Berkeley Early Music Festival/Festival Opera: Handel's Alcina

Handel's Alcina is such a great opera, & I feel very fortunate to have experienced it live three times. The first, in 2002, was at San Francisco Opera, when a Stuttgart production was brought here by Pamela Rosenberg. I already loved the opera from recordings but had not heard good things about the production (that includes reviews not only of the SF production but in Gramophone of the DVD of the Stuttgart performance). I was overwhelmed by the intelligence & style of the production & regretted that my ticket was for the final show & I couldn't go experience it again. It's still one of my fondest memories among my opera nights. (It may have helped that I knew the opera, as mentioned, but had also read the Barbara Reynolds translation of the source, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, so I was already aware of the characters & context). The second time I heard it was at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music this past April; each spring the Conservatory does a historically informed performance of a baroque opera, & this year it was Alcina. I heard & very much enjoyed the first cast (I had a conflict & couldn't go the next day to hear the other group of singers). The third time was last Saturday, in the first of two concert performances presented at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley by Festival Opera as the climax of the bi-annual Berkeley Early Music Festival. There will be two fully staged performances on 19 & 21 June at Festival Opera's usual venue, the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek, & their audiences are, based on Saturday's performance, in for quite a treat.

Alcina is one of Handel's "magic" operas, meaning there are plentiful opportunities for visual splendor & shifting scenic extravaganzas, so although it works very well concert-style as a psychological study, staging adds to the fun & the sheer theatricality of the piece, but, as I said, the opera can stand on its own without baroque visual effects. One of the fascinating things about the piece is the potential ambiguity of character: how sincere is Alcina's love? She is a Circe-like sorceress who lives on her island, surrounded by wild beasts, rocks, & even waves that were once lovers whom she tired of. But she does seem – possibly – genuinely attached to the knight Ruggiero; even at the end, when it is clear he is leaving her, are her warnings to him motivated by sincere concern, or jealousy, or vindictiveness, or some combination of all those things?

Ruggiero has been rescued (or "rescued") from Alcina's pleasure island by his mentor & tutor, Melisso, & his once & future beloved, the Woman Warrior Bradamante (disguised for protection from hostile magic as her brother Ricciardo). There are further complications involving Alcina's sister Morgante, her general Oronte, & Oberto, a pageboy searching for his father, who has been transformed by Alcina into a lion. I will reiterate my usual advice on the plots of baroque operas, which is never read the plot summary, which will, inevitably, leave you hopelessly confused, with X in disguise as Y the beloved of Z & girls playing boys & boys who sound like girls playing military heroes: it will all make perfect sense on stage. And I don't think of these plots as fluff, or as some convoluted excuse for lots of pretty arias. There is a great deal of psychological insight & truthful dramatic strength in how life is portrayed in such operas. I find a more accurate reflection of the confusions & vagaries of love in baroque opera, with its gender-bent confusions & longing for love & uncertainties about what is real & lasting, than in any sweeping verismo statement of grand passions.

I've never understood why people who claim that they just want beautiful memorable tunes out of opera aren't clamoring for more baroque opera, which is basically a string of beautiful, memorable (&, let me emphasize, dramatically & emotionally appropriate) tunes – I mean, I'm sure there are some such who do love baroque opera, but people who make such statements usually mean they want overly familiar things done in an old-fashioned romantic style. You need terrific singers for baroque opera, & we certainly had them on Saturday night; let me run through the list, starting with the pageboy Oberto, sung by Nina Jones: it's a small part, but she brought pathos & power to it. Isaiah Musik-Ayala as Melisso was appropriately virile for someone trying to redirect his wayward pupil from love to duty – not, in the eyes of many of us, a very sympathetic position, but it's Melisso's position, & Musik-Ayala sold it. As Oronte, the general of Alcina's army & hopeful lover of the fickle Morgana, Spencer Greene was almost surprisingly memorable; this character can come across as a weakling, a mere cog in the wheels of lovely & lustful complications, but here he was a convincing frustrated lover.

