I normally see both casts; this production is sufficiently spectacular that a third visit was called for. Everything was the same as the performance of Sept. 17, except that Tony Quartuccio replaced George Cleve on the podium, and Andrew Whitfield replaced Nova Safo in the relatively minor role of Arbace. I tried to evaluate whether I actually heard any difference with different conductors, and concluded that Cleve’s performance was just a tiny bit “crisper.”
I had spoken with Silas Elash after the Sept. 22 performance, and learned where he was positioned as The Voice. I thought he had been just out of sight on the third level of the palace, but no—he was on the other side of a grate at the very top of the ceiling of the theater, way up there. He sounded even better than he had before.
I spoke with one of the cellists afterward, and she said that the orchestra had been told not to get used to all the money and care and attention lavished on this performance—“After this, it’s back to JC Penney.” Thank you, Dr. Packard and Opera San Jose, for a magnificent cultural contribution.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Idomeneo 2, Opera San Jose, Sept. 22 2011
Back to the California Theatre to see the “other” cast perform Mozart’s Idomeneo, and to refresh my memory on the sets. From my orchestra (rather than balcony) seat, I could see that the ceiling of the opening set was also painted. Most of the painting was of geometric designs; the wall on the left depicted porpoises. Elettra’s first act aria is performed in front of a dark-gray-on-black backdrop while a scene change is made behind; she is accompanied (visually) by her handmaidens (dancers) who dramatize her mental state. The diorama forming the backdrop of the second scene was the plastic/cellophane material, unpainted. When the curtain goes up for Act 2 (which is actually the finale of Act 1, perhaps they had intermission “early” to make the two acts closer to the same length), the diorama features a painting of ships at sea; at the left there is a depiction of a village at the base of a mountain. The painting is a reproduction of an artwork from the island of Santorini, 17th century BC. When the scene shifts to the royal apartments, Idomeneo has a not-very-fancy throne (not a bench, as previously reported) to sit on. Elettra gets to cover another scene change—a large painting of three Cretan women, with eyes on the sides of their faces just as in Egyptian paintings, is hung in front of the dark-gray-on-black curtain. In Act 3, when the scene changes from the small room in the basement of the palace to the gigantic Palace of Knossos, it is covered by a recitative by Arbace in front of the dark-gray-on-black curtain. For this production, they cut Arbace’s aria in which he offered himself to be sacrificed instead of Idamante. The palace does have three levels. The final scene change is covered with Idomeneo’s “Torna la pace” (Peace has returned), sung in front of a large painting of a Cretan warrior.
Our cast:
Idomeneo: Christopher Bengochea
Idamante: Aaron Blake
Ilia: Rebecca Davis
Elettra: Christina Major
The Voice: Silas Elash
Conductor: George Cleve
Director: Brad Dalton
Rebecca Davis made an outstanding Ilia. Christopher Bengochea started in less than top form, but by the end of the evening he was displaying a power in his voice that came across as authority rather than just volume. Christina Major sang Elettra beautifully, although her acting make it look as though Katisha had somehow wandered into this performance. In 1786 Mozart rewrote the castrato part of Idamante for a tenor, and this performance did not make a convincing argument for presenting that version. Perhaps the tenor voice lacks the agility of the mezzo-soprano voice. My understanding is that the rewriting made only minor changes, and then mainly in the ensembles rather than in the solo arias. Silash Elash’s The Voice was even more impressive in my orchestra seat than in my balcony seat.
Another wonderful evening, again better than beta, not quite alpha.
Our cast:
Idomeneo: Christopher Bengochea
Idamante: Aaron Blake
Ilia: Rebecca Davis
Elettra: Christina Major
The Voice: Silas Elash
Conductor: George Cleve
Director: Brad Dalton
Rebecca Davis made an outstanding Ilia. Christopher Bengochea started in less than top form, but by the end of the evening he was displaying a power in his voice that came across as authority rather than just volume. Christina Major sang Elettra beautifully, although her acting make it look as though Katisha had somehow wandered into this performance. In 1786 Mozart rewrote the castrato part of Idamante for a tenor, and this performance did not make a convincing argument for presenting that version. Perhaps the tenor voice lacks the agility of the mezzo-soprano voice. My understanding is that the rewriting made only minor changes, and then mainly in the ensembles rather than in the solo arias. Silash Elash’s The Voice was even more impressive in my orchestra seat than in my balcony seat.
