Orlando in San Francisco

Conductor: Christopher Moulds*
Director: Harry Fehr*
Production Designer: Yannis Thavoris*

Zoroastro, doctor: Christian Van Horn (bass)
Orlando, hero: Sasha Cooke (originally alto castrato, here mezzo)
Dorinda, nurse: Christina Gansch* (soprano)
Angelica, rich American: Heidi Stober  (soprano)
Medoro, patient: Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen* (originally contralto, here countertenor)

Our production of Orlando, an opera in three acts by George Frideric Handel seen at the San Francisco Opera, has leapt into the latest craze in opera regietheater:  opera as psychotherapy.  We have seen this recently in:

• Bizet's Carmen from Aix-en-Provence 7/9/17.  Don Jose is being treated for marital difficulties.
• Weber's Oberon, or The Elf King's Oath live streamed from the Bayerische Staatsoper 7/30/17.  Psychiatrists experiment on random members of the audience.  Gods and fairies are delusions.
• Berlioz' Les Troyens 2/28/19.  After the Trojan War, the survivors are institutionalized in a mental hospital with PTSD.

So our hero is showing signs of mental illness after fighting for Britain at the beginning of WWII .  In an early scene photographs of Edward VIII before and after his abdication are shown, including one where he and Wallace are friendly with Hitler.  This sets the context.  Hitler is probably still easy to identify, but I might wonder about Edward VIII.

Orlando is having hallucinations which are projected on the set as seen above.  We see handwriting, a large engagement ring, lights, a woman's eyes, etc. 

Act I

Orlando is in a hospital bed.  He is shown rescuing a woman in a wheelchair.  Both Dorinda and Angelica fall in love with Medoro, who has injured his leg.  Orlando has given Angelica an engagement ring.  Characters are introduced in rooms of the hospital.

Act II

Dorinda lets Angelica have Medoro, and Angelica gives Dorinda Orlando's ring.  Orlando is furious over this turn events and threatens everyone.  At the end of the act we hear bombs exploding

Act III

Orlando is completely bonkers by this time and is locked up.  Spoiler alert:  he is treated with not too shocking shock treatments, and is cured.  Angelica and Medoro are allowed to go in peace.  Orlando puts his uniform back on and retreats.

I felt that this modernization was very successful.  It fit the story surprisingly well.  However, sometimes plot points went by in a way that allowed you to completely miss them.

In Handel's time Orlando was a male castrato and Medoro was a woman.  We have the long ago example of Marilyn Horne to reverse this.  Our countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen is nice looking and has a beautiful voice.  My favorite singing was by Christian Van Horn, a bass who sings coloratura.  Who ever heard of such a thing.

Among the women Christina Gansch received the most applause for her act III aria.  She is someone to look out for.  Our stalwarts Sasha Cooke and Heidi Stober were both excellent actresses and good in their roles.  Their voices didn't always precisely fit the music they were singing.  Orlando in particular is quite low.

One becomes impatient with endless da capo arias, but all in all it was very enjoyable.  The orchestra included recorders, a small organ but no harpsichord, and a theorbo.

The screens in the balcony are coming down.  This is sad.  I can't read the titles from where I sit without using binoculars, while the ones on the screens are very clear.  This has to do with money.  I'm not happy about it.

Arabella in San Francisco

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Conductor Marc Albrecht *
Director Tim Albery *
Production Designer Tobias Hoheisel

Waldner family:
Arabella, elder daughter of the Waldners: Ellie Dehn (soprano) ‡
Zdenko/Zdenka, Arabella's sister: Heidi Stober 
Countess Adelaide Waldner, their mother: Michaela Martens ‡
Count Theodor Waldner, a retired cavalry officer, their father: Richard Paul Fink ‡

Arabella's suitors:
Mandryka, A Croatian landowner Brian Mulligan ‡
Matteo, a young officer Daniel Johansson * ‡
Count Elemer, one of Arabella's suitors Scott Quinn ‡
Count Dominik, one o f Arabella's suitors Andrew Manea † ‡
Count Lamoral, one of Arabella's suitors Christian Pursell † ‡

