Salome and Turandot are among the most demanding roles in the dramatic soprano’s repertoire. Lindstrom, who is of Swedish descent, and brings to mind the vocal powers of the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson, has demonstrated the ability to occupy performance niches beyond the power voice we associate with Nilsson.

As Turandot, Lindstrom showed California audiences that she had physical beauty and stage presence. As Salome, Lindstrom proved the mastery of stage director Sean Curran’s brilliant dance choreography and psychologically aberrant portrayal of the Tetrach Herod’s stepdaughter.

[Below: Lise Lindstrom is Salome; edited image, based on a Ken Howad photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The San Diego Opera imported Sean Curran’s absorbing 2009 production, a co-production of the San Francisco Opera, Opera de Montreal and the Opera of St Louis. [For my previous production review and comments relevant to its revival in San Diego, see Nadja Michael a Sensation in Luisotti’s Soaring San Francisco “Salome” – October 18, 2009.] There I had made the case that San Francisco achieved one of the most successful presentations of the opera that I have witnessed in over four decades by a company known for doing the works of Richard Strauss very, very well.

Much of the credit of the production’s success was the insightful staging of Sean Curran, a former lead dancer, who has forged a second career in opera direction. But to implement Curran’s very physical ideas on how to present “Salome”, one must have a cast, especially for the five principal roles – Salome, Jokanaan, Herod, Herodias and Narraboth – who can achieve what Curran has in mind.

In San Diego, Lindstrom was joined by a uniformly excellent, world-class cast, including two veterans of the San Francisco mounting of the production – the Jokanaan, Greer Grimsley, and the Herodias, Irene Mishura.

For the Narraboth – the Syrian captain who allows his secual attraction to Salome to be manipulated into a career- (and life-) ending lapse of judgment – is a major presence in the opera’s first scene. [Because Stage Director Curran employs the increasingly popular device of opening the curtains so that several of the comprimario artists and other performers who will be present at the beginning of a given opera, can be seen wandering about the stage in character several minutes before the opera begins, we see Narraboth kneeling and watching the offstage Salome long before Conductor Steuart Bedford first raises his baton.]

Narraboth is the vehicle for the San Diego Opera debut of Sri Lankan tenor Sean Panikkar. The former San Francisco Opera Adler fellow displayed a maturing lyric voice that suggests he is at the threhold of a major intenational career. [For my recent review of Panikkar in a very different role, see Loving “The Last Savage”: Over the Top Menotti Charms at Santa Fe Opera – August 5, 2011.]

[Below: Sean Panikkar as Narraboth: edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The opera’s intense psychological drama and its exploration of the depravity of the tetrarch’s court, might cause a person unfamiliar with Strauss’ to assume this 1906 work, to be melodically austere. Instead, it is one of the most melodically lush and exotic musical scores in all of opera.

It, like Wagner’s “Parsifal” evokes the battles between Christianity and paganism. (Herod, of course, is nominally Jewish and consults with the various sects, but, from Jokanaan’s perspective, Herod, Herodias and family are all pagans. Even in our more ecumenical age, the Tetrarch’s court, certainly as Oscar Wilde portrayed it, seems far removed from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.)

Just as Wagner did in “Parsifal” Strauss creates some of the most exquisite music in German opera for the work’s references to Christ – Jokanaan’s Christ motive is as memorable an orchestral fanfare as the Zoroastrian motive that begins Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (that Stanley Kubrick chose as the musical highlight of his film 2001.)

Jokanaan, whose stern exhortations of the hellfire that awaits Queen Herodias and her kind, delivered thunderously by Grimsley, also sings sweetly of his Master who is even now preaching in a fishing boat in the Sea of Galilee. Similarly beautiful music will be composed 45 years later when the hero of Britten’s “Billy Budd” will be singing of his own body after his death sinking into the sea.

Grimsley’s character seems so austere, inarticulate and mysterious to the characters onstage, other than the utterly fascinated Salome and the Two Nazarenes, who are in adoration of his message (and are nicely sung by San Diego Opera’s most stalwart comprimario, Scott Sikon and San Diego Opera chorister Nick Munson).

But Strauss provides the audience with the musical clues to understand the meaning of Jokanaan’s seeming ravings, and Director Curran and Grimsley leave no doubt that Jokanaan is not immune from Salome’s physical charms and that  he summons all his moral strength to resist them.

[Below: Jokanaan (Greer Grimsley, front center, tethered) denounces Salome (Lise Lindstrom, left, kneeling) while Captain Narraboth (Sean Panikkar, standing behind Salome) realizes what a mistake he has made; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The small reservations that I expressed about the San Francisco staging (that the Herod and Herodias combination, when compared with others that had sizzled on the San Francisco stage, were a bit underplayed) was addressed. Mishura, in her San Diego debut, meshed beautifully with the crippingly superstitious, debauched, elegantly mad Herod of Allan Glassman, an extraordinary portrait by this well-respected character tenor. One had no doubt that the Tetrach and his Queen were the exemplars for a corrupt and dissolute monarchy.

[Below: Herod (Allan Glassman, left) and Herodias (Irene Mishura, center) have different thoughts on how they wish Salome to behave; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Curran is not only the production designer and choreographer, but brings a keen sense of the history of theater and dance to “Salome”, incorporating sets and costumes (designed by Austrian painter Bruno Schwengl) and lighting (by San Francisco Opera’s former Lighting Director Chris Maravitch), that have a historical resonance with Continental avant-garde theater at the beginnings of the 20th century, the time of the opera’s premiere.

Lindstrom’s  wilden Tanz (the Hollywood  association of Salome with the “seven veils” dropped by Rita Hayworth has nothing to do with Richard Strauss’ opera or the Oscar Wilde drama on which the opera is based) is also inspired by Curran’s study of early 20th century dance choreography. The dance differed in detail from that of Nadja Michael’s Salome in San Franicsco, but was equally memorable and impressively danced.

[Below: Salome (Lise Lindstrom, center) dances with sexual provocativeness in order to achieve the object of her desire; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Grimsley’s Jokanaan, whose rantings are occasionally heard even while Salome negotiates for his head, sits in the dark in a cistern at the set’s back wall, which stands upright like a giant front-loading washing machine whose entrance opens like the focusing eye of a camera. The sexual obsession of Lindstrom’s Salome with the prophet is pointedly defined, as Lindstrom crawls around the cistern door as if she were rock-climbing.

Salome’s request for the execution and beheading of Jokanaan might have passed for merely a political act or an act of personal revenge, even as she demanded the head to be brought to her on a silver platter. Surely, Herodias thought so, and, in Curran’s production, takes the head from the executioner to deliver to her daughter.

[Below: Herodias (Irene Mishura, standing top center) holds the severed head of her enemy above her head to place it in the silver platter that Salome (Lise Lindstrom, below center) holds; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Salome then goes about to prove the point that no matter how depraved a person might be, there are always behaviors that that person believes to be beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable. Curran underscores this point by having every person onstage other than Salome turn their backs on her throughout Salome’s lengthy display of necrophilia.

[Below: Salome (Lise Lindstrom) holds Jokanaan's severed head; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

Glassman’s Herod, who now knows the meaning of the expression “be careful what you wish for” orders Salome to be killed on the spot and the opera ends.

Suzanna Guzman was the Page.  The five Jews were Simeon Esper, Joseph Frank, Joseph Hu, Kristopher Irmiter and Doug Jones. Jamie Offenbach and Philip Skinner were the Soldiers and Ashraf Sewailam was the Cappadocian.

[Below: Herod (Allan Glassman) can take no more and orders that his stepdaughter be killed on the spot; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

___

The Seattle Opera assembled a strong international cast for the work’s Seattle premiere. The treacherous role of Odabella was impressively sung by the Venezuelan soprano Ana Lucrecia Garcia, whose meteoric rise internationally is one of the current operatic phenomena.

The Italian baritone Marco Vratogna, in his Seattle debut as the Roman general Ezio and the  big-voiced tenor Antonello Palombi, rounded out an accomplished Verdian quartet that would be welcomed on any operatic stage in the world.

[Below: John Relyea as Attila; edited image, based on an Elise Bakketun photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

Notes on the Production

The physical production incorporates the concept and basic set created by Bernard Uzan for the France’s Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, and has most recently been seen at the Israeli Opera Tel Aviv. However, Seattle Opera hs extensively revised both the concept and the production, creating new costumes (including often stylish new military dress for the principals) and creating a series of visual projections that are often the dominant image of a scene.

The opera’s central theme is warfare, and all four of the story’s principal characters are battle-scarred. Two of the characters – Attila and Ezio (Aetius) – are historical personages and there are fragments of historical fact at least alluded to in the opera’s libretto.

However, the actual 5th century ravages of the historical Attila in France, Germany and Italy have had a millenium and a half to become encrusted with myth and legend. The opera’s libretto and the Napoleonic era German play on which it is based are steeped in fictional elements, the “scourge of God”, as this leader of the Huns came to be identified, mythologized to serve the geopolitical viewpoints of the German dramatist and of Verdi himself.

[Below: Ana Lucrecia Garcia as Odabella; edited image, based on an Elise Bakketun photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

This Seattle remake of the Strasbourg production has remythologized Attila yet again for the  21st century audience. Attila and his “barbarians” are bedecked in desert camouflage, and perform the precision strikes of special operation forces. Those more or less on the “Roman” side (Odabella, Ezio and Foresto) regale us in the brighty colored uniforms of some sort of fascist potentate (perhaps German imperialists or the machismo  forces of some Central or South American dictator).

Since no character in “Attila” can be regarded as either especially virtuous or evil, the remythologizing is hardly controversial. The themes in “Attila” are just as much about war and cultural conflict as those of the Theofanidis’ 2011 opera “Heart of a Soldier”.

Therefore, 20th and 21st century military costumes and images are nowhere at odds with the story line (whose deficiencies have always been evident) and certainly do not get in the way of the performance of Verdi’s incessantly melodious score.

[Below: Ezio (Marco Vratogna, left) offers to concede all the rest of Europe to Attila (John Relyea, right) if he can retain control of the Italian peninsula; edited image, based on an Elise Bakketun photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

 The Donizetti-Early Verdi Matrix

I have suggested elsewhere that the contemporary opera goer should think of the Donizetti operas from 1830 on and the Verdi operas up until 1850 as a stylistic continuum. During the two decade period the two composers perfected an approach to opera that adapted the sensuous, dramatically exciting stories of the Romantic era poetry and literature to the traditions of early 19th century Italian opera.

