San Francisco Opera: Idomeneo

For some time now I have been saying to anyone who wants to listen, as well as to many who do not, that Idomeneo is the one Mozart opera I have never really connected with (to forestall the question, I love Clemenza di Tito, as well as all baroque opera, so this is not an objection to opera seria or stylized music drama in general). Yet I persist in trying! On Tuesday night I was at the second performance of San Francisco Opera's latest production of the piece. Idomeneo & I remain unconnected.

Not that I don't see things to admire in it: mostly musical things. Eun Sun Kim led a crisp ensemble in music that was powerful & tender. San Francisco Opera had assembled a sterling cast – Matthew Polenzani in the title tole; Daniela Mack as his son Idamante; Ying Fang as Ilia, a Trojan princess loved by Idamante; Elza van den Heever as the volatile Elettra, in unrequited love with Idamante; Alek Shrader as the counselor Arbace – who all sang with beautiful sound, but beauty used to expressive purposes; the vocal fireworks were explosive, the yearning & sorrow genuine. (I have to give a special mention to Mack, who was singing despite some unannounced vocal cord issues; she could not continue singing during Act 3 & instead mimed the role while Laura Krumm sang offstage – kudos to both of them for doing so beautifully under physically difficult circumstances. During the curtain calls company director Matthew Shilvock explained the situation & introduced Krumm.)

Ying Fang was making her San Francisco Opera debut & her tender & lively performance as the conflicted Ilia confirmed advanced word of her extremely beautiful voice & skillful acting. There were also excellent contributions from some current Adler Fellows: Georgiana Adams & Mary Hoskins as Cretan Women, Samuel White & Olivier Zerouali as Trojan Men, Samuel White as the High Priest of Neptune, & particularly Jongwon Han as the Voice of the Oracel.

Idomeneo-inspired lighting effects in the opera house lobby before the show.

It was an excellent performance of early prime Mozart, musically speaking. I know someone who was there last night after also hearing Saturday's opening, & he is currently planning a third & maybe fourth visit. But all he cares about is singing. He doesn't care about staging, or the drama, & he sits in the last row of the second balcony, a spot from which you can barely see what's going on way down on the stage anyway.

For people like me, who prefer the front row of the orchestra & consider opera a theatrical form, the production by Lindy Hume was less satisfying. I will say whatever role she may have had in helping the singers shape their characters & their interactions paid off; the performers were all convincing – though there were some oddities; for example, when Elettra, thinking she & Idamante are being sent off together, sings that although he loves another, she is going to turn that around & make him love her – when she sings that, surely Idamante shouldn't be standing there, directly addressed by her? What is he supposed to do with that? We don't know, because Mozart & his librettist Giambattista Varesco didn't give him any response. He just looks noble & stricken. But how could an honorable young man like Idamante not protest immediately that he loves Ilia, even if (he thinks) she doesn't return his love, & how could he proceed with the trip as if Elettra hadn't announced to him that she was going to seduce him?

The staging struck me as mostly Modernizing Update 101: there is a unit set, a large boxy room with large doors on the back & on the sides. Everything is overwhelmingly white, black, or gray (with the exception of a red cloth that gets carried around by Idomeneo when he is trying to sacrifice to Neptune in Act 3, & some green branches – inevitably, the rebirth of hope – carried by the chorus at the very end. But after 3 and a half hours, these bits of color didn't do much, at least for one exhausted viewer. There are projections against the walls of the room: some effective shots of the sea (some color here; lots of deep blues) at the beginning of the opera. During emotional moments, abstract blotches swirl around the walls, to match the inner tumult, a device that might have been more effective if it had been used less often. During emotional moments (Idomeneo's Fuor del mar, Elettra's D'Oreste, d'Ajace) characters will, naturally, tear off their outer garments. There are, of course, many chairs on stage. They get moved, re-arranged, sometimes thrown, occasionally sat in.

The costumes are mostly contemporary, with some odd touches: a couple of the guards, as well as some of the higher aristocracy, wear uniforms or suits surmounted by a shoulder cape of shiny black feathers. When Elettra & Idamanta are supposed to leave on their voyage, their outfits have odd golden filigree added to the back & shoulders. The clothes are almost all black, & struck me as drab & ugly. At the beginning of the opera, when the Trojan prisoners are being freed, they line up, sort of, & go up to a table where some guards give them envelopes, which, when opened, have a paper in them. I am unclear on what was supposed to be happening there. I assume it was meant to represent some sort of sign that they were now free (maybe the papers were new legal ID?) but it struck me as mostly the theatrical equivalent of busy-work, the kind of thing you do when you feel something needs to be happening on stage other than someone standing there singing, no matter how beautifully, a noble though perhaps slightly repetitious sentiment.

So the production wasn't helping things, in my view, but I have some issues with the opera itself. I have speculated to some that the reason I don't connect with Idomeneo is that we're promised a sea monster but he only shows up offstage. I'm only half-kidding about this, because the thing is, most opportunities for drama in this story are, like the sea monster, shoved offstage. The crux of the drama is that Idomeneo, returning to his kingdom of Crete after the fall of Troy, is caught in a huge & deadly storm &, apparently not having read as many fairy tales as I have, tries to placate Neptune by promising to sacrifice to him the first living creature he sees on land, which of course turns out to be his son. (Think of the dramatic fireworks Handel made out of a similar vow & a similar dilemma in Jephtha, & you'll see what's missing here.) In his sorrow Idomeneo, apparently not having read as much Greek mythology as I have, thinks he can outwit the god's anger by just sending Idamante away on a long trip. This doesn't work, of course, & the even angrier Neptune, deprived of his human sacrifice, sends a rampaging sea monster to attack the king's city.

Idomeneo doesn't tell his son, until the very end, about the vow. He just shuns him, orders him away, & generally rejects him. Presumably this is done to protect Idamante, who seems like the type to offer himself as a sacrifice if honor commands, but Idomeneo's evasive ways cause his son probably more pain than a straightforward explanation would have. What we end up with is hours of the father being abrupt & inexplicably (in the eyes of Idamante) unloving, while the son wonders unhappily what he did wrong. There isn't a lot of development there, mostly restatement. Some of the articles in the program-book note that Mozart's troubled relationship with his own father (or other father-figures) entered into his work here. On the one hand, sure, but on the other, so what? The only reason we have any interest in the troubled relationship of these long-dead men is that one of them created art that keeps our interest. And the art has to continue to hold our interest & to stand on its own apart from any psychobiography of the artist.

The motor of this drama is the anger of Neptune, but the drama's handling of it is fundamentally incoherent. Everything is driven by the sea god's implacable anger: the deadly storms, Idomeneo's vow, his attempt to evade fulfilling that vow, the attack of the sea monster. . .  There is a daring & challenging indictment being drawn up about the cruelty of the gods &, by implication, the religion that surrounds them. And then, abruptly, near the end of the opera, the sting is removed: Neptune, having apparently checked a calendar to see what year it is & realizing that the alternative is to become nothing more than a fancy fountain ornament, decides he'd better get on board with the Enlightenment. So he announces that Love & Reason are Everything, & that his commands, which called pretty clearly for a human sacrifice or else, had been completely misunderstood & instead what he obviously meant was that Idomeneo should step aside as King & let Idamante take over after he marries Ilia. Elettra gets her big number & goes offstage, presumably to kill herself, thereby removing the last obstacle to a happy ending, if not for her then at least for everyone else. Well, not quite everyone: I guess it's too bad about those hundreds of people killed by the rampaging sea monster! Maybe the sea monster also misunderstood what Neptune wanted. (I am reminded of Jane Campion's The Piano, in which a sincerely meant but barely plausible happy ending is tacked on to the story, completely undercutting everything we've just spent hours watching.)