A Fortune - Teller to Countess Waldner: Jill Grove ‡
The Fiakermilli, a cabaret singer Hye Jung Lee ‡

* San Francisco Opera debut † Current Adler Fellow ‡ Role debut

A new production of Strauss's Arabella is currently running at the San Francisco Opera.  This opera is very nice, has lovely music and a perfect ending, as long as you remember that everyone in it is an idiot.  The Waldners have two daughters and no money because papa gambles it all away.  They are trying very hard to find a wealthy and suitable husband for their elder daughter Arabella.  Father remembers his old army buddy Mandryka and sends him a picture of his daughter.

Don Pasquale

Dr. Malatesta, Norina, Don Pasquale, Ernesto

Conductor: Giuseppe Finzi
Director: Laurent Pelly

Don Pasquale: Maurizio Muraro
Norina: Heidi Stober
Ernesto: Lawrence Brownlee*
Dr. Malatesta:  Lucas Meachem

I knew there was something that looked familiar about this production of Donizetti's Don Pasquale.  It is shared with the Santa Fe Opera.  In Santa Fe there are no overhead flies and things often slide out from the sides.  Well that's what this does.  The colors are drab in the extreme and only brighten up later through the introduction of colored chairs and flowers.  I thought it was functional but drab.  Drab in a comedy doesn't make much sense to me.  Laurent Pelly retained his credit but did not come out to bow.  I suspect this is not actually his production.

The highlight of this performance was the company debut of Lawrence Brownlee as Ernesto.  He had the most slapstick comedy and performed it expertly.  Besides being a fabulous singer.  We loved him.  He was well matched to Heidi Stober, by now a company favorite.  Larry, please come back.

It was in fact a fabulous cast.  Everyone met and exceeded expectations.  This is my list of where I have seen these people.

• Maurizio Muraro SFO live (Don Pasquale, Barber of Seville) London (Manon Lescaut, I due Foscari) Met (Cosi fan tutte)

• Heidi Stober SFO live (Don Pasquale, Show Boat, Xerxes, Falstaff, Un Ballo in Maschera, Sweeney Todd) at Santa Fe live (Platée, Arabella, La Boheme) Berlin live (vocal recital)

• Lawrence Brownlee* SFO live (Don Pasquale)  Met (La Cenerentola, Armida, Barber of Seville)

• Lucas Meachem  SFO live (Die Tote Stadt, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Pasquale, I Pagliacci, Barber of Seville) Santa Fe live (Don Giovanni)

For me the fabulous singing actors saved this.  But then don't they always?  The intermission was extended by about 20 minutes without explanation.

Footnote:  the program cover showed a picture of Gina Lollobrigida.

Lieder in Berlin

I went to hear a recital with Heidi Stober at the Deutsche Oper because she and Simon Pauly were performing Lieder by Mahler, Pfitzner, and Wolf, all composers that I enjoy very much.  They know when to clap here.

Someone named Monika Rinck spoke similar but not exactly the same texts between them.  This I have never seen before. They called it Lieder und Dichter.

I have seen Heidi many times in San Francisco and three times in Santa Fe.

I had a fine dinner before at the restaurant at the opera.  I was here at this opera once before in the 70s to see Janis Martin who is not completely forgotten.

Sweeney Todd

Conductor: Patrick Summers
Production Designer: Tanya McCallin *

Sweeney Todd: Brian Mulligan
Mrs. Lovett: Stephanie Blythe
Johanna: Heidi Stober
Beggar Woman: Elizabeth Futral
Anthony Hope: Elliot Madore *
Adolfo Pirelli: David Curry *
Tobias Ragg: Matthew Grills
Judge Turpin: Wayne Tigges
Beadle Bamford: AJ Glueckert

The great performers fund of the San Francisco Opera is accumulating money.  Gerald Finley who was supposed to sing here and Diana Damrau who was supposed to sing Lucia have both cancelled to be replaced by less expensive but still very fine singers.  My Brian Mulligan experiences have included an excellent Valentin in Faust, a very nice Marcello in La Boheme, and a less significant role in last season's magnificent Les Troyens.   He was everything you might want in a Sweeney Todd.  The entire cast is made up of excellent American singers.  The star of the evening was the very distinguished Stephanie Blythe.  Heidi Stober and Elizabeth Futral deserve special mention.

