Tosca, Opera San Jose, Nov. 18 2010

I have very much enjoyed researching the background of Tosca (the Roman Republic, the Battle of Marengo, the original Victorien Sardou play La Tosca, etc.) in preparation for giving three of my “potluck preview” talks, and doing so meant that I got more out of this Tosca than ever before. For just one example, remember that the opening to Act III includes the sounds of church bells at dawn. The score marks the bells not as pp or ff, but as vicino (nearby), lontano (distant), molto lontano (very distant), etc. So for the first time, I really listened to the bells—it is a wonderful effect!

The sets were fairly modest without looking cheap. In Act I, there is the requisite statue of the Madonna to the left, and nearby the entrance to the private Attavanti chapel. Center, the sight line goes back to the church wall, with a double door. To the right, a closer wall, with a large painting of the Madonna surrounded by cherubs, and the painter’s scaffold. With the chapel to the left and the painter’s scaffold to the right, not a whole lot of room is left for the chorus to sing the Te Deum. The Act II set has Scarpia’s desk to the left, with several candles on it; behind the desk are the shutters that he can close to shut out the sounds of the cantata from the floor below. To the right, a small writing table in front of the doorway to the torture chamber. Said doorway and entrance is a structure in the room, not just a door in a side wall. In back, again a wall with double doors in the center. Act III has a walkway five feet above stage level, going all the way from left to right, with an angled ramp leading from stage level up to it. In back of the walkway is a brick wall, with cutouts, presumably for cannon. And there is a small statue of St. Michael Archangel, in the same pose as the one atop the real Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome.

The first voice heard is that of Angelotti, the escaped prisoner, expertly sung by Krassen Karagiozov. He was sounding very good that evening. Isaiah Musik-Ayala’s Sacristan was also delightful. It’s good to see Isaiah with a good close shave. Alexander Boyer’s Cavaradossi was good, aside from a badly cracked note in E lucevan le stelle. My studies had revealed that in the Sardou play, Cavaradossi is a freethinker and a Bonapartist, opposed to the government in power; even his mustache contributes to the suspicions about him. I was pleased to see that the director had indeed equipped Alexander with a mustache. Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste sang Tosca. She started out a bit rough in Act I, but cleaned it up as the evening went on. I was particularly looking forward to Silas Elash’s Scarpia. Silas in real life looks to be on the other end of the spectrum from the purely evil Scarpia—but the makeup and costuming departments can do wonders. His Scarpia sounded somewhat more gentle than the most effective Scarpia would be—but I acknowledge that I’ve been deeply into the classic Maria Callas/Giuseppe di Stefano/Tito Gobbi recording from 1953.

One bit of acting/direction that really worked for me was in the middle of Act II. Cavaradossi’s final scream of Ahime! (that leads to Tosca’s spilling the beans) was immediately preceded by Scarpia holding out his arm in the direction of the open door to the torture chamber, with his fingers clenched and his thumb up. As the music grows in intensity, Scarpia brings down his thumb, clearly directing Roberti to tighten the screws even more. Chilling.

There is always the question of how Tosca will actually “jump to her death.” Here, she runs up the ramp, runs to the left along the walkway to meet soldiers entering from the left, reverses course and runs into more soldiers entering from the right, and has no choice but to jump off the walkway through one of the cannon ports. Sorry, but I’m not privy to what she jumped onto. Presumably not a trampoline.

Good singing, good acting, decent sets, fabulous music, goosebumps in places. A solid beta.

Madama Butterfly, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 14 2010

San Francisco Opera’s new production of Madama Butterfly is lovely to look at, but it’s hard to get excited over the remaining aspects. The set consists of the little house on Nagasaki hill with sliding shoji walls and pointed arches, and rafters open to the elements. To one side there is a deck; growing through the deck is a large tree, with leaves larger than fig-tree leaves, leaning over the little house as though it is trying to engulf it, kudzu-like. The little house really does sit on top of a hill, so that the characters need to climb up 6 feet or so to reach the house. In the background there is a diorama of Nagasaki harbor way down below; the little house may be 1000 feet or more above sea level.

