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.

West Edge Opera: Claude & Marcel preview concert

As an addition to its summer festival, West Edge Opera headed over to the Wattis Theater at SFMOMA to present a preview concert, minimally staged but with singers & orchestra, of next season's world premiere, Claude & Marcel, based on the lives of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, two (not necessarily in this order): stepsisters, best friends, lesbian lovers, Jews, surrealists, poets, anti-Fascist resistance fighters, & general shapeshifters. For more information on their lives, check here (or buy a ticket next summer to the finished opera); in this space I will be talking about last Sunday's performance.

The preview lasted about an hour & though there was no official announcement of what portion we were seeing, I think, based on a closing surtitle saying it was the end of Act 1, that we were seeing the first half of the opera. Of course what we heard is contingent & in process & incomplete, but I found it powerfully persuasive & am very excited to experience the completed work next summer. Alyssa Weinberg is the composer, Stephanie Fleischmann the librettist, Jonathan Khuner the music director, Elkhanah Pulitzer the stage director, & Chris Steele the dramaturg; Nikola Printz is Claude, Laura Bohn is Marcel, Angela Yam is Charlotte, their maidservant, & there is a chorus made up of Samuel Faustine, Glenn Healy, Laurel Semerdijian, Kyle Tingzon, & Matthew Worth.

When I entered the nondescript grey & black of the Wattis Theater, I was a bit alarmed to note an amplifier on stage, but it is used mostly for what I'll call, for lack of a better term, sound effects used as music, which would not otherwise carry into even a small space: breathing, for example. We open with rhythmic breathing, which summons up not only (obviously) breath, but the sound of a heart beating (the basic things of life) & merges into natural sounds, the breeze & in particular the ocean. In the spirit of its protagonists, anything can be appropriated & turned into art, into music & drama. Even the conventional orchestral instruments take on new colors, often being played in extreme ways, with a skittering & flittering effect that sounds like the frayed edges of music & the natural world; it is a beautiful, liminal world, in an unworldly light – like Debussy on acid. You hear traditional forms being bent, stretched, transformed, making the music a mirror to the surrealist view of the world, & as such, this is the sound world of Claude & Marcel.

Charlotte has music that is much more flowing & melodic; I don't mean it to sound condescending or dismissive when I say her music is more conventional. It's quite beautiful, & mirrors Charlotte's attempts to understand the two strange mesdames who have hired her for a job she desperately needs. The class & social differences between the two artist-outsiders, both from wealthy backgrounds (which is why they can afford a big house on the Isle of Jersey), & their farmgirl helper are examined with subtlety & care. Charlotte clearly is a bit nonplussed by these odd birds, but willing to accept what might even be their scandalous ways (are they just stepsisters? who are very close? or something more?) & to defend them to overly curious villagers, sometimes by dismissing their accurate guesses as to what the two ladies are. The ladies in turn can be, with the authority of their class, peremptory towards servants, though there's also the defensive fear of revealing themselves too far to possibly traitorous outsiders, even if the outsiders are economically dependent subordinates.

The chorus is sometimes villagers, sometimes occupying soldiers from the German (Nazi) Army. The two blend together. The villagers are curious about the very strange women who have moved in. The Germans are as well. There is no sentimentality, either positive towards the villagers or negative towards the soldiers; both groups are shown convincingly as a mixed bag of ordinary people. The extended sound-effects continue, with stamping feet as one of the musical effects, & also much laughter among the soldiers, as another interesting musical effect. The soldiers are not overdone villains: they are bullies who can threaten & sneer & cause serious harm, but they're also boys far from home, in a place that isn't going to feed them the propaganda they grew up on. I'm not suggesting that the presentation of the Germans is sympathetic, but it is nuanced, which is a good thing. Given their presentation as in many ways ordinary young people, you can see why & how Claude & Marcel's subversive acts could sway them; these are not convinced members of an alleged Master Race, but ignorant boys forced into positions of power they aren't suited for.

The relationship between Claude & Marcel is deftly handled: their low-level squabbles, their uncertainty in the face of the looming Nazi threat, their abiding love of each other & commitment to each other & their mutually-made art. I listed the singers above, & if you are familiar with those names, you know the very high level of singing & acting & commitment we were given. There were indications in the surtitles that the staging will involve some surrealist-dream-style dissolves between locations, & as I mentioned earlier the music flows between the natural world (particularly the sea) & the psychological / social reality of the characters. This was a preview performance, so the piece is in flux, & more no doubt can & will be said about the finished product. What I say here is even more provisional than usual. But I found the hour quite absorbing, with many intriguing possibilities; it will be very exciting to see how they play out in the completed work.

West Edge Opera: American Apollo

The third & final opera of the 2026 West Edge Opera Festival was American Apollo, a new opera with music by Damian Geter to a libretto by Lila Palmer, offering & examining the relationship between John Singer Sargent & Thomas Eugene McKeller, a young Black man employed at Sargent's hotel in Boston, who served as a model for the painter for a set of murals in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. McKeller's body served for various Greek gods & heroes, though his skin, his face, & sometimes his gender were switched, which is not unusual for models, of course, but Sargent also left a radiant portrait of a naked McKeller as himself, a portrait that he kept in his own possession & passed on to close friends. It did not surface into the "official" story of Sargent until the 1980s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the same museum whose sub rosa renditions of McKeller still greet visitors on the grand main staircase.