The way you tell what is an opera is by including all musical theater that can be performed by an opera company made up of opera singers and an opera orchestra.  Sondheim's Sweeney Todd qualifies.  This work has only recently seeped into the opera house where it can be heard with supertitles.  The libretto, also by Sondheim, is very wordy, and sung quickly with fake English accents.  Tough.  The real Brits Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel were much easier to understand.  The most fun part was the section where Todd and Lovett are describing the taste of the pies according to the profession of the victim.

I think this was a Sweeney Todd of very high quality, if you like that sort of thing.  As my fourth viewing, I found that I was growing tired of it.

Editorial comment:  the only excuse for doing a musical instead of real opera would be the filling of the seats.  This did not happen.

After the performance Patrick Summers received the San Francisco Opera medal.

Un Ballo in Maschera

Conductor:  Nicola Luisotti
Director:  Jose Maria Condemi

Amelia:  Julianna Di Giacomo *
Oscar:  Heidi Stober
Gustavus III (Riccardo):  Ramón Vargas
Count Anckarström (Renato):  Thomas Hampson
Madame Arvidson (Ulrica):  Dolora Zajick

If you go all the way back to 1982, Un Ballo in Maschera at the San Francisco Opera starred Lucciano Pavarotti and Monserrat Caballe, but that was during the reign of Kurt Herbert Adler who ran the San Francisco Opera as though it were the greatest institution on earth.  Our cast wasn't quite that distinguished, but it was still excellent.  Dolora Zajick is still the greatest Ulrica.

I was very impressed with the Amelia Julianna Di Giacomo who had plenty of Verdi voice and Verdi style.

I have been puzzling over the credits listed on the programs.  If you look through the production photos from 1982 to 2014, you will see that the look of the scenery and costumes changes, but never do any of these changing productions, all traditional, claim to be a new production.  Who decides the credits and why has become something of an obsession to me.

The conducting was exemplary. 

Show Boat

Last night's performance at the San Francisco Opera of Jerome Kern's Show Boat, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, was my first musical at the opera. 

I want to write about the use of amplification in this performance.  A friend told me that the first performance was criticized because the spoken dialog could not be heard.  I'm sure no one, including certainly me, would object to amplifying the spoken dialog.  Opera singers are trained to project their singing voices, but speaking is not that common in opera and when it is found it isn't nearly as large a part of the performance as it is here.  So fine.  The microphones and speakers used were fine for talking, but it was immediately apparent that this was going on.

The problem arises when the songs are heard.  Microphones in a large theater distort the sound.  Everyone starts to sound the same.  My friend didn't believe that "Old Man River" (sung superbly by Morris Robinson) was amplified until the repeat in Act II where it had been shut off.  Only without amplification do you hear the natural sound of the voice.

We had a couple of straight actors in Bill Irwin as Cap'n Andy Hawks and Harriet Harris (from Frasier) as Parthy Ann Hawks, his wife.  Bill was fabulous and even sang a little bit.

Our opera singers were Patricia Racette (who can do anything) as Julie, Heidi Stober as Magnolia Hawks who danced a bit and was beautiful in the role, Morris Robinson as Joe, Angela Renee Simpson as Queenie, and Michael Todd Simpson as Gaylord Ravenal, the gambler who marries Magnolia.  Can opera singers sing musicals?  When the musical is Show Boat, absolutely.

Francesca Zambello's production of this great American musical was shared with Lyric Opera of Chicago, Washington National Opera and Houston Grand Opera.  For me it worked.  The costumes reminded one of candy canes.  Each scene was clear and moved smoothly and quickly to the next scene.