Along the way the two Italian composers transformed those traditions. Donizetti was a major force in the creation of the modern tenor sound, writing for those artists who perfected a new style of singing, most famously the high C belted from the tenor’s chest.

Both composers during this period glorified the agility and power of the soprano voice. Both were adept at creating female characters whose vocal pyrotechnics signified the woman of power, such as those of the title roles in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena”, “Maria Stuarda”, “Lucrezia Borgia”, Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc) and Abigaille in Verdi’s “Nabucco”; or Verdi’s women of determined purpose such as “Attila’s” Odabella, Giselda in “I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata”, Elvira in “Ernani” or the Lady in “Macbeth”. Both composers also exploited the lyrical potential of the baritone and basso voices.

During those two decades Donizetti and Verdi effectively utilized such conventions of the early 19th century Italian opera as the dual arias – the cavatina followed by the fireworks of the cabaletta, giving them the dramatic thrust to move the action forward. Both composers also sought opportunities for the concertato, when major characters would assemble for a concerted number.

However, by the time Donizetti was age 47 (1844), he was too ill to write anything more, and Verdi was to abandon such conventions as the repeat of the cabaletta melody only a few years after “Attila”. Most of the Donizetti and early Verdi operas fell out of favor and many were unperformed for over a century. When they were performed (and we are in a period of where virtually all of the Donizetti and Verdi operas of the 20 year period have been revived) it is quite usual for cuts to be made, particularly shedding the stretta that separates the two verses of the cabaletta and limiting the cabaletta to a single verse.

Carlo Montanero, Seattle Opera’s conductor,  made a felicitous decision that should cause Verdi aficionados from afar to book a flight to Seattle to see this set of performances. He is presenting the opera uncut, so that each principal, the chorus and the orchestra perform all the music in Verdi’s original score.

[Conductor Carlo Montanaro; promotional photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

The results are revelatory. Experienced opera goers have been taught to dismiss the earlier works as less worthy than Verdi’s later efforts, because Verdi changed elements of his style in the decades after “Attila” and was quoted at different times with slightly pejorative comments about his old approaches to composing. However, if one surrenders to the music, one can grasp how masterful it is and why “Attila” was such a successful opera in the generation in which it premiered.

The Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni argued (in what I acknowledge is my substantive paraphrasing of his thoughts) that  it is impossible to consider opera as veristic simply because people in real life don’t communicate by singing to each other. Therefore, he concluded, operas should be based on surreal themes, with Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” being Busoni’s operatic ideal.

From the time of its composition, there has been a degree of intellectual angst about the obscurity of the motivations of characters in “Attila”.  Its original librettist, Solera, resisted Verdi’s request for him to write the words for a concertato in which the soprano, tenor, baritone and basso come together to sing a concerted number. Verdi’s great biographer Julian Budden, almost a century and a half later, was immensely bothered by Verdi’s request, more or less defending Solera’s position. Why would the tenor (Foresto) who is the sworn enemy of the basso (Attila) be permitted to come and go freely around Attila’s camp, so he can be ready when needed to take part in Verdi’s glorious ensembles?

I believe that Busoni and Montenaro have given us the answer to Solera and Budden. One can concede that every aria and every ensemble in “Attila” is glorious Verdi, at the apex of his early style. I don’t think that any attempt to strengthen the dramatic motivations of Foresto’s actions throughout the opera would add anything to our evening’s pleasure. But Verdi knew exactly how he wished to intermesh the vocal lines of the four principals in their great number together. No harm is done by considering the drama as a bit surreal, because the music is surreally beautiful.

[Below: Foresto (Antonello Palombi, right) is assured of the faithfulness of Odabella (Ana Lucrecia Garcia, left); edited image, based on an Elise Bakketun photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

 The Vocal Performance

In my past interviews with John Relyea [See Rising Stars: An Interview With John Relyea, Part 1 and Rising Stars: An Interview with John Relyea Part 2] he expressed his strong interest in performing roles that match his actual age (he is now in his early 40s). This role provided the opportunity to portray a virile warrior, whose range of emotions include dream-induced moments of terror.

Attila’s vocal line is lyrical, appropriate to a basso cantante, and Relyea proved himself an exemplar of the beautifully sounding high bass voice. His musical and dramatic performance was enhanced by effective use of his body, particularly his hands, in conveying the character’s thoughts and fears.

The most famous incident in Attila’s life is his encounter with Pope Leo III, who persuaded Attila to leave Rome untouched. The historical evidence suggests that such a meeting likely really happened but, if it did not, it is a legend of persuasive verisimilitude.

One can observe an emerging tradition, at least in the United States,  in which the tiny role of Leone, as he is called in the opera, is sung by a famous basso whose principal career is associated with the previous operatic generation. At the Seattle Opera, Michael Devlin, who sang many of the roles in the 1970s and beyond that Relyea is performing today, sings the role. I saw Devlin, for instance, as the four villains in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman” that Relyea first sang at Seattle Opera. Devlin’s appearance, even with only a few lines to sing, was appropriately nostalgic, evoking memories of stellar performances over a great operatic career.

(As another example of the new “tradition” of casting Leone with lustrous stars of the past, the most famous American Attila, Samuel Ramey, is scheduled to sing Leone at the San Francisco Opera in June 2012, 21 years after he performed Attila on the San Francisco stage.)

[Below: The appearance of Pope Leo III (Michael Devlin, right) causes Attila (John Relyea, front center) to change his course; edited image, based on an Elise Bakketun photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

Seattle Opera was fortunate to have baritone Marco Vratogna making his Seattle Opera debut as Ezio. An accomplished Verdi baritone, his exemplary work is associated with Conductor Nicola Luisotti, establishing him as a favorite with San Francisco Opera audiences [See Ovations for ‘Otello’ – San Francisco Opera, November 8, 2009 and Brilliant Cast, Colorful Production, Luisotti’s Masterful Conducting Enliven San Francisco “Aida” – September 19, 2010.]

Finally, Antonello Palombi, the Foresto, whose Seattle Manrico two years ago had impressed me [Seattle’s “Trovatore”: Standing Ovations for Antonello Palombi, Lisa Daltirus – January 16, 2010], once again demonstrated  the vocal weight appropriate to a Verdian role written for a spinto voice.

Charles Edwards created the original sets for Strasbourg. They were significantly enhanced and updated through the use of digital media created by the Seattle Opera. The costumes were the work of Melanie Taylor Burgess with lighting design by Connie Yun.

I recommend Seattle’s “Attila” without reservation.

There are perhaps several reasons why pre-Mozartean works are now performed more regularly in North America. I believe three reasons predominate. First, audiences have come to appreciate the waves of arresting melodies that abound in the 17th and especially 18th century operas. Second, there have developed performance traditions as how to present these works. Third, there are singers who have mastered the artistry required to perform the operas.

Over the next few weeks, in venues large and small, North American audiences will have the opportunity to experience two different productions of the French version of Gluck’s masterpiece about the story of Orpheus – one with a tenor Orpheus, the other sung by a mezzo soprano.

Audiences will also be able to view two 18th century settings of one of the most famous works of the 16th century – Italian poet Torquato Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered”. One version of Tasso’s exotically fanciful account of the strife between Muslims and Christians in the First Crusade  is Handel’s “Rinaldo”, to be performed in Chicago. The other is Lully’s “Armide”, which will be seen in Toronto and at the Glimmerglass Festival.

Orphee et Eurydice (Gluck), Seattle Opera, February 25, 29, March 3, 4(m), 7 and 10, 2012.

When Gluck first composed his operatic masterpiece on the Orpheus legend, it was in Italian and written for a mezzo-soprano playing a male role. But Parisian tastes persuaded Gluck to revise the opera for performance in French, with a tenor male as Orphee.

The opera has three characters and a chorus, but it is Orphee, sung in Seattle by the excellent lyric tenor William Burden, who dominates virtually every scene, a daunting task rewarded with some of the 18th century’s most beautiful melodies. He will be joined by Davinia Rodriguez as Eurydice and Julianne Gearhart as the God Amor.

[Below: Tenor William Burden is Orphee; resized image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

The production is conceived and staged by the brilliant Argentine director Jose Maria Condemi, with with sets designed by Phillip Lienau and costumes by Heidi Zamora. Gary Thor Wedow conducts.

Rinaldo (Handel), Lyric Opera of Chicago, February 29, March 4(m), 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24, 2012.

“Jerusalem Delivered” is the great work by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (whose life was sufficiently dramatic to inspire an semi-biographical opera by Donizetti).

The list of Baroque, Rococo and Classical opera composers who created operas about its principal characters, Armide and Rinaldo, is a who’s who of great figures in 17th and 18th century vocal music. The Tassomania extended to the artworld as well, with several famous artists painting their own visions of the Deliverance of Jerusalem.

[Below: Francois Boucher's "Renaud et Armide"; resized image of the painting in the Louvre, Paris.]

Lyric Opera has assembled a Dream Team for its “Rinaldo” production, conceived by the impressive Mexican concept director Francisco Negrin. Virtually every artist enlisted for this series of performances has been praised, often multiple times, by this website.

The pre-eminent counter-tenor of our day, the American David Daniels, returns to Lyric Opera as Rinaldo. He is joined by an international cast all making their Lyric debuts, but whose memorable performances in San Francisco, Santa Fe, Houston, and/or Dallas have been enthusiastically reviewed by me and are archived in this website.

These include South African soprano Elsa van den Heever (Armide), Italian mezzo Sonia Prina (Goffredo), Italian basso Luca Pisaroni (Argante) and British counter-tenor Iestyn Davies (Eustazio). Harry Bicket conducts.

Armide (Lully), Opera Atelier, Toronto, April 14, 15(m), 17, 18, 20 and 21, 2012, in a co-production with:

Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, New York, July 21, 29(m), 31(m), August 5(m), 10, 13(m), 18 and 23, 2012.

