Two days later, back to San Jose to see the other cast perform this unusual double bill. The sets and action were the same as in the first cast. I was very much looking forward to seeing this cast because A Woman would be sung by Suzan Hanson, who had sung Tatiana in the company’s 1989 (?) production of Eugene Onegin and had turned in one of the most impressive performances I have seen on the operatic stage.
Our cast:
A woman: Suzan Hanson
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas
This evening, the acting wasn’t up to the standard set by Betany Coffland two days before. Hanson sang well enough, but didn’t convey the intensity of feeling that Coffland had. A bit better than a gamma.
Our cast for Pagliacci:
Tonio: Jason Detweiler
Canio: Travis Jones
Nedda: Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste
Beppe: Michael Dailey
Silvio: Krassen Karagizov
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Cynthia Stokes
This performance failed to reach the relatively low bar set by the performance of two days prior. Travis Jones appeared to be out of his element as Canio. Again, no magic, no intensity. A gamma.
Friday, November 25, 2011
La Voix Humaine and Pagliacci, Opera San Jose, Nov. 20 2011
La Voix Humaine (“The Human Voice”) is a one-act, one-singer opera by Francis Poulenc in which the singer spends 45 minutes on the telephone breaking up with the man that she had lived with for five years. Pagliacci, a 70-minute, two-act opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo, is one of the highlights of the verismo style of Italian opera. Pagliacci is usually preceded in the operatic evening by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, not by La Voix Humaine. Why not “Cav & Pag”? According to Larry Hancock, it simply costs too much to do Cav & Pag; opening with La Voix Humaine allows for a reasonable amount of music in one evening without breaking the bank.
No economy of set was obvious in La Voix Humaine. We saw a clever representation of an apartment in Paris: the side walls and most of the back wall were basic flat black, but windows had been artfully sketched in using narrow, flexible white tubes (oversized drinking straws?). In the center of the back wall was a large double window that looked out over the rooftops of Paris. The apartment was furnished with a sofa and an easy chair atop a circular rug. Along the right wall was a small table with a mirror; along the left wall was a small bar in a box whose sides were on hinges, along the lines of a side-by-side refrigerator but much smaller. And in the center there was a coffee table on which rested the telephone, which plays an important part in the opera.
Our cast:
A woman: Betany Coffland
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas
The opera was based on a play by the same name, written in 1930 by the French playwright (and man of many other talents) Jean Cocteau. His actors had complained of being “over-directed,” not given enough freedom to display their acting abilities, so he said “Here’s a telephone and one half of a telephone conversation. Act away!” And Betany Coffland did. We first heard anguished sobs from offstage, then she rushed in and busied herself for three or four minutes with the mirror and the bar before the orchestra played the first note of music. For the next 45 minutes, Coffland held up her end of the telephone conversation masterfully, at one point winding the telephone cord around her neck. At the end, after they have hung up, she went and stood in the window, apparently about ready to jump a la Tosca, but then the lights went out. It was an excellent display of acting, and she sang pretty well too. A solid beta.
After an intermission, Pagliacci. Most of the money for sets must have been spent on La Voix Humaine. We saw a concrete wall curving in from the left, about 6 feet high at the edge of the stage, dropping gradually to about 3 feet high in the center of the stage. In front of the concrete wall there was an elliptical concrete “stage,” about 2 feet high and 15 feet long. To the right, nothing. The players did have a small (very small) cart that they pushed down the ramp in back of the curving wall, and there were some boxes that some assistants carried around. After intermission (we got an intermission after “Vesti la giubba” and before the intermezzo), the curtain rose on the same set, except that a wall with a door and a window had been erected at the back of the “stage.”
