Madama Butterfly, Opera San Jose, Feb. 23 2014

Back to San Jose a week later to see the other cast than the one we saw on Feb. 16: 

Cio-Cio-san: Jennifer Forni
Suzuki: Nicole Birkland
BF Pinkerton: Christopher Bengochea    
Sharpless: Evan Brummel
Goro: Robert Norman
Commissioner: Silas Elash
The Bonze: Matthew Anchel
Prince Yamadori: Torlef Borsting
Kate Pinkerton: Carin Gilfry
Trouble: Owen Neuendorffer
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Stage director: Brad Dalton

Forni sang the role of Butterfly very very well, but in some indefinable way lacked the passion that López had brought to the role a week earlier. A beta.

Madama Butterfly, Opera San Jose, Feb. 16 2014

When you get into the story of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, you can find a great amount of very interesting history. The opera is about a young Japanese woman who rents herself out as a “temporary wife” to an American sailor for a few months. The tragedy is that when he leaves, he tells Butterfly that he will return when the robins nest again. But when he does return, 3 years later, it’s with his “real” American wife. The story is based on the play Madame Butterfly by David Belasco, which was based on the novella Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long, which was in its turn informed by the novel Madame Chrysantheme by Pierre Loti. In each case, the story concerns a sailor, a young woman in Nagasaki, and a temporary marriage. This practice can be traced as far back as 1597, when Francesco Carletti observed it in Nagasaki, and later reported on it in his book My Voyage Around the World.

The set for Madama Butterfly, as presented by Opera San Jose, consisted largely of a shiny rectangular black platform raised a few inches above the stage, with half a dozen narrow silver concentric rectangles drawn near its edges. In front, like a step preceding a porch, was a similar shiny black rectangle, with a one-foot-by-twenty area next to the main platform, filled with rocks. The black back wall was actually a picture window of sorts, with sliding walls that could be drawn aside to reveal the stripes of an American flag, a starry sky, an abstract design, and other directorial choices. The little house on Higashi Hill was quite simple, just three shoji screens that could be raised and lowered as needed, plus a little bit of furniture.

Our cast: 
Cio-Cio-san: Cecilia Violetta López
Suzuki: Lisa Chavez
BF Pinkerton: James Callon
Sharpless: Zachary Altman
Goro: Michael Mendelsohn
Commissioner: Silas Elash
The Bonze: Matthew Anchel
Prince Yamadori: Torlef Borsting
Kate Pinkerton: Carin Gilfry
Trouble: Sammy Tittle
Conductor: David Rohrbaugh
Stage director: Brad Dalton

This was one of the most moving Butterflys that I have seen. According to a person who is in a position to know, the Butterfly in the other cast has a bigger voice, but López emotes more—and she certainly did. We were all drained at the end. David Rohrbaugh’s conducting was, as always, exemplary; we’ll miss him when he retires at the end of this run. For some reason one of the company’s finest basses ever, Silas Elash, was assigned the tiny role of Commissioner rather than the Bonze. The part of the Bonze isn’t much larger, but Anchel could barely be heard. Overall, a very strong beta, nearly an alpha.

Rusalka, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Feb. 8 2014

Rusalka is the ninth of Dvorak’s ten operas, and frankly the only one of those that you are ever likely to see. Its plot has a strong similarity to that of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson, in which a water creature gives up the power of speech in order to consort with a human prince, but ultimately the prince marries someone else. Rusalka is one of these one-hit wonders, known mainly for the “Song to the Moon” aria in Act 1, which Renee Fleming made famous.

Act 1 was a dimly-lit woodland scene surrounding a small pond in which the water nymph Rusalka and her father the Water Gnome live. Looming over the pond is the tall stump of a dead tree; Rusalka climbed to the top of the stump to sing her Song to the Moon. Near the front of the stage and to the right was the cave that served as the home of Jezibaba, the witch who will brew the potion that will turn Rusalka into a (mute) human.  Act 2 was similarly dimly lit, with the windows and balcony of the main floor of the Prince’s mansion visible at the rear of the stage, and a curving staircase descending to stage level. In front of the mansion was a smaller pond with a big rock in the middle, serving as a home away from home for the Water Gnome. Act 3 was back at the pond of Act 1.

