December 12, 2009: Family-style opera

Every year at this time the Opera Theatre Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents a "Family Opera" production.  Last year Heather Carolo staged a production of a "condensed version" of Die Zauberflöte in an English translation by Marcie Stapp, intended, as Director of the Opera Program Rick Harrell put it, for "children of all ages."  This year (now Heather Mathews) she directed a similarly condensed Hansel and Gretel in the Constance Bache translation (with revisions by Hamilton Benz) that honors all of the rhymed couplets of the original German text by Adelheid Wette.  Engelbert Humperdinck's score was performed (presumably from the Schirmer vocal score) by Music Director Darryl Cooper.  The English text being sung was projected on a screen to the right of the stage.

While the story is one of the traditional fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, its subject matter is far darker than the quest story of Zauberflöte.  In the first act we have extreme hunger and at least suggestions of parental abuse;  and in the third act we have a child-devouring witch who ultimately suffers the same fate as the children she has captured, being baked in her own oven.  The best way to make this more kid-friendly is to play down the sinister qualities of the witch;  and Mathews achieved this by turning her into a clown-like character, played full out by a tenor in outrageous costume.  (In the current Metropolitan Opera Production, shared with the San Francisco Opera, the witch is portrayed as Julia Child, which is not the sort of joke that kids are likely to get.)

However, the greatest asset to a kid-friendly production is a plot line that keeps things moving at a brisk pace.  By sacrificing many of the Mozart arias we love so much, Carolo achieved that pace in her Zauberflöte.  Mathews banked on the wealth of folk tunes adopted by Humperdinck, but one could sense kids losing patience with some of the songs going on too long.  Fortunately, she found a better sense of pace in the final act and kept the entire production to about an hour's duration.  If the kids were a bit restless at the beginning, Mathews had them hooked at the climax and final celebration.

This annual project is an excellent idea.  It provides the Conservatory students with an alternative take on opera production;  but it also fosters a spirit that the Conservatory has a way to give back to the general community, rather than appealing only to specialist interests.  The day's rather nasty persistent rain did not seem to interfere with the house being full;  so there is every reason to hope that the community appreciates the Conservatory's efforts.  We should hope that this tradition will continue in the coming years.

November 17, 2009: Joyce DiDonato returns to San Francisco

Since I am always interested in how to think of an evening's program as a journey in its entirety, I was delighted to see that Joyce DiDonato explicitly declared the structural strategy of her San Francisco Performances recital last night in Herbst Theatre with accompanist John Churchwell.  At the highest level the intermission divided the evening into an Italian side and a Spanish side (which provided DiDonato the opportunity to sport two different "geographically appropriate" gowns).  The Italian portion began with a selection of Arie Antiche, all of which predated the nineteenth century, which was then ushered with a scene from Gioacchino Rossini's Otello, composed in 1816 when he was twenty years old.  The section then concluded with I Canti della Sera, a cycle of four songs composed by Francesco Santoliquido in 1908.  The "Spanish" section should probably have been called the Catalan section, since its three composers were based in Barcelona (although the texts themselves were in Spanish), and was entirely twentieth-century.  It began with the first volume of Canciones Clásicas Españolas, a collection of seven songs by Fernando Obradors from the early twenties.  This was followed by the three "Maja Dolorosa" songs from the 1910 Tonadillas collection by Enrique Granados.  The section then concluded with four songs from Cinco Canciones Negros, scenes of Caribbean life by Xavier Montsalvatge composed in the mid-forties.

What was most striking about this collection was how unfamiliar most of it was.  Among the Arie Antiche, "Se tu m'ami" (falsely attributed to Giovanni Pergolesi) was the most likely to be known through its appropriation by Igor Stravinsky.  The Rossini excerpt was included on DiDonato's latest CD, Colbran, the Muse, but probably most appealed to the curiosity of those in the audience who had seen or were planning to see Giuseppe Verdi's Otello next door in the War Memorial Opera House by way of comparison.  On the Catalan side Obradors' "Del cabello más sutil" shows up on the recital circuit;  but this was the first time I heard one of his volumes (the first of four) sung in its entirety.