Our cast:
Tonio: Evan Brummel
Canio: Alexander Boyer
Nedda: Jasmina Halimic
Beppe: Michael Dailey
Silvio: Krassen Karagizov
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Cynthia Stokes
Pagliacci can be an exciting opera, especially in the final scene when the actions of the play resemble real-life events so closely that the play-within-a-play breaks down and the Canio character “actually” stabs his wife and her lover. This time, there was no magic. I was sufficiently not caught up in the action that I began to wonder, “Where in his clown suit has Canio hidden the knife that he will use?” and I located said knife in Tonio’s hand. Tonio is standing at the edge of the “stage” and hands the knife to Canio when he needs it. To the director’s credit, this is the same knife that Canio almost used on Nedda just before “Vesti la giubba” and that Tonio had picked up after Beppe had wrung it from him—after all, Tonio had threatened Nedda with “You will pay for this!” after she had rejected his advances. Competently performed, but that’s all. A gamma.
No economy of set was obvious in La Voix Humaine. We saw a clever representation of an apartment in Paris: the side walls and most of the back wall were basic flat black, but windows had been artfully sketched in using narrow, flexible white tubes (oversized drinking straws?). In the center of the back wall was a large double window that looked out over the rooftops of Paris. The apartment was furnished with a sofa and an easy chair atop a circular rug. Along the right wall was a small table with a mirror; along the left wall was a small bar in a box whose sides were on hinges, along the lines of a side-by-side refrigerator but much smaller. And in the center there was a coffee table on which rested the telephone, which plays an important part in the opera.
Our cast:
A woman: Betany Coffland
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas
The opera was based on a play by the same name, written in 1930 by the French playwright (and man of many other talents) Jean Cocteau. His actors had complained of being “over-directed,” not given enough freedom to display their acting abilities, so he said “Here’s a telephone and one half of a telephone conversation. Act away!” And Betany Coffland did. We first heard anguished sobs from offstage, then she rushed in and busied herself for three or four minutes with the mirror and the bar before the orchestra played the first note of music. For the next 45 minutes, Coffland held up her end of the telephone conversation masterfully, at one point winding the telephone cord around her neck. At the end, after they have hung up, she went and stood in the window, apparently about ready to jump a la Tosca, but then the lights went out. It was an excellent display of acting, and she sang pretty well too. A solid beta.
After an intermission, Pagliacci. Most of the money for sets must have been spent on La Voix Humaine. We saw a concrete wall curving in from the left, about 6 feet high at the edge of the stage, dropping gradually to about 3 feet high in the center of the stage. In front of the concrete wall there was an elliptical concrete “stage,” about 2 feet high and 15 feet long. To the right, nothing. The players did have a small (very small) cart that they pushed down the ramp in back of the curving wall, and there were some boxes that some assistants carried around. After intermission (we got an intermission after “Vesti la giubba” and before the intermezzo), the curtain rose on the same set, except that a wall with a door and a window had been erected at the back of the “stage.”
Our cast:
Tonio: Evan Brummel
Canio: Alexander Boyer
Nedda: Jasmina Halimic
Beppe: Michael Dailey
Silvio: Krassen Karagizov
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Cynthia Stokes
Pagliacci can be an exciting opera, especially in the final scene when the actions of the play resemble real-life events so closely that the play-within-a-play breaks down and the Canio character “actually” stabs his wife and her lover. This time, there was no magic. I was sufficiently not caught up in the action that I began to wonder, “Where in his clown suit has Canio hidden the knife that he will use?” and I located said knife in Tonio’s hand. Tonio is standing at the edge of the “stage” and hands the knife to Canio when he needs it. To the director’s credit, this is the same knife that Canio almost used on Nedda just before “Vesti la giubba” and that Tonio had picked up after Beppe had wrung it from him—after all, Tonio had threatened Nedda with “You will pay for this!” after she had rejected his advances. Competently performed, but that’s all. A gamma.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Satyagraha, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov. 19 2011
According to a superb commentary in the New York Review of Books, Satyragraha is the middle opera in a trilogy about “saintly men”: Einstein (Einstein on the Beach), Gandhi (Satyagraha), and Akhenaten, the father of Tutankhamun, and the pharaoh who attempted to introduce monotheistic religion to Egypt (Akhnaten). I love the music of Akhnaten and so had high hopes for Satyragraha. These hopes were only partly realized.