The score is full of famous American songs, more than you expected.  Racette sang "Can't help lovin that man of mine" and "Just my Bill" in a convincing American pop song style.  Heidi and Michael sang "You are Love," one of the truly great songs.

The house was full.  Francesca Zambello production.

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Falstaff in San Francisco

I noticed something I hadn't noticed before in Verdi's Falstaff seen last night at the San Francisco Opera:  Bryn Terfel enters Windsor Park in the final scene in his very Wotan-like outfit (see picture above), and some very Wotan-like music accompanies him.  My goodness.  Wasn't he doing Wotan....?

Conductor:  Nicola Luisotti
Director: Olivier Tambosi

Falstaff:  Bryn Terfel
Alice Ford:  Ainhoa Arteta
Nannetta:  Lisette Oropesa
Dame Quickly:  Meredith Arwady
Fenton:  Francesco Demuro
Ford Fabio:  Capitanucci *
Meg Page:  Renée Rapier
Bardolfo:  Greg Fedderly
Dr. Caius:  Joel Sorensen
Pistola:  Andrea Silvestrelli

Heidi Stober was scheduled for Nannetta, but she was replaced by Lisette Oropesa who is singing the role at the Met.  Bryn was fabulous.  Meredith Arwady was excellent as Dame Quickly.  It was well cast and well sung all around.

But.  You knew this was coming.  I couldn't get over how much easier it was to follow the plot in Portland.  Perhaps in Portland the Falstaff was less interesting and therefore the others stood out in comparison.

Remember I'm the one that thinks the production is supposed to explain the opera.  It didn't.  The hiding Falstaff while everyone searches was well done, but the characters were not really drawn individually.  Which is what I like.  I liked the linens being thrown all over the stage.  That was cute.

It is a problem for me to see the same opera over and over in close succession.  One cannot resist comparisons.  And there's going to be another one soon in HD.

Arabella

At the Santa Fe Opera, our last opera for the summer was Strauss' Arabella with these two stars:  Mark Delevan as Mandryka and Erin Wall as Arabella.  Musically they were extremely well matched.  Mark has a big beautiful voice and projects well the quality of a gentleman from the country.

Set in Vienna, Arabella begins with a fortune teller who predicts that someone will come for Arabella from far away.  She asks if there is another daughter--a very intuitive fortune teller.  Adelaide, Arabella's mother, confesses.  Zdenko is really Zdenka (sung by Heidi Stober) disguised as a boy.  The fortune teller predicts that an officer will cause confusion.  Zdenka immediately knows that this is Matteo (sung by Zach Borichevsky) who loves Arabella and is loved by Zdenka.

Mandryka is clearly the stranger from afar, and they fall instantly in love.

At the party for carnival the next day Mandryka sees Zdenko give Matteo the key to Arabella's room and immediately becomes jealous.  No one suspects that it is Zdenka who goes to bed with Matteo and not Arabella.

Arabella decides to forgive Mandryka because how was he to know that this young man with her bedroom key to hand out was really her sister with her own agenda?  Anyone could be confused.  The production is ambiguous about Matteo's reaction to all this.  In fact the ending of the opera is a bit lame.  It would hardly do for Arabella to stab herself like Anna or leap off the top of the hotel like Tosca.  Would it?

Conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, this entire opera was completely permeated with the Strauss style.  It was a joy.

We didn't have quite as much behind the scenes gossip as last year, but we did learn that Erin Wall is ... ahem... five months along?  We didn't guess.

Xerxes

I'm struggling with what to say about the San Francisco Opera's production of Handel's Serse, or Xerxes, as it is billed here.

There are a number of pretty funny things about the production from the ENO in London.  Apparently it has made the rounds.  The main characters are dressed more or less as Handel's period.  And then there are the gray people.  I thought they might be garden statues, or anonymous chorus.  My favorite bit was the green folding lawn chairs, shown above.  They began their life folded flat on the floor.

At one point the back of the stage opens up on a desert landscape, and I thought I was back in Santa Fe.  On the floor of the desert are the ruins of the ancient Persian city of Persepolis.