France was the country in which the epic poem Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) first popularized the theme of heroic battles between Muslims and Christians. In this great poem and the similar works that followed it, the Knights Roland and Renaud (in Italian, Orlando and Rinaldo), are part of Charlemagne’s 8th century army defeated by the Saracens at Ronceveaux, but the warriors over the next half millenium become the subject of myriad story lines, especially by French and Italian story tellers.

Throughout much of that half millenium’s history, Christians are driving Muslims from Spain, while Muslims controlled most of North Africa, the Middle East and parts of the Balkans, continuously inspiring new spins on the old tales. The most significant literary works in this tradition for Baroque opera goers are Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” and, of course, Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered”.

Many operatic production designers wish to conceptualize ways to make unfamiliar baroque operas relevant to modern audiences. The Christian-Muslim interrelationships that inspired Tasso, however fancifully he dealt with the subject matter, can inspire new ideas about how production designers should present operas about Christians and Muslims written almost three centuries ago.

Canada’s Opera Atelier creates its first co-production of an opera, in conjunction with the Glimmerglass Festival, choosing Lully’s great operatic tragic drama, “Armide”.

[Below: a painting of the premiere performance of Lully's "Armide".]

Stage director Marshall Pynkoski, set designer Gerard Gauci and choreographer Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg are the creative team. Lighting designs are by Bonnie Beecher.  For Toronto, Peggy Kriha Dye is the enchantress Armide, Colin Ainsworth the Christian knight Renaud, with basso Joao Fernandes as the Hidraot. David Fallis (Opera Atelier’s music director) conducts.

Dye and Ainsworth are announced for the lead roles at Glimmerglass, with the team of Fallis, Pynkoski, Gauci, Zingg and Beecher joining them at the Festival.

Orphee et Eurydice (Gluck), Opera Santa Barbara, April 27 and 29, 2012.

Jose Maria Condemi, who has assumed the duties of artistic director of the Opera Santa Barbara, promises a different production and staging of “Orphee” from the one he directs for Seattle Opera in February and March. In Santa Barbara, the role Orphee is sung by mezzo-soprano Layna Chianakas.

[Below: Mezzo-soprano Layna Chianakas is Orphee; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the Opera Santa Barbara.]

Marnie Breckenridge is the Eurydice and Angela Cadelago is the Amor. Yannis Adoniu is the choreographer. Jose Luis Moscovich conducts.

My plan is to attend and review one performance of each of these four productions.

Regular opera goers will understand the humor that Robert sees in the story. Most long-term opera subscribers have seen “Tosca” many times and know both the score and the libretto very well. But if one reflects on the idea of a core repertory of operas that audiences go to again and again, one might regard it as a quite special idea. Two centuries ago, there was not a “core repertory” of operas. New operas were constantly expected and revivals of old operas were rather rare.

*****

[Below: Siegmund (Brandon Jovanovich, left) and Sieglinde (Anja Kampe, right) name each other, secure the sword Nothung, and run away together; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Power Singing, Powerful Imagery in Zambello’s “Walkuere” – San Francisco Opera, June 15, 2011.]

*****

But the “standard repertory” of opera persists, not necessarily because opera companies prefer to perform the best-known operas, but because audiences – particularly in countries that have no tradition of large scale public subsidies of opera companies – vote for them with their ticket purchases. San Francisco Opera’s David Gockley has gone to great lengths, through a quite revealing commentary in his company’s recent opera programs, to quantify this phenomenon.

Because there are a specific number of subscription series, an opera will normally be performed for a minimum of six performances in a San Francisco season, but some operas sell so many tickets that they can be scheduled for up to twelve performances. This latter group Gockley names the “AA” operas. He wants good singers for all performances, but the “AA” operas don’t require ”big name” stars. The “Double As” that he names are Bizet’s “Carmen”, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, “Nozze di Figaro” and “Magic Flute”, Puccini’s “La Boheme”, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”, Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” and Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata”.

*****

[Below: Mimi (Ana Maria Martinez, left) finds herself attracted to Rodolfo (David Lomeli, right); edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera.]

[For my performance review, see David Lomeli, Ana Maria Martinez Shine in Deeply Cast “La Boheme” – Santa Fe Opera, July 2, 2011.]

*****

 Gockley announced a policy that San Francisco Opera will not repeat an “AA” opera more than once in five years. (Since “Butterfly” has been performed in 2006, 2007 and 2010, and “Nozze di Figaro” was performed in both 2006 and 2010, presumably these two operas will be out of the repertory for a while). The five year bracket is in evidence for “Carmen” (2006 and 2011) and “Magic Flute” (2007 and 2012).

He uses “such as” for his list, but it’s not clear what other operas than those he names would make the “AA” list. (He does not list Puccini’s “Tosca” or Verdi’s “Aida”, which perhaps are candidates.)

The “A” operas are those that Gockey is confident of scheduling for up to nine performances. He provides five examples in this list: Bellini’s “Norma”, Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”, Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore”. In this list of five, the Donizetti, Gershwin and Verdi works cited have been performed during the Gockley era, and the other two a season or two before, so one guesses the assignment to categories is based on fairly recent experience with audience demand for tickets.

He stated that the “B” and “C” operas can sell up to six performances. The “B” examples consist of ones done during his tenure: Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” (performed in the 1869 version without the Polish acts); the three one-act operas of Puccini’s “Il Trittico”; Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Salome”; and three operas expected in the future – Berlioz’ “Les Troyens”, Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman” and Verdi’s “Falstaff” (all three of which perhaps generated intense internal discussion as to how many performances to schedule). World premieres, of which Gockley has shepherded three, are expected to attract enough attention to rate a “B”.

The “C” operas include “baroque works” and those of several composers – Berg, Britten, Janacek, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. (The last named’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk” will be on the schedule, according to an absolutely solid source, with Brandon Jovanovich as the Sergei.) He lists Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” (which has been expected to return to the San Francisco stage) and Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” and “Die Frau ohne Schatten” in the “C” category as well.

[Below: the Governess (Patricia Racette, seated) is now certain that the ghost of Peter Quint (William Burden, at window) is real; edited image, based on a copyrighted Robert Millard photograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Countdown to Britten Centennial: Conlon, Racette and Burden Impress in Enigmatic “Turn of the Screw” – March 12, 2011.]

*****

According to Gockley, there are certain opera stars with sufficient box office appeal to make a “C” opera into a “B” or a “B” in to an “A”. (His examples are Placido Domingo in Alfano’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Angela Gheorghiu in Puccini’s “La Rondine”), although, he concedes, it is not so likely that a superstar box office draw could be persuaded to commit to a dozen performances, with the result that an “A” opera could be turned into a “AA”.

Gockley then reveals that each season is deliberately balanced to include – as an example of how a now typical nine-opera season is constructed – three AAs, two As, two Bs and two Cs. And, as a final consideration, over a five year period, the “Big Five” composers – Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss, Verdi and Wagner – all must be well-represented, although they need not be present every year.

I find his formulas for constructing an opera season to be fascinating and revelatory. One expects that the impresarios in other cities would shift some operas  from one category to another based on their own company’s experience. Some might take issue with the details (even with a personal great reverence for Berlioz I wonder whether the demand for “Les Troyens” in San Francisco will really prove to be in the same category as “Rosenkavalier” and only a category below “Lucia” and “Trovatore”.) But the Gockley formulas display an intense interest in what the audience will actually buy tickets to see and it suggests a healthy balance between the immensely popular, the new, and the little known. It’s nice to have three  Mozart operas in Gockley’s ten opera list of what he categorizes as AAs.

The core repertory – and what operas can be depended upon to generate box office appeal – will continue to be a subject of discussion on this website. David Gockley’s expressed thoughts on how a person running a company decides which operas to schedule, is an illuminating contribution to our understanding of how the opera impresarios make decisions.

For those who wish to comment on this post, or any other item on this website, please contact me at operawarhorses@yahoo.com. 

The examples of “Best Bet Revivals” discussed here are the first two offerings of 2012 of both the Los Angeles Opera and the San Diego Opera. (Each of the four productions featured below, from the standpoint of that audience, is a production new to the company.)

Salome (Richard Strauss), San Diego Opera, January 28, 31, February 3 and 5(m), 2012.

Dancer Sean Curran, who has extended his artistic career by assuming the roles of operatic stage director, chose an opera in which a dance (indeed, a wilden Tanz) by the title character becomes a central plot point. Curran revives his production, seen in San Francisco a little over a year ago, in San Diego, with the San Francisco Opera Jokanaan (Greer Grimsley) and Herodias (Irene Mishura) joining him.

The title role in the opera, which opens San Diego Opera’s 2011 season, is to be sung by Lise Lindstrom, who was spectacular in the title role of Puccini’s “Turandot” that opened San Diego’s 2010 season.

[Below: Jokanaan (Greer Grimlsey) is the object of the sexual desire of Salome (here Nadja Michael); resized image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

The surreality of Bruno Schwengl’s set design (in this co-production of the opera companies of Saint Louis, San Francisco and Montreal) fits the surreality of the opera, in which some of most exotically lyrical melodies in the German repertoire are counterpoised with the depravity of the court of the Tetrarch Herod (Allan Glassman). Sean Panikkar is the Narraboth. Steuart Bedford conducts.

For my performance review of the production as seen in San Francisco, see: Nadja Michael a Sensation in Luisotti’s Soaring San Francisco “Salome” – October 18, 2009.

For my performance review of the production as seen in San Diego, see: 

Lindstrom, Grimsley, Glassman Gleam in Sensuous, Searing San Diego Opera “Salome” – January 28, 2012

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Simon Boccanegra (Verdi), Los Angeles Opera, February 11, 15, 19, 21, 26, March 1 and 4, 2012.

Elijah Moshinsky’s version of “Simon Boccanegra”, first produced for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with sets by Michael Yeargan and costumes by Peter J. Hall, is arguably the most elegant amd venerable production of “Boccanegra” in current use. Moshinsky himself will be the stage director for the vehicle for Placido Domingo’s first major baritone role.

[Below: Placido Domingo (center) as Doge Simon Boccanegra; resized image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

For the Los Angeles performances, Puerto Rican soprano Ana Maria Martinez will be the Maria Amelia and Paolo Gavanelli, an eminent Boccanegra himself, will be Paolo. Vitalij Kowaljow, whose Fiesco Grimaldi has been seen by San Francisco audiences, will bring this role to the Southland. Stefano Secco is the Gabriele Adorno. Los Angeles Opera’s Music Director James Conlon will conduct.