The structure of the opera is highly unusual. The libretto is in Sanskrit. The libretto consists of passages from the Bhaghavad Gita. These passages are not words that the characters would utter if they came to life, but rather phrases of the holy text that are appropriate to the action taking place on stage. And according to the Met’s web site, “Satyagraha features minimal subtitles. ... Glass did not wish the text to be understood -- just to be heard -- and to allow the actions on stage to speak for themselves.” There were some subtitles, but they were few and far between, so for long stretches we listened to language that we did not understand, without the aid of translation. Theoretically, that made no difference. In practice, I wondered whether this opera might work as an oratorio, without staging.
Our cast:
Miss Schlesen: Rachelle Durkin
M. K. Gandhi: Richard Croft
Mr. Kallenbach: Kim Josephson
Parsi Rustomji: Alfred Walker
Conductor: Dante Anzolini
Production: Phelim McDermott
All three acts of the opera took place in front of a semicircular wall made of corrugated steel, with doors along the bottom that opened and closed, and a “picture window” in which a different figure sat or stood (silently) for each act: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.
In Act 1, we saw the young Gandhi as he arrived in South Africa, dressed in a lawyer’s suit. Upstage, two gigantic “puppets” were formed before our eyes; one appeared to be made of tenuously connected bits of paper and the other from woven baskets. The puppets reenacted the battle between the Kuruvas and the Pandavas.
In Act 2 we saw a line of oddly-dressed men in prominent plaids and clashing colors getting their shoes shined by other men dressed as menials, while upstage several large puppets wandered to and fro. These puppets seemed to be constructed of a papier-mache-like substance and featured grotesque expressions. In the second scene, long rolls of printed newspaper were unrolled across the stage, then wadded together, and the very large wad was grasped by a woman who was hoisted (along with her wad) to the top of the corrugated steel backdrop. In the third scene, the chorus displayed and then burned their registration cards.
The music of Acts 1 and 2 was not as compelling as the music of Akhnaten, but it was rather interesting in its own right. Things sort of fell apart in Act 3. The second and larger part of Act 3 was a long monologue by Gandhi, in Sanskrit, without subtitles, while up in the “picture window” an actor mimed the gestures of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing a (presumably) large crowd. With essentially no action, and no understanding of the words, and no significant variation in the music, Act 3 went by as a big “Huh?”
The whole affair came off as a bit better than a gamma. I will attend the encore, in the hope that a second experience will make more of an impression on me—and also as some sort of preparation for San Francisco’s upcoming production of Nixon in China, another opera in which no one falls in love, no one dies, and there is no inter-character conflict.
The structure of the opera is highly unusual. The libretto is in Sanskrit. The libretto consists of passages from the Bhaghavad Gita. These passages are not words that the characters would utter if they came to life, but rather phrases of the holy text that are appropriate to the action taking place on stage. And according to the Met’s web site, “Satyagraha features minimal subtitles. ... Glass did not wish the text to be understood -- just to be heard -- and to allow the actions on stage to speak for themselves.” There were some subtitles, but they were few and far between, so for long stretches we listened to language that we did not understand, without the aid of translation. Theoretically, that made no difference. In practice, I wondered whether this opera might work as an oratorio, without staging.
Our cast:
Miss Schlesen: Rachelle Durkin
M. K. Gandhi: Richard Croft
Mr. Kallenbach: Kim Josephson
Parsi Rustomji: Alfred Walker
Conductor: Dante Anzolini
Production: Phelim McDermott
All three acts of the opera took place in front of a semicircular wall made of corrugated steel, with doors along the bottom that opened and closed, and a “picture window” in which a different figure sat or stood (silently) for each act: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.
In Act 1, we saw the young Gandhi as he arrived in South Africa, dressed in a lawyer’s suit. Upstage, two gigantic “puppets” were formed before our eyes; one appeared to be made of tenuously connected bits of paper and the other from woven baskets. The puppets reenacted the battle between the Kuruvas and the Pandavas.