To move on to the main quartet: Sarah Couden, well known as a commanding yet often whimsical presence in local productions of baroque operas, brought sincerity & pathos to Bradamante. As Morgana, Alcina's sister, another well-known local singer, Shawnette Sulker, was kittenish & hilarious but also, when the character expressed what is (possibly?) sincere regret over her straying love, genuinely moving. You couldn't blame Oronte for being won over, even if neither he nor we could be quite certain how sincere Morgana is. There was an unaccustomed bit of roughness, I thought, in Sulker's first aria, but she very soon righted herself & her voice was sweet & insinuating thereafter & her acting was reliably funny & on point. Courtney Miller as Ruggiero was elegantly assertive both as a lover & then as a warrior (though, for a concert performance, she maybe should have considered butching up her outfit or appearance a bit; I think some audience members were a bit confused by the femme looks of the valiant hero). And anyone who has heard Nikola Printz knows that they are brilliantly cast as the sorceress Alcina, commanding the stage with physical presence (even though Printz does not seem to be a very tall person) & vocal splendor; you truly believe that Alcina has magic powers & can control both her lovers & her magic island. Printz's interestingly androgynous face (they would be excellent casting as Joan of Arc) & clothing (a combination of soldier-like boots & flowing sheer tops in different colors for each of the three acts & necktied shirts) helped dramatize the erotic & subversive lure that captured so many supposedly strong men. Using not just sheer vocal volume but nuance, Printz held the center of the romantic & political complications of the plot. After Alcina's first aria, Printz delicately raised a finger & wiped first one side of her lips & then the other: the sort of understated but telling gesture that reveals a character in all her decisive & certain power. Festival Opera head Zachary Gordin directed the staging & Derek Tam led the ensemble from the harpsichord; the contributions of both were valuable parts of a memorable production.

One of the blessings of our musical moment is the revival of baroque opera, once thought an exotic blossom forever extinct, but in our time we have seen powerful & revelatory stagings of these formerly forgotten works. This year is a particularly good one for Handel operas in the Bay Area; not only did we have this Alcina, as well as the one in April at the Conservatory, but next month Philharmonia Baroque will be performing Tolomeo & in August West Edge is doing Rinaldo. All is not yet lost.

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.

August Addendum

This is what I get for thinking I could knock off two months at once! Here’s some extra stuff for August:

As noted earlier, Festival Opera in Walnut Creek is presenting Lucia di Lammermoor on August 7, 10, 13, and 15 (matinee), with an excellent cast: Angela Cadelago, Thomas Glenn, Brian Leerhuber, and Kirk Eichelberger. The Walnut Creek audiences can be badly behaved, but it’s sometimes worth it to hear exciting voices in a nice smaller house, as opposed to the bellowing in a barn these favorite operas usually receive.

This one is already underway: Cal Shakes (in Orinda, but accessible by shuttle from BART, though I must admit I’ve never tried it myself) is presenting the very talented Rick Miller in his hilarious MacHomer, in which he acts out Macbeth using the voices of various Simpsons characters. I saw this in Berkeley last time it came around and recommend it highly, and not just for laughs – honestly, this was a better version of Macbeth than the touring production I saw in Boston years ago with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson. (I know!)

Shotgun Players presents Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy, The Norman Conquests, starting this Friday, August 6.

And thanks to Lisa for mentioning the following, which I would have missed otherwise: The Hot Air Music Festival presents Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell and new pieces by Wolfgang Thompson and Matthew Cmiel on August 21 and 22 (7:30 both days), at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. You can buy tickets and read more details at Brown Paper Tickets.

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.

I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let's have the tongs and the bones.

I often wonder what exactly people mean when they say they “love opera.” Usually it means they saw Boheme/Butterfly/Traviata once, and it made them cry, or that they’ve seen Boheme/Butterfly/Traviata hundreds of times, and if they’re not still crying, they at least enjoy complaining that the golden age is past. I wonder how many people are actually interested in drama expressed musically. My latest reason for wondering this is that everyone assures me that Festival Opera is taking a huge risk in staging Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. They probably are, since I saw a number of empty seats on opening night last night (once again, Festival Opera kindly invited me to attend). Neither Britten nor A Midsummer Night’s Dream are exactly unknown quantities, I would have thought, and it’s hard to believe we live in a world in which that combo is not self-recommending, but apparently we do, such is our fallen state. But then I have only realized this past year, based on various comments and reviews I’ve read, that Britten is apparently like coconut, in that people tend to love him or avoid him, with little middle ground.

