Il Trovatore, Opera San Jose, Feb. 14 2013

It was lots of fun preparing for Il Trovatore—there is so much wonderful music in this opera! Granted, some of it doesn’t quite fit; the music for the Soldier’s Chorus at the beginning of Act 3 sounds as though the soldiers ought to be doing the vaudeville trick of swinging one leg in front of the other. But as Ernest Newman wrote, Verdi’s mistakes are the mistakes of a genius. Kip Cranna of San Francisco Opera describes it as a “double-A” opera, one that is guaranteed to be a great success at the box office. (The other double-A Verdi operas are Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Aida. Beyond that, make up your own list. You can start with “ABC”—Aida, Boheme, Carmen.)

The set was simple but effective, though architecturally unsound. Downstage, massive square stone-and-mortar pillars on the far left and far right formed the posts of a post-and-lintel construction; the lintel was also of stone and mortar. Given the width of the California Theatre stage, such a construction would not survive long in real life. But that’s just a quibble for the engineers in the audience. This post-and-lintel design was repeated upstage, and a third identical structure was positioned mid-stage. There was also a stone-and-mortar construction of steps, rising gently to a height of about 5 feet over the course of 20 or 25 feet; stagehands pushed these steps around to various positions for the various scenes. In the back, we saw a silhouette of a mountain range. In back of the mountain range, there was either a gigantic full moon (displayed whenever the Count di Luna (get it?) was in the scene) or reddish clouds, evoking the burning of Azucena’s mother at the stake. For the scenes that took place inside, such as the interior of the Castellor fortress or the prison cell  in Aliafera castle, the back of the stage was blacked out.

Our cast:

Manrico, the troubador: Alexander Boyer

Leonora, with whom he is in love: Cecelia Violetta Lopez

Count di Luna, mortal foe of Manrico: Zachary Altman

Azucena, the baby-burner: Nicole Birkland Rebecca Krouner

Ferrando, the captain of the guard: Silas Elash Matthew Anchel

Conductor: David Rohrbaugh

Director: Brad Dalton

We were disappointed to find an insert in the program that announced that Silas Elash would not be singing Ferrando, but that the part would be taken by the Ferrando from the “other” cast. Then, at 8:00, general manager Larry Hancock come on stage to announce that Nicole Birkland would be replaced by the Azucena from the “other” cast. An audible sigh went up from the audience—Nicole had received a rave review in the San Jose Mercury-News for her portrayal of Azucena. But such a sigh was undeserved, as Rebecca Krouner delivered a winning, very physical performance of her own. Matthew Anchel, substituting for Silas Elash,  sang well enough, but he’s not Silas. The chorus and orchestra distinguished themselves. Overall, maybe a beta.

Maria Stuarda, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Jan. 19 2013

Donizetti is known for, among other things, the “three queens” trilogy: Anna Bolena (1830), Maria Stuarda (1835), and Roberto Devereux (1837). The Met has only recently given its first performances of Anna Bolena, in late 2011 and early 2012. This is their first production of Maria Stuarda. Roberto Devereux remains unperformed—should we expect to see it in the near future?

The sets were faithful to the opera, in a somewhat modern idiom, but with no directorial excesses. All of the sets used a wooden floor, raised a couple of feet above stage level, divided into large squares with the planks running north-south, east-west, and at a diagonal. The back of Act 1 Scene 1 was a nod to the Globe Theater, with a wall of wood at the back, painted red. In the center was an opening through which we could see a painting of brightly colored flags and pennants. Up high was complex carpentry to support the roof, if there had been a roof. In the center of the stage was a large, very sturdy wooden platform on which jugglers and acrobats could perform. In Scene 2 the action moved out of doors into the forest, which was suggested by about a dozen poles with short, bare branches sticking out of them. The back wall was a black-and-white abstract background that looked sort of like a sky by JMW Turner.

For Act 2 Scene 1 we were were back inside the castle, with the large wooden platform of Act 1 Scene 1 serving as a desk; the back wall was a painting of a large circle with crosshairs, with a lion (with a dog’s nose!) rampant to the left and a gryphon rampant to the right. In Scene 2 we were in Mary’s cell, with what looked like a very large blackboard at the rear; copies of her various letters were chalked onto the blackboard, different letters at different angles. In Scene 3 the back wall parted to reveal ... bleachers! Sorry, I’m still thinking of the bleachers in San Francisco Opera’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi ... these were really wooden steps, open to the rear, that Mary climbed to approach the executioner. No one actually dies during the course of this opera, but the title character doesn’t last very long after the curtain falls.

