San Francisco Opera: Manon

Years ago I read Manon Lescaut, the novel by Abbé Prévost that launched the charmer on her notorious career; it struck me as more of a parody of a certain type of sensibility-infused romance rather than the thing itself (if you've read early Austen up through Northanger Abbey you know how it struck me), which maybe indicates a basic disjunction between my gestalt and that of the novel & its ensuing dramatic adaptations. I have nonetheless heard multiple recordings & heard the opera live in three other productions, including the last run-through at San Francisco Opera of this Vincent Boussard production, which had fine turns by Elllie Dehn & Michael Fabiano as the lovers. So it's an opera I've heard a surprising number of times, given the basic indifference I felt about it. (I'm talking here about the version by Massenet, though I feel a similar way about Puccini's version.) But during this latest revival of Manon at the Opera I started to feel, to my great surprise, that it was a much better work than I had ever given it credit for.

As with rivers, stepping into, we never hear the same opera twice, but I doubt that anything I've gone through since my last Manon has made me more simpatico with the tale. And this isn't a case in which the production made all the difference, because as mentioned I've seen this production before. And I liked & continue to like it quite a lot, with its gently applied surrealism, its striking tableau, even its metaphorical balloons (at least they're an apt metaphor, being festive, fragile, & ultimately environmentally toxic). Even when the production verges on silliness (or crosses over, depending on your tolerance), as when Manon floats down from above, Mary Poppins-like, clutching a bunch of balloons, it's a thematically appropriate silliness, capturing the frivolous world of Parisian luxury she's temporarily inhabiting.

So what happened to me this time? I think I have to give credit to conductor Eun Sun Kim & to the two leads, Amina Edris as Manon & Pene Pati as the infatuated Chevalier des Grieux (in the off-stage world, Edris & Pati are married to each other). The extra dimensions all three brought to their roles eased my way towards revelation; from the moment the overture started under Kim's direction, I felt an authority & richness in the music that had never really registered with me before. There is a prejudiced tendency to think of French opera, with a few notable exceptions (Carmen, Pelleas, anything by Berlioz) as fairly wispy, but the vitality of this score sprang alive this time under Kim's baton.

Pati has a gorgeous, expressive voice, & there's a certain sunniness that comes through in his performances, joined with a certain level of joyful innocence, that makes him dream casting for the role of an idealistic young man besotted with his first love. But it was what Edris brought to the title role that was the real revelation for me. I remembered finding her voice, strictly as a voice, more gorgeous in the John Adams Antony & Cleopatra, though she certainly sang Manon with great beauty & distinction. But she also brought to her an intelligence & an emotional complexity I haven't seen before in this role.

I've always heard the character of Manon described as "charming", which only goes so far; to me, it's like saying "emotionally trivial but attractive & she knows it" – not necessarily a winning combination, beyond a superficial acquaintance, & you do really have to go beyond the superficial in a performance that lasts close to three & a half hours. Edris captured the passing iridescence of such a character, the lightness & frivolity that convinces the smitten that life & love can always float beautifully on, & that gave a poignancy to her portrayal when it edged into darker moments. Her rendition of the famous Act 2 aria, Adieu notre petite table, was genuinely wistful & moving; I felt sincere love behind her regret that she had to wake up, alone, from their beautiful dream. And when she seduces the clerical Chevalier in Act 4, her motives are complex: yes, she's displaying her sexual power over a former lover (& a vowed celibate), but you also sense her genuine feelings for the man, & her regret that their time of idyllic youth has so quickly passed away.

Because it turns out this opera is pretty hard-headed about the economic basis of society & of marriage. Even when Manon foolishly, fatefully urges the Chevalier to the gaming tables, it's because she is aware that their life together cannot continue with the means they have (she is aware of him, but also of money; he is aware only of her). It takes a lot of cash to pay for elegant frivolity, & unless you're born wealthy, the accumulation of capital is not elegant, or frivolous, or really anything but life-draining drudgery. The final tragedy is brought about by a spurned & vindictive older man. who accuses the lovers of cheating at cards. This man had earlier rented the entire ballet to perform privately, as his way seducing Manon by impressing her with his willingness to squander money on her whims. Unfortunately that's when she's decided to go to Saint-Sulpice to seduce her former love, the Chevalier. The incident is brilliantly shown in this production: something that looks like a large gilded cage slowly descends, but we, like Manon, see no dancers; like her, we are distracted. The rich man is distraught, & eventually takes his revenge.

The attitude towards wealth is one of the many ways in which this opera contrasts with La Bohème. In Puccini's opera, the rich old men are mostly foolish dupes; it's part of the youthful magic of that opera that we don't see their ultimate social power the way we do in Manon. A golden nostalgic glow lies over Bohème, even though it also ends tragically (but the nostalgic glow softens the blow). But to me it always feels very much like a retrospective tragedy, a remembered loss rather than a raw wound caused by the set-up of society. (We tend to associate Mimi's death with her poverty, but tuberculosis was I think for the original audience linked more to la vie de bohème rather than lack of adequate nutrition &c – that other famous victim of tuberculosis, Violetta, was not only financially successful as a courtesan, she supported Alfredo during their rural interlude). Does anyone ever watch Bohème & feel that the characters are trapped in poverty for the rest of their lives? I'd be surprised. Poverty, like youthful love, is seen in a fond backward glance. These things are picturesque, once you know they're temporary.

Look at Act 2 of Manon, by contrast: first Manon, aware that her lover is about to be snatched from her (by his father's underlings), sings a warm, loving – & private – farewell to their little table, the beloved furnishings of their simple, but adored because shared, apartment: a farewell to their whole life together. (But we already know that the humble & simple things of life can't hold her for long.) Then she goes off stage & he has a solo, a dreamy aria with gently undulating music underneath, fantasizing about a lovely cottage for the two of them, somewhere off in the (presumably somehow affordable) countryside, where they can pass the rest of their lives in blissful peace & contented happiness (an aria sung with oneiric elegance by Pati). When they come together at the end of the act, they have a brief exchange, each lover knowing what the other one doesn't, or can't; she aware that their time together is ending, he dreaming implausible dreams that it will float on forever. We see them suddenly & dramatically pulled apart, as we & Manon have been expecting, but the Chevalier is blindsided; not even halfway through the opera, he is plunged into grief, a grief that will return, in a deeper way, at the end, when he loses her to death.

Contrast that with Mimi & Rodolfo in their Act 1: they each have their big solos, each describing themselves to the other; then, after telling each other who they are, they unite for a rapturous duet that signals the two lives are now linked, a duet of such never-failing voluptuous intensity that it inevitably draws tears even from those lukewarm about their opera (in other words, from me). One opera gives us the delirium of mutual love (that is, what many people like to imagine love is, or at least a past love was), while the other shows two passionately entangled people who are ultimately at cross purposes & not saying to each other what really needs to be said. I suppose it's a matter of personal choice, or history, or memory, which of those the listener finds more convincing as a picture of life.

All in all, as I said, the performance was a bit of a revelation for me, a surprise which I received gratefully. Experiencing Manon again fell into the "why not?" category for me, but I came out with new respect for the work. It was not only on stage that the Opera went all out; even the lobby was decorated suitably. The place was bedecked with beads & feathers & lots of pink lighting & a shop for bespoke corsets & other suitably frivolous decor. I do regret that they missed the chance to pay homage to Act 4 by constructing a side chapel in which, under a bare-bodied Jesus, you could make out with an ex. But if even operatic lovers can't have everything, neither can we, I guess.