So I remain unconvinced by Idomeneo. But if you want to hear some glorious music, sure, go up to the balcony, sit back, & bask in the sonic splendors. But you may want to keep your eyes closed. Check here for remaining performances.

San Francisco Opera: The Magic Flute

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 1. . . .)

There's always something that pulls us back to operas we may think we've seen often enough; in the case of San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, it was the celebrated production by Barrie Kosky, usually described as the "silent film" staging, which of course grabbed my interest.

Silent film is definitely a major influence, but the designers clearly also looked at graphic novels, anime, surrealist collages, & comic books; I've heard some people describe the constantly shifting projections as exhausting, but they could just as easily be seen as exhilarating. On the whole I enjoyed the production, but was surprised by some of its limitations.

It does some things extremely well; this is the first production I've seen in which the trials by fire & water carry some weight & seem like actual trials .The whole quest/fairy tale aspect comes out very strongly. The use of silent-film style intertitles relieves us from the generally tedious comedy of the spoken dialogue. (But this has the unfortunate effect of depriving Papagena of some of her most winning moments.)

On the debit side of the ledger, the actions of the singers are extremely circumscribed: one limb awry & the illusion from the seamless projections falls apart. Also, the singers are mostly isolated from each other, often perched midway up the stage & addressing someone down below or off to the side. This is not an opera in which psychological realism is paramount, of course, but it does have a warm human heart that beats a little less vigorously when everyone is physically so separated.

There are specific silent-film references made in the costuming, some of which work better than others. I have never seen a production in which I thought so much about Pamina's hair; she's given the iconic Louise Brooks bob, but . . . is Pamina really a Louise Brooks type? I pondered whether the character would be better off with the golden tresses of the ethereal Lillian Gish, or Mary Pickford's tighter, spunkier blonde sausage curls. Papageno has Buster Keaton's porkpie hat, but Keaton's deadpan but sensitive calibration of on-coming disaster isn't really a Papageno quality (would Chaplin's pleasure-seeking but poignant Tramp be a better fit?). Monostatos is made up like Murnau's Nosferatu, which neatly avoids the ugly racial aspect of the lustful villain. The Queen of the Night mostly appears as a giant spider, which is striking & effective (though, again with the quibbles, shouldn't she at least initially be more immediately appealing?).The racial remarks can be pruned, but the anti-female aspects are too baked in to the libretto to be expunged. My audience mostly reacted to the more egregiously misogynistic remarks with laughter, which seems like the most sensible response under the circumstances.

I think the constraints of the production, striking & memorable as the production is, affected the performers; all of them had moments when I thought they were excellent, & others when I thought they were a bit overwhelmed. (Amitai Pati was Tamino, Lauri Vasar the Papageno, Anna Siminska the Queen of the Night, Zhengyi Bai the Monostatos, Christina Gansch the Pamina, Kwangchul Youn the Sarastro, Arianna Rodriguez the Papagena, & Olivia Smith, Ashley Dixon, & Maire Theresa Carmack respectively the First, Second, & Thirdd Ladies). Eun Sun Kim led a sprightly & noble rendiiton.

I was very glad to have a chance to see this production, even if it struck me as a big more of a mixed bag than I had hoped. But even when I decide I've seen the Magic Flute often enough, I end up glad I went.

a fantastic new Flute

Kenneth Branagh's film of The Magic Flute was made in 2006 but is only now being released in the United States. I have no idea why there was such a delay – the film is captivating, and Mozart is well served. Over the years I've seen quite a few of Branagh's films (he's described on the DVD case as "the director of Thor," which is accurate but not adequate), and though I generally liked them (some of them quite a lot) I was really not prepared for the excellence and inventiveness of his Magic Flute. I preferred it to Ingmar Bergman's celebrated film adaptation. Even if, like me, you feel you've seen enough Magic Flutes to tide you over for the next decade, or two, I urge you to check out this one.

As with Bergman's film, this is an adaptation for film of the opera (as opposed to a recording of a stage production). Branagh did the adaptation, as well as directing, and he had the brilliant idea of setting the story in the midst of World War I, the war that broke open the modern world. Before I saw the movie I would have hesitated to declare that a brilliant idea, but the result is completely convincing, and accommodates the familiar story with surprising ease. The setting amid the trenches and the slaughter immediately raises the stakes, and many elements that before had a fairy-tale arbitrariness now make life-and-death sense: the vow of silence, for example, when Tamino cannot tell even Pamina what his mission is. For once I wasn't irritated that he didn't turn to comfort her. Or the trial by fire, when he and Pamina, both holding the flute, actually walk through enemy fire in their quest for peace.

But I shouldn't make the staging sound too literal: though there are some substitutions (the fierce serpent at the beginning is a hissing grenade, which releases a long tail of black smoke), we still have the titular flute and the spell-casting silver bells, and there are elements that evoke Surrealism, one of the several artistic responses to the war: a trench-wall of sandbags sings a chorus; characters fly and bounce and appear in different locations; when Papageno dreams of one day finding a Papagena, he is suddenly in a bright flowery field, and a huge pair of red lips float Magritte-like in front of him, until he suddenly snaps back to reality, where he's in a cell.

The ambiguities of war help explain some of the story's seeming contradictions: who can tell who is good and who is not and why, in the middle of battle? The Three Ladies first appear when the grenade knocks out Tamino; they float down from the night sky, all in wimpled white, like nurses or nuns. Then when they see how handsome the young soldier is, they pull off their headresses and show a lot more cleavage than nuns or nurses generally show. It's amusing, and part of learning how deceptive appearances are, particularly during wartime.

There's a constant tension in the film between the realistic and the magical (between war and peace, you might say). At the beginning as the overture plays a white butterfly flutters in musical time over green fields and then over the trenches and then war planes drop out of the clouds and also start rolling and dipping in time. The three boys appear and disappear and float in air or roll out of chimneys (their white and beige garments showing no sign of the soot billowing out with them) but they also behave like three actual little boys: when they clap their hands over Papageno's mouth, they do it a little too roughly, enjoying the mischief of it. (There are many excellent touches like this in the performances, as when Pamina hastily smooths her hair before seeing Tamino again.)

There's no simple equation of, say, the Queen of the Night with the Germans and Sarastro with the British. She is bent on war, driven by a personal enmity towards Sarastro (as in Bergman's film, he is a former lover of hers). She makes her entrance backlit, astride a tank. As she sings her first aria to Tamino, commanding him to rescue her captured daughter, the camera moves in until her mouth, issuing its sparkler notes, takes up the whole left-hand side of the screen, and as the other tanks in the background slowly move over the horizon, they look as if they are all issuing from her mouth. The movie is full of inventive touches like that.