For my performance reviews of this production in San Francisco and Houston, see: Verdian Back to Basics: San Francisco’s Satisfying “Simon Boccanegra” – September 21, 2008 and Hvorostovsky, Guryakova, Berti Excel in Houston “Simon Boccanegra” – November 4, 2006.

Moby Dick (Heggie), San Diego Opera, February 18, 21, 24 and 26(m), 2012.

Jack Heggie’s richly lyrical score and Gene Scheer’s intelligent adaptation of Melville’s iconic novel as a libretto for the operatic stage are essential elements of what is arguably the most successful 21st century opera to date.

San Diego Opera, as one of the original four opera companies who commissioned this work, describes it as a “world premiere co-production”.

[Below: Captain Ahab (Ben Heppner left) appears on the deck of the Pequod with his cabin boy, Pip (Talise Trevigne, front row, second from left) and his mate Stubb (here, Robert Orth,  front, far right); edited image, based on a Karen Almond photograph, courtesy of the Dallas Opera.]

Four of the major roles from its first performance ever in April 201o are reassembled for the San Diego Opera, the second stop on the opera’s three-country, five opera company tour: Ben Heppner (Captain Ahab), Morgan Smith (Starbuck), Talise Trevigne (Pip) and Jonathan Lemalu (Queequeg) and stage director Leonard Foglia. Joining them will be Jonathan Boyd (Ishmael). Karen Keltner will conduct.

[For my review of the world premiere in Dallas, see: World Premiere: Heggie’s Theatrically Brilliant, Melodic “Moby Dick” at Dallas Opera – April 30, 2010.]

Albert Herring (Britten) Los Angeles Opera, February 25, 28, March 3, 8, 11(m), 14 and 17(m), 2012.

We use the adjective “superlative” sparingly on this website, and when we do it is because either me or my colleague Tom regard a production as worth special commendation. Tom has awarded it to the Santa Fe Opera’s Summer 2010 production of  Benjamin Britten’s hilarious comedy about a May Queen contest in which the eligible contestants are the virgin girls of Loxford, England.

But what if there is not a single girl who fits the ideas of the guardian of the community’s morals, Lady Billows, as to what constitutes a proper May Queen? What if the only virgin is a male, in this case Albert Herring, the grocery clerk tied closely to his mother’s apron strings?  Then revise the contest to name a May King! But, as the opera will show, this will not assure an outcome that meets Lady Billows’ expectations.

[Below: Nancy (here, Kate Lindsey, left) has her own thoughts about how Albert Herring (Alek Shrader, right) should live his life; edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera.]

Director Paul Curran, who created the staging for the successful Santa Fe Festival production mounts the opera, again with Kevin Knight’s sets and costumes, for Los Angeles. Alek Shrader, who performed the title role in Santa Fe, is again the lead in Los Angeles. His Santa Fe Lady Billows, Christine Brewer, performs the last two performances in Los Angeles.

The rest of the cast is new to the production, with most of them new to Los Angeles Opera, including Daniela Mack as Nancy, Liam Bonner as Sid, Janis Kelly as Lady Billows (first five performances), Jane Bunnell as Mrs Herring and Robert McPherson as the Mayor. Stacey Tappan is Miss Wordsworth and Ronnita Nicole Miller is the Florence Pike. James Conlon will conduct.

[For Tom's review of the production in Santa Fe, see Superlative: Britten’s “Albert Herring” Brings Big Time Laugh-in to Santa Fe Opera – August 25, 2010.]

I have a rather different perspective on how to categorize 19th century Italian opera. My position is to consider the work of one of the supposed “bel canto” composers, Gaetano Donizetti (especially those operas between 1830 and the end of this creative life in 1844) as notably different in the aggregate from the works of Rossini and Bellini, but much closer in style to those of Verdi written between 1839 (“Oberto”) and 1850 (“Stiffelio”). To describe this similarity in styles, I suggest the term “the Donizetti-Early Verdi continuum”.

One can make some generalizations about the Donizetti and Verdi operas written between 1830 and 1850. Most have soprano roles which require extraordinary vocal agility. Most have a Romantic tenor (whom we expect to be capable of singing a high C as a chest tone) who plays a character that is usually the love interest of the soprano’s, and a lyric baritone whose character more often than not is the rival of the tenor’s.

These operas form a cultural vanguard, in the sense that many of the latest contributions to Romantic era literature, drama and poetry provide the subject matter for the operas’ plots. But they also embrace tradition, in that the operas often observe such early 19th century Italian opera conventions as the cavatina-cabaletta combination, normally followed by a stretta and second cabaletta verse; the concertato, where the principals assemble for a concerted number (like the “Lucia” Sextet);  and rousing choruses that might follow or be accompanied by an onstage banda.

By my definition, such Donizetti works as “Anna Bolena”, “Maria Stuarda”, “Lucia di Lammermoor”,  Lucrezia Borgia”, “Roberto Devereux” and “La Favorite” would be considered as part of a category of works that includes also Verdi’s “Nabucco”, “Ernani”, “Attila” and “Luisa Miller”.

The description would account for these composers’ comic works as well, although Donizetti, with three megahit comedies, “L’Elisir d’Amore”, “La Fille du Regiment” and “Don Pasquale”,  would be the undisputed champion of this category. Verdi’s only effort during the two decades under consideration, “Un Giorno di Regno”, would not be considered as in the league of the Donizetti comedies, even those that are not as famous as the three works listed. (I will make further references to the Donizetti-Verdi relationship in an article to be published in San Diego Opera’s program notes for “Don Pasquale”.)

Three of these “Donizetti-Early Verdi” works will be performed in the American West during the first half of 2012:

Attila (Verdi), Seattle Opera, January 18, 21, 22 (m), 25 and 28, 2012.

Verdi’s ninth opera will be heard in two different productions (in Seattle in January and in San Francisco in June). Seattle will provide the opportunity for basso John Relyea to perform a role in a fully staged production in which he has appeared in concert form.

Although the historic Attila terrorized such fifth century French and German towns as Paris and those we now call Orleans, Strasbourg, Reims, Metz and Mainz, the legends about Attila have had as much impact on European culture as the facts. As an example, Attila is a character in the medieval Nibelungenlied, arguably as important as Siegfried and Bruennhilde. The many layers of fact and legend provide for ever shifting layers in what to think about this “scourge of God”.

Seattle will bring to American shores the Charles Edwards production, originally seen at the Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, France, and later in Liege, Belgium and Tel Aviv, Israel, which relates the concept of “civilized” warriors fighting barbarians to the 21st century. Bernard Uzan is the stage director, Carlos Montanaro the conductor.

[Below: John Relyea as Attila the Hun; edited image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the Seattle Opera.]

Venezuelan soprano Ana Lucrecia Garcia (who is scheduled to appear in both the Seattle and San Francisco “Attila” productions) is the Odabella. Spinto tenor Antonello Palombi is the Foresto. Marco Vratogna, the Italian baritone familiar to San Francisco Opera audiences, is the Ezio. Veteran basso Michael Devlin appears in the cameo role of Leone.

For my performance review, see: Reveling in Early Verdi: Relyea, Garcia, Vratogna, Palombi in Montanaro’s Uncut “Attila” – Seattle Opera, January 14, 2012.

Don Pasquale (Donizetti), San Diego Opera, March 10, 13, 16 and 18(m), 2012.

The San Diego Opera, the most Southwesterly of continental U. S. opera companies, mounts its  famous production of “Don Pasquale”, the most successful opera of the final few months of Donizetti’s creative life. The production, both created and directed by David Gately, is, in Gately’s concept, set in the Far West of old.

The opera has been described as the crowning achievement of the buffa style of comic opera, whose predecessors includes Rossini’s “Barber of Seville”.  But “Don Pasquale” has  layers of the kind of character development that is a characteristic of Donizetti’s major comedies.

[Below: a bath for Ernesto (here, Matthew Polenzani, in tub) is the subject of the promotional poster for "Don Pasquale", based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

The San Diego Opera has assembled a major league cast of singers for the production’s revival. The Don himself is played by John Del Carlo, and the conspirators against him are Charles Castronovo (Ernesto), Daniele De Niese (Norina) and Jeff Mattsey (Dr Malatesta). Marco Guidarini conducts.

Mary Stuart – Maria Stuarda (Donizetti), Houston Grand Opera, April 21, 27, 29(m), May 2 and 4, 2012.

The Houston Grand Opera had commissioned a new production of Donizetti’s “Mary Stuart” with a European design team, but “artistic differences” scuttled the project. Instead, noting that the Minnesota Opera has been mounting new productions of Donizetti works for several years, opted to use that company’s production which debuted at the beginning of 2011.

Stage Director Kevin Newbury and his creative team (set designer Neil Patel and costume designer Jessica Jahn) will bring the Minnesota concept to the Lone Star State.

[Below: Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots (here Judith Howarth) under arrest; edited image of a photograph for the Minnesota Opera.]

The opera’s title role wil be filled by one of the most illustrious of the alumni of Houston Grand Opera Young Artist’s program, Joyce di Donato. She will be joined by the Elizabeth I of Katie van Kooten and the Leicester of Eric Cutler. Oren Gradus is the Cecil and Robert Gleadow the Talbot. Houston Grand Opera’s recently promoted Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers will conduct.

Attila (Verdi) San Francisco Opera, June 12, 15, 20, 23, 28 and July 1(m), 2012

Nicola Luisotti conducted performances of “Attila” at Milan’s La Scala in a new co-production with the San Francisco Opera. The production team (also responsible for San Francisco Opera Fall 2011′s new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”)  was stage director Gabriele Lavia, set designer Alessandro Camera and costume designer Andrea Viotti. Luisotti will be in the pit in June 2012 to conduct the San Francisco performances of the co-production.

[Below: Ferruccio Furlanetto as Attila; edited image of a photograph, courtesy of San Francisco Opera.]

The title role in the opera will be sung by basso Ferruccio Furlanetto, appearing 32 years after his San Francisco Opera debut, but following an absence of a decade and a half from the War Memorial Opera House.  Ana Lucrecia Garcia, who was Odabella at La Scala, will perform the role yet again in San Francisco. Quinn Kelsey is the Ezio, with Fabio Sartori and Diego Torre sharing the role of Foresto.