In Act 2 we saw a line of oddly-dressed men in prominent plaids and clashing colors getting their shoes shined by other men dressed as menials, while upstage several large puppets wandered to and fro. These puppets seemed to be constructed of a papier-mache-like substance and featured grotesque expressions. In the second scene, long rolls of printed newspaper were unrolled across the stage, then wadded together, and the very large wad was grasped by a woman who was hoisted (along with her wad) to the top of the corrugated steel backdrop. In the third scene, the chorus displayed and then burned their registration cards.
The music of Acts 1 and 2 was not as compelling as the music of Akhnaten, but it was rather interesting in its own right. Things sort of fell apart in Act 3. The second and larger part of Act 3 was a long monologue by Gandhi, in Sanskrit, without subtitles, while up in the “picture window” an actor mimed the gestures of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing a (presumably) large crowd. With essentially no action, and no understanding of the words, and no significant variation in the music, Act 3 went by as a big “Huh?”
The whole affair came off as a bit better than a gamma. I will attend the encore, in the hope that a second experience will make more of an impression on me—and also as some sort of preparation for San Francisco’s upcoming production of Nixon in China, another opera in which no one falls in love, no one dies, and there is no inter-character conflict.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Carmen, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 6 2011
An intense week of opera-going (Don Giovanni, Xerxes, Don Giovanni, Carmen rehearsal, Siegfried, an aborted attempt at Susannah, Carmen) came to a conclusion with San Francisco Opera’s opening performance of their current Carmen. It was the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production that dates back to 1981, with a common feature of all four sets being a a brick wall mostly covered with pale yellow plaster, and a long arch high above. In Act 1 there was a small door to the space on the other side of the wall, and a wall fountain from which townspeople could fill their jugs. There were some graffiti on the wall, the only legible one being “Viva Escamillo!” Just before the cigarette girls took their smoke break, the wall underneath the arch slid to the left, and a large double door with “Fabrica de Tabaco” slid in from the right. In Act 2, the area under the arch was filled with a large wooden platform up high and a staircase down to stage level. In Act 3 (the smuggler’s hideout in the mountains) the wall and the arch were still there, but the spaces below and behind the arch were filled with rocky landscape. In Act 4, in front of the bull ring, there was a large double door through which the crowd entered the arena, and a jailhouse-like metal gate through which the picadors and chulos and bandilleras marched to their jobs.
Our cast:
Carmen: Kendall Gladen
Don José: Thiago Arancam
Micaëla: Sara Gartland
Escamillo: Paulo Szot
Frasquita: Susannah Biller
Mercédès: Cybele Gouverneur
Le Dancaïre: Timothy Mix
Le Remendado: Daniel Montenegro
Moralès: Trevor Scheunemann
Zuniga: Wayne Tigges
Lillas Pastia: Yusef Lambert
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Jose Maria Condemi
Set Designer: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Kendall Gladen acted the part of Carmen magnificently. She’s tall, statuesque, moves well on stage, and her body language and facial expressions fit my notion of Carmen to a T. Her voice, however, did not carry as well as it did in the dress rehearsal. Thiago Arancam’s Don Jose sounded rather strained and forced. Paulo Szot’s Escamillo failed to generate any sparks. Sara Gartland sang an affecting Micaëla; her third-act aria keeps running through my mind. Wayne Tigges sounded more in his element as Zuniga than he did as Ariodates in last week’s Xerxes. Yusef Lambert, in the speaking part of Lillas Pastia, had the best projection of the cast.
In an interesting touch, Jose Maria Condemi staged the entr’acte to Act 3, having Don Jose give Carmen a ring (the one that she will give back to him in Act 4 by putting it on the tip of his knife) and put his hand on her belly; she reacted with a pantomime of swinging a baby back and forth in the cradle of her arms—and then laughed with gusto. At the very end, with Carmen dead on the ground, Don Jose put the ring back on her finger. It was only this final confrontation that generated much in the way of excitement; all the preceding was competent but short on magic. Somewhat shy of a beta.
