Flight

Conductor:  Nicole Paiement
Director:  Brian Staufenbiel

Refugee (countertenor).... Tai Oney
Controller (soprano) .........Nikki Einfeld
Bill (tenor) ........................Chaz'men.Williams-Ali
Tina, Bill's wife (soprano). Amina Edris
Stewardess (mezzo-soprano) Maya Yahav Gour
Older Woman (contralto) ...Catherine Cook
Steward (baritone) ............Hadleigh Adams
Minskman (baritone) ...........Eugene Brancoveanu
Minskwoman (mezzo-soprano) ...Renée Rapier
Immigration Officer (bass-baritone) ..Philip Skinner

Champion at Opera Parallèle

Nicole Paiement: conductor
Brian Staufenbiel:  creative director
Music by Terence Blanchard,
Libretto by Michael Cristofer

Emile Griffith: Arthur Woodley
Young Emile Griffith: Kenneth Kellogg
Little Emile Griffith: Moses Abrahamson/ Evan Holloway
Emelda Griffith: Karen Slack
Howie Albert: Robert Orth
Kathy Hagan: Michelle Rice
Benny ‘Kid’ Paret and his son: Victor Ryan Robertson
Luis Rodrigo Griffith: Andres Ramirez
Sadie Donastrog Griffith: Chabrelle Williams
Cousin Blanche: Aisha Campbell
Ring Announcer: Mark Hernandez

I attended the opening of Champion last night at the SF Jazz Center.  I had never been in this facility and found that our seats were among the best in the house.  We could see and hear everything.  It appeared to be sold out.

This is a very complex work.  For one thing three different people play Emile Griffith.  We see him in old age and experience his entire life through flashbacks.  This was handled with great skill and never became confusing.  The older Emile, played very emotionally by Arthur Woodley, was present on the stage throughout while his younger counterparts played out the story of his life.

Emile Griffith was a real person who became a prize fighter.  Please remember that even today the two richest athletes in the world are both boxers.   He became famous for having killed someone in the ring, or rather he put him into a coma from which he eventually died. 

Theatrically it was very effective.  Scenes were announced by a Ring Announcer and the stage was bounded by the four corners of a boxing ring.  Kenneth Kellog is a physically impressive man who well suited the role of a major athlete.

I was very pleased to see that one of my rules for creating an opera was observed.  While the story is strictly speaking entirely about men, care was taken to give ample material to the female characters.  Karen Slack as Emile's mother had some lovely bits.

My only criticism is that it was somewhat long.  I enjoyed it a lot.  It seemed to me a work of love.

Dead Man Walking

From left, composer Jake Heggie, company artistic director Nicole Paiement, Sister Helen Prejean and company production director Brian Staufenbiel. 

Conductor: the fabulous Nicole Paiement
Production:   Brian Staufenbiel

Sister Helen: Jennifer Rivera
Sister Rose: Talise Trevigne
Father Grenville: John Duykers
George Benton: Philip Skinner
Joseph De Rocher: Michael Mayes
Older Brother: Jonathan Smucker
Younger Brother: Baxter Spark
Mrs. De Rocher: Catherine Cook
Owen Hart: Robert Orth
Kitty Hart: Kristin Clayton
Howard Boucher: Joseph Meyers
Jade Boucher: Michelle Rice
Actor girl child: Amitis Rossoukh
Actor boy child: Brandon Blum

Opera Parallèle has produced Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.  The cast for this opera is huge, especially for a chamber opera company such as this one.  I have tried to reduce the list to the essentials.

The main characters are Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher.  Such a rough looking man with tattoos in the title role creates an atmosphere of terror that I don't remember in the original production.  This casting is inspired.

The second tier of characters, determined by the importance of their music, are Sister Rose and Mrs. De Rocher, both cast by wonderful singers.  You will look in vain for the evil in Joe's mother that could have created this monster.  Even when he confesses at the end, he blames everything on booze and drugs, but retains the fiction with his mother that he did nothing.