Another wonderful evening, again better than beta, not quite alpha.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Heart of a Soldier, San Francisco Opera, Sept. 18 2011
Mozart last night; brand-new opera this afternoon. David Gockley’s project to bring the book “Heart of a Soldier” to the operatic stage, a project initiated when he was director of Houston Grand Opera, finally came to fruition. The book tells the life story of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley, who led 2700 employees in the World Trade Center to safety after the attacks of Sept. 11, only to lose his own life when he went back to search for stragglers. The opera, by composer Christopher Theofanidis and librettist Donna DiNovelli, follows the book very closely. Of course, with only 1 hour 40 minutes of music, some of the details have to be omitted, but nearly all of the important events do make it to the stage.
The backdrop for the entire production is a representation of the Twin Towers. We see four stories of each building, each with seven bays facing the audience; the insides are bare except for people and the emergency exit stairway. The towers will be obscured by drop-downs from time to time, but the physical structures stay in place through both acts.
Act 1 opens with the young Cyril (Rick’s actual given name, he adopted “Rick” in honor of the American soldiers) making friends with the American soldiers who were in Cornwall preparing for D-Day. In the next scene, we see the inside of a bar in Rhodesia, with walls of corrugated sheet metal, where Rick meets his life-long friend Dan Hill. Rick is borne in on the shoulders of other men; they are all celebrating his killing of a lion that has been menacing the local village. Rick shouts “Who is ready to wrestle the strongest man in Rhodesia?” and the first words of Dan Hill are “I’m ready to wrestle the second strongest man in Rhodesia!” (The pre-performance talk had advised us that yes, there were humorous lines, and despite the serious nature of the story, we should feel free to laugh at the right times.)
There is a brief scene in Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Rick and Dan are in Officer’s Candidate School. An ordinary rigging pole descends from on high and a number of men use it to do pull-ups. (I heard that these supers were super-athletes, capable of 100 pull-ups and 200 push-ups, and magnificent physical specimens, though we only got to see their backs.) Then it’s off to Viet Nam, with another large piece of corrugated metal with a jagged gash through it serving as the backdrop, while projections of jungle plants are displayed on it. The final scene depicts Rick’s wedding to “a bride” who has no music to sing. We see a number of large round tables set for a wedding reception, and Rick and his bride enter through an archway of crossed swords. The women tend to gather on the left side of the stage, Rick and his military buddies on the right side, echoing the point made in the book that Rick paid little attention to his bride at the reception.
After intermission, the twin towers are on full display, as Rick leads his charges in evacuation drills. Dan Hill is there, describing what it would take to bring down the towers. (Dan had eerily predicted both the 1993 truck bomb in the basement of WTC, as well as the 2001 attacks.) Then there is an interlude where we see Susan, who will become Rick’s second wife, relaxing in the park with her dog. The only suggestion of a park is a large red fire hydrant mounted on a short platform. Rick comes by, jogging in his bare feet (he’s writing a book on a barefoot runner), meets Susan, and before long they are having coffee. Then it’s back to WTC. The stage towers do not actually fall (this is not an updated version of Samson and Dalila), but the destruction is represented by lights suddenly going off, emergency lights coming on, and lots and lots of paper floating down from on high. In a short epilog, without voices, Dan Hill and Susan Rescorla kneel and smear their arms with concrete dust, echoing Rick’s ritual of smearing his skin with the blood of the lion he had killed in Rhodesia, the idea being to acquire the strength that the dead had possessed.
Our cast:
Rick Rescorla: Thomas Hampson
Dan Hill: William Burden
Susan Rescorla: Melody Moore
(and 28 minor characters)
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: Francesca Zambello
Thomas Hampson was involved with the project nearly from the beginning, and he portrayed his character perfectly with his acting and singing and craggy good looks. William Burden and Melody Moore supported him ably. This time, Zambello’s staging was spot-on, perfectly suited to the material at hand, and avoiding the directorial conceit so much in evidence in San Francisco’s Ring of a few months ago.
But how was the music? Lots of people are afraid of modern opera, and often with good reason. What little of Theofanidis's other music I have heard suggests “movie music,” which is not necessarily bad; it certainly goes down better than Berg and Schoenberg and Ligeti. Here the music serves the story well, without calling attention to itself unduly. Much of the vocal line is almost recitative. Rick gets one full-blown aria, in the second act, the thrust of which I forget.