Our cast:
Carmen: Kendall Gladen
Don José: Thiago Arancam
Micaëla: Sara Gartland
Escamillo: Paulo Szot
Frasquita: Susannah Biller
Mercédès: Cybele Gouverneur
Le Dancaïre: Timothy Mix
Le Remendado: Daniel Montenegro
Moralès: Trevor Scheunemann
Zuniga: Wayne Tigges
Lillas Pastia: Yusef Lambert
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Jose Maria Condemi
Set Designer: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Kendall Gladen acted the part of Carmen magnificently. She’s tall, statuesque, moves well on stage, and her body language and facial expressions fit my notion of Carmen to a T. Her voice, however, did not carry as well as it did in the dress rehearsal. Thiago Arancam’s Don Jose sounded rather strained and forced. Paulo Szot’s Escamillo failed to generate any sparks. Sara Gartland sang an affecting Micaëla; her third-act aria keeps running through my mind. Wayne Tigges sounded more in his element as Zuniga than he did as Ariodates in last week’s Xerxes. Yusef Lambert, in the speaking part of Lillas Pastia, had the best projection of the cast.
In an interesting touch, Jose Maria Condemi staged the entr’acte to Act 3, having Don Jose give Carmen a ring (the one that she will give back to him in Act 4 by putting it on the tip of his knife) and put his hand on her belly; she reacted with a pantomime of swinging a baby back and forth in the cradle of her arms—and then laughed with gusto. At the very end, with Carmen dead on the ground, Don Jose put the ring back on her finger. It was only this final confrontation that generated much in the way of excitement; all the preceding was competent but short on magic. Somewhat shy of a beta.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Susannah, San Francisco Parlor Opera, Nov. 5 2011
What is San Francisco Parlor Opera? We didn’t know, but when we discovered that they were performing Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, my favorite post-Puccini 20th-century opera, we jumped at the chance to see it. SFPO, as its name implies, performs opera in private homes. As a result, tickets are quite limited. This performance was limited to 55 attendees, and took place in the Zellerbach Mansion, across the street from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Or rather, the performance took place in the back yard of the Zellerbach Mansion, during the first good rain of the season. Yes, they put up tarps in an attempt to keep the patrons dry. No, it didn’t entirely work. With only 55 patrons, in a private home, I was not expecting a full orchestra; I expected a piano, and got a piano. I expected an electronic piano that would sound like a piano, but I got a very distorted electronic piano that no one could possibly confuse with a real piano. The performing space consisted primarily of the steps from the yard up to the first floor. The young voices in open air did not carry well to the back of the audience. In general, my expectations were not very high. For the most part, even low expectations were not met. We bailed after about 10 minutes. At least we had a nice dinner at Jannah Restaurant beforehand.
Siegfried, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov. 5 2011
We have a Siegfried! This morning’s HD Live broadcast of Siegfried with Jay Hunter Morris in the title role was so impressive that one of my friends could not contain herself, and used her iPhone at first intermission to send out a message to her fellow Ring-heads “Are you enjoying this as much as I am?” Not having such a phone, I had to wait until getting home before I could reply “Absolutely!”
Furthermore, the Met seems to be getting its act together with respect to La Machine, the 45-ton, 24-plank behemoth that dominates every scene, and still occasionally goes awry. (In the previous performance of Siegfried, I am told by a friend who was there, La Machine seized up at the beginning of the final scene, and Siegfried and Brünnhilde had to do some rapid improvising in their acting.) I think that La Machine serves the opera best when it takes a configuration at the beginning of a scene and then doesn’t move unless the story line calls for it, such as raising a few planks so that a dragon can appear.