The production first shows us the two teenagers first undressing and going into the water, followed by Joe killing the boy, raping the girl and killing her because she was screaming.  Then we are constantly reminded throughout the opera of why we are here by the presence of these two young people in virtually every scene.  They are present in Sister Helen's dreams, in court, in jail and finally in the execution chamber.

The sister is thinking of his soul.  The thought for us the audience is that God loves him, too.  If he admits he did it, perhaps God will save him, too. The constant reminder of the murdered teenagers blunts the anti-capital punishment message, to the point where you are not at all sure what the lesson is that one is to take away from this.

The opera is very successful both musically and theatrically, especially in this production.  It moves us to reconsider everything.

I shook hands with Jake Heggie in the intermission.  I have witnesses.  I sat in the second row and had really only one complaint--sitting so close to the orchestra resulted in ear pain, something that at my age I try very hard to avoid.  In the future we will phone in our ticket requests.

There was actual smoking on the stage which sent the woman sitting next to me into a coughing fit.

Anya17

Composer:  Adam Gorb
Librettist:   Ben Kaye
Conductor:  Nicole Paiement

Cast

Anya:  Anna Noggle, soprano
Mila:  Shawnette Sulker, soprano
Carole/Natalia:  Catherine Cook, Mezzo-soprano
Uri/ Gabriel:  Andres Ramirez, tenor
Viktor:  Victor Benedetti, baritone
Elena:  Laura Krumm, mezzo-soprano

Anya17 by Adam Gorb is an opera about the sex trade that has won an award in England.  Anya thinks she is getting married but instead is kidnapped into the sex trade.  Carole and Mila are kidnapped with her.  This is a relatively distinguished cast for mostly local singers, but I think nothing saves it.

We are spared all hints of actual sex.  I hesitated to see this because I thought it might be sordid.  The problem is that it isn't sordid enough.  There is lots of violence, as much as would be possible without actually hurting anyone.  Mila is murdered before our eyes and Viktor is killed in a fight with Gabriel.

Was it worth it?  For me only the last scene really worked operatically.  Anya awakes in a hospital, tells about her status as number 17 in a menu of women, and ends the opera by remembering her name.  It's a true operatic mad scene.  But why hadn't we heard of this menu before now?

Was it worth it?  Shrug.

The opera was presented in the Marines Memorial Theater, an acceptable space with a lot of stairs.  The orchestra was partially hidden behind a scrim.  It worked pretty well.

I must mention the two dancers, Janet Das and Quilet Rarang, who acted as stage hands during the opera.  Their looks seemed to suggest gender neutrality, so they could come and go without seeming to blend with the action.

Les mamelles de Tirésias

actor	Songspiel	Tiresias
Thomas Glenn, tenor	Charlie	Lacouf, Journalist, The son
Daniel Cilli, baritone	Billy	The director, Presto
Gabriel Preisser, light baritone	Bobby	Thérèse's husband
Aleksey Bogdanov, bass	Jimmy	Bearded man
Rachel Schutz, soprano	Jessie	Thérèse/Tirésias, fortune teller
Renee Rapier, mezzo	Bessie	Newspaper vendor
Hadleigh Adams, baritone		constable
Amber Marsh		The big lady
Suzanne Riven, mezzo		The lady
Joseph Hernandez		dancer
Vanessa Thiessen		dancer
Nicole Paiement		conductor

Friday night I attended a strange mash-up of Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias (The breasts of Tiresias, 1947, sung in French) and songs from Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel (Little Mahagonny, 1927, sung in German and English) presented by Opera Parallèle in San Francisco.  I'm not sure it's possible to explain this, but I'll have a go.

Both of these classic twentieth century works are intensely political, but the politics is hard to translate to our time.  Each has a significant librettist as well.

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a play called Les mamelles de Tirésias which forms the basis for the opera.  The play was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.  After wars it is common to start political campaigns to encourage having children, especially after WWI where so many young men died. (Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917) is also such an opera.)  The opera was first performed after WWII.

The play concerns a young woman named Thérèse who wishes to have the free life of a man.  Our heroine appears attired in high red boots and a giant red bra with huge breasts made of balloons which she removes and lets float into the air.  She strips down, takes off her red boots, grows a beard and changes her name to Tirésias.  As a man she achieves a number of high offices in the country.