The 1980s were the years I spent in Boston; this story resonated with me on several levels, as I was familiar with the splendid Sargents in the MFA's collection as well as the work of another major character in the opera, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose eponymous museum, located just a few blocks from the MFA (& not that far from my last apartments) is one of my favorite places on earth. (Many a reverie of mine has been if not resolved then ended as I thump down to earth on the thought, Goddammit, why don't I have a Veronese Room?) Sargent gave Gardner an album of sketches of McKeller (signed, unlike many of his sketches: what might that signify?), which she did not display publicly but kept in her Museum. The rediscovery of these sketches led to the exhibit Boston's Apollo, which I missed seeing because of the pandemic; the catalogue is an in-depth look at Sargent & McKeller & worth reading for anyone intrigued by the subject. That exhibit brought new prominence to the relationship between artist & model.

I found the opera a subtle & layered work, & I'm glad I saw it twice. Nobody knows for sure what the relationship was between the painter & his favored model; even bohemian & wealthy artistic circles could be discreet, & passing time always erases life in its wake (a number of scholars have done heroic work piecing together what can still be known about McKeller's life). Time may erase life, but art can linger; there is, above all, the now celebrated nude portrait of the model not as a god or hero but as a man (who radiates godliness & heroism in his joyful nakedness). Probably drawing inspiration from that painting, & its history of being kept privately by the artist, this work tells a definite & probable story of a romantic relationship between the two men. It's not the only possible story from what hints remain to us, but it's convincing & compelling.

The music is lovely & sometimes approaches the perfumed & languishing air of salon music; I assume this is a re-creation of the sophisticated artistic atmosphere of Sargent's & Gardner's wealthy, cultured, Euro-American milieu (I don't know any of the composer's other music, so I don't know if this is his sound or the particular sound he chose for the particular period he is dramatizing). The scenes involving interactions among the Black characters are subtly different, with echoes of a jazz bass & horns (it's lightly done, though, without a gross distinction between the worlds, which interact & flow together). There's quite a lot of harp in the score. The harp is an interesting instrument. It has a fairly ethereal reputation – society girls plucking it as they hunt for husbands, chubby cherubim plinking away around the celestial throne, that sort of thing – but its sound has a surprising amount of tensile strength, & it can sound both glittery & strong, like sequins made out of steel. The final sound of the opera is one last spritz from the harp, vanishing into the silence.

Geter also insets Reynaldo Hahn's song À Chloris. It's a bold move, incorporating another composer's work, but it not only strengthens the period feel, it also resonates thematically here, in an opera about taking from different sources, different cultures, different ways, & shaping what you've taken into something of your own (even as you're adding to, being subsumed in, another tradition). It's worth looking at the lyrics & music of the song: setting a fairly banal celebration of triumphant & reciprocated love by the Renaissance poet Théophile de Viau (you can find the words here), Hahn transforms the text into something new & deeper with his music (a sound which is simpatico with the aura summoned by Geter's for this opera), providing an exquisitely melancholy Bach-like tune, adding a deeper dimension to the words, as if even in the moment of wild first joy the speaker knows that his love, this nacreous bubble, will soon vanish, its momentary beauty gone except for memory & concomitant regrets. Sargent sits down at the piano during a modeling session & starts playing & singing the song. He explicitly compares what Hahn is doing to what he (& McKeller) are creating: a new twist on old, very old, themes. McKeller doesn't know the song, but he knows enough French & enough music to pick up the score & sing the rest of it. Sargent tells him he's full of surprises. The wistful song, with its sense of a blissful love lost, will ripple through the orchestra as the work proceeds.

The opera itself works with surprises & indirection. The story plays out on stage, but the more you know about the situation the more implications you see. McKeller has moved up north from Wilmington, North Carolina, a city which, when McKeller lived there, was the site of a White Supremacist coup against the elected local government. You don't have to know this to know about the racial prejudices & pressures that would cause a young Black man to move away, but it is one of those things that opens out the world of the opera, which begins with a group of Black men lamenting (angrily, despairingly, stubbornly, resignedly, factually: a lot is being conveyed) their racial status in the United States.

The racial difference is a running theme, & how could it not be, but so are differences in age & class & background & worldly experience between the two men. There is a real connection there, as we see when McKeller collaborates with Sargent during their sessions, which become like a director & an actor puzzling out a drama together, but how much of a chance would these two really have together, in their world or ours? A former valet / model (&, presumably, lover) of Sargent's shows up & threatens him & McKeller. He makes dismissive references to Sargent's taste for "exotics" (meaning men of color), as if the jaded aging man needed increasingly spicy dishes for his palate to taste anything, & as if this young American Black man were some sort of fancy foreign import instead of a refugee from North Carolina.