In this production La Machine was used a lot as a surface to receive projections, many of which were effective. In the prologue, we saw what looked like a tangle of tree roots, with several snakes worming their way among them. In Act 2 in front of Fafner’s cave, we saw a well-vegetated hillside with half a dozen strictly vertical tree trunks. In Act 3 we saw some very impressive flames—if these were computer-generated, hats off to the programmers. Later in Act 3 the flames are confined to the outermost planks, while Brünnhilde is awakened from her slumber on a grassy meadow with flowers.
Aside from what was done with La Machine, this was a fairly conventional production, with Mime and Siegfried dressed in crudely-stitched leathers, a bellow and anvil for forging Notung. The Wanderer did appear without his eye patch; in its place he wore a large black contact lens and had black makeup around that eye. And Erda was dressed in a black dress covered with reflective pieces of what appeared to be mica. I heard one uncharitable comment comparing the dress to a disco ball.
There was one particularly unconventional element. In Act 1, in the “twenty questions” scene with Mime, the Wanderer carried a fairly hefty spear. It looked to be a good two inches in diameter, and the close-up was so close that I wondered why it did not have actual runes carved in it, to echo the line “With the runes carved on the shaft of his spear, Wotan rules the world.” But the shaft of the spear turned out not to be made of wood. At the beginning of Act 3, in the scene with Erda, the Wanderer popped off the tip and the butt of the spear and the shaft unrolled into a ten-foot-long parchment, with runes on it. So that’s how you get all of Wotan’s contracts onto the shaft of a spear! He and Erda then walked over the parchment as though it were a rug, presumably to show contempt for the old order that is fading away. The Wanderer did not roll up the parchment to reconstruct the spear that would block Siegfried’s way to Brünnhilde. After the parchment was unrolled, the Wanderer was left with just a length of metal of quite small diameter. It looked to be about as sturdy as a curtain rod. The Wanderer laid his curtain rod across the end of one of the planks of La Machine, and Siegfried hacked off the part of it just beyond the edge of the plank. Not very convincing.
One of the most important staging decisions in any Siegfried is, what to do for a dragon? According to Speight Jenkins, the dragon must be frightful. (Sorry, but trash compactors don’t make it.) This dragon brandished some very long sharp teeth, but otherwise it looked like an inflatable balloon suitable for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
Our cast:
Mime: Gerhard Siegel
Siegfried: Jay Hunter Morris
The Wanderer: Bryn Terfel
Alberich: Eric Owens
Fafner: Hans-Peter König
Woodbird: Mojca Erdmann
Erda: Patricia Bardon
Brünnhilde: Deborah Voigt
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Robert Lepage
And what a cast! Highest praise goes to Jay Hunter Morris, who had been the cover for Gary Lehman, and was tapped to step into the role when Lehman fell ill. (Interestingly, he had been a cover for San Francisco’s Siegfried this summer, and stepped into the role when Ian Storey found himself unable to perform that role in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and chose to limit himself to Götterdämmerung.) Others may quibble, but I find it hard to imagine a better Siegfried. He sang beautifully—the slightly strange color in his voice that I heard in San Francisco’s Siegfried was not in evidence. He did have a small crack at the very end of Act 1, and his final note at the end of Act 3 seemed to be cut rather short, but everywhere else his voice was right where it needed to be. In his intermission interview a week ago, he said that the hardest part of the role was acting like an 18-year-old boy, but he brought that off very well. It was hard to believe that he is in his 40s—I haven’t tracked down a birthdate, but I have found in the Paris News the announcement of his engagement, dated 1988. He simply was Siegfried. I am so eager to catch the encore broadcast, assuming that it is scheduled.
Gerhard Siegel won points by avoiding the whining tone that is all too common among portrayals of Mime. Bryn Terfel’s voice could have been a bit darker, lending more gravitas to his “Heil dir, weise Schmied” in Act 1, but it still gave me goosebumps. Deborah Voigt could have been less dark in “Heil dir, Sonne” but that was also worth goosebumps. Both Eric Owens and Hans-Peter König displayed marvelous bass voices.