Sarastro sometimes seems to be a medical man, at other times a military leader. Subtle touches make him more complex than usual: Sarastro is a good man, but how good, ultimately, were any of the men who led the war? One of the mystic signs of wisdom inscribed on the wall of his temple is the famous line from Horace which the British Empire took from the Roman, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one's fatherland), a reminder of the imperialistic, patriarchal culture of war and patriotism that led to such massive carnage and devastation.

Monostatos is still a dark-skinned man, and initially I was a little surprised that Branagh didn't just change that to avoid the racially-tinged treatment of the character. But it lends some complexity to him; he feels he's victimized because of his skin color (he smashes mirrors as he laments his appearance), and it's a reminder of the imperial era's pervasive racism (he first appears in sort of Indian garb). But this staging doesn't excuse Monostatos or make him too sympathetic; he still tries to rape Pamina. There are darker-skinned men who have positions of authority in Sarastro's army. The crowd that supports Sarastro contains many different types of people (as many as were ruled by the British Empire), and I felt this conveyed the universal import of the story better than Bergman's device of showing "faces of many lands" during the overture.

This is the only Flute I've seen in which the very end, the final attack against Sarastro by the Queen of the Night, Monostatos, and the Three Ladies, doesn't feel sort of arbitrary. Amid the celebrations of the triumph and subsequent wedding of Tamino and Pamina, the Queen and company scale the walls of Sarastro's tower. Sarastro tries to help her but the Queen's rage and despair are so great she chooses death rather than his help. This is not only psychologically plausible, it also helps complete the theme of suicide – both Pamina and then Papageno finally resist the urge to kill themselves (though he's never quite as serious about it), but the Queen cannot bring herself to reconcile with her enemy.

Yes, this is an opera, so music must have the final word, and fortunately the visual felicities and thought-provoking staging are in service of an excellent performance. James Conlon conducted, pacing and shaping the music beautifully (and I believe I also saw him in a Hitchcock-like cameo as an officer in the trenches, comforting a sharpshooter). Joseph Kaiser as Tamino really dominates the story as a leading man in a way that stage Taminos usually don't – and here the wartime setting definitely helps; as I have previously noted, Tamino is the most hilariously unmanly of all opera heroes, but there's something really at stake in what he does here, and the chivalrous idealism that motivates his actions movingly evokes the high-minded romanticism of many of the young men killed in the war. The charismatic Kaiser is an excellent actor as well as a singer of warmth and sensitivity.

Benjamin Jay Davis as Papageno also gained from the wartime setting; he's still a bird-catcher (he first shows up with a canary used to test for poison gas) and still fun-loving, but Davis brings out a wistful side that sometimes get shortchanged when it's all about Papageno guzzling booze (here his drink of choice is beer, not wine, which shows how careful the adaptation is with details; of course a working-class man like Papageno would drink beer, not wine). Rene Pape brings his sonorous authority to Sarastro. The women are just as strong; Amy Carson is a lovely Pamina (when Tamino first sees her portrait, he imagines dancing with her, in a swirly swoony black-and-white dance that epitomizes youthful romanticism). Lyubov Petrova brings surprising nuance to the Queen of the Night. The men in particular had clear diction, though it's probably also more difficult to understand words sung by higher voices. Generally all the soloists are clear. Ensembles are more difficult to understand, which is to be expected. I did wish the DVD had the option of subtitles, though in general they weren't necessary.

The excellent English libretto is by Stephen Fry – no filler, no banging rhymes, no straining for effect; mostly just good straightforward English rhymes, and the right balance of jokiness and seriousness in the dialogue. I had to laugh when Papageno rescues Pamina and tells her about Tamino who loves her after seeing her portrait, and she says, "But where is he?" I always wonder that too during that scene. But then she and Papageno sing that all who are deceitful and treacherous should be punished, and we see the battle lines and the trenches of a war brought about by deceit and treachery and foolishness, with all the attendant waste and slaughter of a generation, and I found myself, to my surprise, bursting into tears.

The film is being released in theaters Sunday 9 June, with a reprise screening Tuesday 11 June. In some theaters the Sunday screening will be followed by a webcast Q-and-A session from London with Branagh (check www.emergingpictures.com to check for showtimes and theaters near you). The film is also being released on DVD on Tuesday 11 June, and is available on Amazon and the other usual sources.

Flute finale

Last Sunday afternoon I was at the final performance of The Magic Flute, which was also the final performance of San Francisco Opera's 2011-1012 season. I had hesitated before buying a ticket to yet another Magic Flute. On the plus side, I do enjoy the opera, and I was curious about the new production design by Jun Kaneko, and I had never seen Nathan Gunn's Papageno in a live performance. On the minus side, I was dubious about the plan of performing it in English (in a new version by SF Opera General Director David Gockley), and I was generally feeling pretty Fluted out.

I found Kaneko's designs delightful. There are lots of projections, starting as soon as the music starts, usually of shifting abstract patterns involving stripes or polka dots or triangles or some combination thereof, done in glowing blues and greens and crayon-bright reds and yellows and pinks. It all has the purposeful naivete that only great sophistication can produce. The total effect is vivid and even hallucinatory and puts you suitably in another world. I was reminded of the controlled profusion of color and pattern found in kabuki theater. Some of the costumes also looked Japanese-influenced, particularly that of Sarastro (Kristinn Sigmundsson), which in that case was a bit unfortunate since his look reminded me of the Mikado and I kept expecting him to burst into "My Object All Sublime."

If the setting moved me to a different world, the translation kept pulling me back to this one. I suspect one reason for performing The Magic Flute in English is that it is now considered the gateway opera par excellence and performing it in translation seems more family-friendly (though parents please note: when people talk about The Magic Flute as a great opera for children, they aren't talking about your average five-year-old; seriously, what is wrong with you people?). This version wasn't bad; a lot of it fit the music quite well and during the intermission I heard many audience members assuring each other that though of course they would prefer the original German, they found it worked surprisingly well in English. The dialogue scenes are always awkward in German, so doing them in English makes some sense, though (for me at least) making these scenes more comprehensible doesn't make them more entertaining, and I would prune them ruthlessly, instead of adding jokes about drag queens, carb intake, and other obligatory local and topical references. Lots of people did seem to find the jokes more amusing than I did, but for me they were more along the lines of jokiness, and that's the difference between creating a fairy-tale and a vaudeville. My major criticism of the production was that it was a bit too cheerful; there could have been more darkness and danger, more of the threatening undercurrent found in most fairy tales.