The last person to have sung Attila on the San Francisco stage was Samuel Ramey in 1991. He will return to San Francisco to sing the character role of Leone.

The criteria are simple. An “A” reflects a musical and theatrical performance and production that would meet the standards for a “world class” performance in any opera company internationally. And, to make sure that I remain informed of what “the world” is offering, I periodically attend and review performances at many of the major opera companies of North America and Europe.

Since San Francisco Opera is the only company whose every production I have attended at least once during each calendar year since 2006, it is the only one that I rate in this fashion. (I think it would be unfair to make any comparable judgment of another company in which I missed significant numbers of their productions. Perhaps it’s also unfair to choose this one company to bestow this annual rating to, but once something like this starts, and people look for it, it takes a while to get out of the habit of doing it.)

Calendar year 2011′s mainstage productions at the War Memorial Opera House were a series of successes, with three solid San Francisco-owned productions conducted by Nicola Luisotti and a world premiere. The best of the best included the complete Francesca Zambello production of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs”, the imported John Pascoe production of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” and Sir Nicolas Hytner’s production of Handel’s “Xerxes”.

Grade A+

Das Rheingold (Wagner)

The Zambello “Rheingold”, the first of the “Ring” co-productions with the Washington National Opera, received its San Francisco premiere in Summer 2008. “Rheingold” introduced the War Memorial Opera House to Mark Delavan’s Wotan. Lustrous at that time, in its 2011 revival “Rheingold” shone even more brightly as the prologue to Zambello’s entire “Ring”.

Although Zambello has her particular viewpoints as to what constitutes good and bad behavior in the cosmos, what is striking about her images – a gold rush era mine for Nibelheim, an upscale house in the Hamptons in obvious need of remodeling and repair for the temporary home of the gods, the bridge to Valhalla the gangplank to an ocean liner – is how chameleon-like Wagner’s storyline and music can be, fitting well with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of imaginative concepts.

There is not a single character in “Das Rheingold” who is a human being, yet the struggles for power (Wotan, Alberich, Mime) and the desire for emotional control over another being (Fricka) prove to be universal traits, whether gods, dwarves, giants or humans.

As one brilliantly imaginative example, Zambello’s Freia, hostage of the giants, becomes the poster child for Stockholm Syndrome. Although Wagner made it clear that Fasolt had fallen in love with Freia, Zambello finds reciprocal romantic feelings of Freia for Fasolt, so that it is genuinely affecting when Freia grieves that Fasolt has been murdered.

[Below: details of the contract for building Walhalla are discussed by the construction giants, Fafner (Daniel Sumegi, far left) and Fasolt (Andrea  Silvestrelli, third from left), and the gods Freia (Melissa Citro, second from left) and, from right to left, Wotan (Mark Delavan), Donner (Gerd Grochowski), Fricka (Elizabeth Bishop), and Froh (Brandon Jovanovich), and the demi-god Loge (Stefan Margita, center); edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

The San Francisco Opera Orchestra, led by the company’s former music director, Conductor Donald Runnicles, showed its skill and maturity. A strong cast was assembled, surrounding Delavan’s inspired Wotan. Gordon Hawkins’ Alberich, Stefan Margita’s oily Loge, David Cangelosi’s Mime, Elizabeth Bishop’s Fricka all stood out.

The first night of the “Ring” marked the debut in a Wagnerian role for tenor Brandon Jovanovich, the Froh, who would be assaying a far bigger Wagner role on the next evening.

[Below: Bruennhilde (Nina Stemme, front left, on landing at bottom of stairs) steps forward to take her punishment from her father Wotan (Mark Delavan, right) as her eight Valkyrie sisters stand on the stairs beside her; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

The final act is a true coup de theatre with the eight Valkyries dressed as parachuting aviatrices, several landing at once to the Wagner’s most famous musical composition (other than the tune of “Here Comes the Bride”).

A welcome continuity was obtained by having Delavan and Bishop repeat their roles as Wotan and Fricka on the consecutive nights of “Rheingold” and “Walkuere”.

Jovanovich was a youthful looking and excellent acting heldentenor, suggesting that the jugendlich Wagnerian roles will be a major part of his career from this point on. Nina Stemme, should she assert her claim to being the reigning Bruennhilde of our day, would have the San Francisco audiences backing her all the way.

[For my performance review, see: Power Singing, Powerful Imagery in Zambello’s “Walkuere” – San Francisco Opera, June 15, 2011.]

Siegfried (Wagner)

“Siegfried” is the most like a Once Upon a Time fairy tale of any Wagnerian opera, with a dragonslayer-hero, a sleeping beauty, scheming dwarves, and a spear with a spell so powerful that the world begins to out of spin control when the hero shatters it.

Zambello’s approach proved to be just as imaginative as in the first two operas, with both Alberich and Mime existing in states of poverty (the former with his possessions in a shopping cart, the latter raising Siegfried in a rusty trailer surrounded by a yard of junk), while waiting for the dragonslayer-to-be to grow to manhood.

Unlike the Zambello “Rheingold” and “Walkuere”, her “Siegfried”, which had premiered at the Washington National Opera, had not been seen in San Francisco before. In this opera the two principal characters are Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris) and the dwarf Mime (David Cangelosi), supplemented by the vocally demanding characterizations of Alberich (Gordon Hawkins), Wotan disguised as the Wanderer (Mark Delavan) and Bruennhilde (Nina Stemme).

[Below: Mime (David Cangelosi, right front) goes about the business of raising a hero; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

All the cast sang and played their roles excellently, with Cangelosi’s stunningly  athletic performance as Mime especially memorable.

[For my performance review, see: Down and Out in Zambello’s American Ring: Sly, Theatrically-Centered “Siegfried” Satisfies – San Francisco Opera, June 17, 2011.]

Goetterdaemmerung (Wagner)

“Goetterdaemmerung” has always been my favorite opera, and one I consider to be a great bargain for the opera “consumer”. (No opera company can expect to get back but a fraction of the cost of producing it from ticket sales, whatever price they dare put on the ticket.)

Act I is the longest act of any multi-act opera. Its orchestration requires as large and as skilled an orchestra as any company is ever called upon to provide. The demands on the singers, particularly the Siegried (Ian Storey) and Bruennhilde (Nina Stemme), are daunting. And, to add to the complexity and cost, a full chorus is necessary.

In fact, the complexity and expense turned out to strain co-producer Washington National Opera’s fiscal resources, and San Francisco Opera became the site of the first performances of the final part of Wagner’s Nibelung saga a la Zambello.

[Below: Bruennhilde (Nina Stemme, left( and Siegfried (Ian Storey, right) both swear an oath on the spear of Hagen (Andrea Silvestrelli, center); edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Whether or not every Zambello detail resonated with the audience (Rheinmaidens using garden trash bags to pick up after the mess the men had made of things) hardly mattered. The final scene proved affecting,  in which Bruennhilde, Gutrune and the Rheinmaidens share the grief of Siegfried’s death and the satisfaction of the Ring finally returned to the place it belongs.

Even an unexpected romance on the side between Hagen and Gutrune, who share a bed to watch late-night TV, proved that moments of light-heartedness can shine through even the destruction of the world’s order (at least the order conceived by the gods who ruled before the Age of Mankind).

“Goetterdaemmerung” is a triumphant experience when it is performed under the leadership of a great conductor (Donald Runnicles), by a first rank symphonic entity (San Francisco Opera Orchestra) and when presented in a theater with brilliant acoustics (the War Memorial Opera House).  Stemme was an absolute phenomenon. Andrea Silvestrelli’s Hagen, Gordon Hawkins’ Alberich, and Melissa Citro’s ditzy Gutrune were notable.

[For my performance reviews, see: Glorious “Goetterdaemmerung”: Nina Stemme Glistens – San Francisco Opera, June 5, 2011 and “Goetterdaemmerung”: Strong Finish to the First Zambello “Ring” – San Francisco Opera, June 19, 2011.]

Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti)

The John Pascoe production of Donizetti’s operatic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s play, was used for “Lucrezia”‘s first appearance ever at the San Francisco Opera. The opera was the vehicle for the return of Renee Fleming, who has been absent from San Francisco operatic productions for over a decade.

The result of a collaboration between Fleming and Pascoe which had evolved over several years of discussion, Pascoe’s conceptualization of “Lucrezia” was originally mounted by the Washington National Opera. Pascoe fine-tuned the story of power struggles between the Duke (from the d’Este family) and Duchess (from the Borgia family) of the Renaissance city of Ferrara. In Pascoe’s hands, details of the plot are clarified, producing a dramatically cohesive performance.

[Below: Lucrezia Borgia (Renee Fleming, above) is shocked to discover that her son Gennaro (Michael Fabiano, lying on steps) was part of a group she had poisoned for revenge; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Strong casting and attractive sets assured stellar performances of an opera that more stage directors (and opera critics) should take seriously. Fleming and company were worth the “enhanced” ticket price (with a 20% surcharge), especially when joined by the solid Alfonso d’Este of basso cantante Vitalij Kowaljow. The astonishing voice of debuting Michael Fabiano heralds the career yet another first class Donizetti tenor. Elizabeth DeShong was an engaging Maffio Orsini.

[For my performance reviews and a commentary, see: Fleming, Fabiano, Frizza Fuel San Francisco Opera’s Flaming, Fulfilling First “Lucrezia Borgia” – September 23, 2011 and A Second Look: “Lucrezia Borgia” at the San Francisco Opera – October 2, 2011 and also “Lucrezia Borgia” – The Dramatic Foundations of Donizetti’s Opera.]

Xerxes (Handel)

Sir Nicholas Hytner’s production of Handel’s most light-hearted opera was imported from London to Houston in 2010 with Susan Graham (Xerxes), David Daniels (Arsamenes), Sonia Prina (Amastris) and Heidi Stober (Atalanta) in four of the principal roles. That quartet was signed to bring the opera to San Francisco, where each principal performed with great distinction, led by San Francisco Opera’s principal guest conductor, Houston Grand Opera’s Patrick Summers.