Bottom line: a triumph for Jay Hunter Morris, with great support from his co-stars. Clearly an alpha.
Furthermore, the Met seems to be getting its act together with respect to La Machine, the 45-ton, 24-plank behemoth that dominates every scene, and still occasionally goes awry. (In the previous performance of Siegfried, I am told by a friend who was there, La Machine seized up at the beginning of the final scene, and Siegfried and Brünnhilde had to do some rapid improvising in their acting.) I think that La Machine serves the opera best when it takes a configuration at the beginning of a scene and then doesn’t move unless the story line calls for it, such as raising a few planks so that a dragon can appear.
In this production La Machine was used a lot as a surface to receive projections, many of which were effective. In the prologue, we saw what looked like a tangle of tree roots, with several snakes worming their way among them. In Act 2 in front of Fafner’s cave, we saw a well-vegetated hillside with half a dozen strictly vertical tree trunks. In Act 3 we saw some very impressive flames—if these were computer-generated, hats off to the programmers. Later in Act 3 the flames are confined to the outermost planks, while Brünnhilde is awakened from her slumber on a grassy meadow with flowers.
Aside from what was done with La Machine, this was a fairly conventional production, with Mime and Siegfried dressed in crudely-stitched leathers, a bellow and anvil for forging Notung. The Wanderer did appear without his eye patch; in its place he wore a large black contact lens and had black makeup around that eye. And Erda was dressed in a black dress covered with reflective pieces of what appeared to be mica. I heard one uncharitable comment comparing the dress to a disco ball.
There was one particularly unconventional element. In Act 1, in the “twenty questions” scene with Mime, the Wanderer carried a fairly hefty spear. It looked to be a good two inches in diameter, and the close-up was so close that I wondered why it did not have actual runes carved in it, to echo the line “With the runes carved on the shaft of his spear, Wotan rules the world.” But the shaft of the spear turned out not to be made of wood. At the beginning of Act 3, in the scene with Erda, the Wanderer popped off the tip and the butt of the spear and the shaft unrolled into a ten-foot-long parchment, with runes on it. So that’s how you get all of Wotan’s contracts onto the shaft of a spear! He and Erda then walked over the parchment as though it were a rug, presumably to show contempt for the old order that is fading away. The Wanderer did not roll up the parchment to reconstruct the spear that would block Siegfried’s way to Brünnhilde. After the parchment was unrolled, the Wanderer was left with just a length of metal of quite small diameter. It looked to be about as sturdy as a curtain rod. The Wanderer laid his curtain rod across the end of one of the planks of La Machine, and Siegfried hacked off the part of it just beyond the edge of the plank. Not very convincing.
One of the most important staging decisions in any Siegfried is, what to do for a dragon? According to Speight Jenkins, the dragon must be frightful. (Sorry, but trash compactors don’t make it.) This dragon brandished some very long sharp teeth, but otherwise it looked like an inflatable balloon suitable for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
Our cast:
Mime: Gerhard Siegel
Siegfried: Jay Hunter Morris
The Wanderer: Bryn Terfel
Alberich: Eric Owens
Fafner: Hans-Peter König
Woodbird: Mojca Erdmann
Erda: Patricia Bardon
Brünnhilde: Deborah Voigt
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Robert Lepage
And what a cast! Highest praise goes to Jay Hunter Morris, who had been the cover for Gary Lehman, and was tapped to step into the role when Lehman fell ill. (Interestingly, he had been a cover for San Francisco’s Siegfried this summer, and stepped into the role when Ian Storey found himself unable to perform that role in both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and chose to limit himself to Götterdämmerung.) Others may quibble, but I find it hard to imagine a better Siegfried. He sang beautifully—the slightly strange color in his voice that I heard in San Francisco’s Siegfried was not in evidence. He did have a small crack at the very end of Act 1, and his final note at the end of Act 3 seemed to be cut rather short, but everywhere else his voice was right where it needed to be. In his intermission interview a week ago, he said that the hardest part of the role was acting like an 18-year-old boy, but he brought that off very well. It was hard to believe that he is in his 40s—I haven’t tracked down a birthdate, but I have found in the Paris News the announcement of his engagement, dated 1988. He simply was Siegfried. I am so eager to catch the encore broadcast, assuming that it is scheduled.