Most of the demotic tomfoolery fell on the broad shoulders of our Papageno, and Nathan Gunn, who has performed the role many times, was in warm and fluid voice and as an actor of considerable skill and charm managed to pull off the jokes, even though I would have been happier without them. Even though, like everyone else, I love Papageno, there is a point in every other performance I've seen where I get deeply irritated with him: that would be when he finally manages to stop talking at exactly the wrong time, when his chattiness might be useful in reassuring Pamina, who's been left in the dark. This time I not only wasn't irritated with him, I was actually touched by the abashed and awkward manner in which he reassured Tamino afterward that he could actually keep quiet once in a while. So that is my tribute to Nathan Gunn's performance: he kept me for once consistently on Papageno's side. As usual with Gunn his diction was excellent, rendering the surtitles unnecessary. In fact most of the cast, even those who were not native speakers of English, could be understood without reference to the surtitles, which is not always the case. And like everyone else I love the scene with Papagena at the end, and Nadine Sierra was a delightful Papagena. Instead of the usual "old woman" costume for her first appearance she was disguised as a large vulture, which was amusing.

Sigmundsson as Sarastro was the weakest of the leads; his low notes got very croaky and raspy; he behaved but did not sing with the requisite warmth and nobility. Albina Shagimuratova as the Queen of the Night spun off her two flashy arias with considerable style, though I would have preferred a crueler edge to her performance, because most of the characterization in this opera is simply asserted so every little bit helps. (Indeed, she does command her daughter to kill Sarastro, but given that he's kidnapped that daughter, taken the sevenfold disk of the sun or whatever the hell it is, and been badmouthing her all over town, I can't really blame her for holding a grudge.) The usual racial awkwardness with the villainous Moor Monostatos (Greg Fedderly) was avoided by dressing him like a kabuki warlord or demon, but he was for me a bit too straightforwardly comic, and as with the Queen there should have been more of a sense of real menace from him. (The translation also should have just jettisoned the occasional unnecessary reference to him as a Moor, especially since he really wasn't. If you're going to translate, you might as well take advantage of it.) Lovely Heidi Stober was a lovely Pamina.  She's been consistently fine the other times I've heard her and she stood out this time as well. Her suicide aria was particularly impassioned and heart-rending. With her shoulder-length blonde hair and her angular blue and white dresses she looked like Alice in a Mod World Wonderland.

I've started hearing a lot about Alek Shrader, the Tamino for most of the run, but he was not scheduled for the last two performances, which were the ones that fit my schedule, so I guess I won't hear him until his San Francisco Performances recital next season. Nathaniel Peake, originally scheduled for the Shraderless shows, withdrew and Norman Reinhardt was the last-minute replacement. He has sung the role elsewhere (though obviously not in this new translation) but I understand he didn't even have a rehearsal of this staging. Under the circumstances, it would have been impressive if he had merely kept from tripping over the other singers, but he also managed to give a convincing and lovely-toned performance. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear he had been Tamino through the whole run. He perhaps tired just a shade towards the end, but then so did I, and I was just sitting down watching instead of singing to thousands in a production I hadn't rehearsed, which sounds like an anxiety dream.

It helped that Reinhardt is tall, attractive, and stalwart, because you need qualities like that to counteract Tamino's actual behavior, since he is probably the most hilariously unmanly of all operatic heroes: he enters crying for help, running from a really big snake, and promptly faints center stage. The big snake is handily dispatched by three ladies, who then take turns singing about how pretty Tamino is. He immediately falls in love with Pamina after seeing her portrait (this is not the last example we'll see of his very suggestible nature), but she is actually rescued not by him but by his goofball companion the bird-catcher while he is wandering elsewhere tootling on his flute. He does manage to keep the vow of silence imposed on him by some people he's just met, though he has no real reason to believe what they tell him, as opposed to what the Queen of the Night has told him. A vow of silence is a fairly perverse vow to give the hero of an opera, and I sometimes wonder if this was Mozart and Schikaneder getting in a little jab at chatty audiences. By keeping the vow he comes close to pushing the woman he loves towards suicide, but luckily once again he is saved from the consequences of his actions. Given all this it's understandable that there's some masculine anxiety underlying the injunctions from Sarastro and Co. against the deceitful wiles of women. The translation should probably have removed said injunctions entirely, since they just make a contemporary audience laugh at rather than with the material, but honestly "beware the deceitful wiles of women" is the only specific step we are ever given towards a somewhat vague and sketchy enlightenment. (And when is Pamina ever deceitful? Does she not insist to Papageno that if Sarastro questions them they must speak only the truth? And is she not a woman? I've always found her the most consistently admirable and sympathetic character in the opera.) Despite my gentle mockery here this really is a beautiful and strange opera with a profound message, but it's perhaps best not to examine the specifics too closely and just to let the music move you toward the embrace of charitable justice and benevolent enlightenment.

So I ended up glad that I had bought a ticket. When the final curtain fell the audience roared its appreciation and behind the curtain I could hear the performers give themselves a justified cheer. I found myself lingering in the aisles and the lobby afterward, reluctant to leave. It's always poignant and a bit difficult leaving the house after the last show of the season, even though I know the new season is gearing up in just a few weeks.

De Profundis (out of the depths or out of their depth)

The first time I heard Anne-Sophie Mutter live was back in Boston days. She is of course famously beautiful and she used to say she preferred dresses that left her shoulders bare because she played better when she felt the violin against her bare skin. During intermission I was trapped behind two slow dowagers and one said to the other in slightly bewildered tones, “Isaac Stern doesn’t need his shoulders bare.”

Mutter and her playing are just as beautiful as ever, judging from her appearance with the San Francisco Symphony a few weeks ago for the North American premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens. Gubaidulina, who takes her own path somewhere between Shostakovich and Arvo Part, is the first Phyllis Wattis Composer in Residence at the Symphony; I had heard some of her music back in Boston, but this was my first chance in a long time to hear her work live.

This was an amazing half-hour. I’d describe the music, but instead I’ll just say you should buy it and come up with your own evocative metaphors – just trust me when I say it’s even better, much more so, heard live. I hope Mutter, with her well-known commitment to new music, will continue to travel around with the piece.

It was such a success that the second half of the concert, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse, left me itchy and restless. Normally I love Ravel (and I have to quote my favorite Ravel line: “People call me artificial – have they never considered that I am artificial by nature?”) but after the profoundly spiritual and nature-echoing Gubaidulina the waltzes grated on me and seemed silly and shallow, especially in a coarse performance that brought out the blare in the orchestra (though I should give Tilson Thomas credit for the beautiful handling of the first half, and for the delightfully spiky American Overture by Prokofiev that opened the concert). I spent my time coming up with things that I thought would have made a better coupling: maybe something by Beethoven, or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night.

I wish I had thought of leaving at intermission. I was tired anyway. The night before I had heard Barbara Bonney in recital, and it was a dispiriting evening: her voice sounded worn and strained, dry and forced, and I wondered if she had some sort of unannounced cold or allergy problem since she seemed to have trouble with breath support. There was obviously a lot of love and respect for her in the room, which made the concert that much more painful. It was one of those evenings when I think about the time lost and look at how much I spent on my ticket and I just feel sad about life. So out of two evenings, at least I had the half hour of Gubaidulina, and that honestly made it all worthwhile.

The symphony had a more consistently successful outing the next week, and another celebrated soloist in Martha Argerich. This concert was probably one of the most anticipated of the season, at least by me; I was so excited about the Ligeti Requiem that I actually kind of forgot that this would also be my first time hearing Argerich live.