Elektra Redux

The morning of the last performance of San Francisco Opera's Elektra, which was also the last performance of the season, I was lucky enough to receive a text from a friend offering me the additional ticket she had for the evening, as her expected guest had unexpectedly had to drop out. I say I was lucky, but it took a moment for the luck to sink in. I had been out late the night before, & I sleep poorly anyway, waking up feeling more tired than when I went to bed, & a sudden change of plan can throw me. I tend to respond quickly, & my first impulse was to decline, but wiser heads (well, mine) prevailed & I told myself to ponder this offer for at least 10 minutes before responding. It didn't even take that long. My brain adjusted & my fingers typed out the response that should have been immediate as well as obvious: yes, thank you!

This revival was something to see as often as possible, just as the original 2017 production was. Both times the powerhouse cast made the run a must-see (or rather, a must-hear). But there was another selling point: the production itself, by Keith Warner. Set in a museum display of Bronze Age Greece, it provided an evocative, rich, & exciting concept. Partly, as I said in my post on this year's revival (which is here), there's just a sense of gratitude that someone did something with this piece besides throwing the cast in vaguely Grecian tunics amid a few shattered columns. But there's more to it than that; I've seen other productions of this work that took some chances (I recall one with huge sides of raw slaughtered beef hanging up around the stage). And productions that do more than sketch in the basics are not always popular. There is definitely a large section of the opera audience that resists anything that indicates an "attitude" towards the work: updating, deconstructing, rethinking, whatever. I put "attitude" in quotation marks because of course there's always an attitude of some sort being displayed; staging is inherently interpretation.

Opera audiences are usually quick, too quick in my frequently expressed opinion, to sneer at any production that tries anything different. Yet this production, so provocative, so very much a "concept", not only seems to have escaped the usual jibes: it seems to be, as far as I can tell, that rare thing, a production that is actually beloved, even apart from the musical execution.

I think what a lot of people object to in most "concept" productions is the misalignment between what the production is imposing on the work & what people go to the opera for: many people attend to get swept up in grand emotions, transported to a different time & place, an alternate level of reality. Most "concept" productions drily deconstruct the usual operatic narratives & tropes, offering an intellectual review of the grand passions, an overlay of present-day preoccupations on the escapist fantasy many in the audience are hoping for. (Neither side is really right or wrong; the audience's assumptions about classic works can be as wrong-headed as an inappropriate interpretation.) In other words, the audience feels condescended to by the "concept": oh, you want sweeping romance? Cute! Here's a presentation that will dismiss what you want in favor of shoving the sour world as we see it back in your face.  It's intellect versus emotion. Perhaps that is why there is so much anger directed at productions of this type; fortunately the irritating dismissal of all such productions as "Eurotrash" seems to be going out of fashion, at least in my hearing, but the anger remains. These productions can be good, or bad; but usually a lot of the audience dismisses them automatically based on the concept, not on its execution.

What I'm guessing is that the Warner production manages to hit the sweet spot between offering a thoughtful critique of what is going on in the old myths / operas & how they resonate for contemporary audiences & sheer horror-film effectiveness. In other words, the production respects the material & the way its creators intended it to be presented, yet also offers us a fruitful alternative view of what's going on.

The thrills were undeniable. At this final performance, I was surprised when the killing of Klytemnestra, her severed head held aloft by her son & killer Orest, was met not only with audible gasps, as at most performances, but a fairly sizable round of applause. It seemed a bit bloodthirsty. (Maybe people didn't know her backstory? Her actions didn't come out of nowhere. Either way, it's a tribute to the intensity of the performances & the production.) A friend asked me later if there was a special energy to this, the final performance of the run & of the season, & maybe there was a bit of going-for-broke but as far as I could see, & as far as I heard, all the performances were pretty much all-out. One difference that signaled the end of the season: at the curtain call, one of the violinists (I assume she was retiring, or at least moving on) was called up on stage by conductor Eun Sun Kim to take a solo bow. She was showered with bouquets from the pit, which was lovely to see.

So Elektra provided a suitable capstone to a generally thrilling San Francisco Opera season. There's often a certain poignancy to wandering through the lobby for one last time as the attendees for the final performance trickle out (until we all start trickling back in for the next season, in a couple of months) but this time we were all on an Elektra rush. As we left the Opera House, the surrounding area was even more chaotic than usual, as Civic Center was already filling up with Pride Weekend partiers, & the train ride back to the East Bay was a Boschian hellscape. But it was still worth it to experience this Elektra one more time. I almost said one last time, but here's hoping this production, which I think we can call classic as well as beloved, comes around again before another ten years have passed.

San Francisco Opera: Pride Concert

I did not attend last year's Pride Concert at San Francisco Opera, but I did attend this year's, which was announced as the second annual. The very full house was very full of enthusiasm, & if I didn't quite share it, well, that's pretty much on me, now isn't it?

I make a somewhat snobbish point of not going to Opening Night at the Opera, but I imagine it's similar to this concert: there's a packed house, & a lot of buzzy energy & excitement, but it's not really of the "here for the music" variety, but more about a hoped-for "scene"; also, there are speeches! For someone who has devoted so much life & love to the theater, I acknowledge that it's weird that speeches from the stage cause me immediate distress, but, once again, that's pretty much on me, isn't it. So there were speeches. For anyone playing Buzzword Bingo, it took barely ten minutes before we heard "being your authentic self". Oh, & the performance start-time was 8:00 rather than the Opera's usual 7:30, for reasons unclear to me.

The performers were stellar: Robert Mollicone led the Opera Orchestra, with Sapphira Cristál as our masterly Mistress of Ceremonies, with vocal soloists Melody Moore (soprano), Nikola Printz (mezzo), & Reginald Smith Jr (baritone), along with a back-up trio (or, as I thought of them, the Pips), Sadie Cheslak (mezzo), Alexa Frankian (soprano), & Thomas Kinch (tenor). All were top-notch, & often even better than that. Their commitment & enthusiasm were palpable. There were many stylish & fun costume changes, especially from our Emcee, of course, & glitter & sparkles & vivid colors were everywhere – except, unfortunately, in the musical selections.

Not that things were all bad on that front. We started with a tribute to the late & much-loved Michael Tilson Thomas in the form of Agnegram, a lively & eclectic piece he wrote to honor a rich & I'm sure lovely Symphony patron, Agnes Albert. As with the other pieces I've heard by Tilson Thomas, it is entertaining but strikes me as a bit ramshackle & a bit derivative (in this piece I particularly heard echoes of, though perhaps I should say "an homage to", Charles Ives). I enjoyed it but was mildly surprised to realize in retrospect that it would turn out to be one of the musical highlights of the evening.

Mme Cristál was tireless & I think accomplished what she set out to do, which was offer inspiration & uplift as well as introductions & context. It was all more high-minded than I was expecting; I never thought I would long for a drag performer to be snarkier & smuttier. I thought some of the context given was unnecessary, but then perhaps I am not understanding who exactly the target audience was. I do think that if a San Francisco Opera audience, particularly one gathered for a Pride Concert, really needs to be told who Sappho of Lesbos was & why she is significant, then we should just give up on humanity. That explanation came as an introduction to Ô ma lyre immortelle from Gounod's opera Sapho, which is based on the familiar story of Sappho ending her life by jumping from a cliff into the sea over despair for a male lover, Phaon. Our emcee seemed to suggest that this story was something invented by Gounod, or the nineteenth century in general, to cover up the truth of Sappho's love for women. It was all done in that very knowing, mmm-hmmm, right, we know the real story way.

But this incident has been part of Sappho's life (or, more accurately, legend) since classical times. Even Ovid, a "queer" author only in the broadest sense but one certainly open to sexual difference & aware of varied sexual options, gives us this story. I don't know offhand what the story's source is (it certainly predates Ovid) & I assume it's considered an embellishment rather than a biographical fact, insofar as we can determine what those are based on the fragments & remnants of such a different time & place, but in a way none of that matters: it has always been part of Sappho's story, & nonetheless she was still identified strongly & mainly as a lover of other women, lending her name & her island's name to all her daughters.