Her left behind husband decides he still wants to have children, and clad in the same red boots and red bra by sheer force of will produces over 40,000 of them.   It becomes politically correct to make babies so Tirésias turns back into Thérèse and her husband takes her back.  "But you're flat as a board!"  This was all charming.  Rachel Schutz was excellent, and I rather liked the gender bending husband played by Gabriel Preisser, too.

Surrounding this work were the songs from Mahagonny Songspiel, usually in German with the hit song "Moon of Alabama" sung in English by Jessie and Bessie.  The significant librettist for Mahagonny Songspiel was Bertolt Brecht, a notorious leftist who got Weill in trouble with the rising Nazi movement, resulting in Weill emigrating to America.  So he writes this significantly anti-American piece called Mahagonny and then he emigrates to America.  Huh!  [Badly written, uninformed paragraph.  Weill was Jewish and didn't need additional reasons to leave Germany and eventually the rest of Europe.]

In our mash-up we are somehow in a waterless future.  There is no water to float the boat so it is wheeled about the stage.  The men's roles appeared to be a lot of work pushing the boat around the stage and climbing in and out of it.  Thomas Glenn shaved his head for this.

Did it work?  I couldn't connect them, but enjoyed each individually.  They didn't quite get the correct style for Weill, but Poulenc was fabulous.  So no.

This group is wonderfully imaginative and a lot of fun.  We still think they could do Ainadamar over and over.  Whatever they choose to do next, I can't wait to find out.

Twitter suggests this film with Francis Poulenc at the piano and Denise Duval.



It's all so French.

Trouble

Last night Opera Parallèle presented Samuel Barber’s Hand of Bridge and Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti at Z Space in San Francisco.  To date I have loved everything they did, (see here, here and here) but not this time.  Most of what I didn't like had to do with Z Space.  Like it or not, the audience for opera is old people.  Two different audience members fell down trying to get to their seats.  If you insist on staying in this venue, I predict a law suit in your future.  The acoustics were not good.  The orchestra was positioned to the side of the stage with no shielding.  I think a screen between the orchestra and the audience would have been helpful.  Any kind of pit muffles the orchestra at least a bit.  Here there was no pit and a lot of reverb, not a good combination.  Z Space is probably cheaper than the place in Yerba Buena Center, but I will not go there again.

Trouble in Tahiti began its life as a stand alone one act opera in 1952.  This was the version presented here.  Later, in 1983, it was first presented as the opener for a one act version of A Quiet Place.  Then a year later it was swallowed whole by a three act version of A Quiet Place.  Just so you know.  Trouble is legitimately presented by itself.  We did it at my college in 1958.

These two operas are basically the world before Betty Friedan.  Some of us lived then.  The sexes are still battling, but the rules have changed. 

Operas are full of projections these days.  They faked an entire movie of people on Tahiti, complete with a rescuing navy.  It was funny but very much too complex and distracting from the characters of the opera.  I liked the atmospheric stuff, like the cigarette ads, but not the movie.  This is a gross generalization:  the opera is about the people singing.  Try to remember that.  What I imagine is that this opera was found to be tedious, and the fake movie was intended to make it more interesting.  It was a futile effort.

Baritone Eugene Brancoveanu (Sam) and mezzo-soprano Lisa Chavez (Dinah) played the main characters in both operas.  They are excellent singers and fully up to the challenge of a loud orchestra.

Conductor/Artistic Director Nicole Paiement
Stage Director Brian Staufenbiel

Ainadamar 👍🏻

Chorus members in costume wandered among us before the drama.

Oswaldo Golijov's opera Ainadamar, Arabic for “fountain of tears,” as presented by Opera Parallèle, is a complete theatrical experience.  We have costumes.  We have marvelous dancing.  We have atmosphere created by lighting projections.  We have fascinating orchestral textures in Spanish style music.  We have poetry.  We have women's chorus.  We have history filled with violence.  And best of all we have gorgeous, full voiced singing.