One of the great things about going to the Thursday performances in Civic Center is that the Asian Art Museum is open late that night, so instead of just wandering around killing time before the theater (which, I have to admit, is basically all I ever really do anyway), I could wander the galleries, in particular the new Bhutan exhibit, which incorporates many fascinating videos of that country’s sacred dance and music (though I have to admit to being a bit amused by the museum’s reverent insistence on the religious origin and nature of the art we were seeing – it apparently never occurs to people that all those crucifixions and Madonnas by the Old (and not always so old) Masters that line galleries all over the world also have been torn out of their religious context).

I think some of that chanted aura, and also the sense of religious works surviving out of context, went into my hearing of the concert, which opened with the SF Symphony Chorus director Ragnar Bohlin conducting an excellent performance of Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis, with some of the chorus on stage and the rest lining the two side aisles to re-create the separated choirs of a Venetian church.

After that Tilson Thomas came out to conduct the Ligeti Requiem. He spoke beforehand, and for once I didn’t mind it; in fact, I felt some kinship, because I realized he trusted the Symphony audience as little as I did. A sizeable chunk of that crowd can only even pretend to listen to music that has been certified as a masterpiece, the more familiar the better, which makes them not the most receptive crowd for modern music. Tilson Thomas cited a Rilke poem, briefly and appropriately, to set the mood. (I had a link to a blog that gave the whole poem, but that entry seems to have disappeared, so maybe we should all just go read Rilke and think about Ligeti.) (I was also grateful Tilson Thomas didn’t mention the music’s use in Kubrick’s 2001; no offense to that film, which I enjoyed when I saw it years ago, but what’s important and intriguing about this music is not its use in a film which, I suspect, most people haven’t seen very recently – yet 2001 always comes up in articles about Ligeti. We certainly live in a movie culture. But I do have to admit that during the performance I kept thinking about Kozintsev's King Lear, which I recently saw again; I think a Ligeti soundtrack would have been even better than the one Shostakovich supplied for it.)

Tilson Thomas then conducted one will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of this season at the San Francisco Symphony. I realize there are people who find Ligeti “difficult”, but I only realize that because they say so; to me this music is so jaw-droppingly beautiful, and so nakedly and immediately available, that other responses seem a bit unreal to me. Not witty like Le Grand Macabre (though writing a Requiem Mass when commissioned to celebrate a new music festival is, as Thomas May’s characteristically excellent program note remarked, “characteristically provocative”), it has a similar mood-altering effect, in its somber way. Talking with Ms TS afterwards, I found that I was not the only one to feel it as cries and moans emerging from a swirling mist. There’s a part at the end when the cembalo startlingly shivers in, and I was reminded but in a good way of Beecham’s quip about harpsichords sounding like two skeletons making love. Hearing Ligeti live is always amazing and enriching. And while Hannah Holgerson, the soprano, and Annika Hudak, the mezzo, were outstanding, I think the Symphony chorus was the real hero of the performance. I hope the Symphony revives this piece soon.

During intermission I was yet again blocked behind two dowagers making their slow way up to the lobby. One was noting to the other with implied disapproval of what we had just heard that “Mozart’s Requiem is much more melodic.” I’m sure Mozart would be horrified to discover that his funeral mass is now preferred for its prettiness. I’m not sure why “melodic” is a great recommendation in a lament for the dead, anyway. Times and places and musical styles change, but dowagers do not.

After the intermission Martha Argerich came out to play the rather Gershwinesque Ravel Piano Concerto in G major, and this time Ravel did not seem like an irrelevant intrusion after a profound contemporary work. I mentioned to Lisa at the intermission that after the Ligeti, and after all I’d heard about Argerich, I was going to be disappointed if she didn’t make the piano burst into flames. Well, guess what? She did. She came out, looking rather shy and stumbling slightly. She sat down and ripped through an electric performance that was poetic and strong, fleet without being rushed, dazzling and deep. She had to repeat the third movement because the audience wouldn’t let her leave.

Where do you go after that? Home might have been best, but there was one more piece. Liszt’s tone poem Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo was in the unfortunate position of being a double anti-climax after Ligeti and Argerich. I enjoyed it, and it actually had some interesting submerged links with the rest of the program (Hungarian composers, political oppression, an individual against society), but it was really in an impossible position, and the music though often striking and beautiful also has its Romantic clichés, or what strike us as such; talking with Lisa afterwards, I wondered whether some of Liszt was like the Tarantino of Pulp Fiction – an innovator whose innovations were so rapidly absorbed that they don’t strike latecomers as innovations at all.

It’s nice when a concert you’ve been anticipating since it was announced actually lives up to your hopes.

Somewhere amid all these concerts I heard soprano Nicole Cabell (accompanied by Spencer Myer) in Berkeley (and I just checked my calendar because I could have sworn this concert was after the Ligeti/Argerich concert, but it was before, and I heard several other things in those weeks as well; how busy I am!). She and her voice are both fresh and lovely, though a few members of the audience, more querulous than I, felt that she sometimes sacrificed expressiveness for sheer beauty of sound. I saw their point, but I was happy to bask in the sheer beauty, though merely lovely sounds can become a bit monotonous.

To me any problems had more to do with her program. The second half had a cycle of five songs (I Hate Music) by Bernstein, which was five songs too many, and I have to say that nine Spanish songs in the first half were kind of a lot of Spanish songs; once again I couldn't help noticing a certain similarity in theme and style, and in the spirit of my generic Russian Song, I offer a generic Spanish Song, titled, of course, Mi Corazon:

Mi Corazon
My hair is dark and curly,
My eyes are black and sparkle,
But a dog has bitten my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi, yi yi yi

I play guitar and sing,
And the boys all come to listen,
But a dog has run off with my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi,
Ay yi yi yi yi yi yi . . . .

But glad that now his Sea should find a shore

I decided to go to Idomeneo this fall because Alice Coote was singing; it turned out she was sick the afternoon I went, but I enjoyed the performance anyway. Adler Fellow Daniela Mack, her substitute, was a last-minute but committed and beautiful Idamante, and I thought Kurt Streit was fine as the lead. None of the voices were really big or outstanding, but none were weak or half-hearted either. I like the elaborate baroque costumes in the Greco-Roman sets (I’m not sure if that’s due to John Copley, who is credited with the Production, or John Conklin and Michael Stennett, credited with respectively Sets and Costumes, or some combination of the three). Donald Runnicles led a fluent performance and is certainly going out on a high note.

The only night-time performance I could have made was on a Tuesday night, with the usual idiotic curtain time of 8:00, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through the next day at work, and possibly through the rest of the week, if I did that. I was, you will be astonished to hear, complaining about the start time to someone who told me, “Well, Tuesday night is rich people night, so they don’t care about getting to work in the morning.” You will be even more astonished to hear that I complained to more than one person, and got pretty much the same response each time. Apparently everybody but me knows that Tuesday nights are society nights at the San Francisco Opera, so performances must start at 8:00 rather than 7:30.

