of forming your own opinion! You can sometimes find copies of the Columbia University premiere floating around, but I think it wasn't ever officially released.

And, of course, there are recordings of 4 Saints itself. Even without the added interest that comes from being conducted by the composer himself and from including many of the original singers, Thomson's own recording is bouncy and tangy and, though I really hate using this word in a context like this, essential. It is also, unfortunately, only about half of the opera, so it's sort of 2 Saints in 1.5 Acts. What's really unfortunate is that this abridgement (insisted upon by a record executive; since CDs can have longer running times they've filled the rest of the CD with Stokowski conducting Thomson's The Plow That Broke the Plains) has often been taken as an alternative performing edition. (To continue with unfortunate things, the upcoming performances are abridged, though I understand that was not Ensemble Parallele's idea.) C'mon, people, the whole thing is only about an hour and a half! There is one very good complete recording, which is the one I first bought on cassette long ago, though my cassettes were replaced, also long ago, by CDs. But it too seems to have fallen out of print, though like some of the CDs mentioned earlier used copies are available at prices ranging from the reasonable to the outrageous, and I keep hoping for another one anyway (possibly Naxos's American Opera Classics series will come through for me), because, as previously noted, I can't get enough of this opera.

The photograph at the top is a detail from The Cathedrals of Broadway in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted by Florine Stettheimer, who is best known for her original designs (fanciful, colorful, and staged with cellophane) for the 4 Saints premiere.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: August

August is as usual a fairly slow month, but there’s a surprising amount of opera on offer:

This year’s Merola singers, by all accounts a very promising bunch, are performing Rossini’s evergreen Il barbiere di Siviglia at Herbst Theater at 8:00 August 4 and 5 and 2:00 August 6 and 7. The opera is doublecast, with each cast performing twice.

OK, the Merola Program offered me tickets to this, for which I am grateful, since I don't get these offers very often, but: we are “strongly urged” to attend on both the 4th and 5th, and those who do get “seating priority”; tickets will be “extremely limited” for those who can only go once, or to the later performances. That's fine; it makes sense to have reviewers hear both casts, and I was starting to look forward to doing so, this being an instance in which hearing something twice might be more interesting than hearing it once (I like Barbiere but don’t really feel much urgency about hearing it again, but it would be fun to compare the different casts).

Then I checked the calendar. I had assumed we were talking about Friday and Saturday: no, it’s Thursday and Friday. So this is apparently how this is supposed to go: I get up early and work all day Thursday, then I have to kill three hours until the show starts at 8:00; the show runs about three hours, so I don’t get home until around midnight; then, after five hours or less of sleep, I have to get up early, go work another full day, then waste another three hours waiting for 8:00 to roll around, and then I get home around midnight, presumably to rise early the next morning to be first out of the gate with something cogent and quotable.

8:00 start times on Thursday and Friday night for a three-hour work, two nights in a row? Look, I say this with sincere love in my heart, and mucho gratitude for the offer, and every good wish for the success of these swell young singers, but: these people are simply not dealing in reality. Does someone over Opera-House Way realize that most of us bloggers actually have to have jobs? Ones that, you know, pay? Where we need to be productive, or at least semi-conscious, and no one cares that we’d really rather be at the opera?

Well, if you’re retired, unemployed or self-employed, or a student, please enjoy the show!

The Merola Grand Finale will take place on Saturday, August 20, at 7:30, in the Opera House.

Berkeley/West Edge Opera offers the world premiere of Caliban Dreams; the final two performances are Friday August 5 and Sunday August 7.

The fabulous and adventurous Ensemble Parallele offers one of my all-time favorite operas (thank you!), the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein collaboration 4 Saints in 3 Acts, at Yerba Buena on August 18-21. This is billed as an “opera installation” with additional music by Luciano Chessa. I personally have never felt the need for additional music to 4 Saints, but considering Ensemble Parallele’s track record I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

If you’re tired of singing (or, rather, of listening to singers), Old First Concerts has some interesting programs; the one that is catching my eye is Sunday, August 28, at 4:00: Robert Howard on cello and Elizabeth Dorman on piano, performing Orion by Takemitsu, Louange a l’Eternite de Jesus by Messiaen, Suite Italienne by Stravinsky, and the Sonata in F major by Brahms.