Why does this matter, & why did Cristál's approach depress me? Because it just illustrates our need to put people into boxes & to keep them there. Sappho could be mainly a lover of women but also have an affair with a man without betraying herself (or, for that matter, us, as if it's any of our concern anyway). Oscar Wilde, after all, was married & had two children. In both cases, their basic preference is clear & defining: but why dismiss their other experiences, unless it's our need to categorize, to classify, to limit? Despite all of our talk about embracing the variety of our feelings & the individual's right to choose his / her/ their own representation, we still crave definite & defining answers to the often irrelevant question, What's going on down there?

Having said all that: Printz gave a stunning, passionate performance of the aria, & at the end the singer (or director E Reed Fisher, or both) had the wonderful idea of having them extend their blue garment & cape out into a Loïe Fuller-style serpentine dance, illustrating the waters swirling over the poet's head. Very effective! I've heard Printz in several performances recently, & they consistently dominate the stage.

This is not to slight the other singers. Before the Gounod we heard Melody Moore give a touching performance of Lucky from Stephen Schwartz's opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon. He's known for musicals, particularly Wicked (as well as Godspell & Pippin) & based on this aria & what I know of his other works, he's more at home in the world of musical theater. After the Gounod, Smith gave a probing rendition of Peculiar Grace from Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, an aria about the tricky expectations for & from a young Black man who is grappling with his sexuality. That was followed by Moore giving a wrenching performance of La mamma morta from Giordano's Andrea Chénier, which seemed to be on the program mostly because it appears in a pivotal moment in Philadelphia, a movie I had almost forgotten about (I've never actually seen it), about a man dying of AIDS. I wondered how many in the audience were familiar with this 33-year-old film. Like many of the pop-culture callbacks during the evening, this one seemed weirdly dated. Nonetheless I was glad to hear the aria, no matter what ushered it into the line-up. After that Moore & Printz gave us a lovely, lilting rendition of the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, & I am always happy to hear Offenbach, especially performed so beautifully; the sensual languor of this particular piece stood out amid the uplift & the anthems.

After the Offenbach, things got even more pop-centric, starting with Be the Change by Michael Abels, who worked with Rhiannon Giddens on the opera Omar (my thoughts on that opera are here). Omar,  I thought, was trying to do some complex & subtle things; this song, which the program book described as "in the spirit of protest anthems & communal uplift songs", is not. It's like a campfire song that high-minded counselors urge on those who find Kumbaya too emotionally complex to deal with. This was the first song on which the Pips joined in. The two women, Cheslak & Frankian, were quite enthusiastic; Kinch seemed a bit off the beat & a bit more tentative in his gestures, which I found quite endearing. I enjoyed the trio, a feeling in line with my experience throughout this concert of enjoying the performances more than what was being performed.

The thing is, I mostly dislike (often verging, I will admit, on hate), pop / rock / rap, & I resent having it forced on me, just because I have to live in the world: going to the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery store, on public transit, walking down the street, even just sitting in my own residence: other people's boring trashy taste gets forced on me at inescapable volume. I hate the attitude that we all need to genuflect before the (corporate-sponsored) altar of pop culture. A few years ago I was at a piano recital in which the jazz-influenced pianist performed some wonderful pieces & then, for an encore, did a Michael Jackson song. It deflated my evening immediately. Musically it was the least interesting piece he performed. And the attitude seemed to be that now that we'd eaten our classical vegetables, we'd get the sticky sweet pop treat that we were truly craving. It had all been so enjoyable up until then! (It doesn't help that Jackson is one of those 1980s cultural figures whose popularity I did not get then & continue not to get, along with Madonna, Keith Haring, Princess Diana, & probably others I'm forgetting.)

I stopped listening to pop music in the early 1980s, because I found it increasingly vacuous & irritating, like trying to live on nothing but Doritos. Sure, the occasional bag is fun, & they do have different flavors thanks to the wonders of chemistry, but on the whole, there's a lot out there that's more enticing, complex, & interesting, as well as more nourishing to body & soul. But despite switching the station decades ago, I knew many of the songs performed during this concert, which made me wonder what was guiding the repertory choices. Even I know there are more current pieces that would be worth doing for a Pride concert (surely at least one of the 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields could have made the cut?). Couldn't the choices have reflected a wider range of moods & decades?

We were given The Joke by Brandi Carlisle (& three others, according to the program book), sung by Moore. It's pretty much an "it gets better" song, & the refrain ends "I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends / And the joke's on them". Here's the thing: a movie, like any dramatic structure, including a concert program, is an artistic arrangement of the often perverse, nebulous, infuriating, & frustrating realities of life into a shape that we can find emotionally & morally satisfying. In other words, saying to me, "I've seen this movie & here's how it ends" is not persuasive, outside of the context of characters in a movie. The lyrics just don't hold up to even a cursory examination of how life really happens; they're about trying to jolly everyone into optimism by overlooking reality. We all know people who were bigots & bullied those who were seen as weak or different, & no, they did not always get their comeuppance, even in the form of a less than successful life. And anyone of a certain age knows people who made their little jokes & jabs about queerness when we were all young (& therefore more susceptible to jokes & jabs, & back when such remarks were more socially acceptable & prevalent, & when "queer", now reclaimed, was an outright insult), & now those same people, come each June, are wreathing their social media with rainbows & glittery unicorns & reposting Love Is Love memes. And they probably think they were with you all along. Sure, why not. Life is slippery & people are elusive &, as Didion reminds us, we all tell ourselves stories in order to live.

One more song from the latter half of the show: Gender Binary (F*ck You) by Ryan Cassata, performed by Nikola Printz. Why the dainty fig-leaf of an asterisk in the title (as printed in the program book)? If you're going to sing Fuck, why not print it in a straightforward way? The asterisk is a nod to a transgressive power that that word lost years ago. While agreeing wholeheartedly with the intent & spirit of the song (which fights back against all kinds of insistence on fitting people into pre-made gender boxes: so see my comments above on the story of Sappho & Phaon), the message, though Printz's fiery performance really put it across, is pretty basic & fairly crude & simple. It's coming from a punk-rock attitude, but, again, punk was around when I was still listening to what I'll just call pop music, & it all seems too dated to be genuinely shocking.

Most of the songs were enjoyable, though not really engaging to my ears: the ones I haven't mentioned so far were Constant Craving, made famous by k d lang, sung by Moore & Printz; How Will I know, made famous by Whitney Houston, sung by Smith & the Pips; I Can Only Be Me, made famous by Stevie Wonder, sung by Printz; Any Love, made famous by Luther Vandross, sung by Smith & the Pips; Let It Rain, made famous by Tracy Chapman, sung by Smith (this one stood out, in a good way); & a finale sung by everyone, a medley of Greatest Love of All, Everybody Rejoice (A Brand New Day), & I'm Coming Out.

The focus was solidly on songs that might be called "anthems", songs that offered uplift & positivity. These were songs in which uncertainty ends in true love & rejection is a fear but never a reality. This was not a night for ambiguity, broken hearts, & never ever quite fitting in. Sure, I get it: we're all under siege by the ascendant reactionaries & fascists & just by life in general, & maybe uplift is called for. I would have hoped that an audience at the Opera would be given repertory that is of greater musical interest, but perhaps others found this program just the thing to give them the strength to go out & fight, or at least to dance into Pride weekend in the rainbow-bedecked foggy city. I would have preferred another approach. I'm usually reluctant to say that an artist should have given us something different from what he / she / they chose to give, but: couldn't whoever put the program together find some material that was more interesting & varied? some standards to repurpose, something by Cole Porter, or Rodgers & Hart, or even Rodgers & Hammerstein (I'm thinking of We Kiss in the Shadows from the King & I)? A simple gender-flip in the singer can give a new & refreshingly queer slant to even a familiar song (here are links to YouTube videos of Aaron Tveit singing Mein Herr from Cabaret & As Long As He Needs Me from Oliver!). Couldn't we have had even one song, just one little number, by the late &, as is increasingly obvious, very great Stephen Sondheim?

