Auditions for the general director, Merola Opera Program, June 25 2011

Each summer the Merola Opera Program invites 25 young singers, apprentice coaches, and apprentice stage directors for intense study to improve their craft. One of the first public events for the participants is to sing one or two arias for San Francisco Opera’s general director, David Gockley, sitting in row 14 of the orchestra. Each singer presents an aria of his or her choosing, accompanied on the piano by one of the apprentice coaches. After an intermission, approximately half of the singers are invited to sing an additional aria. Although the additional aria is introduced in the form “My name is Elizabeth Zharoff, and I will sing Sempre libre from La Traviata,” I am told that the additional aria is chosen by David Gockley from a list of several submitted by the singer. It’s very much like the Irene Dalis Vocal Competition, except that in the competition every singer sings one aria of his/her choice and then immediately a second aria selected by the judges, and intermission is taken after half the singers have sung. Since the Merola audition is a working audition, the audience was requested to withhold applause until the very end, after all the singing was over. No evaluations or conclusions were shared with the audience, although after each aria we heard a “Thank you” or “bravo;” I may have heard one “fabulous.”

I had a couple of favorites. Suzanne Rigden impressed me in the first half with her strong, clear tone in Olympia’s aria from The Tales of Hoffman, but she was not called back to sing again. Elizabeth Zharoff was called back, and that is when we heard her dynamic Sempre libre. A friend has spoken highly of bass Adam Lau, but he did not participate in the auditions. NR.

The Merry Nibelungs, Shelton Theater, June 23 2011

Die lustigen Nibelungen is a one-act operetta written in 1904 by Oscar Straus as a send-up of Wagner’s mighty Der Ring des Nibelungen, though it is more Nibelungenlied than Götterdämmerung. A modern translation/adaptation, The Merry Nibelungs, is being given as part of San Francisco Opera’s Ring Festival. Since I had so much enjoyed seeing Das Barbecü (a light-hearted retelling of the Ring in a country-western style) in Seattle, I hoped that The Merry Nibelungs would be similarly entertaining. Not. The singing was undistinguished, the acting subpar, and the adaptation full of crude attempts at sexual and potty humor.

There was one redeeming feature. Die lustigen Nibelungen lasts only about an hour, so in order to make a more substantial evening, the producer introduced several interstitial scenes in which the character of Cosima Wagner, in period costume, recalls various events from her life. I presume that the text was taken from Cosima’s diary. It was not a reading from the diary, it was more like we had Cosima herself telling us (in accented English) about interesting events in her past. While not the most inspired acting I’ve ever seen, Esther Mulligan’s Cosima was head and shoulders above what should have been the main event. A delta, at best.

Madama Butterfly, Metropolitan Opera HD Encore, June 15 2011

I was delighted to learn that the Met would rebroadcast this beautiful production by Anthony Minghella. There is no little house on a hill overlooking Nagasaki; rather, shoji screens that slide back and forth, right to left, are sufficient to evoke the little house. In back, the stage is raked, but painted in strips of successively darker colors which suggest steps. Above the steps, there is open sky. But the production may be most notable for its use of the traditional Japanese technique of using people, clad all in black, with black veils, to assist in the performance. By convention, these black-clad figures are understood not to be present—in a similar fashion to the convention that an “aside” sung by one character on stage is not heard by the other characters, even if they are only 10 feet away. In particular, the production sidesteps the challenges of working with a very young child by using a puppet dressed in a sailor costume and handled by three people: one for the feet, one for a hand and the body, and one for a hand and the head. It doesn’t work for some people, but it does for me. The puppeteers were masters of their craft. Additionally, Butterfly’s additional servants (Suzuki is one of three) were small puppets, manipulated by other black-clad assistants. In the flower scene, when Butterfly and Suzuki need flowers to decorate the little house in preparation for Pinkerton’s arrival, the flowers arrive on the backs of more black-clad assistants, who prostrate themselves on stage, and the principals can then pick up the flowers.

The most beautiful scenic effects accompany the beautiful love duet of the end of Act 1. The stage is darkened (after all, night has fallen), and 10-12 spherical paper lanterns are carried about by the black-clad assistants, now almost perfectly invisible in the darkness. Later a curtain of strings , each string bearing a number of golden paper squares, is lowered, and Butterfly and Pinkerton drift among them, while a flight of origami birds at the end of bamboo poles adds a special touch. Truly beautiful.

Our cast:
Butterfly: Patricia Racette
Pinkerton: Marcello Giordani
Sharpless: Dwayne Croft
Suzuki: Maria Zifchak
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Production: Anthony Minghella

Patricia Racette’s Butterfly was excellent, though she didn’t quite carry the impact that I experienced in her San Francisco performance of 2007, which is one of my “top ten.” The other principals brought their considerable talents to the performance as well. An alpha-minus.

Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera HD, June 1 2011

We had to miss the regular May 14 broadcast of Die Walküre because we were at Spannochia, near Siena, in Tuscany. But we were back in time to catch the encore broadcast. This being the Robert Lepage production, the stage was dominated by the 45-ton “machine,” the one with the 24 rotating planks. Here, the machine was put to the best use yet: during the prelude, Siegmund runs through the trees, represented well enough by planks held vertically or almost vertically so that Siegmund can run in front of some and in back of others. Images of tree trunks were projected on the planks. You wouldn’t confuse them with Seattle’s trees, but it worked. As Siegmund enters the hut (“Ein Quel! Ein Quel!”) all planks but one rotate to form the ceiling of the hut, and a lightly varnished wood color is projected on them. The one that remains vertical is, of course, the ash tree, and there is a sword sticking out of it—a convenient place for Hunding to hang his coat when he arrives. During the episodes in which Siegmund tells his history, some silhouetted figures representing the action (mainly, running one way or the other, or stabbing another figure) are projected. And they ran quickly—very distracting.

In Act 2, there was a stage prop that I had not seen before. The stage directions call for Fricka to arrive in a chariot drawn by two rams. Here, Fricka is seated in a large chair; the front of the armrests are carved in the shape of rams. Since Fricka dominates Wotan in this scene, she and her chair are placed on the planks, above Wotan, who is at stage level. For the second part of Act 2, we are back to the planks-as-trees theme.

The Ride of the Valkyries opens with the Valkyries riding bucking planks (rotating first one way, then the other), and holding reins that are connected to the fronts of the planks. Later the planks serve as a surface on which to project abstract images. When Wotan puts Brünnhilde to sleep, a double is suspended head down from a central, vertical plank.

Our cast:
Siegmund: Jonas Kaufmann
Sieglinde: Eva-Maria Westbroek
Hunding: Hans-Peter König
Wotan: Bryn Terfel
Brünnhilde: Deborah Voigt
Fricka: Stephanie Blythe
Conductor: James Levine
Production: Robert Lepage

The performances were uniformly excellent, but I was particularly struck by:

• Jonas Kaufmann’s cries of “Wälse! Wälse!” This is what it means to be a heldentenor.
• Hans-Peter König’s superb tone as Hunding, although he had the appearance of a kindly grandfather.
• Deborah Voigt’s anguished, dejected entrance for the Annunciation of Death scene. Just in her acting, it was obvious that she was about to do something she really did not want to do.
• Bryn Terfel’s towering rage at the Valkyries in Act 3 Scene 2. Never before have I seen a Wotan so beside himself with anger.
  

A very solid beta—would have been even better without the distractions of the machine.