Given all the complicating factors, Sargent & McKeller do not have a steady affair. Reality intervenes, as reality does. Sometimes the intervention is tragic, as when the First World War convulses the globe; German bombs kill relatives of Sargent's; McKeller enlists in the American army. Sometimes the intervention is positive, as when Isabella Stewart Gardner brings the men back together, as she sees how powerfully McKeller has inspired her friend's art. (Even her commitment to art, though, has sadness underpinning it; she sings of how she dedicated herself to beauty after her little son, barely two years old, died.) With her keen eye & abundant spirit, she does with artist & model what she did with artworks in her museum: she arranges, she juxtaposes sometimes unlikely elements, creating out of existing objects something new, a vivid spark of the memorably gorgeous.

And don't artists always have the last, or at least the lasting, word? As the painter & his model go from "Mr Sargent" & "Mr McKeller" to "John" & "Tom", the model wants to be seen as himself: that is, not as a model. A model has an artistic function that often involves metamorphosis & erasure. McKeller knows what the deal is, of course; it's a wish to be in a different world, a different relation to Mr Sargent / John. In the very moving final scene, McKeller hears of the painter's death (by then he's left the hotel for a job as a postal carrier, & his close friend Ida Mae shows him the newspaper when he stops by on his route). He goes by his studio to pay his respects. That part is historical fact. What is perhaps speculative, but certainly compelling, even overwhelming, is that it's only then that McKeller discovers the portrait of him that Sargent did. He is overcome by this proof that the artist's transforming eye had in fact seen him for who & as he was.

This was a rich work. Like the Gardner museum, or Sargent's paintings, it would repay repeated visits. On the surface, it's a conventional story of an artist & his model. (Is the relationship exploitation or celebration? or both & something else besides?) But, as in the scene in which McKeller starts singing Hahn's art song, it's full of surprises. Sargent is now a celebrated figure, but his reputation has dipped & swooped over the years (too many portraits of rich society ladies, perhaps). But it's worth remembering that painting murals featuring Greek gods & heroes was a strangely, stubbornly outmoded artistic choice in the years between 1916 & 1925, when Sargent dedicated himself to what he saw as the capstone of his career. Matisse had painted Femme au Chapeau in 1905. Picasso had painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (a work openly, assertively, famously influenced by African art) in 1907. The western tradition was twisting & splintering under Sargent's feet (& in fact, the Gardner museum was the first American museum to own & display a work by Matisse). The ground is always shifting under us. Nothing here is as it seems.

You can't present a rich & subtle work without rich & subtle artistry. If artists have the last word, as Sargent did viewing McKeller, here are some of the artists who had the last, or at least latest, word with their viewing of Sargent viewing McKeller: Kedrick Armstrong led a gorgeous performance of the gorgeous score, & Nataki Garrett molded it all on stage. Baritone Markel Reed performed Thomas McKeller; he doesn't particularly look like McKeller, outside of both being Black men, but he has a commanding stage presence & a rich, resonant, honeyed voice; this must be a really taxing role, given the length of the opera & the demands it places on him, but he had the strength & power to make his ending liebestod, in which he sees Sargent's portrait of him & realizes its implications, deeply moving. Tenor John Bellemer performs John Singer Sargent, with great beauty of tone & delicacy of touch. He makes the famous man both surprisingly tentative around his models & authoritative in his artistic vision. Isabella Stewart Gardner is not an easy role – there's always the danger of slipping into a caricatured Eccentric Rich Lady mode, sort of a haute monde Auntie Mame (I hate Auntie Mame, by the way), but soprano Marnie Breckenridge brought warmth, wit, & understanding to the performance. Alexandra Armantrading creates a warm, compassionate Ida Mae McDonald, indelible in her few appearances, as does Leberta Lorál as Thomas's mother (as well as another minor role). Matt Hidalgo brings cynical anger & some floating high notes to Nicola D’Inverno (the former valet / model / lover); he also portrays Mr Sparhawk.  Philip Harris, Wilford Kelly, Michael Belle, & Alex Taite are all memorable in small roles. Outstanding work all around.

West Edge Opera: Rinaldo

I cannot gush enough about West Edge Opera's witty & astute production of Handel's Rinaldo. I have been going to Handel operas for over 40 years (I saw baroque operas before I saw any of the mainstream repertory) & this is one of the all-around best productions I have seen; everything – concept, costumes, sets & lighting, acting, singing, playing, dancing – worked at a remarkable level.

I was reminded of one of the first operas I saw, the Peter Sellars production of Handel's Orlando at ART in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982. His idea was to set the work in Cape Canaveral, saying that the contemporary marvels of moon flight were an apt equivalent to the fanciful machinery of baroque opera. The result, propelled as was this production by a cast of superb singers, was so clear & persuasive that a year or so later a co-worker of mine swore it had been performed in English. As those were the days before surtitles, I had thought long & hard, in my opera-going infancy, about whether I wanted to sit through three hours of a drama in a language I basically did not understand. So I told her that I was "pretty sure" (meaning dead certain) it was performed in Italian. She kept telling me I was wrong. A few days later, though, she did grudgingly admit that she thought "perhaps" I "might have been" right about the language. I gave my usual response in such situations, a bland smile, but insert internal eye-roll.