[Below: a scene from the first act of "Xerxes"'; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Hytner envisioned the opera set in 18th century London, the time of the opera’s premiere, rather than Ancient Greece or Persia. That time was a great period of discovery of both the ancient and the natural world. The British museums and scientific societies collected and displayed historical artifacts, as well as biological and botanical specimens.

In the Hytner production, gray-clad London citizens wander about, examining such artifacts and specimens in their display cases. Paralleling this collective effort of London’s elite at self-improvement and book-learning, the tongue-in-cheek story of the romantic machinations of two sisters in love with one of two brothers and two brothers in love with one of two sisters wends its way to an amiable solution. The fact that one of the brothers is the King of Ancient Persia has virtually nothing at all to do with this opera’s story.

[For my performance review, see: Graham, Daniels, Prina Excel in Elegant, Witty “Xerxes” – San Francisco Opera, October 30, 2011.]

Grade A

Turandot (Puccini)

David Hockney, although best known for his famous paintings, is also the creator of several of the most important operatic productions, themselves works of museum quality, of which two are in the possession of the San Francisco Opera.

A world treasure, the vibrant and inspired “Turandot” is one of the works dating from when Hockney and Costume Designer (and illustrator) Ian Falconer were partners. One admires this show not just for the visual delights of Hockney’s sets and Falconer’s arresting costumes, but for the production’s lighting design and stage movements. All the elements  provide a flow of energy so appropriate to Puccini’s masterpiece.

[Below: the imperial commissioners Ping (Hyung Yun), Pang (Greg Fedderly) and Pong (Daniel Montenegro) attempt to dissuade Calaf, the Unknown Prince (Marco Berti) to leave the kingdom as Calaf's father, Timur (Raymond Aceto) and his slave, Liu (Leah Crocetto), look on; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Nicola Luisotti conducted a vivacious performance, in which the debuting Irene Theorin was a praiseworthy Ice Princess, and Marco Berti an ardent Calaf. The trio of Ping, Pang, and Pong, with their finely choreographed movements, were sung nicely by, respectively, Hyung Yun, Greg Fedderly and Daniel Montenegro. Leah Crocetto’s Liu was affecting. Raymond Aceto’s excellent Timur was luxury casting.

[For my performance reviews, see:Luisotti Leads Superb “Turandot” Cast In David Hockney’s Treasured Production – San Francisco Opera, September 9, 2011 and A Second Look: Luisotti Improvises in “Turandot” Game Delay, then Hits a Grand Slam – San Francisco Opera, September 25, 2011.]

Don Giovanni (Mozart)

In San Francisco Opera’s 2010 season, Conductor Nicola Luisotti added Mozart to the list of operatic composers whose works he has conducted during his tenure as the opera company’s Music Director. His “Nozze di Figaro” was built around an American cast with Lucas Meachem and Ellie Dehn as the Count and Countess Almaviva. In 2011, Luisotti rejoined Meachem (Don Giovanni) and Dehn (Donna Anna) for Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in a new production with an Italian team as stage director and set designer.

[Below: Don Giovanni (Lucas Meachem, below left) instructs Leporello (Marco Vinco, below right) to invite the statue of the Commendatore (Morris Robinson, above) to dinner; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Italian basso Marco Vinco, renown for his buffo roles in Europe, was impressive in his San Francisco Opera debut as Leporello. Americans Shawn Mathey (Don Ottavio), Kate Lindsey (Zerlina) and Ryan Kuster (Masetto) and Italian Serena Farnocchia (Donna Elvira) rounded out a successful Italo-American effort.

[For my performance review, see: Meachem, Vinco, Lead Cast of Imaginatively Staged “Don Giovanni” – San Francisco Opera, October 23, 2011.

Carmen (Bizet)

Another treasured opera production owned by the San Francisco Opera is Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's mounting of Bizet's "Carmen". Luisotti led this most popular of French operas in a rousing performance, in which Kendall Gladen, who was last seen here in her Adler Fellowship days, returned triumphantly to the War Memorial Opera House stage in the title role. Brazilian tenor Thiago Arancam was her Don Jose.

[Below: Don Jose (Thiago Arancam, left) appears to be fastening the restraints of Carmen (Kendall Gladen, center) as Zuniga (Wayne Tigges, right) looks on; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph; courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Stage Director Jose Maria Condemi reworked much of Ponnelle’s stage direction, but Condemi, like Ponnelle, presents ideas that always advance the story. Paolo Szot, fresh from Broadway successes, was Escamillo. Adler Fellow Sara Gartland was the Micaela.

[For my performance review, see: Kendall Gladen, Jose Maria Condemi, Nicola Luisotti Create a Consummate “Carmen” – San Francisco Opera, November 6, 2011.]

Grade B+

Heart of a Soldier (Theofanidis)

Throughout history, one can bet against any opera composed becoming a big and lasting hit and be correct 99 out of a 100 times. Even so, there are talented composers at work today, and it seems possible that among them will come some compositions that will hold their own on the operatic stage.

Christopher Theofanidis’ first large-scale effort at writing an opera for the mainstage of an international company became the third commissioned new opera to have its premiere in San Francisco during the General Directorship of David Gockley, following Glass’ “Appomattox” (2007) and Wallace’s “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” (2008).

“Soldier” is an opera commemorating the heroics of an individual whose sagacity and self-discipline saved almost as people from the Twin Towers as were lost the day of the Towers’ destruction, even though the hero perished in the effort. This opera becomes a monument to him. With accessible music, fast moving action, and an absorbing story, one can expect interest in reviving the opera, particularly for  anniversary dates of 9-11.

[Below: the Twin Towers offices are filled with employees, while Dan (William Burden, front left) and (Melody Moore, on bed, front right) try to obtain information on what is happening; edited image, based on a Cory Weaver photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

In trying to figure out how to grade a performance in which there is no tradition in how to present it, I considered my grades of the two previous San Francisco Opera commissions – my A+ grades for “Appomattox” and “Bonesetter’s Daughter” and concluded, for the reasons stated below, that it should be a full grade lower that the other two.

Although all three operas are episodic, the Glass and Wallace works seemed to me to be more focused around a central theme. In “Appomattox”, Glass’ firmly held (and appropriate) view is that the assassination of Lincoln destroyed the efforts of Generals Grant and Lee in Appomattox Courthouse to create the basis for reconciliation between North and South. Wallace’s opera, whose somewhat autobiographical libretto is by Amy Tan, conjures up familial relationships and events that occurred long ago in China, but that cast a long shadow on the lives in the United States of her mother and herself.

In contrast “Heart of a Soldier” devotes considerable time to the stories of the late hero’s wife and his war-buddy, that, interesting as they might be, seem like they should be split off into separate works or left for the curious to peruse by reading the book on which this opera is based.

Sometimes a libretto can be fixed, to the long term benefit of the opera. Perhaps a reworked opera could be ready for the 15th anniversary of the events of the last hours of the hero’s incredible and inspirational life. But even with those reservations, the new opera was a theatrically valid, inspiring performance.

[Below: For my performance review, see: Hampson’s Heroic “Heart of a Soldier” at the War Memorial – San Francisco Opera, September 10, 2011.]

For last year’s scorecard, and hyperlinks to the previous years, see:  San Francisco Opera’s Calendar Year 2010 – Straight “A” Average Trending Higher.

For those who wish to comment on this post, or any other item on this website, please contact me at operawarhorses@yahoo.com.

[Conductor Robert Heger; resized image, based on a historical photograph.]

But Robert Heger was a wonderful conductor, one of those fiery craftsmen of the pit who tend to serve more as a “first conductor” at a big-name opera house than “general music director” – and if German or Austrian spend most of their career in German-speaking countries; and don’t make as many Beethoven symphony recordings as Bruno Walter or Toscanini.

Think also of the muscular/poetical Rudolf Moralt – oh, the anguished brass and those palpitating flutes early on in his 1948 Parsifal – and there’s Arthur Rother, a great favorite of the baritone Fischer-Dieskau, or the underrated and rather Leo Blech-like Horst Stein, author of the most lyrical Richard Strauss Elektra in my experience. Or the near-phantom Heinrich Steiner, whose subtle and rather Harnoncourtian Freischuetz overture “live” from Berlin in ’36 is world class.

And there’s that candidate for frequent contempt the Met administrator/conductor Paul Breisach whose 1943 Don Giovanni of Mozart contains passages I’ve never heard better: the delicacy and pathos of the Anna-Ottavio duet early in the first act would be the opening evidence in my case for the defense.

I should also mention Bernard Haitink’s teacher Ferdinand Leitner, a g.m.d. at Stuttgart and Zurich to be sure but underrated in view of how mellifluous and undulant  a Wagnerian evening he could produce with his Karl Muck-trained baton. And how many Karajan-Solti-Bernstein groupies know the name Joseph Keilberth? The great Furtwaengler himself considered him the best of his junior colleagues because he understood the art of climax so well.

But back to the subject of this article. Just in from Hamburg in 1965, my wife and I were amazed in the little lobby of the fabled Sacher Hotel behind Vienna’s Staatsoper to see that the evening’s performance, Der Fliegende Hollander, would be conducted by none other than Prof. Robert Heger. Ah, so he wasn’t a mirage, that not-a-Walter-or-Toscanini who had conducted those gemuetlich chunks of Rosenkavalier for a cumbersome 13-disc RCA album thirty-two years before!

[Below: Conductor Robert Heger, preparing the 1933 recording of "Der Rosenkavalier" with Lotte Lehmann, Maria Olczewska, and Elizabeth Schumann.]

Alas, we had other plans for the evening (crepes, I think, at the Balkan Grill), for which I now kick myself: to have seen Heger at his impressive exercise would have been something to tell one’s grandkids.

Listening again to the ’33 Rosenkavalier after many a Straussian moon I couldn’t fail to noitice the mixture of wistfulness and sexuality in the prelude – but surely you know about the famous “orgasm” in the horns four bars after #4, whoopwhoop etc., it took the music director of the Budapest Opera to explain it to me! Then there’s the sweet-soft atmosphere as the curtain rises, with that nasty old real world held totally at bay, and Heger’s perfection of leggiero in the breakfast music.

A very Viennese performance in short, recorded in that very town, but for all its laidbackness never rhythmically sloppy.