Should I be proud or embarrassed that I didn’t know this fact? Does it make a difference that I would have known it if this (my life, I guess) were a novel by Edith Wharton, which it pretty emphatically is not? (Note to self: next season, for that Old New York experience, Faust on a Tuesday!) I still think it's silly to start a three-and-a-half-hour opera at 8:00 on what is for most people a work day. In my experience of Tuesday nights this season, all the old society types are leaving before the end anyway, so they can be in bed by 10:30, sipping the Postum that Lupe so considerately heated up for them before taking the bus back home to Richmond. So why not throw a rational bone to the rest of us?

Anyway, I ended up at a Sunday matinee, and I think I need to reconsider my long-standing prejudice against Sunday matinees, since the audience was well-nigh perfect (that is, I forgot they were there, except for one moment I'll get to). The charming elderly Austrian woman to the right of my front-row seat was actually wearing elbow-length white gloves, pearls, and a fur-trimmed mantle. Afterwards she asked me to help her over to her walker in the corner, and she was even pleasant when she was obviously frustrated that I couldn’t figure out where to put my arms in order to guide her without either crushing her or engaging in inappropriate touching of the sort that children have to illustrate for the court on little dolls. I finally told her to grab my arms and place them where she needed them to go. No wonder the old ladies love me. She was pleasantly friendly during intermissions and completely silent during the performance. What a jewel. Even better, the seat on my left was empty.

The audience was so surprisingly attentive and respectful of the artists and other audience members that I was kind of shaken when laughter swept parts of the auditorium at the dramatic high point, when Ilia rushes onto the executioner’s block to offer herself in place of Idamante. I honestly didn’t see (and still don't see) what was funny about it. Of course she has to throw herself down in the same position as Idamante: you can’t just stand off to the side immovably warbling that they really ought to consider taking you as the sacrifice in place of the person whose neck is on the altar. What did people think she was supposed to do? Such opera-seria conventions might be alien to our outlook on life, or to our theater, but if you can’t enter sympathetically into the theatrical conventions of the past, then perhaps the opera house is not where you should be spending your time.

The gesture that struck me as ill-considered and possibly comic (though I didn't laugh, it takes more than that to make me laugh) was in Elettra’s big 11:00 number (D’Oreste, d’Aiace, Ho in seno i tormenti, in case you’re wondering), during which she tore off her crown and gave it a Hail-Mary pass to an unseen receiver in the wings. After the fake and gooey reconciliation at the end of Bonesetter’s Daughter, I appreciated the integrity and psychological acuity of Elettra’s exclusion from the reconciliation at the end. As with Beckmesser in Meistersinger (or Malvolio in Twelfth Night), the point is made that happy endings aren’t happy for everyone. There’s no pretence, as in Bonesetter’s Daughter, that if our protagonist is happy, then no one else’s feelings matter. Elettra's pain is real, and she is given her great moment apart from the general rejoicing.

I'm glad I went, but despite my enjoyable afternoon Idomeneo is still my least favorite of the major Mozart operas (and despite the valiant attempt to show some sort of sea monster on stage as illustrated here with cupcake assistance by the Opera Tattler; even if it looked mostly like a multi-headed hippocampus, I appreciated the effort). In watching Idomeneo bow to the gods and lose his throne, and his son defy the gods to battle a monster and create a new world, I was reminded of Wotan and Siegfried. If you enter sympathetically and mythopoetically into opera seria, it’s not a formal and foreign world, alien to our deeper concerns, though I have to admit I still prefer La Clemenza di Tito.

Dich, teure Halle, gruss ich wieder!

One little-noted hazard of the alleged graying of the concert-going population is that you’re much more likely to be killed crossing the street before and especially after concerts, when all the cranky old people with night-blindness are running red lights to get home in time for that night’s Matlock re-run. That’s the sort of thing that put me in a foul mood both before and after the recent Magic Flute (and let me admit I’m also not as spry as I used to be). The opera itself was like a sweet oasis, something to look back on with pleasure as I resumed trekking through the dry wastes. I used to have this experience when I started going to San Francisco Opera: I would walk up Market Street, and always just as the sordid filth and craziness was making me feel like Travis Bickle the Opera House would appear.

I had seen this Gerald Scarfe production a few years back in DC at the National Opera. It holds up very well. It's colorful and fantastical without being too cartoony, and it strikes a good balance between beauty and whimsy. To me this production avoided the whole awkward Monostatos the evil dark-skinned would-be rapist thing quite neatly by making him a frog-like bright green, but check out Campbell Vertesi’s write-up for a very different reaction. The conglomerate creatures drawn forth when Tamino first plays his flute justifiably bring down the house (the biggest hit always seems to be the little alligator-headed penguin in his Converse Hightops), but I did talk to someone who really objected to this scene because it distracts from what Tamino is singing. I see his point, but I still find it within the acceptable range of theatrical effects. To run down the list, I thought Erika Miklosa as the Queen of the Night was a little underpowered in her first aria, though that might just have been a side effect of being suspended mid-air while singing it, since she blazed through her Act 2 aria. Georg Zeppenfeld as Sarastro was basically fine but seemed a bit lightweight to me, which is too bad for me since his Act 2 aria about vengeance being forbidden within these hallowed halls is one of my favorite moments in the opera. Piotr Beczala and Dina Kuznetsova were the appealing and lyrical Tamino and Pamina; I particularly liked her plangent pianissimos. Often there’s a point when Papageno starts to get on my nerves, the way someone who is ostentatiously a regular guy would, but Christopher Maltman kept the character funny and charming. But I did miss the hilarious little moment from the DC production when Papageno (Rod Gilfry) slicked back his head-feathers upon meeting Papagena out of her old-lady disguise.

I’ve always thought that the Magic Flute would be a good introductory opera, since it contains just about every type of operatic situation or mood, and is furthermore a work on the highest level; you’re not talking down to someone, no matter what his or her age or interest, by leading him or her Flute-ward. Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed this, since there seems to be a push among opera houses to turn the Magic Flute into the sort of family-friendly cash cow that ballet companies have in the Nutcracker. My godson told me that radio ads were marketing it to video gamers as a fantasy quest. I said, Sure, but did they also tell you it’s in German and lasts over three hours? And that the hero enters being chased by a big snake and immediately faints, and has to be rescued by three women who then sing about how pretty he is, and that it’s actually his goofy sidekick who saves the girl, and later his vow of silence keeps him from saving his girl from despair? Not quite the manly avatar most gamers go for, but I was reminded of how deeply weird the Magic Flute really is. The amazing thing is, you accept all of this while you’re watching it, and the even more amazing thing is that the whole mishmash forms a coherent work, thanks no doubt to Mozart’s gorgeous music, which illuminates low farce and high tragedy with an identical radiance that becomes wisdom.

