L'Elisir d'Amore, Merola, August 7 2010

San Francisco Opera's Merola program presented Donizetti's The Elixir of Love on four consecutive evenings at the Cowell Theater at Ft. Mason. One cast performed on Thursday and Saturday and another cast performed on Friday and Sunday. As principals, we heard singers whom we had not heard at the summer concert three weeks ago; the summer concert singers formed the chorus.

The staging was a combination of “local color” and already-tired concept. In the self-referential vein described in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the opera was presented as though it were a rehearsal of The Elixir of Love at Ft. Mason, with a director's chair for Adina, a closet full of stage props (Nemorino must be the props boy), and a stage and proscenium set well back from the edge of the actual stage. I saw the same idea some months ago in a Met HD broadcast of La Sonnambula. It didn't work then and it didn't work now. But this time the concept didn't intrude excessively on the action; for the most part it was as if the action took place in front of whatever the set happened to be. One interesting twist was that while the score calls for Adina to be reading the legend of Tristan and Isolde, here Adina carried around the score of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

The role of Adina was sung by Nadine Sierra, whom I wouldn't mind seeing again. It took her a while to get up to speed, but once there she displayed a lovely voice fully capable of handling the intricacies of the part. Daniel Montenegro as Nemorino, Thomas Florio as Dulcamara, and Benjamin Covey as Belcore were not as impressive. Hye Jung Lee (Gianetta) had a squeaky little voice that did not appeal. As mentioned earlier, several fine singers from the summer concert performed in the chorus. I listened hard to try to pick out Kevin Thompson's superb bass, but was unable to do so.

We signed up for front row seats, as is our wont, and got more than we bargained for. The Cowell Theater does not have an official orchestra pit; they removed the seats in rows A and B and put the musicians there. In particular, the oboist (Patricia Mitchell?) sat right next to the folded-up seats of row C, so we in row D were close enough that we could easily have reached out and touched her. (But we did have a nice conversation.) I feared that the aural perspective might be pretty strange, but instead I got a feel for what the sound must be like on the conductor's podium: music to the left, music to the right, super-stereo. And they did not overwhelm the singers. I was also able to make a brief acquaintance with the bassoonist Rufus David Olivier, son of San Francisco Opera's principal bassoonist Rufus Olivier, whom I know slightly through some bassoon-playing friends. (RDO is also a member of the SF Opera orchestra.) His introduction to the big aria, Una furtiva lagrima, was nicely done.

It was not only summer in San Francisco, it was summer in San Francisco on the waterfront at 8pm. The thermometer in the car read 57° when we left the car to go to the theater, and it was 57° when we returned. Brrrrr!