If you have any interest at all in Britten in particular or opera in general, I urge you to head on down to Walnut Creek for the remaining performances of Midsummer Night’s Dream (which are Tuesday August 12, Friday August 15, or a matinee on Sunday August 17). Despite a few reservations, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, and as I’ve said before this is one of the few Shakespeare-based operas that are worthy of their inspiration. Britten and Pears did a wonderful, intelligent job compressing the play (though I think the opera was trimmed a bit further last night, since I missed a few moments, though my mind might be deceiving me). And if many familiar lines from the play are missing from the libretto, I have to say I have the same experience during regular productions of any of Shakespeare’s plays, which are almost always cut, and not always with this libretto's intelligence and care.

This is the third time I’ve seen this opera staged; the first was at San Francisco Opera several years ago, and the second was at the Met. I’ve been to the Met four times, and the oldest work I’ve seen is Midsummer Night’s Dream; I’ve also seen The Great Gatsby and the first two performances of An American Tragedy, so based on my personal experience I have to say that the Met is clearly a staunch advocate of operas written in English and new American works in particular, which shows you the limitations of relying on one’s personal experience. If only I hadn’t had to call off my New York trip this past spring – I could at least have added an opera in Sanskrit to the list.

I have to say those empty seats I referred to earlier came in handy, since I moved after the first two acts when I realized the people around me were pretty much not going to stop chatting. I’m sorry, but I have to say it – what the hell is wrong with the audiences in Walnut Creek? I can understand the occasional coughing fit, I can even understand occasionally forgetting to turn off your cellphone, but there is absolutely no excuse for talking during a performance, and certainly not for conversations as long and as loud as the ones around me. Don’t let that scare you off, though, since I was assured by friends who sat elsewhere that the audience was courteous in other parts of the house, but someone seriously needs to do something about those people. Given that this is their audience, I really have to salute Festival Opera with gratitude for scheduling one unusual work along with one popular favorite – I would be deliriously happy if San Francisco Opera could match that 50/50 split. Festival Opera deserves the support of the Bay Area’s genuine opera-lovers.

The staging (by conductor Michael Morgan, with Mark Foehringer listed as co-director and choreographer) is simple but had some effective touches, mostly involving the fairies clearing props from the stage or covering or uncovering the lovers or Tytania with long stretches of rose-colored fabric (I know it doesn’t sound like much when you put it that way, but the effect is often charming), or the fairies' barely concealed eye-rolling when Tytania makes them wait on the ass-headed Bottom, a nuance I haven't seen in other productions of the Dream. And I really enjoyed the airborne Puck (an athletic and elegant Kurt Wolfgang Krikorian). The set for all scenes is basic, with a slightly rolling elevated area, some pink cloths hanging down, and a map of the stars as backdrop; a large rose descends when Oberon mentions the magic flower. The look is vaguely late ‘60s/early ‘70s; in general I think it’s a mistake to switch works to this period, because it is already so heavily identified with particular music and slang, though perhaps people always feel that about the period in which they grew up. In any case the switch isn’t too intrusive until the final scene, when the lovers pass around a bong during the performance of Pyramus and Thisby, and Theseus seems to be proposing a threesome to at least one of the couples. If the court isn’t formal and elegant, the crudity and foolishness of the Pyramus interlude loses some of its contrasting humorous effect. Before that scene, though, the costumes look vaguely but not painstakingly of the period, so the total effect is of haphazard whimsical charm, and of a slightly different time and place from our own; it’s just enough to have a slightly and desirably unsettling effect.

The costumes for the fairy chorus in particular are bright and witty and assembled from the fun and funkier reaches of our costuming subconscious; unfortunately I didn’t think they jibed particularly well with the ethereal, haunting music Britten used to slide us into the fairy realm. Also, the fairy chorus was made up of full-grown women, and was not a boys’ choir as specified by Britten. There is a quality – can I just say ethereal again, so soon after using it to describe the fairy music? – that a boys’ choir has that a women’s chorus doesn’t, so a certain delicacy of sound was lost, though the performance was still gorgeous. As Oberon, William Sauerland had a beautiful voice, and he phrased and enunciated with great care, but I couldn’t help feeling his voice was a size too small even for this comparatively intimate venue. Ani Maldjian as Tytania came through beautifully as a last-minute replacement for Marnie Breckenridge, who was called to Glyndebourne to cover a role in the new Eotvoos opera.