I mention this because there is no real "performance tradition" of these operas; they sank out of sight, mostly, after the eighteenth century & have only been revived in our day. I've seen productions that range from powdered wigs & period-appropriate stage machinery to high-concept modernist shenanigans. One of the many advantages of baroque opera is exactly that there is no performance tradition; the works are flexible & sturdy enough to take on all kinds of approaches.

Just as Sellars set Orlando in Cape Canaveral, so this production, devised, directed, & choreographed by Keturah Stickann, transfers the action of Rinaldo to a comic-book / graphic novel world in which evil (but sexy) villains fight the Police Commissioner & the local superhero for control of the Big City. The original (the libretto by Giacomo Rossi is loosely based on an episode in Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata) is set during the Crusades, which feels a bit awkward these days. It's not that the original audience of 1711 really cared about the Crusades, but they would have a pretty clear general sense of who were the good guys & who the bad & whom they should support. Today's audience, by & large, if it feels anything about the Crusades, feels the opposite of the original audience. (I realize I am simplifying a great deal here, as we have contemporaries who care passionately about the Crusades, & are very certain of the right side, & would like to resume the fight, but those people are unlikely to be attending baroque operas in Oakland California.) Setting the action in a comic-book world clarifies which side is which. Most comic books & superhero movies are all about titanic & deeply felt clashes between Good & Evil. And they're very serious about it.

And that's the most astute thing about this choice: it doesn't diminish or mock the material. Just as Mark Morris in The Hard Nut used the graphic style of Charles Burns to shed fresh & illuminating light on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, so the comic-book setting here not only clarifies the drama but gives it a contemporary intensity it might lack in a less considered new setting. The vivid colors (lots of dark purple among the wicked, a peacock-blue body suit for our hero) & the bold graphic backgrounds (handled by shifting & skillful projections, designed by Yuki Izumihara), with fights illustrated as in the 1960s Batman TV series with Pow! & Blam! in graphic bubbles, all lie easily on the sumptuous & varied music of Handel's rich score (conducted with verve & authority by Emily Senturia).

The entire ensemble is superb, starting with the dancers, playing various policemen, furies, & suchlike attendants & background personnel; they had a verve & precision that brought all their roles to vivid life, & their Keystone Kop antics were, rather surprisingly (& unlike many of the antics of the original Sennett Kops) very funny. The dancers were Ellis Broderick, Eden Magana, Elena Martins, Devon Martirez y McFarland, Christopher Nachtrab, Max van der Sterre, & Livanna Maislen. Their sense of being vividly, actively present in each moment was shared by the singers: to the splendid singing was added deft characterization, with subtle touches throughout.

As our massively strong & righteous titular superhero, countertenor Kyle Tingzon, clear & pure & true of voice & person, justified the baroque preference for high-voiced heroes. As with many heroes noted for physical strength – Hercules, Samson, Ajax – there's a comic angle to the treatment of him, & a bit of obtuseness in his make-up (both are amusingly illustrated in his battle with the little birds during his picnic with Almirena). He is constantly flexing, grinning, standing with hands fisted on hips Superman-style, striking poses. What you see is what you get, mostly, though he does have his suffering arias, which Tingzon delivers as movingly as you could wish, piercing through the heroic exterior to display a genuine heart within. The posing is actually pretty remarkable; I've seen dramas in which someone playing a boxer has clearly studied his pugilistic choreography but in between those moments lets himself go slack. Tingzon was alert & on point throughout, while also delivering fountains of glittering vocals, a remarkable feat of physical & mental concentration.

Contralto Sara Couden plays Goffredo, here recast as a Commissioner Gordon type, head of the metropolitan police, with an impressively bushy walrus moustache & even more impressive low notes. There's an amusing running gag in which Rinaldo, unaware of his strength, obliviously crushes the Commissioner's hands during a handshake, or unsettles him with the heartiness of a backslap. The Commissioner tries gamely to keep up. He's also a bit appalled by some of Rinaldo's more crotch-centric poses, but that's what you get with superheroes. Shawnette Sulker plays Almirena, the Commissioner's adorable daughter & Rinaldo's love, with pert & appealling comedy, though she also can pluck heart strings with her rendition of what is possibly this opera's most famous aria, Lascia ch'io pianga. (Funny how often in comedies it's the moment of sadness that stands out; to take an obvious operatic example Una furtiva lagrima from the otherwise lightly comic L'Elisir d'amore.) To complete the roster of good guys, we have Gabi Esquinazi in a couple of striking smaller roles, as a Siren & a Magician who helps Goffredo & Rinaldo defeat the forces of evil, transporting them to their magic lair (their supervillain hideaway) on a magical craft: a tandem bicycle. As the Magician, Esquinazi was in a glowing pink ensemble & seemed to be making a play for the Commissioner in various subtle ways, hints the Commissioner decided not to take.