I think it might be important to understand that Serse was a failure when it first appeared in 1738.  The music, if we choose not to blame the conductor, Patrick Summers, is a bit draggy and pompous.

Another problem is that four of the characters all have names that start with A:

Arsamenes, Xerxes' brother, sung by David Daniels,
Ariodates, Xerxes' general, sung by Wayne Tigges,
Atalanta, Ariodates' daughter, sung by Heidi Stober,
Amastris, Xerxes' betrothed, sung by Sonia Prina, seen also in Ariodante.

The production helped with this situation by introducing the characters during the overture.  And not to forget Xerxes himself, sung by Susan Graham, and the other daughter of Ariodates, Romilda, sung by Lisette Oropesa.

Do we have to talk about the plot?  Everything gets straightened out in the end.

Making it all worthwhile was the marvelous Susan Graham, who gets all the really good bits.  She starts the opera with that great Handel aria "Ombra mai fu."  Did you know it was about a tree?  I should have known that.  The other hit tune comes at the end where Xerxes knocks over a bunch of statues singing "Crude furie."  This is only a hit tune because it's on Joyce DiDonato's Handel Mad Scenes album.

I think there could have been cuts.

La Boheme at Santa Fe

Why do we love it so?  I think it is because we love them, their youth and enthusiasm for living.  The Santa Fe Opera production of La Boheme achieves this.  At Santa Fe all the chorus, bit players and walk-ons are played by the apprentices who bring their youthful enthusiasm to every scene.

The production is very clever.  It looks like two streets that meet in the center of the stage until the middle building opens up to become the garrett.  The problem at Santa Fe is that the entire facility is quite tiny, so to achieve a relatively spacious looking stage is an achievement.

These days everything is coming up tenors, and La Boheme is no exception.  We were won over from the start when David Lomeli, a young Mexican tenor, opened his mouth and out flowed that bright, gorgeous, very Italian sounding voice.  He's a winner.

Also worth mentioning are Ana Maria Martinez as Mimi and Heidi Stober as Musetta.  I saw Heidi here in Platée four years ago. 

La Boheme is many people's favorite opera.  For sheer lovability it would be hard to top.

[See Kinderkuchen History 1890-1910]

Platée

It is astounding to think how little changed in France between the 1745 of Rameau's Comédies lyriques Platée, the Swamp Queen, and the banana dance of Josephine Baker. The mind boggles. The taste for absurdity and low comedy is exactly the same.

The work is more a ballet than an opera. At its premiere it was called a ballet bouffon. In the San Francisco Bay Area it was presented by the Mark Morris dance company. Folly, a coloratura soprano here sung by Heidi Stober, presents some spectacular singing, but hers is the only truly operatic role.

The set begins looking like a section of portable bleachers borrowed from the neighborhood high school and gradually disintegrates into the swamp.

The chorus enters in couples led by suspiciously thin ushers and is seated in the bleachers in a way that mirrors the audience it is facing. Then the ushers go berserk and start forcing everyone to change seats, sometimes crawling on the floor, sometimes climbing over the rows.

The plot is an attempt to reconcile Jupiter and Juno by making it seem that Jupiter is marrying a hideous monster. To avoid offending women by presenting an ugly woman as a character, the role of Platée is composed for a tenor and always played by a man. At the Santa Fe Opera the role is sung by Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, the current master of this role wherever it is presented. He is what I would incorrectly call a Spieltenor. (I would call him that because I am ignorant of French opera and don't know what they call anything. This blog is subtitled the education of DrB.) He was very funny and quite unselfconscious.

The jokes came thick and fast, and the ballet numbers were very creative. Gods descended from the ceiling. Scum gradually grew until it covered everything. When she was rejected by Jupiter and ridiculed by everyone, Platée vowed to get her revenge.

And the music? Varied and amusing in a late Baroque, early Rococo way, very suitable for dancing.


See pictures of Santa Fe Opera's Platée here. It's almost like being there.