I went with friends who had seen it before in Santa Fe and were completely confused by the Peter Sellars production.   And they actually know things about Federico Garcia Lorca.  For me a few quick glances at the program were enough to clarify everything I needed to know about this complex drama.  Congratulations to Opera Parallèle for another job well done.

Margarita Xirgu, sung by Marnie Breckenridge, is the main character of the drama.  The story begins in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1969 when Margarita is an old woman who teaches about the historical Spanish figure Mariana Pineda who was the subject of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, sung by  Lisa Chavez.  Xirgu's main student was sung by Maya Kherani.

Perhaps you are already confused.  Margarita appears with her students and they sing about Mariana.  Margarita knew Lorca, whom she calls Federico, and flashes back to their last meeting in Granada, Spain, in 1936.  The changes in time and place were flashed on the supertitles.  You knew they were good for something.  Federico hands Margarita a drink and tells her that as a child there was a statue of Mariana Pineda outside his room.  She was a martyr to an earlier Spanish revolution in 1831.

So we have three time frames:  1831, 1936 and 1969.  We see Mariana Pineda executed on the stage.  And we see Lorca shot by members of Franco's army.  Margarita tried to persuade Federico to go to Cuba with her on her dance tour, but he wanted to stay in Spain to experience the violence.

The almost Flamenco dancing was extremely beautiful--I say almost because it included everything except the banging on the floor.  The head dancer is named La Tania, I think.  Jesus Montoya sang in a Flamenco style.  He was incredible.  I was on the edge of my seat the entire performance.

You should know by now that I am a fan of Golijov.  Stop writing stupid symphonies and give us another opera.

If you are searching for intelligent life in your opera, I can highly recommend Opera Parallèle in San Francisco.  They have pretty much cornered the market on the National Opera Association's Opera Competition, winning first prize for 2011 and 2012.  Perhaps they will win again this year.

I have just one question:  suitcases?

Gatsby

I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby once long ago, but I could not remember much of it.  I remembered people riding around in cars and that the millionaire Jay Gatsby was carrying a torch for Daisy.  This is considered the great American novel, and is a portrait of the beginning of modern life, with women in short skirts, cars, boozing, extra-marital affairs, and that great American pastime:  driving around.  Don't get the wrong idea:  boozing is as old as America, but it's less dangerous if you go home on a horse.  In 1922, the time of the story, booze was illegal.

The opera The Great Gatsby by John Harbison and presented by Ensemble Parallèle follows the plot of the novel pretty closely.  Even the ubiquitous giant glasses with wandering eyes behind them are reminiscent of the cover of the novel, though the appearance of the word occultist instead of oculist is not explained.

Nick is the perspective.  Tom and Daisy are married, have a child and live in West Egg.  Wilson and Myrtle are married and live in Flushing.  Tom is having an affair with Myrtle.  Nick is dating Jordan, a professional golfer, and lives next door to the mysterious Gatsby who lives in a large house in East Egg, throws wonderful parties and dreams of Daisy.  There are ten scenes in 2 acts in five locations.

The sets move smoothly from West Egg to Flushing, to Gatsby's house, to Nick's house, to Gatsby's, to the Plaza Hotel in New York City, etc.  Plenty of interlude or driving music is provided to accomplish this.  I thought the production for this complex opera was very successful.  No cars appeared on stage, but they were discussed and described.  The parties at Gatsby's house are fun. At one of the parties Charlie Chaplin in his tramp costume appears as a guest.

There is an on-stage band that plays jazz period music, in great contrast to the strictly modern music of the rest of the opera.  Period music also comes from the radio.  These two musical sources and styles are blended smoothly throughout the opera.  Jacques Desjardins reorchestrated the opera to achieve this effect. 

I missed the mysterious, exalted nature of Jay Gatsby.  They work too hard trying to make him seem a fake, and they seem ridiculous complaining about the source of his income--illegal booze--while they are constantly drinking.  The poor man, Wilson, kills the rich man, Gatsby.  It's all a mistake.