The little house and its hill were mounted on a turntable. The unfortunate aspect of the production was that (1) the turntable was overused, there seemed to be too many gratuitous rotations of the turntable (2) the rotation of the turntable was presented as being performed by half a dozen kuroku (black-clad stagehands) pulling on hefty ropes, but the ropes often went slack and the illusion of pulling a weighty object was not well conveyed. Other kuroku served the performance as well, but instead of the appropriate stealthy, I’m-not-really-here motions, their grossly exaggerated stepping motions seemed to want to call attention to them.

Our cast differed from the opening night cast:
Cio-Cio-San: Daniela Dessì
Lt. B. F. Pinkerton: Stefano Secco
Suzuki: Daveda Karanas
Goro: Thomas Glenn
Sharpless: Quinn Kelsey
Prince Yamadori: Austin Kness
The Bonze: Christian Van Horn
Conductor: Julian Kovatchev
The conductor for the first several performances was our esteemed Verdi/Puccini maestro, Nicola Luisotti; I’m sure I would have preferred to have been at one of his performances. I can’t specifically fault anyone for anything, aside from the director who dressed Goro in a straw hat and a checkered vest (maybe he specializes in procuring Japanese women for visiting American sailors?), but the performance fell far short of the bar established a few years ago in the productions with Patricia Racette. I do need to note a few effective directorial touches: we see Suzuki at the opening of Act II praying to her Japanese gods, then we notice that Cio-Cio San has been praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Also, when Pinkerton enters the house, he removes his shoes, Japanese fashion—when Sharpless enters the “Welcome to this American house,” he does not. A beta—but barely.

Don Pasquale, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov 13 2010

According to the images projected prior to the beginning of the performance, in 40 years James Levine has conducted nearly 2500 performances of 86 different operas at the Met, but this is his first Don Pasquale. And it is a winner. The sprightly, sparkling overture was just a prelude of things to come, and earned Levine and the orchestra sustained, well-deserved applause, well more than a “Jimmy, we’re glad you’re back after a long absence.” When the curtain went up, we saw Don Pasquale’s cavernous (after all, this is the Met stage) but dilapidated abode, with a sagging bed in the middle, stairs ascending behind the bed, columns and pillars and an entrance way off to the right, the whole festooned with dirty laundry. John Del Carlo sang the title role to perfection; I now understand why one of my companions this morning is a big John Del Carlo fan. Mariusz Kwiecien was an excellent Dr. Malatesta. Ernesto was sung by Matthew Polenzani, who earned one of my few minor reservations about the performance: I heard a bit of a glare in his upper register that didn’t particularly appeal to me. On balance, though, he fit well with the rest of the cast.

We don’t hear a female voice until the second scene, when we are introduced to Norina, reading a book on the balcony of her rooftop apartment overlooking a Tuscan city, and introducing herself to the audience in an aria that functions exactly as does “Una voce poca fa.” Anna Netrebko absolutely shone in this role. When I first saw her following the birth of her child, her voice sounded a shade darker, and she had lost some of her endearing girlish impishness. Here she sang gorgeously, and acted the part of the young woman to the hilt, even doing a somersault into her chaise longue at the end of the scene, and jumping on Don Pasquale’s bed as part of her antics following the signing of the marriage contract. Here the antics went just a bit too far: her kicking him in the behind wasn’t necessary.

Following intermission, we are again in Don Pasquale’s house, but now with dozens of newly-hired (but not yet uniformly attired) servants, and many large packing crates, presumably containing new furniture, and labeled with proper Italian words. The scene ended with an encore of the wonderful Pasquale-Malatesta patter song duet, in front of the curtain, which has been a feature of every other Don Pasquale that I have seen. I finally understood it as (partial) cover for the scene change, which is complicated enough that the curtain remains down for several minutes following the encore. Nevertheless, it is delightful to hear that music again.