Our cast:
Rusalka: Renee Fleming
Water Gnome: John Relyea
Jezibaba: Dolora Zajick
Prince: Piotr Beczala
Foreign Princess: Emily Magee
Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Production: Otto Schenk

That’s a lot of star power to lavish on a rarely-performed opera, but I will venture that it was produced at the request of Renee Fleming. There was fine singing from all of the principals, but the one who really stood out was a singer previously unknown to me, Emily Magee. “Where did she come from?” No idea, but I hope to be able to hear more of her. The star power balanced the uninvolving story and (aside from the Song to the Moon) rather ordinary music; a beta.

The Barber of Seville, San Francisco Opera, Dec. 1 2013

San Francisco Opera presented 11 performances of The Barber of Seville in the space of 19 days. That’s a very ambitious schedule for a single cast, so in a fashion similar to Opera San Jose, the principal roles were shared by two singers. Having reported earlier on another performance, no repetition of the staging is needed.

Our cast:
Figaro: Lucas Meachem
Almviva: Javier Camarena
Rosina: Isabel Leonard
Doctor Bartolo: Alessandro Corbelli
Don Basilio: Andrea Silvestrelli
Berta: Catherine Cook
Fiorello: Ao Li
Conductor: Giuseppe Finzi
Director: Emilio Sagi

The different cast, even with a few bigger names, didn’t make much of a difference. Still a gamma.

Hansel and Gretel, Opera San Jose, Nov. 26 2013

Back in San Jose to see Hansel and Gretel  with the other cast than the one seen two days earlier:

Hansel: Kindra Scharich
Gretel: Sara Gartland
Mother: Buffy Baggott
Father: Krassen Karagiozov
Sandman: Antonia Tamer
Dew Fairy: Christine Capsuto
Witch: James Callon
Mother Nature: Rita Elizabeth Horiguchi
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas

Sara Gartland, a former Adler Fellow with San Francisco Opera, distinguished herself as Gretel. I usually think of witches as thin; Marc Schreiner in the other cast certainly looked the part. James Callon is not thin but he adapted well to the role—even holding his hand over his “cleavage” for his curtain-call bows. A beta.

Hansel and Gretel, Opera San Jose, Nov. 24 2013

According to operabase.com, Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel is the most-performed opera by a German composer. (Remember that Mozart and Johann Strauss are Austrian. Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman takes second place among operas by German composers.) This position on the operatic hit parade may be due to the fact that Germany is responsible for 30% of all recorded performances, and that Hansel and Gretel at Christmas in Germany is the moral equivalent of The Nutcracker ballet in the US.

Opera San Jose last presented Hansel and Gretel in the Montgomery Theater in 1986, just before I started attending. This production was in the much larger California Theatre. The sets were charming. In Act 1, we saw just one wall, the back wall, of Hansel and Gretel’s home, with a small raised platform for a floor. Furniture (a bunk bed and a table and chairs) was built from natural-looking branches that a woodcutter might have found in the forest and stripped of their bark. The forest outside the house was represented by a series of flat drops on the left and right sides of the stage, each drop painted to look like a tree, darker trees in front and lighter-colored in the rear. The effect was like a long tree-tunnel, and conveyed just a bit of a sense of the foreboding forest. For Act 2, the house was removed, leaving just the tree-tunnel. The 14 angels called for in the score were children dressed in dark gowns and accompanied by the figure of Mother Nature in a lovely green gown. For Act 3, the witch’s gingerbread house was another flat dropped onto the stage, with candy canes and frosting, and two rows of child-size gingerbread men. The staging challenge of having the witch fly around the stage on her broom was met by having the witch ride around the stage on her Segway scooter, which brought the expected chuckles from the audience. Another highlight was the oven that the witch tried to get Gretel to climb into. The basic concept came from a species of deep sea fish with lots of prominent teeth. The witch’s oven looked like a giant head mostly given over to tremendously long black teeth, and two glowing eyes on top; these eyes went dead when the oven blew up after the witch had been tricked into it and Gretel shut the oven door (the teeth) on her.

Our cast:
Hansel: Lisa Chavez
Gretel: Cecilia Violetta Lopez
Mother: Nicole Birkland
Father: Evan Brummel
Sandman: Chloe Smart
Dew Fairy: Christine Capsuto
Witch: Marc Schreiner
Mother Nature: Rita Elizabeth Horiguchi
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas (yes, the former resident artist)

You may have heard of “pants roles,” in which a woman, typically a mezzoo-soprano, sings the role of a young man such as Cherubino, Octavian, or Prince Orlofsky. Well, here we have a “skirt role,” in which a man sings a woman’s part, the witch. Schreiner was very effective in this role. Horiguchi was beatific as Mother Nature, a non-singing role not actually in the score but created for this production by the director. The remainder sang well, though the musical interest in this opera lies mainly in the orchestra. Humperdinck was a disciple of Richard Wagner, and made extensive use of the leitmotif concept. A worthwhile afternoon, but barely a beta.