To these forces of righteousness we have opposed the villains: Nikki Einfeld as the enchantress Armida & Efraín Solís as Argante, here the head of a syndicate aimed at eradicating superheroes & otherwise generally being bad guys. Armida, her dark hair swirling high above her head & dark purple flounces cascading down her hips, with a shiny black leather corset & shiny thigh-high black leather boots, surrounded by demons in matching shades of purple literally dancing attendance, is a cross between a dominatrix & a drag queen. Argante wears the classic gangster's dark pin-striped suit, with the surreal touch of rose-pink petals covering the shoulders & the trouser legs. (These petals are a running motif in the costumes; Rinaldo has them as well, though in a shade of blue that matches his outfit, & here I will mention that Bethany Deal did the striking & witty costumes.) Argante has an arrogant & precise formality, at least when dealing with his secretary, or the Commissioner, but he also has a puppy-dog horniness. While embracing Armida he waggles his butt against her, when thinking about her while alone he slides his hands down to his midsection, he is immediately smitten by the charming Almirena. Both Einfeld & Solís command the stage effortlessly; their scenes have a real spark.

I could rave on & one, with details that instead will be stored in memory, to be replayed over & over. this performance (which, as with all the West Edge productions, I saw twice) was pure joy from beginning to end: even the somber moments are done with such talent, such conviction, such brio that they contribute to the overall sense of joy. I have seldom left a theater with quite this level of exhilaration. If only they could bottle this essence & sell it. Would I restrict myself to a few sips a day. or just heedlessly down the heady elixir?

West Edge Opera: The Turn of the Screw

The West Edge Opera Festival is in full swing; as I did last year, I will be seeing each show twice, as I volunteer at the Saturday matinees & am a ticket holder for the Sunday matinees. I have now seen my two performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, based on the famous ghost story by Henry James as adapted by librettist Myfanwy Piper. Company music director Jonathan Khuner led a strong performance, with committed, exciting singing from the cast: Laura Bohn as the Governess, Alex Boyer as Peter Quint, Erin Neff as Mrs Grose, Aléxa Sessler as Miss Jessel; James Coniglio & Noah Hajduk alternate as Miles, & Siena Coniglio & Roya Agarwal as Flora (I saw both sets of children). Company head Mark Streshinsky directed a provocative but sometimes puzzling staging.

Plentiful use is made of projections & scrims. I know some people who are immediately put off by scrims on stage, but I am fine with them, especially for a work like this, in which they act as a physical representation of the haziness, the out-spreading ambiguities, of the story & the layers of memory & interpretation or misinterpretation through which that story unfolds. They also provide a useful screen for the plentiful projections, through which this production tells much of its tale; the ghosts, for example, are always projections, never appearing physically on stage until they take their bows. Those singers are sequestered in a discreet curtained booth way up in the auditorium & off to the side; I probably would not have noticed it but someone pointed it out to me & told me what it was. (There is enough weirdness in the Scottish Rite Temple so that this particular oddity didn't stand out.) The physical dislocation between the projected figures on stage & the sound of their voices helps create an otherworldly air about them (this is true also of the amplification of the children's singing, which lends, as amplification usually does, an odd, slightly flattened effect to their voices).

Some of what is shown on film, though, falls under the "puzzling" category I mentioned earlier. When the Governess meets the handsome, romantic guardian of the two children, with his somewhat odd injunction that whatever happens, she, a young & inexperienced woman, must deal with it on her own, without contacting him, the two of them are shown on the scrims in passionate physical embraces. The Governess looks disheveled & a bit distraught. This seems to be something that we are meant to understand is actually happening & not just a (literal as well as metaphorical) projection of the Governess's fantasies about this mysterious figure (he is literally masked, wearing a carnival black mask, which presumably also is meant to differentiate him from Peter Quint, as the same singer performs both roles). When I see moments like this, which I do fairly often in contemporary stagings of works from different, less accommodating times, I wonder if anyone these days knows what "sexual repression" really means. It doesn't mean being a bit discombobulated by a brief & unsatisfying affair; it means that even the notion of such a thing, when it inevitably starts creeping into the susceptible mind, is hurried out of sight, pushed down out of conscious thought, into the murky depths of longing that act as the hidden springs of our outward actions. This story is one that springs in that way from repression. I don't understand what is gained by making the Governess's barely acknowledged desires, or even just her romantic feelings towards the guardian, into actual physical embraces. It seems too crudely obvious.

We are also shown several times footage of Miles at school. He is cowering near a sink, obviously in a bathroom, being pelted by unseen but presumably fellow-student hands with wadded balls of paper. Miles has, of course, been expelled from school, for reasons that are never officially explained. In classic horror-story style, this allows our imaginations to float free, though they mostly head in the direction of some sort of sexual corruption. The footage here, as with that of the Governess & the guardian, is too explicit & also too trivial: this is the sort of thing that gets the perpetrators a stern talking-to, not expulsion. Spelling things out kills the mystery & the haunted atmosphere. Also, it looks as if Miles is the victim, so why would he be expelled? I am assuming the boy we are shown is meant to be Miles; we are not shown his face, which he clutches in his hands, because of course we have two separate Miles (Mileses?) performing. It's not impossible that the unseen Miles is meant to be leading the victimization of another boy, but, again, what happens doesn't seem to warrant expulsion. The scene, whether Miles is victim (as I think he's meant to be) or perp, goes against everything we are told about him: that he is a boy who is very popular with other children & adored by adults. And if he were being bullied & ostracized in school, why would he be so eager to go back?