Substantial “live” performances of Wagner led by Heger  have surfaced over the years, much to his credit. The 1943 Berlin Tristan is a darting, smoldering performance urgent to the point of what might be called controlled frantic.The scene in the first act wherein Tristan, backed by Kurvenal, tells Brangaene he’s too busy keeping the ship on course to deal with other matters (i.e.: of emotion), well, that scene comes on like an angry family drama, an energetic soap opera if you will.

Heger opens the opera with a fetching “feminine attack,” a velvety vroom of sound, trembling. There follows a twelve-and-a-half-minute prelude slow, secretive, helpless with amorous frustration, topped with a climax more rhetorical than carnal. By the way, the broadcasting studio in wartime Berlin is so lean and sensitive we can hear the rustle of music pages being turned. And when the singers come on final consonants are ceremoniously spat out in what amounts to a heaven of perfect enunciation.

The sizzle and echt-Viennese vibrance of that city’s Philharmoniker violins fairly crinkling with a sweetness just short of cloying, these make an Immolation Scene from Heger’s 1933 Goetterdaemmerung across the street from Madame Sacher’s hostelry another treasurable experience. Speaking of 30s inter-war Vienna, the Philharmonic strings may have sounded on that distant evening willowy and glamorous and devil-may-care as can be, but according to that inimitable historian Richard Cobb the city was in bad shape: “it had a sort of dusty, yellowish, run-down feeling about it.” Well, come to think of it crinkly strings and dusty baroque may go together after all …..

Strauss. Wagner. Yes of course. In fact, Heger’s Wagner with its all- there personality seems as trade markable in the twenty-first century as, say, Sir Thomas Beecham’s – I’ve just discovered Sir Thomas’ Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, so aureoled and hyper-intimate, just short of unctuous. But Heger was quite a Puccinian as well. A 1954 Vienna Radio Manon Lescaut stands out for its long and supple line, precision of articulation, and, for this is a performance as emotional as craftsmanly, its quick striking of notes plaintive as well as jolly.

The Intermezzo is milked to a turn, gracefully, its heavy regretful steps striking a bull’s-eye at our willing heart-strings.

And a postscript: Just found, the ’51 Munich Opera recording of Tannhaeuser conducted by Heger with a characteristically blazing baton. The overture is positively visceral in its gut-kicking intensity. A springy start, then huge warmth in the cellos a couple of eight bar clauses along, a wonderful crescendo of compassion to follow, then a uniquely lengthened upbeat to “a-hem” so to speak the amen of the pilgrims’ procession.

The succeeding allegro has a feverish sensual abandon: never has this music been more aroused, absolutely kicking off its trousers without care for where they might land. In the final minutes sinful strings buzz hysterically around the hear-no-evil see-no-evil brass. The opera in a nutshell. And imagine: at the very end Heger manages the rare feat of de-abrupting Wagner’s Procrustean final cadence. Big bangs musn’t be awkward!

Now I’d like to give you another postscipt re Paul Breisach ….

Critics tended to type him as a routinier because he wasn’t a recording “star” like his colleagues Walter, Szell, Reiner, Busch, Beecham. But Astrid Varnay the great Wagnerian soprano-turned-mezzo regarded him highly. I took the trouble the other day to listen to a Met broadcast of Tannhaeuser I hadn’t heard since I was a middle school brat checking in on Milton Cross and the gang at 39th and Broadway before hopping a San Francisco cable car to go to the Saturday afternoon movies. Breisach was in the pit and heavens, there emerged from my Norelco speakers a Tannhaeuser conducted with infinitely more flair than the usual downgradings in the press had suggested.

Interesting in the overture how much pain I heard in the haunting cello passage at bar 17 (don’t worry, you can’t miss it), this being promptly transformed into anger as the pilgrims’ procession sounds – Tannhaeuser will of course be missing from its trudging complement later in the opera, his bid for forgiveness in Rome having been unsuccessful as co-habiting with Venus, Improper Woman No. 1, is a very Big no-no. But Breisach’s vivid third act prelude shows Tannhaeuser’s defiance knocked to pieces in great fanfares suggesting a papal Superego lording it totally over Tannhaeuser’s roving Id.

Also among Breisach’s Met broadcasts of the 40s there’s an Aida in which he takes wrap-up-the-action ensembles in several scenes and delivers them purring along in strongly profiled, confidently relaxed tempos a bit slower than listeners might be used to. Impressive!

Alas poor Breisach, butt of many scribes, even yours truly as an under-informed junior critic. I remember seeing him one autumn day outside the stage door in San Francisco looking very natty in a gabardine suit as he waited for a taxi. Two months later he was dead in New York, aged only 56.

Please visit Arthur’s e-book on the styles of the great old conductors, at morethanthenotes dot com.

Each year, I invite readers to join me in a dialogue (via my e-mail address, which is operawarhorses@yahoo.com). The responses have been generous in their words of support for the material covered on this website.

However, I did receive a response from a detractor, who is an opera reviewer for an electronic media site with which I had had no previous (or subsequent) familiarity. The reviewer objected to my high letter grades for the San Francisco Opera performances of three of the ten operas offered in the calendar year 2010.

Since for this sixth year of David Gockley’s General Directorship, and I have reviewed and at year’s end awarded letter grades to at least one performance of each opera mounted during the previous five calendar years, I plan to do so again. (When you start doing something like this, you discover that people expect you to keep doing it. As I have mentioned before, I do it only for the San Francisco Opera, because that is the only company whose every production over the past six years I have attended and reviewed at least once.)

*****

[Below: Romeo (Vittorio Grigolo, above) and Juliet (Nino Machiadze, below) spend a night of love before Romeo's banishment; edited image, based on a Robert Millard photograph, courtesy of the Los Angeles Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Vittorio Grigolo, Nino Machaidze Sublime in Ian Judge’s Romantic, Erotic “Romeo et Juliette” – Los Angeles Opera, November 9, 2011.]

*****

I thought it would be useful to review my e-mail correspondent’s critique of the letter grades I assigned to San Francisco Opera’s productions in 2010, before I post my on grades on the 10 opera productions performed on the San Francisco Opera mainstage in 2011.

This was the communication: “I cannot fathom how you deemed all of those productions to be of such high caliber. Faust, Aida and Werther all get As? Preposterous. It makes you look like a shill for the company.“

I would imagine a reviewer is supposed to ignore such comments, but, on reflection, it does seem that some of his points do warrant further discussion. My first reaction was to wonder why a person who holds himself out as an opera critic would feel it preposterous that another reviewer  recognizes the San Francisco Opera, with its world famous reputation, as producing “high caliber” performances of Gounod’s “Faust”, Verdi’s “Aida” and Massenet’s “Werther”. In fact, if you can’t get high caliber performances of these standard repertory works at the San Francisco Opera, where do you go? Chicago? London? Paris? Berlin?

If one reads the criteria on which my grades are based, they are quite specific that an “A” means that I judge the performance, production and cast as one that is consistent in quality with with what one should expect at the first rank opera houses of the world, such as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, the Opera National de Paris, or the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

I certainly am not arguing that it is impossible for the San Francisco Opera to fail, and “bad reviews” from me of San Francisco Opera productions exist on this website, although I am pleased to note that the virtually everything I disliked intensely was associated in one way or another with the previous management.

*****

[Below: Count Octavian (Anke Vondung, right) has presented a rose made of silver to Sophie (Patrizia Ciofi, left); edited image, based on a Ken Howard photograph, courtesy of the San Diego Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: San Diego’s Solo Celebration of Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier” Centennial – April 3, 2011.]

*****

My correspondent did not state why he did not like the “Faust”, “Aida” and “Werther”, but sent me the grades of yet another reviewer, also one with whom I was unfamiliar, whose wide ranging grades for the season averaged out to a C. But, as I state each year, my published criteria neither require me nor allow me to grade on a curve. A low grade would mean that something has gone terribly wrong. If it were the case that a significant number of the productions were going awry, it wouldn’t be just myself who was taking notice of that fact.

In the case of the “Faust”, I reviewed Lyric Opera’s Perdziola production seen in San Francisco four separate times, including performances at Lyric Opera and San Diego Opera. All four of my reviews can be accessed here. The two San Francisco Opera reviews Racette Ravishing, Relyea Riveting in San Francisco “Faust” – June 5, 2010, and also, A Second Look: A Visually, Aurally Praiseworthy “Faust” at San Francisco Opera – June 20, 2010, are the most relevant, although my reviews of the sets and production used in the other cities are offered in evidence as well:  Lyric Opera Revives Inventive Corsaro-Perdziola “Faust”: Chicago November 3, 2009 and Costello, Perez, Grimsley and Mulligan Brilliant in Spectacularly Staged “Faust” – San Diego Opera, April 23, 2011.

In the case of the “Aida”, see Brilliant Cast, Colorful Production, Luisotti’s Masterful Conducting Enliven San Francisco “Aida” – September 19, 2010 and in the case of the “Werther”, see: “Werther” Re-invented, Yet Again – Francisco Negrin’s New Production at San Francisco Opera, September 15, 2010.

Opera performance is a complicated endeavor, both for the performers and the audience. At most times the senses of each audience member are simultaneously bombarded with sight and sound images from the orchestra, chorus, opera principals and comprimario artists, in which story-telling, and dramatic interactions between characters is occurring. Such elements as the lighting also affect the operatic experience.

Additionally, during this whole process, some audience members bring to the theater, their long memories of past live performances, and/or their familiarity with studio recordings or DVDs or YouTube experiences. As well, every member of the audience sits in a unique part of the auditorium.

There is simply no objective way of grading a performance that could possibly satisfy everyone, even if it were designed for the most sophisticated opera goers. The best that one can do is for the reviewer to propose a set of criteria for judging whether a performance is very, very good or very, very bad or something in between. Not that many critics, alas, take that step, but the dicourse about the performance may be clearer.

For an example, the reader of a review should know beforehand if the reviewer believes that a good performance requires that the offering be a contemporary opera written in a serial, twelve-tone scale and mounted in a surrealistic avant-garde production.  Then the reader will better understand why that reviewer would then conclude that the San Francisco Opera – by those criteria – performed dismally in 2011, and the whole season, therefore, must be regarded as a failure.

*****

[Below: Annie Oakley (Deborah Voigt) is finally alone with the man she loves, Frank Butler (Rod Gilfry); edited image, based on a Julieta Cervantes photograph, courtesy of the Glimmerglass Opera.]