Our cast:

Maria Stuarda (Mary Queen of Scots): Joyce DiDonato

Elisabetta (Queen Elizabeth I): Elza van den Heever

Roberto (Robert Dudley): Matthew Polenzani

Giorgio (George Talbot): Matthew Rose

Guglielmo (William Cecil): Joshua Hopkins

Anna (Jane Kennedy): Maria Zifchak

Conductor: Maurizio Benini

Production: David McVicar

Designer: John Macfarlane

Joyce DiDinato showed us why she is one of the world’s leading mezzos. Although not as impressive as she was in the aforementioned  I Capuleti e i Montecchi, she was nevertheless the star of this show. Elza van den Heever sang well enough, but I’m not yet a fan. The men seemed to be doing their jobs and not much more. The music was pleasant enough, but Lucia di Lammermoor has nothing to worry about. Somewhere between a beta and a gamma.

 

Un Ballo in Maschera, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Jan. 9 2013

We couldn’t get to the live performance of Un Ballo on December 8; thank goodness for encores. Many other people must have been in a similar situation—attendance was much better than for most encores.

The production, by David Alden, was a strange one. For starters, the action had been moved from colonial Boston back to Stockholm (the original setting was supposed to be Stockholm, but the censors objected to a regicide on stage, so Verdi and his librettist recast Eugène Scribe’s play to be set in Boston). Therefore, in this production, Riccardo the governor of Boston reverted to Gustavo the king of Sweden. Renato, the king’s best friend, became  Count Anckarström, but still he was sometimes called Renato. Ulrica became Madame Ulrica Arvidsson. Amelia and Oscar survived unchanged.

The pre-performance curtain was a Baroque-style painting of Icarus falling from the sky after the wax holding his feathers together had melted. When the curtain rose for the prelude, the Icarus theme was repeated. The ceiling (which sloped from on high downstage to near stage level upstage) had the same painting; during the prelude, Gustavo paced the stage while a dimunitive Oscar, equipped with wings, performed a pantomime. The set was basically a box, with a semi-shiny floor, walls to the left and right, and as mentioned the ceiling sloping downwards from front to back. With all this reflecting surface, I’m sure that the singers could easily be heard in the far corners of the opera house. The chorus was made to engage in exceptionally strange actions: at one point they pushed steel-gray desks around on stage; at the end of Act 1 Scene 1 they performed a “song and dance” number that looked as though it belonged in Radio City Music Hall. At the end of the act, the Icarus ceiling was raised at the rear to become nearly horizontal and to reveal the facade of a brick office building, with two stories of regularly-spaced windows. Huh?

Act 2, in the graveyard, fared equally poorly. We saw the same walls left and right as we had seen in Act 1. These walls were covered with a light gray on almost white pattern that looked roughly like a Rohrschach inkblot repeated over and over again. The same Icarus ceiling was still there. The semi-shiny floor was still there, but this time about four panels the size of a sheet of plywood had been set at angles to the rest and laid over holes in the stage, signifying graves. The gallows was nothing more than a 10-foot tall I-beam, broken off at the top. The same leather easy chair that appeared in all of the acts was here in the graveyard. At the end of the act, the Icarus ceiling was again raised to near horizontal, this time revealing a black-and-white photo of homes and trees and telephone poles silhouetted against the horizon. Huh?

In Act 3 Scene 1, the confrontation between Count Anckarström and his wife, Amelia, took place in a smaller box: floor, close-in walls, low-hanging ceiling sloping down to the rear. It was a black-and-white box, with black areas meeting white areas at unusual angles not related to room boundaries. Huh? It took the stagehands several minutes to take this little box apart and set up the final scene. Here, in addition to the Icarus ceiling, a cardboard cutout of Icarus’s fall hung from above. In back we saw, at times, a half-tone image of vast Roman arcades and columns, and at times the same image (maybe) as distorted by a fun-house mirror. The walls to the left and right were mirrors, with distorted images. Again, huh?

Our cast:

Amelia Anckarström: Sondra Radvanovsky
Oscar: Kathleen Kim
Madame Ulrica Arvidsson: Stephanie Blythe
King Gustavo III (Riccardo): Marcelo Álvarez
Count Anckarström (Renato): Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: David Alden
Set Designer: Paul Steinberg

The wretchedness of the production was almost overcome by the superb cast. Marcelo Álvarez had come to my attention in the Met’s Tosca of 2009; he was just as outstanding here. Stephanie Blythe appeared in only one scene, but she absolutely made the most of it. Sondra Radvanovsky (equipped with blood-red lipstick) has got to be one of the world’s leading Verdi sopranos. Dmitri Hvorostovsky built up to an overpowering performance in Act 3. Perky little Kathleen Kim made a fine Oscar. Almost an alpha on the singing, but the production is only worth a gamma.

