It’s quite a season for Verdi’s final opera: it’s on the schedule for Opera San Jose, San Francisco Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Los Angeles Opera. San Jose performed Falstaff in September; now it’s San Francisco’s turn.
The staging was a bit unusual without being completely off-the-wall. The stage was dominated by two elements. The first was the walls that surrounded the stage, left, back, and right. For the most part the walls were flat, but with slight protuberances and light drawings on them so that they could give the audience the appearance of being either inside or outside, depending upon how you looked at them. The second element was a gigantic trap door in the middle of the raked stage. The trap door was opened to the maximum for the scenes at the Garter Inn (the first scene of each of the three acts); when opened the underside of the trap door supported a number of bright-red planks. At the right, toward the rear of the trap door opening, was Falstaff’s favorite chair. The trap door and its bright-red color scheme reminded me (too much) of the final scene of Don Giovanni in at least one production that I have seen, in which the Don is dragged off to hell via just such a trap door that opens in his dining room.
The set for Act 3 Scene 2 was the most effective of the evening. The back wall was removed to reveal what at first appeared to be just a black night sky with stars. Then a gigantic full moon rose, very slowly, and as it rose we could see more and more of the silhouette of Herne’s Oak.
Our cast:
Falstaff: Bryn Terfel
Bardolfo: Greg Fedderly
Pistola: Andrea Silvestrelli
Dr. Caius: Joel Sorensen
Ford: Fabio Capitanucci
Fenton: Francesco Demuro
Nannetta: Lisette Oropesa
Meg Page: Renee Rapier
Alice Ford: Ainhoa Arteta
Dame Quickly: Meredith Arwady
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Olivier Tambosi
Bryn Terfel was every bit as good as Scott Bearden of the Opera San Jose cast; Ainhoa Arteta was superb as Alice Ford; but perhaps the most impressive was Meredith Arwady, who sang a true contralto that not many women can reach. Andrea Silvestrelli, one of my all-time favorites, sounded wonderful, but he seemed to have been under-directed, frequently having nothing to do but just stand around. Overall, the performance lacked the sparkle that Opera San Jose had brought to the same opera just a few weeks before. A beta, but no more.
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