DiDonato alleviated the unfamiliarity with more than the usual amount of cheerful chat, which was probably a good way to encourage the audience.  Such encouragement was very much worth while, since I would be hard pressed to identify any selection from her program that was not a gem in its own right.  To the extent that I could play favorites, my past love of early music particularly resonated with "Amarilli mia bella" by Guilio Caccini, whose Florentine "new music" of expressive chromaticism was as daring as the work of his Venetian contemporary, Claudio Monteverdi.  Similarly, having worked on several of the Obradors songs with a baritone friend, I found myself drawn to Montsalvatge by my unfamiliarity and was particularly struck by his jaundiced view of Cuba "liberated" by the Spanish-American War.  Tasked with having to manage such a rich abundance of selections, DiDonato performed with an excellent sense of pace, gently ushering our attention from one discovery to the next, always dutifully accompanied by Churchwell.

At the end of the evening she took two encores, the "Tanti affetti" finale from Rossini's La Donna del Lago, another selection from her Colbran CD, and Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow," ending an evening of intensive exploration with an easing gesture of sentiment.  Susanne Langer completed the Foreword to her Philosophy in a new Key by quoting J. M. Thorburn:

… all the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people all the mud-pies you have made;  and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other's sympathetic consideration.

In recommending this rich collection of songs, DiDonato was probably more like a beachcomber, discovering a treasure trove of fascinating shells, than a mud-pie maker;  but she certainly did well to recommend her discoveries to our "sympathetic consideration!"

October 18, 2009: The action in the orchestra pit

I am sure that my colleague, SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner, will have much to write about what happened on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House at this afternoon's first performance of Salome, Richard Strauss' one-act opera based on the play by Oscar Wilde.  However, the score of this opera plays such an important role in the history of twentieth-century music (important enough to provide the introductory material for Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise), that this performance deserves an account on strictly musical grounds.  This account is even more important because this is the second opera of the season to be conducted by the company's new Music Director, Nicola Luisotti;  and it strikes me as significant that, for this second outing, he turned to the twentieth-century German repertoire rather than that of the more traditional nineteenth-century Italy.

Clearly, I was not in a position to follow every last detail of the musical performance with score in hand;  but I have to confess that, for all of the many virtues of this particular staging, there were many times when I could not resist taking my eyes into the orchestra pit.  Familiar as I was with Strauss' particular approach to motivic detail, I found myself listening to relations among the motifs of which I had been previously unaware.  Also, as a result of remarks that Luisotti made at last Monday's Opera Insight Panel, I realized how sparing Strauss could be with his resources.  The pit was pretty much filled to maximum capacity, but Strauss very seldom pulls out all the stops.  Watching Luisotti at work, I was reminded of my experiences with the conducting talents of Pierre Boulez and my ongoing recognition of his talent for recognizing "the importance of knowing where the climaxes are and making sure that they are recognized as such."  Where opera is concerned, this is a matter of understanding the dramatic climaxes and then deciding which of those dramatic events are reflected through musical climaxes.  Listening to Luisotti at the Panel discussion, I realized that he has given Strauss' score considerable attention;  and the result is a prioritization of those climaxes that serves both the dramatic needs of the staging and the musical needs of the score itself.

I was also stuck by the spatial decisions that Luisotti made in deploying his resources in the pit.  The two harps were center rear with almost all the violins (first and second) to the left and the low strings to the right.  Further on the left behind the violins were all of the winds behind which were the six horns.  The rest of the brass was to the right with the percussion behind them.  This made for a spatial balance that seemed to enhance the individuality of the many voices involved in the "musical conversation," including the lowest of the wind parts and the eerie use of double bass harmonics in the still moment of waiting for Jokanaan's execution.

Last March we had the opportunity to listen to Luisotti conduct at Davies Symphony Hall without the benefit of an operatic context.  For his program he selected a suite of dances by Zoltán Kodály, Ernest Bloch's "Schelomo," and the fourth symphony of Johannes Brahms.  In some ways one could view the Bloch as an "opera without singers;"  and the Kodály dances had their own implicit sense of staging.  The real challenge lay with the Brahms;  and, at the time, I found Luisotti to be unduly flamboyant for this choice.  However, the challenges of Strauss are decidedly different from those of Brahms;  and, while it was clear that Luisotti was putting a lot of energy into his physical performance, it was also clear that he was controlling that energy in the best interests of what was happening both on the stage and in the score.  On several occasions I found myself comparing Strauss' Herod to the Captain in Alban Berg's Wozzeck;  and this left me curious as to how Luisotti would approach Berg's score.  I hope that my curiosity will be satisfied in the course of Luisotti's tenure with the San Francisco Opera!