There are also many projections of the still-living Quint & Jessel in their time with the children. These are literally sunny & quite wholesome: Quint playing catch with Miles (using an American baseball glove, rather surprisingly), sitting with the children in church, teaching them to play the piano, gently touching the swollen middle of an apparently pregnant Miss Jessel. In many of these scenes, Quint is wearing a light tan sweater vest. No man can look insidious, corrupt & corrupting, in a sweater vest. This is simply a fact. I may not know much about fashion, but I know that.

During my second viewing of the production, it occurred to me that perhaps this was a deliberate move, a signal to us: Quint & Jessel are actually not, & were not while living, corrupting influences; they were, instead, positive role models of a healthy sexuality. I think what we have here are essentially two separate sets of ghosts: the wholesome ones &, later on, dressed in serving-man attire & more luridly lit, the evil influences of the Governess's fevered imagination.

This is an interpretation that seems almost comically perverse, but then this is an opera that exists in perversity, that is, in speculation, nuance, & eerie alternatives that go beyond our surface & conventional assumptions. Sometimes what seems perverse is merely unexpected.

I had to parse all this out after seeing the show twice & reading the director's note in the program & thinking between my two performances about the implications of what we are shown. Some elements I haven't mentioned yet went into this, so I'll spell them out now. The Governess (who throughout wears a sort of odd ensemble of plaid skirt & white blouse, like an overaged Catholic schoolgirl back when such girls wore school uniforms) is disturbed by her encounter with the guardian. When she arrives at the lush estate of Bly, the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, who is apparently intended as a sort of Mrs Danvers figure, kisses her ("with your permission") full on the lips. This triggers the already emotionally vulnerable Governess, who picks up on Mrs Grose intense disgust at the former & now dead valet, Quint, & his relations with the former governess Miss Jessel. The Governess then projects her sense of sexual danger & corruption onto these two, hallucinating their appearance as ghosts who are still capable of corrupting Miles & Flora; in the later scenes, when this more threatening Quint appears, we see the Governess off to the side, mirroring his actions in a herky-jerky way (but which is the marionette & which the puppet master?). The Governess determines to protect the children, with increasing hysteria (yes, I know the origin of the word) & dire results.

At least, I think that's what we're supposed to see here. Questions are raised & there are no definite answers, which I suppose is only suitable for a work rooted in a story by Henry James.

I re-read the tale before going to the opera. It is, as any English major can tell you, a celebrated example of the potential ambiguities of a first-person narration: are the ghosts real, or are they a projection of a lonely, repressed young woman? (No other adult actually sees them, & we only have the Governess's word for it that the children do.) It occurred to me this time that there is a third way: the ghosts are indeed a corrupting influence, but what the Governess sees as the corruption of the Innocent is what Blake would have termed Innocence turning into Experience (in this light, Quint's longing appeal to Miles, comparing himself to a wild horse on the shore, is particularly telling). In other words, given what is usually read as the sexual nature of the ghosts' influence, the Governess is trying to keep them artificially innocent, out of adulthood, confined forever in the stylized innocence of the children's folk rhymes that form an important part of the score. The Governess actually succeeds in her aim, but with tragic results. This move from innocence into an adult consciousness expanded by the knowledge of how vicious people can be is certainly one of James's great themes; The Ambassadors & The Golden Bowl & The Wings of the Dove, that massive trio from late in his career, explore this theme with ever-expanding subtlety. How can the good not only remain good but become better exactly through confronting the evils of others?

The idea of Mrs Grose as a repressed lesbian is definitely not in James, but that's OK. It struck me as an intriguing possibility. In the novel, Mrs Grose, as her name indicates, is a sort of salt-of-the-earth, good-hearted but not particularly imaginative woman ("gross" in the sense of solid & not refined, not in the sense of "ooh, icky!"). She functions as the "normal" person who is mostly willing to go along with an educated young woman like the Governess. Interpreting her as a further turn of the Governess's screw ratchets up the general sense of perversity, which certainly works for this opera, but it also removes any sense of a "normal" world, outside of what we see of the living Quint & Jessel.

When I saw this production the first time, I felt the kiss came out of the blue & went nowhere. I did notice in my second viewing that there is a scene when Mrs Grose tentatively & briefly strokes the Governess's hair, but that still isn't a lot. The key mechanism here – the transference of Mrs Grose's obsessions to the Governess – did not occur to me until I read the director's note ("When the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, who has her own problems of obsession, expresses to the highly suggestible Governess her deep-seated anger toward the memory of the late valet, Peter Quint, we are launched into a perfect storm of psychosis."). I'm pretty sure I would not have picked this up from staging alone. I'm not wild about the Hitchcockian notion of the insidious lesbian, but I can see the possibilities here. (But if it's Mrs Grose's lesbian attraction that rouses the Governess, why is the latter so fixated on Miles & not on Flora?)