Am I allowed to tirade here?  Modern composers seem all to be part of the musicians fallacy.  Musicians praise Placido Domingo and Janet Baker for being like them.  In a modern classical orchestra everyone has to play precisely what is written on the page.  Any alternative represents chaos.  The same can be said for a chorus.  The perceived absence of a singing style is regarded as a virtue, and elicits constant praise for the two above named singers.  So when modern composers are composing for classical singers, they do not conceive or encourage a style for the singers to use when singing their music.  Just reproduce the notes, and you're done.  The only problem with this is that it is the style that makes you most want to listen to the music.  Style is the parts that lie between the notes.  Where do you want anyone to slide?  If you don't know, who will?

So in most modern operas the singing is the least interesting part.  A modern opera is driven by the plot and the orchestra.  Susannah Biller who played Daisy was the most professional of the singers, but Erin Neff who played Myrtle showed the most style.  One couldn't help feeling that the characters were cast mainly for their looks. 


I regard this visit as part of my education.

Saints

In San Francisco this summer is the summer of Gertrude Stein. I've seen the art exhibit at the SF MOMA, I've seen the picture exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, so now it is time for Four Saints in Three Acts.

Of course, there are at least four acts and many more than four saints.  You knew that.  As a former GS freak who has actually read a substantial percentage of her literary works, it feels like the rest of the world is finally catching up.  To keep the record straight, this is my first Four Saints.

I have taken down my copy of Last Operas and Plays to see how the text looks on the page.  Most of Stein's plays look like normal plays--on the left is the character's name and on the right is the words he is to speak.  This is the form for The Mother of Us All, the other opera with text by Stein and music by Virgil Thomson.  Not Four Saints.  Her desire to write a play or maybe an opera is only half-hearted.  She just writes down anything--Stein notoriously never edited herself--including a lot of words that look like stage directions, and Thomson composes everything and assigns who will sing what.

A few words about Virgil Thomson. From the perspective of 2011 he is clearly the original minimalist. The program speaks of his influence on Philip Glass. Deliberate, self-conscious simplicity is minimalism. Why have I never seen this before?

And in Stein's text we have minimalist poetry. Why invent new text when we could simply keep repeating the old text? Perhaps this text is just thoughts about possibly thinking about possibly writing a play.

"Pigeons on the grass alas." Crossing Yerba Buena Gardens on the way to the performance, I saw these pigeons.

At the start of the "installation" someone came out and tried to explain what we were about to see.  Apparently at some date after the original 1934 production, Virgil Thomson created a cut down version of the opera.  Then along came Ensemble Parallèle and SFMOMA, and they requested Luciano Chessa to compose something more 21st century for these cut out bits of text. The result is a short prelude opera called A Heavenly Act. The characters here are also Saint Ignatius and Saints Teresa I and II.

This new work can't decide what it is musically. There is something resembling ensemble Sprechstimme, a kind of randomized whispering. There is an extended rap song, complete with microphone. There's a long, almost tonal waltz. There's a beautiful duet with Teresa I and Teresa II. Often it's almost tonal with intrusive percussion and a meandering synthesizer (harmonium) to throw you off.

You can tell I'm enjoying trying to explain this, even if I don't really succeed.

A Heavenly Act is a dark work, produced in a dark style, with looming black and white projections of angels. The liner notes tell us that the projections of fluffy clouds are heaven as we imagine it, while the dark angels are heaven as it truly is. The projections are by Kalup Linzy who may also be our rapper and principle performer.

Gertrude Stein as rap text just might work. Tender Buttons?

When a crowd appears on stage in colorful outfits, we know we are now doing Virgil Thomson. All is sunshine and light.

A plot is imposed on the text to great effect. Saint Ignatius operates on Saint Teresa--that would be Saint Teresa I--and apparently the results are not good, because two policemen appear and arrest him. He goes on trial for murder, is convicted and executed in the electric chair. While the cast sings about pigeons.  All the saints appear to be electrocuted together.  "When this you see remember me."

The able conductor is Nicole Paiement. Wendy Hillhouse, John Bischoff, Heidi Moss (Teresa I), Krisen Choi (Teresa II) and Eugene Brancoveanu (Saint Ignatius) were the most important singers. Everyone involved is from the Bay Area.

It was a work of love.

[See Kinderkuchen History 1930-50]