I don’t think that most opera plots are ridiculous or incoherent, despite their reputation, but the Magic Flute does take a lot of puzzling out, or, if you prefer, has the deep dreamlike logic of a fairy tale. Why do the Three Ladies give good advice and help at one point and then try to obstruct Tamino and Papageno at another? The Queen of the Night is evil yet a loving mother – or does she just want Pamina to steal back the disc of the sun for her? What’s the deal with the disc anyway? It seems even less effective than Alberich’s ring. Why is Monostatos hanging around in the enlightened court of Sarastro, or being allowed to hang out there? And shouldn’t that enlightened ruler have more effective punishments than beating the soles of the feet? I don’t think Masonic symbolism is really that important to understanding the Magic Flute, and it’s probably best for us not to pursue too far its division between enlightened/male/white and destructive/female/dark energies. The Magic Flute’s very contradictions and confusions are what provide the audience with the most realistic picture of what it’s like to puzzle one’s way through the moral confusions of the world.

See the Music

I spent two evenings last week at Mozart Dances, because I knew anything by Mark Morris would be worth seeing at least twice. Last year’s wonderful King Arthur, a parade of theatrical views of Britishness, was more of a staged opera; instead of having singers in the pit and dancers on stage (as in Dido and Aeneas, his other Purcell evening) both were visible and involved in the action, but the movements for the singers were inevitably simpler than they would have been for dancers. This time there was no opera or other vocal work as a basis; I can’t think of another of his evening-length works that is so free of story-lines, no matter how submerged or fragmentary (as in L’Allegro ed il Penseroso or Four Saints) they might be. The backdrops (different for each of the three dances and black-and-gray except for the third, which includes red; other colors are supplied by the lighting) are large curvy abstractions that look like details of Japanese brush paintings, greatly magnified. Mozart Dances, as the name implies, is more dance than narrative; the title is basic and descriptive and the three dances are named Eleven, Double, and Twenty-Seven after their music (Piano Concerto No. 11, Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and Piano Concerto No. 27, and even those with eyes obstinately shut all evening would still have enjoyed Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki at piano, and Jane Glover conducting the Berkeley Symphony). Morris’s ability to capture music in movement is always noted, but even after years of seeing his works it amazes me that the movements seem so inevitable yet so fresh. Mozart swirls and the dancers swirl; there’s a looping figure and the dancers make a looping figure, but it never seems like a reduction or a simple equation; in other words, it looks obvious but no one else could or has come up with it, which might be a good definition of genius. He has even succeeded in dancing about architecture (I’m thinking of the “Populous Cities” section of L’Allegro), which can only give heart to those who try to write about music.

You could always find narratives in Mozart Dances, if you were so inclined, of course. Anytime you have a dancer break away from a group, run into a group, move with a partner, or end up on stage alone, there’s an implied and fluid story. There are sudden jabbing gestures and moments when a group will stop and look upwards expectantly, or point at each other or gesture imploringly, and then the moment sinks away, but the cumulative moments help move the dance beyond the purely graceful and fluid, just as Mozart does with the music if we have ears to hear it. The first dance opens with alternate male and female dancers in a line; the men step forward, dance, and then exit the stage, leaving the entire rest of the dance to the women; this is the sort of subtle disjunction (I kept expecting a symmetrical return at the end or suchlike) that helps give a deeper ambiguity to the loveliness. Like Mozart, Morris is very witty, but I have to say I don’t find his work what you might call “ha-ha funny” the way some seem to; I’m sure everyone at any abstract dance has had to put up with the sort of audience member who giggles ostentatiously at the witty parts, lest the surrounding rows think she didn’t get it, but I think Mark Morris the Fabulous Personality can color views of what Mark Morris the choreographer is actually doing. I’ve seen him interviewed and he’s outrageous and hilarious and over-the-top in a kind of old-fashioned gay way (he also objected strenuously to having his work described as camp, which I thought was revealing), and audiences can bring that to their viewing: when he did Sylvia for the SF Ballet, some writer at the local paper made the astonishingly stupid remark that “everyone” was surprised that he treated the work seriously. I don’t know who “everyone” is, but anyone who’s paid attention to his work could have told them that Sylvia is exactly the sort of thing he would be serious about. Several years ago he did Dido and Aeneas here; the first evening was the season opener, and (I’m totally speculating here, I should point out) the party atmosphere and champagne (for the big donors and schmoozers, not for me) might have gotten to people, including Morris, because there were some giggles at his Dido. It was fascinating to return the next evening and see how he responded by making certain gestures more severe, by toning down the hair tossing, and otherwise connecting his Dido with the world of Greek tragic drama rather than drag revues; there was no giggling the second night. Even The Hard Nut, the most overtly comic work of his I’ve seen, is not a parody or deconstruction of the Nutcracker but its own thing, complete with moments of sob-inducing beauty (the pas de deux between the Nutcracker and Drosselmeier, for instance, which I have actually heard audiences giggle at, presumably because two men dancing together is by nature a campy joke). Making a separate, non-satirical thing of the Nutcracker is pretty difficult to do, based on the evidence of Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, which is fairly enjoyable but completely lacking in the psychological integrity or emotional depth of the Hard Nut. What brought all this up is the moment in Mozart Dances when one of the men runs down a double row of dancers and leaps into the arms of a lone man at the back of the stage. I guess there was a Looney-Tunes quality to it since it involved sudden running and jumping, but I also found it incredibly poignant, which is something your standard pratfall is not going to be. But then sometimes audience laughter makes me feel like a particularly ponderous German professor of metaphysics, straining his whole life to define the origin and purpose of wit in the weltschmerzy Weltanschauung.

Making it a mostly Mozart weekend, on Sunday evening I went to Il Re Pastore, performed by Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, an elegant brick rebuke to my former home, the Unit III dorms across the street. It’s like a New England Congregational Church, but higher and broader, which may be what gave the voices a strange reverberate halo in the first Act; I noticed the top-notch cast (Lisa Saffer, Heidi Grant Murphy, Michael Slattery, Iain Paton, and Margaret Lattimore) adjusted their voices to the space for Act Two. Philharmonia eschews surtitles, I assume because of expense and difficulty (since they perform in so many spaces, not all of them intended as concert halls), so you get the paper-turning, -crinkling, and -folding obbligato. I read the libretto beforehand and decided I only had enough energy to listen without reading along as well. The plot is fairly simple and involves an Emperor first causing and then solving romantic complications among two couple. Beautifully as everything was sung, I wish they had avoided the temptation to play the resolution for laughs; this type of story might be alien to us, but it’s not inherently ridiculous, and in these days when what used to be our country is lumbering imperially through the world, a bad enemy and a worse friend, it might not be such a strange idea to seek instruction on the clemency and justice appropriate to Emperors. But perhaps I’m just being the ponderous metaphysician again.