After two solid intermissionless hours of uplift, I have to say the audience was as enthusiastic as ever, heading into the lobby for the after-party, the throbbing monotonous thumping of which further depressed me. Nothing can send me racing for the exit faster than the presence of a DJ.

I don't understand what it means to live "authentically" (before anyone tries to explain it to me: I understand what it means in this context; it means not hiding basic facts about your gender & sexual identities – but I find authentic & authenticity slippery & problematic words, &, particularly when it comes to our sexualities, I question how much we need or should show to others). I don't really like uplift: I just see too many other possibilities. I don't really believe in daily affirmations (maybe I should try them?). I dislike being told that I'm oh so special (or that, in a nod to the latest pop-culture inevitabilities, being different is my superpower), because that's just the nice way of telling me I'm a weirdo & a freak who doesn't fit in with others. I don't believe in "communities" based on coincidental characteristics. And as always when I say things like this, I need to add that I do not think that feeling this way makes me "better" than anyone else. I don't regret going to the concert. You go so you can know, & now I know. Many others seemed to be perfectly satisfied with the bill of fare, & I'm always glad when people enjoy themselves, as long as I can get to the exit.

Schwabacher Recital Series #3: Invitations

The third & final recital of this season's Schwabacher series took place last Tuesday, & it was all mostly marvelous (except for the venue, the Conservatory of Music's Barbro Osher Hall, which I will complain about below). The featured players were bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, currently slaying across the street as Orest in Richard Strauss's Elektra, & pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson (who is also Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, co-presenters with the Merola program of this recital series). Ketelsen  & Matheson were joined by several participants in this year's Merola program. Before the music started, Matheson gave us the key to the eclectic program: invitations, a theme malleable & capacious enough to provide a program of surprises & satisfactions. Surtitles were used for the songs as well as the opera excerpts, & I wish every recital did this.

The first piece was Là ci darem la mano, from Don Giovanni; as the recital took place on Bloomsday, this was a lovely but perhaps inadvertent homage to the day, as that duet is one of the musical notes ripping through Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin. Ketelsen was joined by soprano Shannon Crowley & they were accompanied by pianist Deven Shah. (stage director Claire Choquette supplied minimalist but effective movements for the dramatic pieces). Ketelsen as Giovanni (& later as Scarpia) is sexy & seductive; the commanding but nuanced authority of his voice is familiar but what struck me, seeing him at relatively close range, is how good an actor he is: convincing, insightful, nothing overdone; he could hold the stage even without his distinguished singing. Crowley was charmingly conflicted as Zerlina, & the next two numbers, L'invito by Rossini & Stornello by Verdi, for which she was accompanied by Matheson, confirmed her strength in the pert/perky/winsome repertoire; I'm sure there are sassy servant girls & clever peasant sweethearts in her future.

The next set had Matheson accompanying tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson in three Duparc songs: L'invitation au voyage, Chanson Triste, & Phidylé. He took these dreamy songs from a convincing ardent angle, which worked very well; there was a lot of youthful yearning there in songs that don't always sound as youthful as they should. There were lots of passionate, big voices on this program. After the Duparc, Ketelsen & Shah returned to the stage for Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a loose cycle of three songs: Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire. In the latter Ketelsen gave clear but subtle, insofar as a drunk can be subtle, indications of the singer's inebriation; it was another demonstration of his skill in inhabiting the persona of a song, something also revealed by the switches in mood among these three very different pieces. Shah is a strong accompanist.

Two sets, both accompanied by Matheson, closed out the first half: a trio of Italian songs (Sognai by Schira, Il poveretto by Verdi, & Nebbie by Respighi) sung by tenor Chester Seungyup Han & a trio of Korean songs (San A / O Mountain by Dong Soo Shin, Ma Joong / Welcome by Hak Joon Yoon), & Mot I Jeo / Unable to forget by Hye-Young Cho) sung by baritone Paul Jang: powerhouse passions to send us into intermission. Han's rendition of Il poveretto was for me the highlight of his set, a song about an old soldier begging for any small coin so he could buy some sort of meal that turned out to be surprisingly touching. It made me think of beggars I had passed that day, particularly one lying on the sidewalk moaning that he couldn't even buy a cup of coffee. The three Italian songs were not ones I had heard before, but the Korean songs seemed a greater rarity & were a real treat; recitals so seldom step off the German-French-Italian-OK-maybe-some-English song path. Musically they sounded to my ears like American folk songs. The song to the mountain was particularly moving. Both Han & Jang really let it rip in their sets.

The entire second half was an excerpt from Tosca, with Ketelsen as Scarpia, soprano Charlotte Kelso as Tosca, Chester Seungyup Han as Cavaradossi, Paul Jang as Sciarrone, & Ryan Bryce Johnson as Spoletta, with Carrie-Ann Matheson as a fluid & evocative accompanist. Matheson started off by giving us a plot summary of what was happening. I'm not sure this crowd needed such a summary, but Matheson knows her audience better than I do.

(left to right: soprano Charlotte Kelso, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson)

Even without a full orchestra, & even in excerpt, Tosca is a musically & dramatically powerful opera. It's one I have mixed feelings about, though: the only interesting (& even, in a weird way, sympathetic) character, as far as I'm concerned, is Scarpia, the reactionary head of the secret police: not the choice the opera or my heart would really want a listener to make. Cavaradossi is passionate & romantic & mostly a cipher. As for Floria Tosca, let's look at her behavior just in this Act 2 excerpt: Cavaradossi is the one tied up & tortured, with blood running down his face, but she insists she's the one who is being tortured & she is just too sensitive to take it. That's why, against Cavaradossi's wishes, she betrays his compatriot (& also, by association, him). Her lover can keep quiet under torture but she, under the mere thought of torture, breaks his confidence & betrays his trust. Then, during her big aria, she insists that she has never harmed a single person – really? I just heard you sell out Angelotti – & she doesn't deserve any of this anyway because she has brought flowers & jewels to adorn the church. (Do I need Latin Catholic trigger warnings?) Yet, despite her efforts to bribe the Creator with His own creations, bad things have happened to her (of course to her; forget Angelotti & even Cavaradossi). There are just too many bitch, please! moments with her.

That aside: the opera is, as I said, musically & dramatically effective, & the excerpt was gripping. Ketelsen is a superb Scarpia. Again, he doesn't overdo it, but he makes very clear the sadism, the sexual tingle, underlying the police chief's machinations. He doesn't indulge in snarling & bellowing (genuinely powerful people don't need to bellow); he even amuses himself with his sadism. Kelso was compelling & even touching (at least, as touching as I will find this character) as Tosca. with lovely rich tones for Vissi d'arte. Han really belted out his Vittoria! Vitorria! triumphantly, which is pretty much Cavaradossi's business in this act. The smaller parts were well taken; Jang portrayed amusing confusion on Sciarrone's part at the start again / stop again orders of the seemingly capricious Scarpia (the torturer, being in the other room torturing, of course doesn't hear the conversation with Tosca). It was quite a show, received very enthusiastically by the full house. Ketelsen & Matheson followed it with an encore, Cole Porter's very funny Tale of an Oyster, made even more hilarious by Ketelsen's commanding tones & authoritative stage presence. He also nicely delineated the oyster's different emotions at each stage of its journey, from Oyster Bay to high-society meal to being upchucked back into the Bay, sadder but wiser for his social-climbing adventure.