I don’t want to shortchange the rude mechanicals (John Minagro as Quince, Jonathan Smucker as Flute, John Bischoff as Snug, Trey Costerisan as Snout, and Joshua Elder as Starveling), especially the vigorous and rolling-toned Kirk Eichelberger as Bottom (some felt he stole the show, and if he didn’t for me, it’s only because I’ve never quite warmed up to Bottom – Eichelberger gave a commanding performance), but I have to say it’s pretty remarkable to see a Dream dominated by the lovers; their quartet at the beginning of Act 3 was particularly soaring and stirring. Nikolas Nackley as Demetrius had to compete with my memories of Nathan Gunn in the role, but he held his own with Stacey Cornell’s Helena of the lovely floating tones; Jessica Mariko Deardorff, who made a surprisingly big impression on me in the minor role of Ines in Festival Opera’s Trovatore last month, solidified the impression favorably with her Hermia. But to me the outstanding member of the excellent set was Jorge Garza as a clarion-voiced Lysander.

Speaking of chatty audiences, the court’s comments during Pyramus and Thisbe always strike me as fairly cruel and annoying, and in this performance they should have toned down the snickering and eye-rolling of the lovers and Theseus and Hippolyta (Igor Vieira and Lauren Groff, respectively, in what must be two of the more thankless roles in the operatic repertoire). I’ve often wished that one of the hempen homespuns would turn to the court and announce, as Holofernes does under similar circumstances in Love’s Labor’s Lost, “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble,” a scathing rebuke that of course sails right over the heads of its targets.

It’s probably needless to say that despite the few reservations I had about this scene, Pyramus and Thisby brought down the house, as it always does, which is actually sort of surprising, since so much of its humor is so sophisticated. When I heard this opera at the Met, the woman next to me assured her increasingly restive son, who was probably around thirteen and made it clear he would have preferred attending the Mets game, that he would absolutely love Pyramus and Thisby, and I thought, hmm, I don’t think so. Finding it funny is very dependent on understanding the theatrical conventions it’s playing off. I mean, if you’re not really familiar with Shakespeare – and Midsummer Night’s Dream is always a popular one to take children to for their first Shakespeare – you don’t necessarily realize that “O grim-looked night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not! / O night, O night! Alack, alack, alack. . . ” is funny and overdone, because it sounds like what people think Shakespeare sounds like. (In another nice directorial touch, Peter Quince sits below his troupe, mouthing along earnestly, totally engrossed in the awful script he's written.) Britten in this scene brilliantly parodies a variety of operatic styles and conventions, particularly the modernist sprechstimme (I don’t know if that’s technically what Britten is doing, but it’s what the parody sounds like) in Wall’s speeches, and most particularly the bel canto style, beginning its modern resurgence shortly before this opera’s 1960 premiere. Pyramus and Thisbe, a formerly respectable myth which Shakespeare sabotaged for all time, may be a case where getting all the jokes prevents you from seeing how generally appealing something is. Go see for yourself!

enemies of the people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down Town

Decades of reading plays and seeing them live, and somehow, without deliberately avoiding it, I have never seen or read Our Town. Probably most theater-goers have a similar tale to tell. Recently an actor friend told me he had never read or seen The Taming of the Shrew. I was actually pretty impressed that he had not only never read it (like most farces it plays better than it reads) but had somehow managed to avoid either being cast in or forced to see a production. These things happen. But I’m not entirely blank when it comes to Our Town. I have seen the 1940 movie, with a score by Copland, a film debut by William Holden, and some major (Wilder-approved) changes (Emily lives!). And now I’ve also seen Ned Rorem’s operatic version at Festival Opera in Walnut Creek (many thanks to TSt for getting me into the final dress rehearsal).