How was the story? As previously mentioned, the libretto was very true to the book. The librettist did leave out a lot of the Viet Nam story, but wisely so. Going in, I had my concerns about an opera comprising lots of little scenes (there is a prologue and five scenes before intermission), based on last year’s Anna Karenina at Opera San Jose, whose 19 separate scenes seemed rather disjointed. These scenes were long enough to be more than thumbnail-size stories, and though there was no smooth transition between the scenes (note that we jumped from the jungles of Viet Name to Rick’s first wedding), the story line worked. The details of the libretto, however, left a bit to be desired. There were too many rhyming couplets, and I do have to credit the line “I’m going to have to give you a geography lesson” as being as mundane as “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose, Andrew Imbrie, 1976).
Bottom line: I enjoyed it. It’s definitely one of the better modern operas that I have seen, though Götterdämmerung has nothing to worry about. I’m looking forward to seeing it again in a few days. A beta.
The backdrop for the entire production is a representation of the Twin Towers. We see four stories of each building, each with seven bays facing the audience; the insides are bare except for people and the emergency exit stairway. The towers will be obscured by drop-downs from time to time, but the physical structures stay in place through both acts.
Act 1 opens with the young Cyril (Rick’s actual given name, he adopted “Rick” in honor of the American soldiers) making friends with the American soldiers who were in Cornwall preparing for D-Day. In the next scene, we see the inside of a bar in Rhodesia, with walls of corrugated sheet metal, where Rick meets his life-long friend Dan Hill. Rick is borne in on the shoulders of other men; they are all celebrating his killing of a lion that has been menacing the local village. Rick shouts “Who is ready to wrestle the strongest man in Rhodesia?” and the first words of Dan Hill are “I’m ready to wrestle the second strongest man in Rhodesia!” (The pre-performance talk had advised us that yes, there were humorous lines, and despite the serious nature of the story, we should feel free to laugh at the right times.)
There is a brief scene in Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Rick and Dan are in Officer’s Candidate School. An ordinary rigging pole descends from on high and a number of men use it to do pull-ups. (I heard that these supers were super-athletes, capable of 100 pull-ups and 200 push-ups, and magnificent physical specimens, though we only got to see their backs.) Then it’s off to Viet Nam, with another large piece of corrugated metal with a jagged gash through it serving as the backdrop, while projections of jungle plants are displayed on it. The final scene depicts Rick’s wedding to “a bride” who has no music to sing. We see a number of large round tables set for a wedding reception, and Rick and his bride enter through an archway of crossed swords. The women tend to gather on the left side of the stage, Rick and his military buddies on the right side, echoing the point made in the book that Rick paid little attention to his bride at the reception.
After intermission, the twin towers are on full display, as Rick leads his charges in evacuation drills. Dan Hill is there, describing what it would take to bring down the towers. (Dan had eerily predicted both the 1993 truck bomb in the basement of WTC, as well as the 2001 attacks.) Then there is an interlude where we see Susan, who will become Rick’s second wife, relaxing in the park with her dog. The only suggestion of a park is a large red fire hydrant mounted on a short platform. Rick comes by, jogging in his bare feet (he’s writing a book on a barefoot runner), meets Susan, and before long they are having coffee. Then it’s back to WTC. The stage towers do not actually fall (this is not an updated version of Samson and Dalila), but the destruction is represented by lights suddenly going off, emergency lights coming on, and lots and lots of paper floating down from on high. In a short epilog, without voices, Dan Hill and Susan Rescorla kneel and smear their arms with concrete dust, echoing Rick’s ritual of smearing his skin with the blood of the lion he had killed in Rhodesia, the idea being to acquire the strength that the dead had possessed.
Our cast:
Rick Rescorla: Thomas Hampson
Dan Hill: William Burden
Susan Rescorla: Melody Moore
(and 28 minor characters)
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: Francesca Zambello
Thomas Hampson was involved with the project nearly from the beginning, and he portrayed his character perfectly with his acting and singing and craggy good looks. William Burden and Melody Moore supported him ably. This time, Zambello’s staging was spot-on, perfectly suited to the material at hand, and avoiding the directorial conceit so much in evidence in San Francisco’s Ring of a few months ago.
But how was the music? Lots of people are afraid of modern opera, and often with good reason. What little of Theofanidis's other music I have heard suggests “movie music,” which is not necessarily bad; it certainly goes down better than Berg and Schoenberg and Ligeti. Here the music serves the story well, without calling attention to itself unduly. Much of the vocal line is almost recitative. Rick gets one full-blown aria, in the second act, the thrust of which I forget.