(left to right: tenor Chester Seungyup Han, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, soprano Charlotte Kelso, tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, & baritone Paul Jang)

Now I will complain about the venue. I have been to the Conservatory's Barbro Osher Hall several times. First something good: once you're up there, in a glass-encased room on the 11th floor of the Conservatory's new building, there are attractive views down Van Ness Avenue & across the street to Davies Hall & the Opera House, & it's very pretty at night, with all the lights of the city sparkling below you. When you see the room from the street, it glows like a jewel.

But: the room (it's not really a "hall") is described as "intimate", but I'd describe it as "small", which is not the same thing. The chairs, the cheap plastic kind that can be stacked up easily & moved out of the way, are not very comfortable. But the real problem is getting to & from the room. I've been to several concerts there & only once were people allowed up to wait when they arrived. Every other time, we have to collect in the lower lobby of the building, where there are not nearly enough seats, so concert-goers, who are often elderly, cranky people (& I include myself in that) have to stand, often for long periods, before we can get upstairs, where we have to stand waiting again. There is usually some sort of rough line that forms, with the policing that that involves (on Tuesday there was a man keenly invested in letting everyone know he was first in line; I had arrived at least 10 minutes before he did, but didn't bother disputing precedence with him, as I had taken one of the few seats available & preferred that to standing the whole time). And that line he was so intent on? It's just to get on the elevator! The audience has to be led up, one carload at a time, to the 11th floor. Once there, as I said, a line has to form again before we can get into the actual room (which, again, I'm not going to call a hall). There is lots of anxiety & fraying tempers, as seats are not reserved & so where you are when the doors open affects where you sit during the concert. And I am far from the only person who cares a lot about where he or she sits.

And then, after the concert, you have to do the same thing in reverse: line up by the elevators to be taken down one carload at a time. And if you need to use the restrooms before descending, because of course you do, you have to get through the crowd jammed up by the elevators, most of whom stand there staring like angry lumps even after you explain that you're not trying to cut ahead of them, you're trying to get past them to the restrooms. I don't really understand why a recital like this, which could have drawn a larger crowd, wasn't in a larger venue. Even if the size of the room weren't a problem, the logistics definitely are. Not sure what the Conservatory was thinking when they came up with this arrangement. But when I see the Osher Recital Hall as a venue, I definitely think twice about attending.

San Francisco Opera: Elektra

The other day I was at the second of the six performances of San Francisco Opera's Elektra, a revival of Keith Warner's 2017 "museum" production of the Richard Strauss / Hugo von Hoffmannsthal setting of Sophocles. I saw the production the first time around & thought it was brilliant, even beyond my gratitude that someone thought to do something with Elektra besides drape the cast in sheets (to indicate Classical Times) & set them amid a few pillars, preferably broken (to indicate the unwholesome state of the House of Atreus).

There is a whole backstory to the setting, centered on a museum visitor who is accidentally locked in at night & relives her own past traumas through vitrined artifacts of Elektra's story, but honestly the staging works even if you don't pick up on that framing, or some of the setting's other particulars (& honestly many of them did not come through to me the other night, possibly a combination of my location in the house & my troubled vision). But the museum is such a vivid, fruitful metaphor, not only for the way we view the operatic repertory (exhibits from the past, the dust blown off for our continued amusement) but our own emotional lives: the Memory Palace converted into a series of labeled exhibits of our grief, our pain, our occasional glimpse of glory, which sometimes means just (in every sense of the word) revenge.

What keeps this conceit from becoming self-consciously arty? Part of it is the inherent horror of the plot, the long-awaited matricide of a woman who was herself wronged, with horror-film touches as we approach the end: Orest (to give Orestes his Teutonic name) suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed to surprise his next victim (beds & what happens in them are really the crux of the drama), or carrying out his mother's severed head after he kills her, a bit of Grand Guignol I did not remember from the earlier production (which doesn't mean of course that it wasn't part of the original staging; it was nearly 10 years ago, & since then there have been a lot of heads that should be severed).

The other element is of course Strauss's call for & expert handling of enormous instrumental resources, the largest pit orchestra (95 players) in SF Opera's history (pit orchestra, because Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise calls for 97 players but 8 of them are on stage, according to the Opera's press department). Eun Sun Kim led this massive force with aplomb, giving clarity & searing forward thrust to the angsty strains. There were a few moments (one of the early statements of the final dance theme) where the volume seemed as high as it could go maybe a bit earlier than it should go there, but then climaxing early is not necessarily a misjudgment in this opera. Richard Strauss, even when dealing with the great figures of Greek mythology, is a bit of a carnival barker, with something lubricious & seedy about his music, at least when it's at its best (or perhaps what I'm saying is that that is when & how I prefer him). This may explain some of the discomfort with this composer (is he quite top drawer?) but there's certainly precedent for treating Greek mythology this way: Euripides also cast an eye both cynical & compassionate on these mythological doings. (Treating Sophocles in this way, though, is more of a piquant disjunction, which is not a bad thing.)

We heard Elena Pankratova in the title role, Michaela Schuster as Klytemnestra, Elza van den Heever as Chrysothemis, Kyle Ketelsen as Orest, & William Burden as Aegisth; all were splendid in the face of this work's extensive & almost excessive dramatic & musical demands; I particularly admired van den Heever as a more forceful than usual sister, Ketelsen as the implacable avenger, & Burden in the thankless role of Aegisth. When the opera ends in this staging, we do not have Elektra's triumphant, ritualistic dance of death; instead, while the murder of her father in the tub replays overhead on video, she collapses under the weight of recurrent grief & remembered trauma: a psychologically acute moment with which to send us back out into our world.

San Francisco Opera: The Barber of Seville

Il barbiere di Siviglia has a long first act, so the intermission line at the lower-level men's room was even longer than usual. The man in front of me, probably late 30s / early 40s, said he had never seen Barber before & he was enjoying it a lot.

"But I'll bet you knew a lot of the music, didn't you?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Bugs Bunny, right?" I responded. He laughed & said he had been surprised to realize when the music started that nine-year-old him was being prepped for the opera by Chuck Jones. And here he thought it was just Saturday morning cartoons!

Not only are snatches of the music mainstays of the more sophisticated & perennially popular mid-century cartoons, but this opera has not only held but been a mainstay of the operatic stage since its premiere in Rome in 1816. All this makes it easy to take Barbiere for granted. I had skipped its last few appearances in San Francisco; in fact, I realized when I glanced at my Opera List that I had not seen it live in 20 years. This stylish & witty production by Emilio Sagi, with a powerhouse & mellifluous cast of singers, reminded me why Barbiere is an evergreen.

The staging is evocative enough of an appropriate time & place without being burdened with cumbersome "realism" or pointed updating. Generous use is made of a troupe of Spanish dancers, who set a stylish flamenco-tinged tone. There are lovely surreal touches throughout, such as the chorus crawling out from under the buildings that dominates the right side of the stage, or instruments (a guitar for a serenade, for example) being handed out from that crawl space. The buildings, which are both the  outdoors &, with some adaptations, indoors of Doctor Bartolo's residence, resemble those toy-like structures you see in the backgrounds of early Italian Renaissance paintings, only here instead of pastels, the buildings are all white. The sets & costumes are mostly whites & tans, with touches of color added as the story progresses, until we end with bright splashes of pink & red & a video of colorful fireworks exploding as Almaviva & Rosina drive off in a cherry-red car.