Perhaps we are meant to understand the source of the problem not as Mrs Grose's sexuality, but her repression. But "repression" doesn't really come across here. It's inherent in the original material, just because of when it's set. And it is very unclear when this production is meant to take place. I asked a number of people what they thought, & pick a decade from 1890 to the present day & someone suggested it, but no two people listed the same one. I think this matters because ideas of sexual corruption & therefore what should be repressed & therefore whether repression is "good" or "bad" have varied wildly over those years. Miss Jessel's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, as shown here, would be a life-destroying tragedy in one decade & a lovely occasion for a congratulatory party in another. There is no single standard. One thing that has not changed is horror at pedophilia, but honestly I never felt in this production that the ghosts posed any kind of sexual threat to the children; as I said, they seemed to be the only healthy role models they had. (I should mention that some people at the same performance disagreed with me about this.)

There are occasional hints of sexual confusion, or perhaps just gender play: when the children are introduced to the Governess, Flora bows & Miles gives a dainty curtsy, but this seems more like mischievous fun than any sort of "corruption". The libretto uses words that would have carried a subtextual weight when the opera premiered in 1954, a subtext which now comes across more as text: gay, which is used to describe the guardian (making his making-out with the Governess either more or less effective, depending on your point of view) & queer. What do those words mean in the context of whenever this production is set?

The lack of an identifiable time period also reduces the way class differences play out among the characters; again, in some decades the class distinctions are vital & in others not so much. One reason Mrs Grose defers to the Governess is the latter's higher class, & one reason she disapproves of Quint is that he aimed above his station: she asserts that Miss Jessel was a lady & therefore too good for him, but this sort of proto-D H Lawrence theme doesn't really come through here.

The Turn of the Screw is inherently a work (whether original tale or operatic adaptation) of radiating ambiguities. There were several points when I felt this production offered not ambiguity but confusion. I have seen the opera before, heard recordings, read the original story & other works by Henry James (not just in college but recently), read the program notes, & saw the West Edge production twice, & it was still sometimes unclear to me what we were supposed to be seeing. And I wonder how many others will see the opera twice, or have the other background I have just listed. I will speculate that this is a case in which the artists involved were so immersed in the material that what was crystalline to them is murky to those less immersed. But I'm not sure the oddities & confusions are altogether a bad thing. I have pondered this production far more thoroughly than I have more superficially pleasing shows; it led me down previously unexplored paths I would have otherwise missed.

When I started telling myself something in the staging was "wrong" I started wondering why I found it so, exploring different implications & suggestions, & I (mostly) ended up thinking that what I saw was not "wrong" so much as an alternative that I needed to consider. If some things don't quite fit in, & some things seem too obvious & others too vague, if  some confusion & uncertainty remain, that's not really unsuitable to a story like this. This is after all a ghost story, & wondering where the solid ground is & what just happened seem like the essence of a haunting.

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.

Philharmonia Baroque: Handel's Tolomeo

One of the more exciting & unexpected developments in my now four decades plus of opera-going is the resurgence, not just in specialty festivals but in mainstream houses, of that expansive & rich body of work, once considered as extinct as the brontosaurus: baroque opera. Not surprisingly revival has come at an uneven rate, & while some works are well known, there are others, even by a giant like Handel, that are relatively obscure; such a one is Tolomeo, which Philharmonia Baroque revived this week. I saw the first performance, in Herbst Theater. Musically the piece was rich enough to satisfy any opera lover, especially with such a truly outstanding cast, but dramatically the semi-staged production by James Darrah Black was less satisfying.

PBO's new Music Director, Peter Whelan, led a lively & musically convincing performance, with a stellar cast of singers: countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role, soprano Lauren Snouffer as his beloved wife Seleuce, countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as his younger brother Alessandro, bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Araspe, king of Cyprus, & soprano Nicole Heaston as Elisa, his sister. The first three, members of the Egyptian royal family, are in exile or hiding or shipwrecked on Cyprus, & therefore to some extent under the power of Araspe & his sister. Complications romantic, dynastic, & familial inevitably ensue. There's no point in spelling them out; baroque operas have notoriously convoluted plots, but the action is generally clear enough in performance, & I will continue to insist that the shifting & often disguised layers of love, longing, & loss portrayed are psychologically & dramatically truer to life than the grand passions of verismo. As is usual in baroque opera, the characters were called on to display a wide variety of emotions (though Araspe was mostly restricted to the anger produced by rebuffed royal love, which Burton delivered with magisterial fury) & the cast was on-point, each time & in all moods; vocally, it was a glorious evening of glowing splendors.

Dramatically things were less certain. Here's one of the points at which vocalization & characterization intersect: Elisa's love for the disguised Tolomeo was portrayed in a comically overdone, almost camp, way. This is a legitimate choice, & Heaston played it extremely well, but it's not the choice I would have preferred. Once you've established Elisa as a comic character, with basically silly emotions rooted in the whims of an entitled princess, then halfway through the opera when her love turns to vengeful anger, it's difficult at that point to start taking those emotions seriously – and if her threats don't carry a sense of real danger with them, then the dramatic tension is really defused.

Also, there's a tendency to see baroque opera as lots of lovely tunes wrapped around a hollow core, emptied of significance, which I think diminishes what these works can actually accomplish for present-day listeners who are open to them. The conventions are already to start with alien enough for many modern audiences; turning them into campy comedy scenes is, I think, something that should be done very sparingly.