How was the story? As previously mentioned, the libretto was very true to the book. The librettist did leave out a lot of the Viet Nam story, but wisely so. Going in, I had my concerns about an opera comprising lots of little scenes (there is a prologue and five scenes before intermission), based on last year’s Anna Karenina at Opera San Jose, whose 19 separate scenes seemed rather disjointed. These scenes were long enough to be more than thumbnail-size stories, and though there was no smooth transition between the scenes (note that we jumped from the jungles of Viet Name to Rick’s first wedding), the story line worked. The details of the libretto, however, left a bit to be desired. There were too many rhyming couplets, and I do have to credit the line “I’m going to have to give you a geography lesson” as being as mundane as “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose, Andrew Imbrie, 1976).
Bottom line: I enjoyed it. It’s definitely one of the better modern operas that I have seen, though Götterdämmerung has nothing to worry about. I’m looking forward to seeing it again in a few days. A beta.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Idomeneo, Opera San Jose, Sept. 17 2011
Idomeneo is Mozart’s 11th opera, and his first great one. It’s rarely performed, perhaps because of the staging demands, perhaps because of the modern public’s lack of appetite for opera seria, an operatic form that was already going out of style in Mozart’s day. But based on this Opera San Jose production, it deserves far more exposure than it has today.
The Packard Humanities Foundation funded a historically accurate production. The foundation’s director, David Woodley Packard, is a professor of classics, with a particular interest in the time and place in which Idomeneo is set: the island of Crete, approximately 1200 BC, right after the Trojan War. Packard brought his knowledge of art and architecture, and that of his professional colleagues, to the production, ranging all the way from the massive set near the end of Act 3 down to the earrings worn by the performers. And scuttlebutt has it that more was spent on this one production than Opera San Jose normally spends in an entire year of four productions. There was even enough funding to permit a complete performance, no need to cut any music in order to bring the show in under 3 hours (I measured 3 hours 35 minutes).
Act I opens in the royal palace, with walls and columns decorated with historical authenticity. The palace floor consists of light brown, almost sandy, 4 ft x 4 ft tiles, which also serve well for the following scene at the seashore. Idomeneo and his shipmates have landed safely on the beach after surviving the wreck of their ship, whose mast and tattered sail can be seen upstage. The beach and ship are surrounded by a semicircular diorama.
Act 2 continues the diorama theme, but now the diorama is informed by the artwork from a piece of decorated 17th century BC pottery depicting the ships of the era. The original artwork was about 16 inches on a side; it has been very effectively recreated in large scale to fill the back of the stage. The scene change takes us back to the royal palace, but a different part, the king’s chambers, consisting of painted (though not decorated) walls and pillars, and a low bench for the king to sit on. Another scene change takes us back to the diorama, this time fairly abstract, looking crinkled cellophane. When the storm hits at the end of the act, strobe lights on the cellophane do a good job of depicting the storm.
Act 3 opens in a very simple set, apparently downstairs in the palace. It looks like a small room, seen at a 45° angle; through an open doorway (without door) we can see steps leading to the upper level of the palace. The scene changes to the most impressive one of the evening: a massive set representing the exterior of the palace of Knossos, again with walls and pillars, but there are (at least) three levels, with people standing on all the levels. (I had heard reports of four levels, but from the Grand Tier I could only see three.) In my preview I had made mention of the fact that Mozart saved the trombones for near the end, bringing them in to preface an announcement from The Voice. In this performance, we don’t get trombones, we get a thunderous statement from the Mighty Wurlitzer installed at the California Theatre, originally a 1927 movie palace. I read that for this performance they installed four new 32-foot organ pipes. (The organ could use more of them, but this performance only needed those four notes.) Following Elettra’s final aria, Idomeneo sings an aria in front of the curtain (and in front of a drop-down panel of artwork), an aria not included in my commercial recording. This aria has covered the final scene change, where they get rid of the palace and return us to the diorama, this time with three copies of a piece of art depicting bull-leaping.
Our cast:
Idomeneo: Alexander Boyer
Idamante: Betany Coffland
Ilia: Sandra Bengochea
Elettra: Jasmina Halimic
The Voice: Silas Elash
Conductor: George Cleve
Director: Brad Dalton
It was a fine cast to go along with a fine production. Everyone sang well, but I was particularly taken with the intense portrayals of Idamante and Elettra by Coffland and Halimic. Elettra is a particularly juicy role, she has a couple of rip-roaring arias to express her extreme displeasure at a Trojan slave (Ilia) rather than her, a Greek, being the one that Idamante is in love with. I had expected The Voice to be amplified and perhaps electronically modified, but Elash's sonorous bass voice filled the hall. It’s unfortunate that we got to hear The Voice for only about two minutes. (I had wondered where The Voice would spend the first two acts; he is not called for, and then does not even appear, until near the end of Act 3. As second intermission began, I ran into Elash descending from the upper balcony, on his way to his warm-up.) George Cleve, our local Mozart expert, led a first-rate orchestra.