The production is genuinely funny, which is always a bit of a surprise & relief for a work as old & well-known as this one. There was lots of appropriate & appreciative laughter from the audience. Clever use is made of props, but it's not overdone: Rosina, very much in vixen mode, jabs at her surroundings with a pair of garden shears; streamers shoot out of Don Basilio's sleeves at the climax of La Calunnia. It's easy to do too much of this sort of thing – for me, Berta's business with sneaking cigarettes didn't work, mostly because I find smoking repellant – but the balance was on the right side here, & the funniest moments actually came from the material: after Basilio winds up his extravagant paean to Calumnia, Bartolo's decisive, "No, we'll do it my way" got a hearty & well-deserved laugh from me as well as the rest of the audience, & other than the man in front of me in the restroom line who was seeing his first Barbiere, I suspect most of us knew it was coming.

Benjamin Manis led a well-paced & stylish orchestra. There are two casts in this revival; here's the one I heard last Friday: Joshua Hopkins as Figaro, Maria Kataeva as Rosina, Levy Sekgapane as Count Almaviva, Renato Girolami as Doctor Bartolo; then, in all performances, Riccardo Fassi plays Don Basilio, Catherine Cook plays Berta, Olivier Zerouali is Fiorello, Gabriel Natal-Báez is Ambrogio, Thomas Kinch an officer, & Andrew Truett a notary. There was outstanding work from all of them. Sekgapane tossed off & held high notes with deceptive & charming ease; he was given his long final aria, & it was a pleasure to hear, though I did wonder why Rossini hadn't given equal time to Rosina & Figaro. It would have been delightful to hear even more of Hopkins & Kataeva. Girolami manages to make Bartolo amusingly pompous & calculating without overdoing it. The cast radiates a sense of fun; even Ambrogio's silent dance with Berta is joyous. Scenes that are often sort of a trial (like Almaviva disguised as a music instructor wishing peace & joy on an increasingly aggravated Bartolo) are genuinely bright & funny.

If I sound slightly surprised at how fresh & fun the show was, & how much I enjoyed it, that's probably because I am. I had seen the Met livecast of Barbiere last year, & though I found it on the whole quite entertaining, I also felt that at a number of points the plot machinery was showing its age: cranking & creaking rustily (always a hazard with works rooted in the commedia tradition). There are comedies whose every production – whose every performance even – reveals new angles & insights & flashes of color; Così fan tutte is my go-to example of these opalescent operas. Barbiere is not one of these. It gleams like a shiny, even brilliant machine, reliably producing an entirely respectable & to varying degrees enjoyable product. I thought this production was as good as Barbiere is going to get, making this old work, so alien to us in many of its rooted assumptions, into something fresh, funny, stylish, invigorating. This was the right way to break my drought with this particular war-horse.

Schwabacher Recital Series #2: Paths of the Heart

The second Schwabacher Recital of the season, & the only one featuring only one vocalist, took place earlier this month (I am, as usual, perpetually behind on posting) at the First Unitarian Universalist Society, an unusual setting (I have only been there once before, years ago, for a Meredith Monk concert) but an attractive one. Pianist Tzu Kuang Tan accompanied baritone Gabriel Natal-Báez in Paths of the Heart, a thoughtful & poetic program taking as its theme journeys outward & inward.

The first set opened with six songs from Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, settings of lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson; we heard The Vagabond, Let Beauty Awake, The Roadside Fire, Youth and Love, Whither Must I Wander?, & Bright Is the Ring of Words. The titles tip you off to the mood: you have a sense of youthful springtime wanderlust, carefree adventuring in the face of the looming drudgery of adulthood, with the mood darkening towards the end into uncertainty & even, in the bittersweet final song, the suggested loss of life & life.

The second set was four Schubert lieder: Prometheus, Geistes-Gruß (Ghost Greetings), Wandrers Nachtlied II (with texts by Goethe), & Der Atlas (text by Heine): a different sort of wandering, more heroic in scale, featuring demi-gods & legendary knights, but also, in the Wandrers Nachtlied, what might be an old, or simply very weary, searcher, calmly awaiting the peace of night to fall on his restless life. These journeys were more in psychological & philosophical realms. It was clear from the start, & became even clearer as the tone & mood deepened & the theme shifted, that we were in very good hands with these performers. Natal-Báez has a rich, smooth voice, which might be enough, but he also uses it with thoughtful care & great expressivity. Tan was a strongly lyrical accompanist. Fortunately the audience was attuned enough to hold applause until each set finished, as requested in the program, so they were able to conjure their vistas without interruptions.

The second half of the program brought us to Spain & the Hispanic world, initially through the French lens of Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée; we were given all three numbers in the cycle (Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire, with texts by Paul Morand inspired by Cervantes's classic novel). The three songs are very loosely related, to each other & to the source material, but the idealistic / crazy figure of the knight errant encapsulates many of the themes of the program: wandering, both physically & psychologically & spiritually; the estrangement that comes from always moving on, as well as the desire to connect that keeps leading one on; a sense of adventuring among the elusive & fragile beauty of the world.

The final set was in Spanish, & included the sense of traveling back nostalgically to one's own past (Natal-Báez is from Puerto Rico). beginning with two songs by Miguel Ortega to poems by Federico Garcia Lorca – Romance de la Luna, Luna & Preciosa y el aire – followed by individual songs by Luis Antonio Ramírez (Lucero del alba / Morning song, with text by Luis Lloréns Torres), Manuel Ponce (Estrellita / Little Star, with text by the composer), Astor Piazzolla (Los pájaros perdidos / The Lost Birds, with text by Mario Trejo), & Alfonso Esparza Oteo (¡Dime que sí! / Say yes!, with text by Alfonso Espiriu). The two Lorca songs, beautifully fraught encounters of children with death & sex, hide their sophistication under charming, almost folk-tale-type, language. The four final songs seemed more like the journey through life, taking up birds, stars, love lost & gained, familiar inhabitants of Lieder-land & none the worse for that, of course.

This was an outstanding recital: the music was chosen with care & intelligence & well presented(Natal-Báez wrote the thoughtful program notes, as well as the translations of the Spanish lyrics) & Tan & Natal-Báez both operated on a consistently high level of artistry. There was one encore, To Dream the Impossible Dream from Man of la Mancha, which neatly tied up several themes of the program: Don Quixote, of course, & questing through life; Tan & Natal-Báez let it soar like the Broadway anthem it is, sending us out into our own starry nights.

Taking their bows: Tan on the left, Natal-Báez on the right

Schwabacher Recital Series #1: Italienisches Liederbuch

Yesterday at the Taube Atrium Theater, the Merola Opera Program & the San Francisco Opera Center presented the first of this season's three Schwabacher Recitals; this one, curated by Nicholas Phan, featured pianist Ji Youn Lee, soprano Mary Hoskins, & baritone Olivier Zerouali. The program had not been announced in advance, so the first pleasure was finding out that we would be hearing Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, a collection of 46 mostly brief lieder to words by Paul Heyse "based on anonymous Italian poetry", which I've heard on recordings but which I've rarely (maybe never? unless it was decades ago, in another time & place?) encountered live. The second pleasure was how successful, how thoughtful, charming & moving, & inspiriting, the concert was.

I'm guessing that the "curating" part of Phan's role was not only in picking the repertory but also in directing the performers; the songs are not explicitly about an on-going story, but instead about many stories flitting in & out of possibility, & the two singers listened to each other attentively, with subtlety & care, to the apt, often dramatic or witty, accompaniment of Lee's playing. Her Steinway was to the center left (audience left) of the stage; to its right were two black chairs on either side of a small round café-like table with a black tablecloth, topped with two glasses of water (Zerouali drank more of his than Hoskins did of hers) & a few candles. Lee wore a stylish black ensemble; Zerouali wore a black tuxedo with an open-necked shirt, & Hoskins wore a velvety forest-green gown (one of her songs mentions wearing green, a possible inspiration). The large back wall featured a series of close-ups of paintings, some famous (Botticelli, Munch) & some not so much, a different art work for each song, printed in soft blacks & greys against a purple background, the art work reflecting & commenting on the content of the songs & the lovely shade of purple evoking the musical period in which Wolf worked; the effect was subtle & evocative. The words of the songs were displayed in large clear white type against the dark background of the art works.