And speaking of Gertrude Stein, SFMOMA’s showing of the reassembled Stein collection will be there for only about another month. This is arguably the artistic event of the year, and it almost doesn’t matter which year you’re referring to.

Love and Death; or, The Poet and the Princess

Fortunately the symphonic excitements happening elsewhere in the Bay Area last night didn’t keep Ensemble Parallele's production of Philip Glass’s Orphee from getting what looked like an almost full house, though they may have been tapping a new audience source, since the crowd looked distinctly more artsy and stylish (and were noticeably better behaved) than the usual crowd. Good to know that word is getting out about Ensemble Parallele, because their adventurous work needs to continue; the year is young, but there’s a good chance that this production is theatrically and conceptually more striking than any other operas we’re going to get around here, except maybe for Ensemble Parallele’s own upcoming (August 19-21) production of one of my favorite operas, 4 Saints in 3 Acts.

Though the visceral emotional impact of last year’s Wozzeck wasn’t quite there, that is no doubt because the Glass/Cocteau work is in itself more playful and ambiguous than the Berg/Buchner. Last week I watched Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, for what I realized was the first time; I had assumed I had seen at least one of the films before, possibly back in college, because I am old enough so that the college experience included seeing foreign art films in funky repertory theaters, rather than getting black-out drunk every weekend. (Orphee is about, among other things, aging and wondering about your presence among the rising generations, so you see it all ties in.) Orphee itself was probably my least favorite of the three, but for reasons that make it prime operatic material: the others are more about poetically ambiguous moments of surrealism and Orphee is more about plot and inter-relationships, and it’s handicapped in that regard by the perpetually petulant Orphee of Jean Marais; last night Eugene Brancoveanu’s strong clear voice and appealing presence made the character instantly more sympathetic and interesting.

It helped to have seen the movies so recently, since the plot can be a bit hard to follow, especially if you're expecting a more straightforward rendition of the Orpheus/Eurydice story. But this production kept the locales and mood clear enough (and of course Glass’s score helps differentiate locales, from the antic, carnival-like sounds of the opening scene at the Poet’s Café to the plaintive flute, reminiscent of Gluck, that pierces the Underworld): the domestic scenes were in soft blues and browns; the Underworld scenes used a circus theme (very suitable, as an inversion and parody of our bourgeois world, with clowns as the imps of Hell) in black and red with accents of white and gold. (If the domestic scenes dragged a bit, that is simply in the nature of domestic scenes when contrasted with the glittering and disreputable circus.) The Roue Cyr, a large metal circle which is manipulated by a human rider inside functioning as the spokes of a wheel, took the place of the film’s mirrors as the entry to the Underworld.

This underworld included several fun and talented circus artists – and though it goes against the raffish, outsider nature of the circus Cocteau admired to refer to all circus performers as artists, to our eyes they clearly are artists (aerialist Marina Luna, Roue Cyr artist David Poznanter, and clown Ajina Slater). The circus theme is one of several references to Cocteau’s interests and milieu that are built into the production; another is that the banal plastic dishwashing gloves which are the key to passing through to the underworld become boxing gloves once one is in the Underworld: this is a reference to Cocteau’s interest in boxing (which was also no doubt an interest in boxers).

I knew the reason for the boxing gloves because, thanks to my early arrival, I was in my seat when conductor Nicole Paiement came out for a pre-performance talk, which was for once informative and useful. Here are some other points she made: Glass’s music for this opera, with its transparent scoring and emphasis on supporting the words, is very much in line with classic French operatic style; and the trance-like, dreamlike state his musical repetitions induce is a neat fit with Cocteau’s dreamlike surrealism.

One twist from the usual Orpheus legend is that his great love seems to be not Eurydice (the extremely appealing Susannah Biller), but Death, who takes the form of an elegant and imperious Princess (the fabulous Marnie Breckenridge). Death returns the favor, a violation of the rules of the Underworld (the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Underworld is an element which, somewhat surprisingly, came out more strongly in this circus staging than in the film itself). The Princess and Orfee’s underworld confession of mutual, transgressive love, right before the Princess sacrifices them both by reversing time and restoring Orfee unconditionally to Eurydice, is the emotional highlight of the evening, brought to intense life by Breckenridge and Brancoveanu. (A minor complaint about the staging: it would be witty to have Death smoking, but when the other characters occasionally light up it seems silly and dated; after all, the opera is supposed to take place in a timeless land, the sort of improbable place where a policeman can refer to a poet as a national hero and no one laughs.)