The final scene takes place in Don Pasquale’s garden, with a courtyard to the right and the two-story house to the left, with a full-width balcony leading to stairs descending to the garden.

Great music, superb singing, excellent playing, wonderful sets, spirited acting—one could hardly ask for anything more. Clearly an alpha.

Boris Godunov, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Nov 10 2010

I had high hopes for Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Boris Godunov at the Met, seen in the encore performance of Nov. 10, based on his superb Ring for Seattle Opera. Unfortunately, reality fell short of expectations. The sets took the minimalist approach too far. For the coronation scene, we get a flat golden wall with a door. Yes, the golden wall appears to be made out of 1-foot by 3-foot golden plates with a bit of texture, but it’s pretty stark. Pimen and Grigory do without a monk’s cell; the only prop is a gigantic book, with pages about 6 feet square, on which Pimen is writing his history of Russia. Yes, he has to walk on and kneel on the book to write on it, using large characters which I take to be representative of 16th-century Cyrillic. (The book then winds up in every scene following, and people keep walking on it.) The inn at the Lithuanian frontier was a small wall flown in from above with a rude table in front of it, and lots of open space on the rest of the stage. Boris’s mad scene was done with a throne surrounded on four sides with steps up to the throne, rather similar to the stepped pyramid in San Francisco's recent production of Aida. The Polish scene was built around four very rectangular benches arranged in a square. The final three scenes (outside the cathedral with the Holy Fool, the boyars, and the Kromy Forest) featured little more than the large chorus. And of course, the book, which ends up in tatters.

The production could have been redeemed by a stellar performance, but the performance also failed to move me. Much advance notice was made of René Pape’s Boris, but I didn't get much out of it. The remainder of the principals were all Russians. The most impressive performance was given by Andrey Popov as the Holy Fool, notable not so much for the singing (Mussorgky doesn't give him particularly nice music to sing) as for his acting. Wadsworth gave him a significant (mute) role in the first scene. The camera followed him closely, and Popov deserved the attention. In the later scene outside the cathedral, where the children pester him, he wound up crawling into the omnipresent large book and wrapping one of the giant pages around him like a blanket—very effective. Mikhail Petrenko brought a superb bass voice to the role of Pimen, and Vladimir Ognovenko was an effective Varlaam. I didn’t feel that my 4½ hours in the theater had been wasted, but I didn’t get much out of it either. A gamma.

Cyrano de Bergerac, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 6 2010

Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac makes for a nice show but it’s not surprising that it’s not standard repertoire.

The San Francisco Opera production, imported from the Theatre du Chatelet, is perfectly appropriate to the time frame of 1619-1655, the lifespan of the historical Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. Swords are swords and muskets are muskets. The stage action actually begins several minutes before the music starts, as we see the reverse side of the curtain at the theater of the Hotel de Bourgogne, with stagehands preparing the various props that will be used in the performance-within-the-opera. The curtain goes up, we see the theater-goers at the rear of the stage, and we see the back side of the “clouds” that are drawn across the stage. Montfleury arrives in a fantastic airborne chariot, but it’s a 17th-century fantasy, not a 21st-century fantasy. The bakery of Act II Scene 1 is a rather industrial-scale bakery, with a baker at the second-story level mixing his ingredients in a gigantic copper bowl, while other bakers arrange 3-foot-tall loaves of bread, baked in the shape of human figures, for glazing. Scene 2 brings us Roxane’s home and balcony, perfectly represented in “stone.”

Act III, following the single intermission, presents what appears to be the interior of the fort that is under siege by the Spanish forces. Although the cadets are supposed to be the ones laying siege to Arras, they are the ones that are starving, and the well-fed, well-dressed, vigorous Spanish forces are the ones that come over the wall and massacre the cadets, somehow missing Cyrano as they perform the coup de grace on the fallen bodies. Only in Act IV do we see something not quite authentic. The stage is dominated by a large tree that looks more like a tree than do the aluminum creations in the Werther production of a few weeks ago. Left with only a few large brown leaves, it manages to look more artificial and less real than anything else we've seen so far.