The play’s once unusual features (the bare set, the Stage Manager stepping outside of the action to comment on it, and the subtle dislocations of time) are now pretty much standard practice, but the play has strengths that outlive its innovations, though I have to say it doesn’t really appeal to me, which I’m sure is more of a comment on me than on the play. The whole thing is so wholesome, the people so wise and good in their little victories and big insights, so loving and profound, that frankly it creeps me out. (Shortly after seeing the Our Town movie I watched another film with a script by Wilder, Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, and it occurred to me that it was the dark reverse of Our Town, and I felt more comfortable with it.) Give me the David Lynch-style severed ear near the white picket fence and I can happily gorge on my (literal or metaphorical) popcorn. But show me the good-hearted sincerity of decent folk in small-town Americana where stern but loving Dads give sensible advice to their chore-neglecting, baseball-crazy sons and busy but big-hearted Mothers dispense deep wisdom while shelling peas and, I’m sorry to say, the flesh of this jaded ironist crawls with uncomfortable terror. The libretto by JD McClatchy doesn’t really help things by banishing some of those subtle dislocations of time (the geographical background and other such comments) to surtitles rather than the actual dialogue. (The surtitles zip by a bit too quickly to be legible – I don’t know if they were planning to change that before the official opening; the actual sung text is not surtitled, which makes sense in a small theater presenting a work in English.) Also, 1901 – 1913 was a lot closer to the play’s original audience than it is to us, and that passage of time makes Grover’s Corners more picturesque now than it probably would have been originally, or is meant to be. My memory of the movie is that it’s much darker than the opera – the troubled drunken organist and the gossipy neighbor seemed rueful here rather than tragic or vicious. On the whole the cast was on a very high level, with Marnie Breckenridge and Thomas Glenn outstanding as the young lovers. I thought Patrice Houston was particularly good as Mrs Gibbs, and Darla Wigginton without much to work with gave us the local Helen Lovejoy in Mrs. Soames. I didn’t like Richard Byrne as the Stage Manager; he kept pursing his face in a rubbery, condescending smile and he had trouble with some of the higher notes. The set is simple and effective, as is traditional for the piece.

Our Town is meant to be – must be, to succeed as more than a sentimental period piece – an accurate picture of life, both in its dailiness and in its profounder call to cherish every moment. Is life in this Grover’s Corners really what McClatchy and Rorem have experienced as life? I don’t know much about McClatchy, and I’ve never read Rorem’s famous diaries, but I suspect it isn’t. You may notice it’s taken me a while to mention the composer. I like a lot of Rorem’s songs (check out “Early in the Morning” on Nathan Gunn’s American Anthem CD). There were some beautiful moments in the opera. All of it was pleasing and suitable. In fact, it sounded exactly the way you’d think the music for Our Town should sound, which could be seen as either a triumph or a disappointment. Even with my limited experience of the play, most of what I was seeing lacked novelty for me. It’s strange that a new opera should already have the familiarity of Carmen or Tosca, and it might have to do with the beloved source, which is already a cultural given even to those who have never actually seen it. According to the playbill, it was Wilder’s nephew and the librettist who decided to turn the play into an opera, and they selected Rorem as the composer. Nothing wrong with a librettist taking the lead, but I got the feeling that Rorem wasn’t producing this out of any deep musical need. Even granted that Our Town is meant to unfold slowly, it takes too long for it to make sense as a sung rather than spoken piece. It’s all pleasant, but I kept thinking about the scene from Getty's Plump Jack that I saw at the Adler Fellow’s Gala last December. I think the combination of music and singing and dancing and poetry and action is the basic impulse of all drama (which is why opera will never die, people, only change), from the Greeks on (even the traditional Catholic Mass is basically a dramatic re-enactment set to music), but there are some things that are just more expressive when spoken. The Plump Jack text was Henry IV pt 2’s scene between Falstaff and Justice Shallow, and any actor could have expressed about seventeen different emotions in those lines, but the singers were limited to two or three, and lines that cried out for an individual twist or inflection were subsumed by the melodic line. It isn’t until Act 3 of Our Town, when Emily sings her farewell to the earth (and Breckenridge is just beautiful at that moment), that the piece really started making sense to me as a musical work.

I’m glad I went to Our Town; it’s worth seeing, but I’m not sure it’s worth seeing twice. Others might feel differently, of course. I’m even glad I went to Festival Opera, which, in my admittedly very limited experience with them, has absolutely the worst audiences around. You could film them for a pre-concert film on “How Not to Behave in the Theater,” which actually might be more useful than most of the pre-concert lectures.