I haven’t had a chance to mention all of those involved in the production, but it’s a sign of Ensemble Parallele’s outstanding work that they can get so many extremely talented people to put in so much work for what was unfortunately only a two-performance run: in addition to Brancoveanu, Breckenridge, and Biller, whom I’ve already mentioned, and Nicole Paiement conducting, we had John Duykers as Heurtebise, Philip Skinner as a Poet and a Judge, Thomas Glenn as Cegeste and a Reporter, Brooke Munoz as Aglaonice, and Austin Kness as the Police Commissioner. Brian Staufenbiel was the director, Austin Forbord did the videos, Matthew Antaky designed the lighting, Christine Crook designed the costumes, and the supernumeraries, who add a lot to the grotesque and menacing circus Underworld, are Michael Harvey, Charlie Lichtman, and Michael Strickland.

in case I didn't already love Ensemble Parallele to pieces. . .

I've just heard (via SF MOMA's e-mail newsletter) that they will be presenting Stein/Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts sometime in August, in conjunction with SF MOMA's upcoming exhibit, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (I also can't wait to see that show, since I have a long-time thing about Stein).

There will be visuals by "video/performance artist" Kalup Linzy and "original music" by Luciano Chessa (hmm, not sure why they need additional music, but I guess I'll find out).

That's all I know at this point; stay tuned. . . .

fun stuff I may or may not get to: February

February 4-6, Magnificat presents works by Renaissance women composers (Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre).

The Conservatory of Music’s Hot Air Music Festival has an utterly fantastic line-up on February 6; unfortunately for me I will have to miss most or most likely all of it, but if I didn’t have a conflict I would be there from opening to closing, because it all looks that good. Check it out and tell them I said hello.

Another interesting event on the afternoon of the 6th: Old First Concerts presents the Wooden Fish Ensemble in songs, piano works, and a new piece for koto ensemble by Young-ja Lee, in honor of her 80th birthday.

The Shotgun Players present Josh Kornbluth’s Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? from February 9 through the 27th.

February 12, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival takes over the Castro Theater for its winter event, featuring several of Chaplin’s Mutual shorts; L’Argent, a 1928 French film based on Zola’s novel; and the King Vidor La Boheme, with Lillian Gish and John Gilbert.

San Francisco Performances has Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa on the 19th, playing Tartini (arranged by Kreisler), Beethoven, Ives, Bach, and Antheil; and Jenny Lin on the 27th, playing selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier and from Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.

Ensemble Parallele has two programs this month: On the 5th at the Conservatory of Music they celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Bowles with music by Bowles, Michele Reverdy, and Maurice Ohana. And on the 26th and 27th they present one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated shows: their circus-inflected production of Philip Glass’s Orphée (based on the Jean Cocteau film).

Cal Performances has the Vienna Philharmonic, but they have them mostly on days when I have conflicts, even if I were willing, with my new-found consciousness of poverty, to pay those ticket prices – I realize this is something special, but for that price I want a full opera (and in the front row), not just the orchestra. They also have Robert Lepage’s group, Ex Machina, in the intriguing-sounding Eonnagata, and I might have blown it with that one by not including it in my choose-your-own subscription, because I thought it was in Zellerbach Playhouse, where they had their last Lepage production, The Andersen Project (Andersen as in Hans Christian Andersen, and Project as in what everyone calls every artistic endeavor these days). Put off by the asinine 8:00 start time in the middle of the week, I figured I’d see how I felt when it came around, because the Playhouse is a manageable size, so that even if I couldn’t get the front row I would have a seat that would be, I will somewhat grudgingly admit, OK. It turns out I should have read the brochure more carefully, because it’s in cavernous Zellerbach Auditorium, and there were no acceptable (to me) seats available last time I checked. Ah well – it’s still at an idiotic time, so maybe that will be a night I sleep well. Maybe. Of course, if I’m not going, it’s bound to be spectacular, so do feel free to rub in what I missed.

The San Francisco Symphony presents Feldman’s Rothko Chapel and Mozart’s Requiem, February 23-26.

And on Monday, February 28, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presents works by Ligeti, Du Yun, Ronald Bruce Smith, and Brian Current.