Les Troyens, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Jan. 5 2013

Les Troyens started at 9:00 am on the West Coast ... that’s early for a Saturday morning! But Götterdämmerung started at the same time, and is about as long, so it has been empirically determined that such a performance can be managed.

Francesca Zambello’s production featured the same basic background for all five acts. Starting about 10 feet above stage level, it looked as though we were within a gigantic woven basket, with a large circular hole in its side, positioned above the center of the stage. Within this hole, various things were to be seen, depending upon the act. In Acts 1 and 2, we saw a random scattering of long, thin planks, covering no more than 10% of the area of the hole in the basket; the very center of the hole was left clear, forming a hole within a hole of 3-4 feet in diameter. In Acts 3 and 4, we saw a large number of bundles of clear plastic rods, sort of approximating sheaves of wheat; there were three distinct rows of sheaves, filling only the lowermost chord of the circle of the hole in the basket. In Act 5, we saw a mast, a yardarm, and a sail suspended from the yardarm.

At stage level, Acts 1 and 2 featured crisscrossing ramps with very large rivets that looked as though they might have been taken from the deck of a battleship. In Act 3, Dido’s throne was a simple wooden bench set atop a short circular platform; the top of the platform looked like a model of the foundations of the buildings of Carthage. In Act 4, these foundations were covered by a red sheet and throw pillows. Behind the circular platform was a large curved box, perhaps 8 feet tall and 3 feet deep, the surfaces covered with very clear plastic (plexiglass?) that occasionally reflected some light. Inside the curved box was greenery, some of which looked like a branch of a tree with leaves at the end. In Act 5, one end of a yardarm lay on the stage, and extended up and to the left, supporting a sail. Also on stage were a dozen or more coils of heavy rope. For Dido’s death scene, the yardarm and sail were hoisted out of sight, and another circular platform wheeled in; this one supported several wooden boxes of moderate size. What this design was supposed to invoke escaped me.

Our cast:
Cassandra: Deborah Voigt
Dido: Susan Graham
Anna: Karen Cargill
Aeneas: Bryan Hymel
Iopas: Eric Cutler
Coroebus: Dwayne Croft
Narbal: Kwangchul Youn
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Francesca Zambello
Set Designer: Maria Bjørnson

This was my first ever Les Troyens, and my dominant impression was 4½ hours of very pleasant music, but there may be more reasons besides the production demands for the fact that it’s rarely performed. The most notable music is that of the love duet in the last half of the fourth act, which started out “pleasant” and ultimately became “lovely.” Bryan Hymel, a late replacement for Marcello Giordani (who is said to have “bailed” on this production and promised never to sing Aeneas again), sang the high, challenging role most impressively and garnered the biggest ovation during the performance. Susan Graham made a fine Dido (her duet with Anna in Act 3 was a thing of beauty); Deborah Voigt seemed somewhat detached from her Cassandra. Bass Kwangchul Youn sang a superb Narbal. There’s 4½ hours of music but not a lot of musical ideas, so the whole experience ranks a bit short of a beta. There is a different production of the same opera, by David McVicar, of which San Francisco Opera is a partner. I reckon we’ll see it locally sometime soon, though not next season, which has already been announced. Music usually works better the second time around.

Aida, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Dec. 15 2012

To the best of my recollection, this is the first opera to be broadcast a second time on the Met’s HD Live series, the previous broadcast being the one of Oct. 24 2009, with Violeta Urmana, Johan Botha, Dolora Zajick, and Daniele Gatti, in the same Sonja Frisell production. This production dates back to 1988, and is a “classic” production with nothing outlandish.

Act 1 Scene 1 took place in front of a large tan stone wall, or rather three walls delimited by two square columns. The middle wall was somewhat recessed, allowing the various characters to enter and exit by slipping behind the left and right walls. For Scene 2, the walls were removed to reveal the Temple of Pthah, where Radames received his commission as the general of the Egyptian army. This time the wall was against the back of the stage, with various stone platforms jutting out from it. In the center, supported ten feet above the stage by the wall structure, was some sort of idol; from its space, ramps led upwards to the left and right.

Act II Scene 1, Amneris’s chambers, featured another stone wall with Egyptian paintings on it. In the center, a small raised platform was marked at its front corners by square pillars, and on this platform was Amneris’s chaise longue. The transition to Scene 2 was accomplished by lowering the “crown moulding” from on high down to stage level, while the wall and chaise longue were dropped into the basement. The Triumphal March took place in front of a structure that vaguely resembled Abu Simel, with Egyptian gods and hieroglyphs carved into a massive wall upstage, with another raised platform for the King of Egypt and his daughter, Amneris. There were no elephants, or even props made to suggest elephants, but there were horses. Six trumpet players shared the King’s reviewing stand; they played loooooong ceremonial trumpets.