These performances are rumored to be Placido Domingo’s final appearance onstage at San Francisco Opera. His voice remains strong and clear and gives no evidence of being ready for retirement. Ainhoa Arteta (from the Basque region of Spain) as his Roxane was also outstanding. Her Christian, Thiago Arancam (from Brazil) started with a rather pinched, strained tenor that improved through the afternoon. Our star-to-be, Leah Crocetto, had one small and one miniscule role as Lisa and Lay Sister respectively; I continue to hope to hear her in larger roles.

The production was magnificent, the singers rose to the occasion, but the music rarely did. A great opera does not have to have hummable, take-home-with-you big tunes to make an impact, but here the music does not make much of an impact. Yes, the final minutes, where Roxane comes to understand that it is the “ugly” Cyrano who had penned all of those wonderful letters from Christian, are quite moving, but the remainder is undistinguished. Perhaps if he had gotten lucky at just one point in his career, we might mention the name of Alfano in the same breath as Leoncavallo and Mascagni, but he didn’t and we don’t. A beta, on the strength of the production and the performances.

Marriage of Figaro, San Francisco Opera, Oct. 10 2010

Das Rheingold yesterday, followed immediately by an author/book-signing event by Lotfi Mansouri, former general director of San Francisco Opera, followed today by San Francisco Opera's performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Fall opera season is busy, but boy is it fun!

The production, by John Copley, dates back to 1986; this is the sixth season in which it has been seen. The sets are lovely, traditional, and in no need of being updated. In Act 1 we see the room that the Count has given to Figaro and Susanna, with two-story tall golden-brown walls and a wooden staircase leading up to a balcony that provides access to the Count's and Countess's bedrooms. There is a bedframe, an armoire, and a dressing-table—and of course a large wooden chair in which Cherubino will hide. Act 2, in the Countess's bedroom, has the same golden-brown walls, and a large bed. The bedroom door is backstage center, the closet is to the right, and the window is to the left. (In a nice bit of stagecraft, Susanna will open the curtains and the sun will stream in.) Act 3 is the one incongruous setting, in a courtyard. There are iron gates to the left, the castle behind (with perfectly rendered Spanish clay tiles), a Moorish design on the wall, and a writing desk at the side of the courtyard. Act 4, in the garden, is dominated by tall Lombardy poplars; there are a few steps leading up to a higher level of the garden. The pavilion is offstage.

Our cast:
Figaro: Kostas Smoriginas
Susanna: Heidi Stober
Countess Almaviva: Ellie Dehn
Cherubino: Michèle Losier
Count Almaviva: Trevor Scheunemann
Marcellina: Catherine Cook
Don Basilio: Greg Fedderly
Doctor Bartolo: Dale Travis
Don Curzio: Robert MacNeil
Barbarina: Sara Gartland
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
(Luca Pisaroni, Danielle de Niese, Lucas Meacham, and John Del Carlo had sung in earlier performances in this run.) What was notable about this performance was the stage action—how many ideas were due to the singers, and how many to the director, is one the great imponderables, but there were any number of nice touches. For example, when Cherubino enters the Countess's bedroom in Act 2, Luisotti played the first bar of “Non piu andrai” on the harpsichord. When Cherubino enters the garden in Act 4, he (she) is humming the same tune. When the Count knocks on the Countess's door, Cherubino's first impulse is to hide under the bedcovers, echoing his hiding under Susanna's dress (in this production, a patterned sheet) in Act 1. In Act 3, after Figaro has discovered that Marcellina is his mother, and after Susanna slaps him, he goes and buries his head in his mother's lap just like a little boy. This last bit is something that is funny once, but probably not nearly as effective if seen a second time, like the tank in Laurent Pelly's production of Daughter of the Regiment.