[For my performance review, see: Deborah Voigt, Rod Gilfry Romp in Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” – Glimmerglass Festival, August 12, 2011.]

*****

Interestingly, the three operas whose productions offended my e-mail correspondent lead me into another point that I would wish to make before posting the 2011 San Francisco Opera grades. All three operas have well-established performance traditions. In the case of “Faust”, I have reviewed several productions on the website, in Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, San Diego and Santa Fe. The San Francisco Opera “Werther” was an imaginative production, with a surreality that I found immensely insightful, yet relevant to both Goethe’s original novella and to Massenet’s treatment of the story.

There was lots to chat about in the reviews based on experiences with the operas over a long period of time. One shouldn’t be reviewing (I don’t think) whether one likes or approves of “Aida”. One should be discussing whether this is a good performance of “Aida” – well sung, well staged, and, if staged non-traditionally, whether the departure from tradition works, and yields new insights into the opera.

But there is another kind of performance review – the first impressions that come from a world premiere. Since there is no performance tradition, one must approach it in a different way, especially when grading it as I have promised to do. Thus, in the case of Theofanides’ “Heart of a Soldier”, I have chosen to approach the grade by considering that opera in relationship to the other San Francisco Opera world premieres that I have graded – Glass’ 2007 “Appomattox” and Wallace’s 2008 “The Bonesetter’s Daugher”.

The grade sheets will be posted before too long. In the meantime, please take advantage of my invitation to share your opinions with me.

For those who wish to comment on this post, or any other item on this website, please contact me at operawarhorses@yahoo.com.

The fifth opera would have been Verdi’s “Nabucco”, starring Cornell MacNeil in the title role, with Giuseppe Zampieri as Ismaele, Margarethe Bence as Fenena and Janis Martin as Anna. A photograph of that cast appears below.

[Below: a photograph of the cast for the Thursday night performance of Nabucco, with, from left Ismaele (Giuseppe Zampieri), Abigaille (Lucille Udovick), Nabucco (Cornell MacNeil), Anna (Janis Martin), Zaccaria (Giorgio Tozzi) and Fenena (Margarethe Bence); resized image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

But I saw the final Monday night (a “non-subscription” performance, added to meet the demand for tickets) in which Ettore Bastianini was Nabucco and Renato Cioni was Ismaele. Although Bence was supposed to have been the Fenena, circumstances required a cast change. There being no cover for Fenena, Janis Martin, the Anna, was enlisted into service, as will be described below.

An Italian Tribute with an Italo-American Cast

The 1961 “Nabucco” was a new production (revived in 1964 with Tito Gobbi and in 1970 with Cornell MacNeil). San Francisco Opera Historian Arthur Bloomfield illuminates the production’s background: “[It] was an unusally festive event, celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italy’s unification being a central element of the evening.”

Of the production itself Bloomfield noted that “Nabucco was unveiled in a near-Cinemascopic production by Andreas Nomikos which mixed spaciousness (a diagonal shaft of columns backing off toward the eye here, a painted backdrop path flowing into infinity there) with the immediacy that came from a then-novel use of a raked stage . . . [Stage director Paul] Hager had a field day, tumbling terrified Hebrews from the wings onto the sloping temple floor as the first act battle spilled to the stage.”

In retrospect, one notes that this celebration of Italian unification was comprised in the earlier performances by an American-born cast for the principal roles, excepting only the Ismaele or Giuseppe Zampieri. MacNeil (Nabucco), Udovick (Abigaille), Tozzi (Ismaele) and Bence (Fenena) were all American-born. In this, the final performance, the presence of Bastianini and Renato Cioni (replacing MacNeil and Zampieri) doubled the Italian-b0rn principals, but the final tally  still had a majority of American artists in the five principal roles.

Ettore Bastianini’s Nabucco

The San Francisco Opera, whose founding general director was the Italian conductor Gaetano Merola, and whose second general director was the Austrian emigre Kurt Herbert Adler, was at the forefront of promoting reconciliation between the artists and audiences of nations in the postwar era.

Thus, I was among the first American audiences to see such Italian baritones as Giuseppe Taddei and Tito Gobbi, and had only a few days before seen, for the first time, the great baritone Ettore Bastianini. The operatic careers of both Taddei and Bastianini were sidetracked as they were conscripted into the Italian army and air force respectively, and, even though Gobbi was able to perform in Italian houses during the war years, his international career had to await the war’s end.

As I have reported, I saw Bastianini the two times in 1961, including his magnificent Renato (see 50 Year Anniversaries: Brouwenstijn, Bastianini, Zampieri in “Ballo in Maschera” – San Francisco Opera, October 12, 1961), and then, singing with Renata Tebaldi, twice again in 1965, both times as Carlo Gerard in Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier”.

[Below: The young Italian baritone Ettore Bastianini; resized image from ettorebastianini.com.]

I’m usually good on remembering details, but a half century later, I can’t recollect exactly why I changed from the Thursday night to Monday night “Nabucco” (perhaps for reasons related to my college work), although I do recall that my friend, the elderly doorman, Mr Fisher, (whom I mentioned in my feature on the 1961 Leontyne Price “Butterfly”) sat in the seat next to me for that Monday performance.

Later events showed switching the nights was the right choice. Bastianini, singing the title role at age 39, but only once in San Francisco, would die of throat cancer only six years later. (I was able to see MacNeil perform the role several years later.)

Lucille Udovick’s Abigaille

The 31-year Abigaille was Colorado-born Lucille Udovick, most of whose career was based in Europe. Afflicted with a spinal problem that shortened her career, she took on roles requiring a voice of power and in the case of Abigaille, coloratura agility as well.

Her only other role in San Francisco was the title role in the 1961 production of Puccini’s “Turandot” (which was not on my series). I believe she was an under-appreciated artist, aspiring to sing roles that others regarded as “voice-killers” and doing a creditable job of it.

[Below: Colorado soprano Lucille Udovick as Abigaille; resized image, based on a photograph, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.]

Renato Cioni’s Ismaele

In the five seasons I had been attending Italian operas performed by the San Francisco Opera, I had seen Italian tenors at the Fox Theater in San Diego (Giuseppe Campora as Pinkerton in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Mario Del Monaco in the title role of Verdi’s “Otello”) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles (Roberto Turrini as Gabriele Adorno in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” and Gianni Raimondi as Edgardo in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”) and at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco (Giuseppe Zampieri, both as Gabriele Adorno and as Riccardo in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera”).

On this Monday night, there was a cast change that permitted me to see one of the younger Italian tenors of the postwar era, the 32 year old Renato Cioni. He was a tenor associated with several of the contemporary superstars, including Maria Callas. I myself was to see him perform Rodolfo (with Victoria de los Angeles as Mimi) in my first live performance of Puccini’s “La Boheme” and, subsequently Rodolfo to Renata Tebaldi’s Mimi.

[Below: Renato Cioni as Rodolfo and Renata Tebaldi as Mimi; resized image, based on a historic photograph.]

Cioni was also Elvino to Joan Sutherland’s Amina in my first performance of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula”, and Enzo to Leyla Gencer’s Gioconda in my first performance of Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda”, and Ernani to Leontyne Price’s Leonora in my first performance of Verdi’s “Ernani”.

Cioni remained San Francisco Opera’s most important Italian-born tenor until 1967, when another tenor from Italy, Luciano Pavarotti, six years Cioni’s junior, took San Francisco by storm. Both tenors sang in 1967 and 1968, but from 1969 through 1981, the end of the Kurt Herbert Adler era, Pavarotti would reign as the Italian-born tenor at the San Francisco Opera.

Giorgio Tozzi’s Zaccaria

The Chicago basso, Giorgio Tozzi, whom I had also seen perform the roles of Fiesco Grimaldi in Italian (see 50 Year Anniversaries: “Simon Boccanegra” with Tito Gobbi, Giorgio Tozzi – October 6, 1960) and Tsar Boris in English (see 50 Year Anniversaries: An American “Boris Godunov” Starring Tozzi and Dalis – San Francisco Opera, September 21, 1961), returned to the Verdian basso cantante repertory as the Hebrew prophet Zaccaria.

It was still regarded as sufficiently unusual for an American basso to be considered an international calibre opera star that RCA Victor Records’ publicity department renamed George Tozzi as Giorgio. But Tozzi, both as artist and teacher, did a large part in establishing that high reputation that so many American bass-baritones and basso cantantes have had (and still have) in the opera houses of the world.

[Below: Illinois basso Giorgio Tozzi; resized image, based on a promotional photograph.]

Janis Martin’s Fenena

According to Arthur Bloomfield’s history, Janis Martin received the request Friday night, October 20th, to learn the part of Fenena in order to perform it the evening of October 23rd. (Some accounts have an even shorter duration.) General Director Adler enlisted San Francisco Opera’s pre-eminent assistant to the artists, Otto Guth (soon to become a favorite of Pavarotti, who worked with Guth for so many of his role debuts).

As I entered the opera house, the buzz about the 22-year old Martin learning an entire role in little more than a day was a main topic of conversation, and a warmly sympathetic audience (and a well-cued prompter) was in her corner. It was a proper “star is born” triumph.

Martin continued to have a full plate of smaller comprimario, some little more than a walk-on, each season through 1964 (in which “Nabucco” was revived for Gobbi, with Martin cast, from the earliest stages, as Fenena). Two years after that, Martin returned to San Francisco Opera in major mezzo-soprano roles, including Venus in “Tannhauser” with Jess Thomas and Regine Crespin. Then as her voice matured, she tackled the dramatic soprano repertory, ultimately singing all three Bruennhildes in one of the 1990 cycles of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen”.

[Below: California mezzo-soprano Janis Martin; edited image, based on a promotional photograph.]

Francesco Molinari-Pradelli was the Conductor. Gwen Curatilo replaced Janis Martin in the small role of Anna.

Even though I never saw Udovick again, and Bastinini only twice more in 1965, I saw Cioni in several major roles through 1968. Tozzi performed at San Francisco Opera through the 1978 season (memorably performing Baron Scarpia to Magda Olivero’s Tosca), and Janis Martin was an important presence in the San Francisco Opera cast lists in many seasons through 1990.

It was a thrilling end to a wonderful six-opera sampler of the 1961 season of the San Francisco Opera.