June 27, 2009: A fortuitous collaboration

Summer Music West is the summer "semester" for the Preparatory Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  It provides an opportunity for "conservatory students of the future," whose ages range between 8 and 18, to prepare performances before audiences.  Most of the performances are of chamber music, although one evening is devoted to original compositions.  Where vocal students tend to focus on opera and art song, Summer Music West has arranged a collaboration with Lamplighters Music Theatre, San Francisco's own Gilbert and Sullivan company;  and the result is a program of scenes from the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, rather than that of grand opera.  Those unfamiliar with Lamplighters should note that Joshua Kosman cited them when he reviewed the San Francisco Symphony semi-staged production of Iolanthe.  He emphasized "just how difficult Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operettas are to pull off," adding parenthetically "the Lamplighters do the trick regularly, with less musical prowess [than the San Francisco Symphony] but greater verve."

Verve was in abundant supply at this afternoon's Gilbert and Sullivan Scenes performance in the Conservatory Concert Hall.  42 students aged between 10 and 18 worked with the Lamplighters production team for two weeks to prepare scenes from seven of the operettas, including two scenes from the almost-never-performed Utopia Limited.  All of them rose to the task with a stage presence that was always compelling enough to override voices not yet fully trained for Sullivan's demands.  In some cases, however, the quality of voice was up there with the acting skills, most significantly the part of Mabel in Pirates of Penzance as sung by Rose Frazier, whose resume already includes performing with the San Francisco Opera in Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter and Pocket Opera in Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hélène.

The event also emphasized my personal regret at how hard it is these days to enjoy a regular diet of Gilbert and Sullivan.  Whatever misgivings (often leading to quarrels) Sullivan may have had about these collaborations not being "elevated" enough (was "Onward, Christian Soldiers" more elevated?), his sense of counterpoint is unfailingly uncanny;  and I have to believe that there are any number of satirical references to music history that almost always fly by without notice.  For his part Gilbert came up with some of the best instances of light verse, obliging the listener to hang on every word.  The tragedy is that Gilbert also demands a breadth of literary context that is probably lacking in more and more listeners.  Nevertheless, there always seem to be opportunities for contemporary references to sneak through the somewhat archaic settings.  Anyone who knows the real message behind Patience would have been sure to find it relevant to the recent attention given to the recent death of a pop singer who could also command cult-like audience attention.

By way of a personal disclaimer, I have to confess that any excerpt from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta is my personal version of Marcel Proust's tasting that madeleine dipped in tea.  I cannot remember how young I was when I first started hearing those songs, but I know that much of my learning to read came from following (and singing along with) the words in the Modern Library edition of the scripts for all of those operettas.  Unless I am mistaken, the first time I saw singing and acting taking place together on a stage was in a production of The Mikado.  I cannot listen to any of that repertoire without unlocking a flood of memories.  Meanwhile, I see that Lamplighters will be producing Patience in January;  so I probably owe it to myself to see more of their work.