Vocally, Ellie Dehn's Countess was the standout, with her two big arias "Porgi amor" and "Dove sono" being particularly effective. Don Basilio projected well; the remaining singers did not. They seemed to be young voices not accustomed to filling a space the size of the San Francisco Opera House. Overall, the performance was a success, with more audience laughter than is typical, and leading up to a moving “Perdono, perdono” finale in the garden. A beta.

Das Rheingold, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Oct. 9 2010

The Metropolitan Opera has launched their new Ring production, directed by Robert Lepage, whose primary center of attention is the 45-ton "machine" or "device" that occupies the rear portion of the stage. Imagine a left-to-right axle that supports 24 2-foot wide planks or seesaws, 2 inches apart from each other, each of which can be rotated independently about the axle. The planks are actually obtuse isosceles triangles, with the long side maybe 20 feet long and the short sides maybe 11 feet long. When the triangles are all lined up with their long sides facing the audience, images can be projected on it (and with other configurations as well).

Scene 1 had one of the short sides nearly level, with the other short side sloping down to the stage floor at an angle that permitted Alberich to climb up the slope to press his advances on the Rhinemaidens above, and permitted him to slide down to stage level. The slope must have been similar to that of a playground slide. On this slope were projected images of gold and silver coins, which slid down in response to the actions of the singers. In scene 2, two sets of six planks were held level, providing platforms for the giants to stand on—a novel alternative to platform shoes or stagehands carrying the singers piggyback or gigantic puppets. Other planks formed a slope down to the stage, permitting Freia (or her stagehand double) to enter sliding head-first on her belly to just below stage level, from whence Freia herself climbed up to the stage. Donner and Froh entered in the same manner. The descent to Nibelheim was handled by rotating each plank a few degrees more than the preceding one, forming a twisted staircase; doubles suspended by wires walked from one side to the other, starting off with their bodies parallel to the stage floor and gradually righting themselves. Scene 3 didn't make much use of the planks, and the ascent from Nibelheim was the inverse of the descent. In Scene 4 the giants were again supported on their platforms, and Freia was laid out in a hammock-like net while various golden shields were placed on top of her to hide her from the giants' eyes—not particularly effective. The best use of the machine was made for the Rainbow Bridge: six planks in the center were positioned so that they could be climbed, the remaining planks were made vertical, while rainbow lighting was projected on the machine and above it. We did not see a Valhalla.

By and large I felt that the machine was well used to convey the action, but nevertheless it called too much attention to itself—“how will the machine be configured next?” The machine left a relatively modest space in front of it for most of the action to take place, 10 or 15 feet. The costumes were in keeping with a “conventional” as opposed to “radical” Ring productions: Wotan, Froh, and Donner were dressed as mythical heroes, with plastic breastplates to make them appear muscular; Loge was dressed in an outfit made up of strips of cloth; the giants looked like burly Norsemen. Fricka and Freia wore simple gowns, though Fricka had some sort of brooch just below her bosom that pulsed with light on occasion.

The cast was as follows:
Freia: Wendy Bryn Harmer
Fricka: Stephanie Blythe
Erda: Patricia Bardon
Loge: Richard Croft
Mime: Gerhard Siegel
Wotan: Bryn Terfel
Alberich: Eric Owens
Fasolt: Franz-Josef Selig
Fafner: Hans-Peter König
plus three Rheinmaidens not credited in the Met's handout. James Levine was at the helm, back from several months of recuperation from medical problems. Of the singers, I was particularly struck by Eric Owens as Alberich. He sang with a snarl in his voice that fitted the part perfectly. My only reservation about him was that he smiled too much. The orchestra under Levine played magnificently and the total effect was very powerful—matching the 2005 Seattle Rheingold as “best Rheingold I've ever seen.” I definitely want to get to the encore broadcast.

See also the Met's page, “A New Ring for the Met”