guys gone wild

David McVicar’s production of Don Giovanni at San Francisco Opera is very dark – I mean physically dark, not emotionally, as in Why doesn’t someone turn on a torch or something? The action starts at dawn, but it looks like midnight the whole time, until it gets a little brighter at the very end, which is supposed to be around 2:00 a.m. Sometimes the singers were invisible also; the set has some large mobile walls and arches that move around and if the action is on the right of one of these those of us on the left couldn’t see. In a nice touch the mostly bare stage lies on top of a layer of bones and skulls, all painted black so that you had to be close to notice what they were. I enjoyed the performance but oddly enough this somber blackness would have been more suitable to the world-weary melancholy of our last Don Giovanni, Dimitri Hvorostovsky, rather than to the sinuous feline seductiveness of Mariusz Kwiecien. He entered from the darkness wearing his black pants and a loose white shirt that was soon torn away, so his muscular pale torso stood out Carravagioesque in the chiaroscuro. There’s a weird optical illusion by which the torso of a guy wearing pants but no shirt looks much larger than the same torso when covered even by a tight shirt, and this effect helped establish a physical command for Kwiecien in the very opening. It was useful to get that out of the way in the very beginning because fully clothed he is, though handsome, not a physically commanding figure, which was used to both comic and dramatic effect in his dealings with Leporello (Oren Gradus) and especially Masetto (Luca Pisaroni). For once Don Ottavio wasn’t washed out next to Giovanni; I was glad to hear by the audience’s reception that the fine-grained singing of Charles Castronovo (who should definitely continue rocking the van Dyke after this run) wasn’t being swamped by Elza van den Heever’s Donna Anna; she has the sort of large, bright voice that can make everything surrounding it sound recessive. I thought all of the singers came off well, though I did think that Claudia Mahnke lacked a bit of the country naiveté that Zerlina should have.

One other oddity of the production which I haven't seen commented on, in addition to the dim lighting, which I definitely have seen commented on: they changed the ending. When the Commendatore appears, he is not a statue, but a half-rotted corpse; Giovanni is not seized by devils, but struck down by the huge Angel of Death who looms over the stage waving his sword; and Giovanni is not physically dragged to Hell, but lies lifeless on the front edge of the stage, looking dashingly like The Death of Chatterton. In other words, Giovanni’s life is not cut off prematurely through supernatural intervention; instead, the inevitable – Death – just catches up with him suddenly and sooner than might be expected. It’s a subtle change, but a definite one.

alien abduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

th-th-th-that's all, folks!!!

The San Francisco Opera season came thudding to a close with a coarse, drab revival of one of my favorite operas, The Marriage of Figaro. I should point out that I saw the second cast (but if your marketing slogan is The Return of the Divas, shouldn’t there be fine print somewhere that says “except for Subscription Series G”?). I was sorry to miss Swenson as the Countess and particularly Relyea as Figaro, but usually I’m open to second casts; although I may not believe that a stranger is just a friend I haven’t met, I’m perfectly willing to believe that an alternate is a star just needing a break. In any event none of the singers particularly thrilled me, though all were good enough, even though the ensemble sounded off to me at several points.
And it wasn’t really the Opera’s fault that this was one of those evenings when I was surrounded by talkers (not whisperers – talkers). “Is that the Countess?” “Yes, that’s the Countess! There she is!” “And this is her first song?” “Yes! She’s singing it!” (dialogue not retouched for satirical purposes). Of course none of these observations, or any of the others I was treated to, could possibly wait until after the opera was over, possibly because it ended so late it would be difficult to remember that far back. Yes, after a brief lapse into reality which led the Opera to start Maid of Orleans (under three hours) at 7:30, they went back to presenting the almost-four-hour-long Marriage of Figaro at 8:00. I think that people who claim they can’t follow the garden shenanigans in Act IV are really just too tired by then to pay attention. (Does anyone else want to punch Cherubino in that scene, or at least send him for some “no means no” sensitivity training?) Even half an hour makes an enormous difference, but apparently the Opera feels that Mrs. Vanderbilt’s carriage can’t quite rumble up the walk before 8:00 and that anyone else who might be tired out from a week of work is probably an Irishman or some other sort of undesirable ethnic, who would be better off in a tavern or other low haunt, or at home beating his common-law wife and their thirteen grubby children.
You could certainly make an argument that Figaro is one of those operas that needs to be set in a very specific time and place (what with ordering the neighbor boy to join the military, let alone the whole “right of the first night” – another plot point that led to an extended discussion during the performance), though in that case it’s not clear to me why this production sets Act I not in a nice room conveniently located near the Count and Countess but instead in what is very obviously an open inner courtyard; it’s even less clear why all the characters have to behave in a way in which no human being has ever behaved outside of exhausted vaudeville sketches. Any moment of subterfuge (of which there are many) is accompanied by winks and grimaces and blinks that would tip off Helen Keller, but go completely unnoticed by the other party; all older women are rapacious man-eaters; stuttering is comedy gold; the mere sight of a chamber pot is not only comedy gold, but comedy gold covered with diamonds; any unwashed person (even better, an unwashed person who also has liquor on his breath – enter Antonio the gardener) causes everyone, even an aristocratic Spanish lady of a delicately melancholy disposition, to rear back in eye-rolling, hand-waving, gasping recoil. (This is the production, not the cast, and definitely not the opera; in fact I have to give credit to Twyla Robinson, who sang the Countess, for trying for some delicacy in portraying the attraction to Cherubino; when I saw this production a few years ago the woman singing the Countess gave a performance of unbelievable vulgarity, swooning and drooling over Cherubino in a way that rendered her protestations of innocence absurd and her forgiveness of the Count ridiculous and hypocritical. Yes, I know about La Mere Coupable, and I wish directors didn’t; that’s later in their lives, after she’s had to forgive more indiscretions and Cherubino has grown up some. In Marriage of Figaro he’s a boy who thinks he’s a man and she’s a woman who thinks he’s a cute boy – if she really took him seriously, she wouldn’t keep dressing him up like a girl; it’s a very delicately ironic relationship, which is why this heavy-handed production has to turn it into a Desperate Housewives moment that would presumably shock the “realism”-loving audience if they bothered to consider how old Cherubino actually is.)
Apparently many in the opera audience, not having been to any theatrical productions postdating the replacement of gaslights with electricity, eat this stuff up, but here’s what really bugs me about this production: if this had been announced as a vaudeville/Looney Tunes concept production there would have been predictable cries of outrage and further calls for the public execution of Pamela Rosenberg, but the only thing they would have had to change would be to brighten and simplify the sets, and maybe tone down some of the mugging. OK, Chuck Jones actually would have come up with better gags, but I stand by my point. Apparently there were sighs of relief at this “traditional” production; who was it who said tradition is just encrusted error?
About twenty years ago in Boston I saw Peter Sellar’s Marriage of Figaro, usually described as the “Trump Tower” production (the only one of his three da Ponte/Mozart operas that I saw on stage). The setting did create some incongruities (for instance, ordering the neighbor boy to join the military). And I disagreed with the decision to have the Count manhandle the Countess (to me his actions conveyed not aristocratic entitlement but bullying, and made him too unsympathetic), but it was a carefully thought-through decision, not one made for some spurious shock value, and although I disagreed with it I had to clarify in my mind why I disagreed and how I thought his behavior worked in the piece. In short, Sellars re-thought the relationships among the characters as if they were people with real emotions (I still think about his remark that Marzellina is obviously a lonely older woman looking for love and emotional connections, which is why she can switch so quickly from wanting to be Figaro’s wife and hating Susanna to being his mother and Susanna’s too), and that is why I remember the production so well after two decades.
(I had seen this production and this was my opinion before I heard of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death, but I have to say, this is exactly the kind of – I was going to say dessicated shit, but instead I’ll say stale routine – that she would never, ever have appeared in.)