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.

chamber Wozzeck

Ensemble Parallele gave a much-needed jolt to the Bay Area opera scene with its triumphant production last weekend of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (in John Rea’s chamber-opera version). It was so outstanding that if I want to bitch about something in that endearing way I have, I have to reach for the peeviest of my pet peeves, like they started late. Well, and maybe I’ll also complain that there were only two performances on one weekend, so anyone who was out of town would miss the production entirely, which is a shame since I doubt we’re going to see this brutal and beautiful masterpiece anytime soon over at the increasingly inert San Francisco Opera.

Under conductor Nicole Paiement, Artistic Director of the Ensemble, the orchestra played so wonderfully that I never really felt the music was stripped down; instead, without undue lingering over details, the shock and beauty of Berg’s score were clearly laid out for us (even though, I have to say, I’m really more of a Lulu guy). Full credit to her and to Stage Director and Concept Designer Brian Staufenbiel; I’ve never seen the complexities and ironies and even the strange absurdist humor of the work brought out so clearly. There was a simple set (Mathew Antaky did set and lighting design), two mobile half-houses that could be turned around for interior scenes, pushed together for the tavern, or moved aside for the outdoors. I don’t know exactly why, but I thought the staging would be really stripped down (I mean stripped down in a “we don’t have money” way, not in a "deliberate aesthetic choice" way), but I never had the feeling that they were skimping in their efforts to realize the work.

The set was augmented by video projections by Austin Forbord; I had read beforehand that there would be video inspired by German expressionist films, and though that’s one of my favorite film eras, I was a little concerned, as it is way too easy to go overboard with both video projections during operas and with German expressionism – all those enticing jagged shadows and intensely, even overly, dramatic gestures! But the projections were never allowed to swamp the staging. In the first scene, when Wozzeck (Bojan Knezevic) is shaving the Captain (John Duykers), the video feed is live, and looming in the back of the stage we see a close-up in silvery black-and-white of the Captain’s face as he lectures Wozzeck. The camera never leaves his face, never switches to Wozzeck, and there’s a slightly disorienting effect since the Captain’s lips are slightly behind the words we hear. And this is how the Captain appears to Wozzeck. We are immediately brought inside Wozzeck's head (the same technique – a close-up on only one speaker of the dialogue, shot live – is used in the scene with the Doctor (Philip Skinner); only those two scenes are shot live).

In other scenes the video simply shows a field, or we see the swaggering drum major (AJ Glueckert) as he appears in the longing, lonely thoughts of Marie (Patricia Green). In the murder scene, the video riverbank starts to fall in on itself (an effect that reminded me of the buildings collapsing on Emil Jannings in one of my all-time favorite films, The Last Laugh) while the moon grows larger and larger and turns redder and redder until the whole stage is bathed in red light. The second tavern scene, after the murder, is much more stylized in the Expressionist way than the first, which is before the murder; the production uses expressionism as it’s meant to be used, for strong emotional expression, and not just for decorative or period effect.

The entire cast was superb and the singing was always expressive and heartfelt. My initial thought was that Knezevic was bringing the crazy a little too soon, but then I saw that he was going back and forth from disturbed to normal (well, normal is disturbed, which is what’s going on here) from scene to scene, and his distance and strangeness help shed a sympathetic light on Marie, his poor beaten-down common-law wife who is made so happy by the gaudy earrings the Drum Major gives her as present and payment. There's a wonderful, subtle moment when Marie realizes Wozzeck has brought her to the riverbank to kill her for her infidelity, and her body slumps slightly towards his, passive and doomed. I’ve never been so touched by a Marie. Duykers and Skinner were expert at the menacing cruel comedy of the Captain and the Doctor. Just to complete the list of major roles: Andres was J Raymond Meyers, Margret was Erin Neff, the First Apprentice was John Bischoff, the Second Apprentice was Torleff Borsting, the Madman was Michael Desnoyers, and Marie’s son was Kai Nau. Consider them all gushed over by me.