Gerhard Siegel won points by avoiding the whining tone that is all too common among portrayals of Mime. Bryn Terfel’s voice could have been a bit darker, lending more gravitas to his “Heil dir, weise Schmied” in Act 1, but it still gave me goosebumps. Deborah Voigt could have been less dark in “Heil dir, Sonne” but that was also worth goosebumps. Both Eric Owens and Hans-Peter König displayed marvelous bass voices.
Bottom line: a triumph for Jay Hunter Morris, with great support from his co-stars. Clearly an alpha.
Don Giovanni, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 2 2011
Four days after seeing the Met’s Don Giovanni on Met HD Live, it’s into San Francisco for SF Opera’s “for real” live performance of the same opera. Compared to the Met’s, it was rather much a disappointment. The predominant stage element was a set of very large (four feet by twelve, or thereabouts) “mirrors” that weren’t very reflective and were a bit transparent—you could see characters walking behind them. Individual mirrors would sit on the stage, or be hoisted out of sight, or positioned somewhere in between on the director’s whim. There were also a large number of 18th-century style chairs lined up along the side walls and the back wall; Leporello used three of them to take a short nap as Act 1 proper (after the overture) began. Act 2 opened with three large hedges to the left, right, and upstage center. In the graveyard scene there were a number of massive stone blocks; the Commendatore’s depicted him as slouched in an wrought-iron chair. The most impressive set was the final one, where the statue arrived for dinner: the back wall was hung with what must have been hundreds of square yards of a rich dark-red fabric, draped in such a fashion as to present concentric semicircles with their center at the top center of the back wall. Don Giovanni disappeared through a trap door in front of the long dining table, with only smoke or steam to suggest the horrors of hell—no flames or even any red lights shining on the clouds.
Our cast:
Leporello: Marco Vinco
Donna Anna: Ellie Dehn
Don Giovanni: Lucas Meachem
The Commendatore: Morris Robinson
Don Ottavio: Shawn Mathey
Donna Elvira: Serena Farnocchia
Zerlina: Kate Lindsey
Masetto: Ryan Kuster
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Gabriele Lavia
Set designer: Alessandro Camera
I found the singing to be competent but undistinguished all the way around, except for Marco Vinco’s Leporello, who displayed a nicely sonorous bass voice. The acting was the weak spot. Don Giovanni appeared to be something of a has-been who had enjoyed the dining table too much and for too long. Leporello was decidedly over-acted—either that, or he was making sure that the patrons in the back of the house could see his every move. Zerlina was less of an innocent country girl and more of a tart—she did not live up to the expectations created by her very fine portrayal of Niklaus in the Met HD broadcast of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Overall, not much more than a gamma.
Our cast:
Leporello: Marco Vinco
Donna Anna: Ellie Dehn
Don Giovanni: Lucas Meachem
The Commendatore: Morris Robinson
Don Ottavio: Shawn Mathey
Donna Elvira: Serena Farnocchia
Zerlina: Kate Lindsey
Masetto: Ryan Kuster
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Gabriele Lavia
Set designer: Alessandro Camera
I found the singing to be competent but undistinguished all the way around, except for Marco Vinco’s Leporello, who displayed a nicely sonorous bass voice. The acting was the weak spot. Don Giovanni appeared to be something of a has-been who had enjoyed the dining table too much and for too long. Leporello was decidedly over-acted—either that, or he was making sure that the patrons in the back of the house could see his every move. Zerlina was less of an innocent country girl and more of a tart—she did not live up to the expectations created by her very fine portrayal of Niklaus in the Met HD broadcast of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Overall, not much more than a gamma.
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