I said above that the basic action of baroque opera, however convoluted in the plot synopsis, is clear in performance, but I need to modify that a bit, as on Thursday night the basic story-telling was often unclear, though I'm familiar enough with what is likely to be going on to make educated guesses. At one point, if the characters themselves weren't narrating what they were seeing & doing ("Why is my beloved, who ungratefully doesn't love me, going over to that shepherd? Why is she speaking to him, a mere lowly shepherd? I will slay him!"), we would have been completely lost. During one aria Tolomeo was in front of Seleuce, who was singing about him, but apparently he was meant to be only in her thoughts (the usually lively & sensitive Cohen was stiff & withdrawn at those moments, which is why I think we were meant to "read" him as present only in her mind).

The ending was very confusing: Elisa has given Tolomeo a poison. I guessed that it would be some sort of narcotic sleeping potion, as it's unlike baroque opera to kill off the hero like that: the eighteenth century liked its happy endings; or, to put it in a more appropriately philosophical way, they liked to have order restored to & on the restless world before sending the audience out into the seething night. I was right about the sleeping potion. But Elisa has also announced that she's seen Seleuce slaughtered in front of her – but then the very much alive Seleuce is led in. Elisa doesn't even look surprised. What's going on? Afterwards I read the plot synopsis & it turns out that Alessandro, who has decided to do the right thing & restore his elder brother to the throne of Egypt, has rescued her. I think the libretto itself was a bit slapdash there, but the staging didn't help things.

The costumes didn't help either. Everyone was in vaguely contemporary outfits, mostly in those sort of wheat-ash-pale pale olive green-beige-taupe shades. At first I thought they all looked like models in a Banana Republic catalogue. Then I noticed there were some differences: the brothers Tolomeo & Alessandro both wore stylish hiking boots (which I envied), while Araspe had very polished black dress shoes. His shirt was black, though his linen suit was pale ash-grey or off-white or some other evanescent shade, & his sister also wore black, though her outfit was also topped with a pale jacket. Seleuce wore a lovely pale (yellowish?) sundress & then partway through switched to a different lovely pale (greenish?) sundress; I don't know why she changed. Were Alessandro's earrings & painted nails part of the characterization, or just the personal style of the singer? (Or both?) And I don't know how some of these distinctions (like the footwear) would be seen if you weren't sitting in the front row, as I was, so I don't know quite what was going on there. I don't really need characters dressed like "shepherds" or "kings" but it's helpful to paint some of these differences in broader strokes & brighter colors, & it might be helpful if characters in disguise have some sort of rudimentary, even symbolic, disguise; otherwise you may well wonder why someone is looking directly at the beloved spouse he or she has been pining for in aria after aria yet does not recognize said beloved. There's suspending belief, & then there's asking for the impossible.

On either side of the stage there were what looked like parts of a wrecked plane, built out of wood, half-buried in sand. These weren't really used, & were meant to indicate that Tolomeo had crash-landed on Cyprus, or at least I think that's what they meant. Stretched along the front of the stage were fluorescent tubes on wooden blocks, which were moved into different shapes on occasion (& the bulbs changed colors sometimes). In the middle of the stage, behind the row of lights, there were some wooden boxes covered with some sort of foam insulation & tied down with ropes. These were eventually removed, & used to tie up a character, & inside the wooden boxes there were large mirrored cubes, which came out in the last half & were stared at by various characters for long periods.

This was an interesting idea, & multivalent enough to be intriguing: was the staring literally a reflection of their narcissism? In the director's note, which I read afterwards, there is a suggestion that even the reflection of a face can't convey everything that face signifies or that that person has gone through. There was a comic edge sometimes: the first person to stare into the mirrored cube was Elisa, & the action seemed in line with her self-indulgent vanity (I couldn't help thinking of Semele in her Handel opera, staring into a mirror & singing Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing). Afterwards an audience member who seemed delighted with the mirrored cubes referred to them as the characters' cellphones (because everyone kept staring into them obliviously), & you could follow that line of thought too, satirically &/or seriously. (But I should probably also note that the reflections off the mirrored cubes repeatedly hurt my eyes.)

There were some striking stage pictures, so much so that the man next to me took several surreptitious photos (he was actually not nearly as annoying as the couple behind me who frequently whispered & then emitted a round of high-pitched giggles). The staging was at its best when it worked on a symbolic, poetic, signifying level, which is where the striking stage pictures would come in; where it fell down was with the basic what is going on here stuff. I do know people who just don't even bother trying to follow the plot twists & emotional complexities, but just bask in the music, &, you know, sure, there are many mansions &c, but for these wonderful works to maintain their newfound theatrical vitality, at some level they need to make sense & be taken seriously. It sounds prosaic, even banal, even, oh horror, literalist & low-brow, to insist that the action should be clear, but it's especially important in a work as little-known as this one. If you mess around with Tosca, some people will have a fit (I am definitely not one of them), but a large part of the audience will know what you're playing around with. That's not the case with Tolomeo.

Having said all that, I have to go back to swimming in the musical glories of the evening. Even if I didn't love Handel & baroque opera as much as I do, just the chance to hear the vivid orchestral playing & the endlessly glorious unfurling singing would have been enough. I wonder if anyone made a surreptitious recording to go with my neighbor's photos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.