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.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
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.
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: 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.
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.
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