Fantastic sets, wonderful costumes, great singing and playing, and first-class Mozart—what’s not to like? Well, the libretto, written by the chaplain at the court of Salzburg, something of an amateur at libretto-writing. Mozart’s music is superb at a moment-by-moment level, but as an entire work of art, it failed to leave a tremendous impact at the end of the evening. Somewhere between an alpha and a beta.
The Packard Humanities Foundation funded a historically accurate production. The foundation’s director, David Woodley Packard, is a professor of classics, with a particular interest in the time and place in which Idomeneo is set: the island of Crete, approximately 1200 BC, right after the Trojan War. Packard brought his knowledge of art and architecture, and that of his professional colleagues, to the production, ranging all the way from the massive set near the end of Act 3 down to the earrings worn by the performers. And scuttlebutt has it that more was spent on this one production than Opera San Jose normally spends in an entire year of four productions. There was even enough funding to permit a complete performance, no need to cut any music in order to bring the show in under 3 hours (I measured 3 hours 35 minutes).
Act I opens in the royal palace, with walls and columns decorated with historical authenticity. The palace floor consists of light brown, almost sandy, 4 ft x 4 ft tiles, which also serve well for the following scene at the seashore. Idomeneo and his shipmates have landed safely on the beach after surviving the wreck of their ship, whose mast and tattered sail can be seen upstage. The beach and ship are surrounded by a semicircular diorama.
Act 2 continues the diorama theme, but now the diorama is informed by the artwork from a piece of decorated 17th century BC pottery depicting the ships of the era. The original artwork was about 16 inches on a side; it has been very effectively recreated in large scale to fill the back of the stage. The scene change takes us back to the royal palace, but a different part, the king’s chambers, consisting of painted (though not decorated) walls and pillars, and a low bench for the king to sit on. Another scene change takes us back to the diorama, this time fairly abstract, looking crinkled cellophane. When the storm hits at the end of the act, strobe lights on the cellophane do a good job of depicting the storm.
Act 3 opens in a very simple set, apparently downstairs in the palace. It looks like a small room, seen at a 45° angle; through an open doorway (without door) we can see steps leading to the upper level of the palace. The scene changes to the most impressive one of the evening: a massive set representing the exterior of the palace of Knossos, again with walls and pillars, but there are (at least) three levels, with people standing on all the levels. (I had heard reports of four levels, but from the Grand Tier I could only see three.) In my preview I had made mention of the fact that Mozart saved the trombones for near the end, bringing them in to preface an announcement from The Voice. In this performance, we don’t get trombones, we get a thunderous statement from the Mighty Wurlitzer installed at the California Theatre, originally a 1927 movie palace. I read that for this performance they installed four new 32-foot organ pipes. (The organ could use more of them, but this performance only needed those four notes.) Following Elettra’s final aria, Idomeneo sings an aria in front of the curtain (and in front of a drop-down panel of artwork), an aria not included in my commercial recording. This aria has covered the final scene change, where they get rid of the palace and return us to the diorama, this time with three copies of a piece of art depicting bull-leaping.
Our cast:
Idomeneo: Alexander Boyer
Idamante: Betany Coffland
Ilia: Sandra Bengochea
Elettra: Jasmina Halimic
The Voice: Silas Elash
Conductor: George Cleve
Director: Brad Dalton
It was a fine cast to go along with a fine production. Everyone sang well, but I was particularly taken with the intense portrayals of Idamante and Elettra by Coffland and Halimic. Elettra is a particularly juicy role, she has a couple of rip-roaring arias to express her extreme displeasure at a Trojan slave (Ilia) rather than her, a Greek, being the one that Idamante is in love with. I had expected The Voice to be amplified and perhaps electronically modified, but Elash's sonorous bass voice filled the hall. It’s unfortunate that we got to hear The Voice for only about two minutes. (I had wondered where The Voice would spend the first two acts; he is not called for, and then does not even appear, until near the end of Act 3. As second intermission began, I ran into Elash descending from the upper balcony, on his way to his warm-up.) George Cleve, our local Mozart expert, led a first-rate orchestra.
Fantastic sets, wonderful costumes, great singing and playing, and first-class Mozart—what’s not to like? Well, the libretto, written by the chaplain at the court of Salzburg, something of an amateur at libretto-writing. Mozart’s music is superb at a moment-by-moment level, but as an entire work of art, it failed to leave a tremendous impact at the end of the evening. Somewhere between an alpha and a beta.
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