Act III was set on the banks of the Nile. On the left, an entryway and steps led into the Temple of Isis, where Amneris prayed before her wedding ceremony. On the right were rocks as tall as a human, with a path wending among them. The painted backdrop showed a low but extensive structure on a hill on the other side of the Nile; on our side of the Nile were many plants, perhaps papyrus bushes.

Act IV Scene 1, in which Amneris offers to save Radames if he will give up his love for Aida, was played in front of yet another stone wall. Scene 2, the trial of Radames, featured a large stone plaza surrounded by stone pillars, with a couple of stone pillars in the interior. Scene 3, the tomb, was somewhat of an echo of Act 1 Scene 1, with a middle wall recessed behind left and right walls, allowing Aida to appear from the depths of the tomb. But the tomb was only half the height of the stage; the ceiling of the tomb formed the floor of the surface on which Amneris could walk back and forth, lamenting her fate.

Our cast:

Aida: Liudmyla Monastyrska
Amneris: Olga Borodina
Radamès: Roberto Alagna
Amonasro: George Gagnidze
Ramfis: Štefan Kocán
The King: Miklós Sebestyén

Conductor: Fabio Luisi

Production: Sonja Frisell

Set Designer: Gianni Quaranta

The Met, of course, presented a spectacular Triumphal March, with a cast of what seemed like hundreds, though we learned at intermission that supers would march across the stage in one costume, do a quick change, and march across again in a different guise. As for the singing, only Olga Borodina’s Amneris of Act IV Scenes 1 and 2 and George Gagnidze’s Amonasro of Act 2 Scene 2 offered much to get excited about. On the whole, the production was entertaining but rarely moving, somewhat short of a beta.

La Clemenza di Tito, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Dec. 1 2012

San Francisco Opera performed Mozart’s almost-final opera (it premiered 3½ weeks before The Magic Flute) in 1993, and it didn’t make much of an impression on me then. But with nearly 20 more years of opera experience under my belt, including Idomeneo, and with notable performers such as Elina Garanca, Barbara Frittoli, and Kate Lindsey, it was worth a short drive and a few bucks to give La Clemenza di Tito another try. Definitely better the second time around!

No radical director “concepts” were in evidence here. Every scene was a variation on a basic set comprising two levels of stage, with a semicircular series of steps to connect the front and the back, and stone arches and columns in abundance, with a large arch in the center of the back wall. Inside this arch were placed various objects appropriate to the action of the scene: a large bed in the opening scene, a ship (on rails) for Berenice’s departure, a statue, etc. 

Our cast: 

Servilia: Lucy Crowe
Vitellia: Barbara Frittoli
Sesto: Elina Garanca
Annio: Kate Lindsey
Tito: Giuseppe Filianoti
Publio: Oren Gradus

Conductor: Harry Bicket
Production: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

I’ve been a fan of Kate Lindsey ever since her knockout performance as Nicklausse in The Tales of Hoffman (Met HD Live broadcast Dec. 2009), and again she was superb. Her duet with Servilia (Lucy Crowe) was ravishing. Elina Garanca certainly has a wide range of characters. I’ve seen her as Cenerentola, Carmen, and now the pants role of Sesto, and each time she was outstanding. To think that, prior to La Cenerentola, I said “Elina Garanca? Who’s that?” Now I know, and you can count me as one of her fans too. Barbara Frittoli sang very well, but was somewhat overshadowed by those first two. Definitely a beta.

Tosca, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 29 2012

After seeing the Angela Gheorgiu Tosca on Nov. 18, and reading a review of the other cast (with Patricia Racette) that started “What a difference a change in cast makes!” I picked up a ticket to see that other cast. 

The other cast:
Tosca: Patricia Racette
Cavaradossi: Brian Jagde
Scarpia: Mark Delavan
Angelotti: Christian van Horn
Sacristan: Dale Travis
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Jose Maria Condemi

The main thing that I learned from this performance is to avoid the ultra-low-priced seats in the back corner of the second balcony. There is a reason that they are priced so low. 

As in the first cast, the Scarpia was the most impressive. This time it was Mark Delavan, in fine voice, though without the tremendous depth of villainy that Lado Ataneli gave us in the summer of 2009. Brian Jagde’s Cavaradossi was somewhat marginal in Santa Fe a few months ago, and my hopes for a quantum improvement for San Francisco were not realized. Patricia Racette sang well, but without reaching the heights of her 2007 Cio-Cio San. Too bad that Angelotti has such a small part, I would have loved to hear more of Christian van Horn. It’s still somewhat short of a beta, though my inferior seat may have a lot to do with that judgment.