I think I have only once before been to a recital which used surtitles, which have now become obligatory in opera houses. I am all in favor of using them in recitals, though I understand there are various difficulties, including cost, that prevent surtitles from becoming standard for recitals. It's worth the trouble, from an audience member's point of view, if only for sparing us the constant rustling & riffling & folding of programs with the words in them. (I'm always amazed by the number of habitual recital-goers who seem unable to figure out how the songs are arranged on the word-sheets, leading to endless flipping & scanning & searching, generally during the music). I was also grateful that in his brief opening remarks, Phan politely but clearly asked us not to applaud until the very end. I don't consider it the end of what passes for civilization if applause arrives at the "wrong" moment, but it is obtrusive, often feels merely de rigueur, & would be especially disruptive when the songs are all relatively brief (our 46 were covered in roughly an hour & 15 minutes).

The soprano is sometimes flirtatious, sometimes annoyed at her straying lover; the baritone is seductive, sometimes puzzled; both are sometimes angry, sometimes sweet. The later songs sometimes reference Paradise, in presence or in absence, a singular marker in Catholic Italy. Unlike lieder that expose the intimate feelings of a single heart, these songs are usually addressed outwards, to another (perhaps this is part of their extroverted "Italian" nature, in the eyes of an Austrian like Wolf), though there is not a clear dramatic arc or storyline in this cycle, but rather a variety of moods & situations; potent little dramas are implied, then slip away. The interplay between Hoskins & Zerouali reflected the on-going variety of the songs; nothing was overdone, nothing detracted from whichever was singing at the time, but both were at all times really present & responsive to the other. Both singers have appealing voices, Zerouali vigorous & forceful, Hoskins with a powerful but pure tone. Their attention to the words & their meanings was heightened by the audience's ability to follow along easily with the surtitles.

I do find the Taube Atrium Theater an odd space, with some acoustic peculiarities. There were only a couple of brief moments when the singers seemed to let the big size of their voices escape the reality of the room a bit. These were very tiny flaws in a collection of jewels. All concert-goers know the peculiarities of the interactions between the day they're having & the performance: does one lift or bring down the other, pull one somewhere else or seem like more of the same: each performance will be different for each audience member. So I'll just say I was having a fairly strange & not all that good day, & this concert was a welcome & delightful respite.

San Francisco Opera: The Monkey King

I was in a packed Opera House for the third performance of San Francisco Opera's world-premiere run of The Monkey King, a kaleidoscopic new work by Huang Ruo (music) & David Henry Hwang (libretto), directed by Diane Paulus. This opera is wildly inventive, wildly colorful, wildly wild, & also substantial enough to be thought-provoking in a number of directions & well worth repeated viewings (I hope it will be revived soon, as I believe the run is pretty much sold out).

The storyline is based on the opening chapters of the very long & episodic Chinese classic novel, Journey to the West; the portion we are given is basically the Monkey King origin story. Sun Wukong, the monkey who makes himself the Monkey King & then a disciple of the Buddha, is, despite his spiritual trajectory, a rambunctious & brassy character, a variant of the Trickster God, but since he is also a King, he has some inherent responsibilities towards others that can lead him into more altruistic directions. The story of the opera is the story of his discovery of some level of selflessness & spiritual enlightenment, as he is guided through adventures & suffering by the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin & the teachings of the Buddha.

It all makes for an emotionally & dramatically complete work, though (perhaps this is just my enjoyment speaking), as in any superhero-based tale, there is room for sequels. It was several scenes into the work, after seeing the Monkey King go underwater to gain his great weapon, & then ascend to the heavens to see the glittering, corrupt world of the powerful gods, when I started to think of The Monkey King as potentially part of a Chinese-American Ring cycle, an impression strengthened by later hopes expressed by his Buddhist teacher that the Monkey King will function as some sort of redeemer of a corrupt world. As with many of our insights, I realized this one was not unique to me: while reading the program-book on the train afterwards I found in one of the articles this very subject being discussed by the composer & librettist.

The clever & frequently ingenious production owes a lot to the brilliantly eye-catching costumes of Anita Yavich & the puppetry & design work of Basil Twist. Great stretches of iridescent silks turn into waves, or horses, or the clouds supporting heaven; the Monkey King himself is sometimes a puppet, sometimes a dancer (Huiwang Zhang), & mainly & notably a tenor, Kang Wang, who does an appropriately heroic turn in what must be a strenuous role (even with leaping & flying done by dancer or puppet), sounding as fresh & spunky at the end as at the beginning. His lines frequently end with a blazoning note, which I thought was an excellent indication of his character (though I should note a friend of mine, a singer, sympathetically found this aspect of the vocal writing exhausting). There is precedent in the novel for the Monkey King dividing himself, but the staging is seamless, with a leap giving way to a puppet, flying with the aid of black-clad puppeteers, in the style of Japanese theater.  There are scenes in which singer & dancer are both in action, in particular a fight scene with representative of the gods Lord Erland (also portrayed by a singer & dancer: Joo Won Kong & Marcos Vedovetto, respectively), but it's always clear what is going on. I have to give credit to the nerves of our Guanyin, the soprano Mei Gui Zhang, most of whose role is sung while she is suspended on (or, even more nerve-wrackingly, moving on) a golden platform a bit like a lozenge or flame-shaped halo, high, very high, above the stage. The entire cast is very strong (I particularly liked the deep bass of Peixin Chen as Supreme Sage Laojun) & the chorus does astonishingly versatile work.

The visuals (the costumes, &, in particular, the make-up of the Monkey King) & the action (the acrobatics, the choreographed fights) are very influenced by Asian theater, particularly Peking Opera; the music also crosses traditional east-west borders. Though the orchestra (led with assurance by Carolyn Kuan) is largely a traditional European opera orchestra, the percussion battery includes large & medium Indonesian button gongs, a Chinese opera gong, & small Chinese crash symbols, & there is a prominent role for pipa (played by Shenshen Zhang), including a rock-god-guitar-type battle between the Monkey King & one of his heavenly opponents. But the music, though permeated by traditional Chinese sounds, is not aggressively "other" or even "exotic" to non-Chinese ears, which is why I earlier referred to it as a Chinese-American work.

This hybridization of times & cultures applies to the libretto as well, which is often agreeably slangy, a helpful reminder to those dazzled by the fairy-tale qualities of the work that there is a contemporary point underneath the dazzle. "Awesome, JE!" announces the warrior nephew of the Jade Emperor, sent by him with Heaven's latest scheme for controlling the Sun Wukong. The gods sing in chorus of how no one knows how to party the way they do. There isn't much individuality there, or dissent. A corrupt & decadent ruling caste, not only on heaven but, clearly though implicitly, here on the political earth as well. The Monkey King gathers his beleaguered monkey-subjects (or brethren) around him & announces that they will no longer be shoved aside by the powerful; joining together has made them stronger. Suffering increases the strength of the Monkey King. It's a point that applies not only to the racist approaches to Chinese & Chinese-Americans through US history, but to other disenfranchised groups.