Die Walküre, Verismo Opera, Nov. 23 2013

I have heard it alleged that there are 30 opera companies in the Bay Area, most of which I am unfamiliar with. I found out about Verismo Opera only because my Mohs surgeon at Kaiser mentioned that she has sung in the chorus in their productions of La Traviata and Il Trovatore. So I looked up their web site, www.verismoopera.org, to find out a bit more. Well, what do you know? This little opera company is going to perform a very long, very big, utterly magnificent opera with an orchestra 1/5 the size of what it should be, in a little theater seating only 160 people, in the little town of Vallejo, not exactly known as a center of culture. My surgeon even told me that my expectations shouldn’t be very high. But since I love Die Walküre (the first opera that I ever saw that made an impression on me), I decided to give it a try.

The set met my expectations of a performance in a theater seating 160, with an orchestra of 20, including a piano. At the front of the stage was a rather well-done construction of a rude table and chairs such as you would expect Hunding to possess, and of course there was an ash tree. In back there was a wall with living space behind it (an open doorway hung with beads led to Hunding and Sieglinde’s bedroom); to the right there was the entrance door, on which Siegmund knocked before entering instead of just barging in as he usually does. On the right side of the set was a small stairway up to the second level. There was nothing on the second level, but it was a space on which characters could walk, where Siegmund could bed down for the night, where Hunding and Siegmund could fight at the end of Act 2, and where Valkyries could gather.

There was some unusual stage business, thanks to the director. Most striking was the appearance of Hunding and Sieglinde’s 10-year-old daughter, who greeted her daddy when he came home from the fight to which he had been summoned. She also witnessed Siegmund and Sieglinde’s escape at the end of Act 1, and presumably reported it to her father, who then appealed to Fricka as the goddess of marriage. An interesting twist, not out of place. What was out of place was when Sieglinde grabbed Nothung after Siegmund had pulled it from the tree and went around smashing things in the hut with it. There was a supernumerary who followed Fricka around, carrying a red box about the size of a cigar box. After Hunding killed Siegmund, the super opened the box and showed its contents to Fricka, who appeared to be satisfied. We the audience never learned the significance of the box.

Nearly all of the cast were completely unknown to me. Richard Goodman, founder of Berkeley Opera, sang Wotan in the other cast, but I was unable to attend his performances.
Siegmund: Mark Lin
Sieglinde: Jennifer Rogers
Hunding: Ben Brady
Wotan: Richard Mix
Brünnhilde: Leslie Schipa
Fricka: Cary Ann Rosko
Gerhilde: Cristin Williams
Helmwige: Kyoko Shimozaki
Waltraute: Elinor Gates
Schwertleite: Lindarae Polaha
Ortlinde: Hannah Stephens
Siegrune: Joanne Bogart
Grimgerde: JoAnn Close
Rossweisse: Lori Rogala
Conductor: Michael Shahani
Director: Richard Bogart

This performance was one of the most unusual things I have ever seen. The sets were primitive. The singing was so-so. Siegmund sounded more like a baritone than a tenor. There were fewer than the expected number of horn flubs, but the string section seemed to have a hard time keeping in tune with each other. Nevertheless, something magic happened. At the end of Act 1 I was simply blown away. I was literally speechless for several seconds, before I could croak out a “Wow!” to my companion, and several more seconds before I could croak out an “Amazing!” It was way beyond the sum of its parts. It raises the question, Can there be a bad performance of Die Walküre? I’ve never seen such, but the fact is, while last summer’s Die Walküre in Seattle was far superior in the specific aspects of sets, singing, and playing, it did not wring me out emotionally the way that this one did. There was magic here that I cannot identify.

I will have to paraphrase Sir Denis Forman’s grading of The Ring in his book “A Night at the Opera”: It is impossible to grade this Xtraordinary and Xceptional performance as if it were a regular performance so let me therefore just give it an X. In the coming year Verismo Opera will perform Carmen, Suor Angelica/Cavalleria Rusticana, La Boheme, and La Tosca [sic], and I’ll see whether lightning can strike twice.