My only other experience with Ensemble Parallele was their premiere of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar three years ago. Apparently they are hoping to stage an annual chamber opera, and it’s probably pretty clear by now that I’m really hoping that happens. The Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena is perfect for chamber opera (so I take back what I said earlier about the Bay Area not having a theater suitable for something like The Rape of Lucretia). Ensemble Parallele’s announced upcoming projects include a new opera from Dante de Silva on Gesualdo and a chamber version of Harbison’s Great Gatsby – I’m very eager to hear them both, but particularly the Harbison, since I saw it at the Met and found it fascinating though flawed, done in by some major miscasting (Hadley as an unmysterious Gatsby and Upshaw as Daisy; I love Upshaw, but the qualities that make her fans love her – her intelligence and adventurousness and down-to-earthness – are all wrong for Daisy, a sheltered golden daughter of privilege; it’s a tricky role to cast anyway, like Helen of Troy, since she functions as a projection, a vision that will differ with each viewer).

Ave Caesar

Even with my favorite composers and performers I usually don’t remember when or why exactly I started listening to them. (Why do I listen to Elliott Carter? I just know I started in the 1980s, possibly because I had read he was “difficult.”) But with Lou Harrison I know exactly when and why: when I heard Ursula Oppens play his Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony; and the why is obviously because I loved it. I headed to Tower the next day and found the Keith Jarrett recording; I see the copyright on the disc (I’m listening to it now) is 1988, which is later than I would have guessed. So as soon as I read that Harrison’s opera Young Caesar would have its (final form) world premiere at Yerba Buena, I bought a ticket. In fact I bought the ticket so early that they sold me one for a row that disappeared into the orchestra pit. Fortunately they found me another one in the front row and even better there was no one beside me.

What a swell evening! I’m not saying the work is perfect: the second act is too long, for example (the first half is about an hour and the second about ninety minutes). And I’m familiar enough with Harrison and with Asian theatrical styles to accept the formality, the repetition, and the reliance on a narrator (the outstanding John Duykers, who looked a bit like Harrison), though I can see where someone coming from verismo might be put off. But what impressive staging, singing, acting, and dedication from all involved. There were no surtitles, and none were needed. There was (hallelujah) no miking, even for the parts that were sung-spoken rather than sung out. The set was an elegant and effective series of white cloth panels that could be raised or lowered, supplemented in the second, Bythinian, half with slightly narrower panels in pink, rose, and crimson, to suggest what used to be called Oriental splendor.

Harrison avoided the usual division in musical styles between West and East, using a sort of Chinese opera sound throughout (anyone familiar with Harrison will be able to guess how the music sounds). Some other conventions were not so successfully avoided: Eugene Brancoveanu was impressive as Caesar’s lover, Nicomedes the King of Bythinia, and wore his costume (a sheer red body stocking with gold lame briefs, a cape, and piles of golden curls) with panache, but I couldn’t help feeling that at moments his behavior and attitudes were a little anachronistically camp, a little too Auntie Mame, for a royal potentate of that time. The “gay love of Caesar” angle has gotten a lot of publicity, but the opera is rightly called Young Caesar – and Eleazar Rodriguez ably shouldered the burden – rather than “Caesar and Nicomedes” since the affair doesn’t start until the second half, and is seen as a step in Caesar’s development rather than the main point of the evening (and therefore his life), making this more of a bildungsroman – bildungsopera? – rather than a straight-forward love story. Harrison and Robert Gordon, the librettist, avoided making the affair into anything overly simple or idealized; it’s clear that, loving as the interlude might be, it is only an interlude, and Caesar knows it as well as Nicomedes, even though the latter is presented as an older, more sophisticated man initiating the newcomer. (I was reminded several times of Rosenkavalier, in substance if not style.)

The interlude is supposed to teach Caesar to value chance and pleasure in addition to the Roman calculation and discipline urged by his Aunt Julia (more excellent work, this time from Wendy Hillhouse), but the point is blurred a bit, since as Caesar himself points out to Nicomedes, the sudden death of his father and the abrupt reversal of Julia’s fortunes have taught him already about uncertainty. And it’s suggested that Nicomedes’s seduction of Caesar is a delaying tactic, to avoid sending ships to the Roman wars as required by treaty. This blurring might be intentional, though, in a yin/yang way, just as Harrison’s music (nicely performed by the young and attractive orchestra conducted by Nicole Paiement, to whom I am very grateful since she was a guiding force behind the realization of the opera), blends European styles with Chinese opera and gamelan into the distinctive Harrison sound. If you like his music, I hope you were there, or get a chance to hear this work.