But the political suggestions of this opera are secondary to its religious & philosophical explorations. How are we to live? is the main theme, the central & too frequently silenced question of our lives. The work opens & closes with choruses singing Buddhist sutras – the chorus, a collective, expressing poetic, spiritual thoughts in a way that suggests universalism. But during the course of the action, sutra sections are usually expressed in the powerful soprano of Guanyin, that is, not only an individual, but one removed both spiritually (by her status as an immortal bodhisattva) & physically (by her elevation above the stage) from what is happening below. She functions as a sort of musical conscience to the Monkey King. Does he truly understand, & accept, & live by, what she is expressing? Or is he just looking to her as a sort of deus ex machina to get him out of various scrapes? We have gone from the choral universalism of the opening to the individual struggle, in the toils of a baffling & illusory world, to understand, accept, & act on profound sentiments in a profound & meaningful way. As they keep saying in the Journey to the West, Splendid Monkey King! Handsome Monkey King! But after the gorgeous stage-pictures have faded, the unsettling underlying message remains: How are we to live in the world we are given?

San Francisco Opera: the Ring is coming!

(from left to right: baritone Brian Mulligan, director Francesca Zambello, Music Director Eun Sun Kim, General Director Matthew Shilvock)

Yesterday afternoon in the Taube Atrium Theater, adjacent to the Opera House, San Francisco Opera made it official: Der Ring des Nibelungen is returning, with three full cycles in June 2028, along with stand-alone Rheingolds &  Walküres in preceding seasons. This announcement was not exactly a surprise, as the Verdi / Wagner project inaugurated when Eun Sun Kim was hired as Music Director implicitly would have to include the Ring, but there are now definite times, & at least some definite performers. What was a surprise, & almost a shock as far as I was concerned, was General Director Matthew Shilvock's statement that this would be the first full Ring cycle in the United States since the pandemic. But thinking for a moment about the dates, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, as it takes years to put together a Ring cycle (hence yesterday's announcement, years in advance of the performances) & the pandemic really wasn't that long ago: depending on how you calculate its end, maybe four years? And so much has happened since then, most of it ranging from bad to very very bad. (So I at least am grateful to have a Ring to look forward to.)

Kim of course will be the conductor, & this will be her first full Ring cycle. (During the Q&A after the presentation, Lisa Hirsch asked if Kim would be the first woman to conduct a full cycle in the United States, & it looks as if she probably will be.) Francesca Zambello's production will be revived (& probably, to some extent, revised, just because that's how these things go). Our principal singers were also announced: Brian Mulligan as Wotan (his first full Cycle in the role), Tamara Wilson as Brünnhilde (making her company debut), & Simon O'Neill as Siegfried. It's probably just me, but when they announced the "three" principals, I thought, "Wotan, Brünnhilde, & . . . who is the third lead?" Haha, so much for The Hero. (Personally, I might suggest Alberich as #3.)

Music director Eun Sun Kim

You can get such details as are currently available here on the Opera's website. Here are some highlights, or maybe odds & ends, from the presentation:

We were fed, which is always important at these things! Various sausages (beef, chicken, & vegan), cut in half  (not lengthwise, the other way), served on rolls, with mustard & sauerkraut available, very tasty, as well as thick pretzels, all very Bavarian, along with wine, beer, soft drinks, & sparkling water. Everything ran smoothly, on time, & was well coordinated (anyone who's been involved in any level in such presentations knows how impressive this is).

The large scene behind the panelists showed various logos (San Francisco Opera, the 2028 Ring logo) or various scenes from earlier productions, or shots of the performers. It was all appropriate & visually interesting, engaging enough to be useful but not obtrusive enough to be distracting.

Shilvock led a discussion with Kim, Zambello, & Mulligan. Each gave some highlights of her or his history with the Ring. Each mentioned, in their own ways, how different Wagner is from the rest of the repertory: a different level of engagement & intensity. Zambello noted that "obviously I love Verdi – look at my last name!" but directing Wagner is different. Both she & Kim noted that the musicians performing Wagner are ones who really want to be there. I was struck by the underlying theme (a leitmotif, if you will, & I guess we must) of the sheer physical difficulty of performing these lengthy & demanding works. Kim mentioned the shoulder strain of the musicians, Mulligan mentioned the daunting level of details involved in something like Wotan's Act 2 "soliloquy" to Brünnhilde in Walküre. Zambello mentioned at that point that that's where she & the conductor act as coaches, helping the singer break things down into less overwhelming segments of a few minutes each. Pacing yourself as for a marathon was repeatedly mentioned.

There was even some consideration of the physical demands on the audience: when asked what one, needed to attend a Ring, particularly for the first time, Kim immediately responded, "A good cushion." I was amused by the echo of Nilsson's advice for singing the big Wagner roles: "Wear comfortable shoes." Kim's remark came from her experience as an assistant conductor at Bayreuth, home of famously excellent acoustics & famously uncomfortable seating. Other than that, people (in the audience as well as on stage) offered varied perspectives on how much "homework" (reading the librettos or some sort of analysis of the Ring, studying the different leitmotifs) was helpful or even necessary. Some vouched for just jumping into the deep end (another sports metaphor).

Zambello was asked what moment in the Ring was most difficult to stage, & she immediately said, "the end of Götterdämmerung." The music is a lot to live up to. All panelists talked about how thoroughly the music guides one through the works, but also about how difficult it is to live up to the music. Shilvock asked the three which role they would ideally play. Kim didn't give an answer, but Mullligan immediately said Hagen, which I thought was an interesting choice, & Zambello said it would have to be Brünnhilde: she even has the name of Brünnhilde's horse on her car's license plate. When discussing her staging of the Ring, Zambello mentioned that it had been described as a "feminist" Ring, but, she pointed out, that's what Wagner wrote. I've also heard other Ring stagings described as "feminist" & I'm never clear what exactly that means in this context, as that interpretation is inherent in the material: no matter what you think of Siegfried, it really is Brünnhilde who is the key to the Cycle.

director Francesca Zambello & General Director Matthew Shilvock

There were some interesting questions from the audience; Joshua Kosman asked Mulligan about putting together the three Wotans: is there a development in the character, or do you approach each opera separately? Mulligan responded with his view of the arc of Wotan's development. I think it was then that he said Wotan's passionate outburst to Erda in Siegfried was one of his favorite moments in the role: the true love duet in the Ring.

Zambello had mentioned working through staging by way of character, which is how you turn moments from potentially mechanical exposition into something more dramatic. Scene 2 of Rheingold in particular was discussed as, in her terms, "a one-act play"; Mulligan mentioned the concentration necessary to keep up with all the overlapping exchanges of information in that scene. The Ring, for all its vastness, is often quite intimate (I was surprised by this initially, until I realized how much of it is based on Greek tragedy, which also mostly uses only a few individuals at a time in the dramatic scenes).

One questioner asked how many people had, like him, come to Wagner through Anna Russell. About ten had, but I noticed when he mentioned Russell, Kim looked puzzled & whispered something to Shilvock: time moves on, & it's been decades since Russell performed; it seemed likely to me that Kim had not heard of her. If she does look up the comedian's famous, or once famous, routine (in which she mostly just recites the plot of the Ring: "I'm not making this up, you know!") I wonder what she'll think of it. Unfortunately there was no follow-up question asking about What's Opera, Doc?

There were questions about the number of leitmotifs (someone in the audience offered I think it was 176 as the answer), & about how many musicians in the orchestra were new since the last Ring was done in 2018 (quite a few of them, apparently). Mention was naturally made of the great extra expense of putting on the Ring, which of course is one reason for announcing the performances years in advance, to allow for the necessary fund raising. And there was a question about the promised ancillary events: would they include some sort of partnership with our local WNBA team, the Valkyries? That too will be revealed as June 2028 draws closer.

Ring swag! Each attendee was given a branded tote bag.