Katya Kabanova at West Edge

 

Conductor / Music Director - Jonathan Khuner
Production Director - Indre Viskontas

Katya - Carrie Hennessey
Kabanicha, mother in law -  Kristin Clayton
Boris, boy friend - Christopher Oglesby
Tichon, Katya's husband - Alex Boyer
Kudrjaš - Chad Somers
Varvara, Tichon's sister - Sarah Coit
Dikój, Boris's uncle  - Philip Skinner

Leoš Janáček's Káťa Kabanová (1921) played at the Bruns Amphitheater in the East Bay hills as part of the season for West Edge Opera.  It's sunny and hot when the sun is shining on you, and cold when it isn't.  You may rent yourself a blanket.  Luckily I brought a hat and a jacket.  This is normally the venue for what is lovingly called Cal Shakes, meaning UC Shakespeare, I assume.  Adjustments were made to accommodate the orchestra who played from under the stage.  In the current era where performing before an audience is difficult, I suppose they were lucky to get it.  I felt that the heat/cold situation was extreme and the acoustics, particularly for the singers, were bad.

I have seen this opera before at the San Francisco Opera before I began blogging.  I remember only the part where Katya throws herself into the Volga.  I felt that this staging introduced the characters and their relationships more successfully.  The stage didn't become cluttered with irrelevant people, because the tiny chorus seemed always to be offstage.  Everyone dresses in modern clothing.  The singers for Tichon and Boris look similar, but were clearly distinguished through their costumes.

This opera would probably best be described as verismo, concerned with the hum drum problems of ordinary people.  Katya and Tichon love one another, but then there is the boss/mother in law who expects to be always the center of attention.  She runs a business and Tichon works for her.  Katya seems to want to be a good girl, and when it transpires that she cannot manage this, she wants to be punished.  She goes around asking everyone to accommodate this desire, and when they don't, she kills herself.

I am a fan of Carrie Hennessey whose character pretty much carries this opera.  (Pun?)  I enjoy her work, and felt that the cast did a fine job.  This is not in line to become a favorite opera.

West Edge Postponed

2021 has arrived and here is the West Edge Opera summer postponed from last year.  The text is the same, but the pictures are new and dates and location are added.

This is the publicity for the 2020 season of West Edge opera:
 Leoš Janáček’s  Katya Kabanova
 Elizabeth Cree, by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell
 Francesco Cavalli’s Eliogabolo

By Michael Zwiebach

August 6, 2019

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West Edge Opera’s Mark Streshinsky | Credit: Mark Mayfield

While West Edge Opera has your attention, as their season rolls out, the company has announced next year’s season. No surprise, it’s just as ambitious as this year’s season. The festival opens a week earlier, July 25, 2020, instead of the first week in August and, just as with the current productions, you will have to wait for Artistic Director Mark Streshinsky to do location scouting to discover where the shows will be held, so stay tuned.

 

 

As usual, there is no sign of a top 50 opera anywhere, which is why some of us regard WEO so highly. However, there is a lot of great music in the works: the 2020 festival opens with Leoš Janáček’s brilliant, realistic drama Katya Kabanova with soprano Carrie Hennessy in the title role. This is a show that will challenge the company on a number of levels, but WEO has waded into these waters before, producing Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen in 2016. If they succeed, it will be one of the highlights of the Bay Area’s musical year.   July 24, Aug 1 & 5

 

The contemporary opera that the company always offers will be Elizabeth Cree, by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell, based on a novel by Peter Ackroyd and premiered by Opera Philadelphia in 2017. The opera is the third collaboration by Puts and Campbell, following Silent Night (2012) and The Manchurian Candidate (2015). Despite the fact that the opera is about a grisly murder, it is, the authors insist, darkly comic, and Puts believed it was his best theater work up to that time. His tonal idiom and command of period style should work well in this tale of a music hall singer of the 1890s who is accused of murdering her surgeon husband. July 25, 30 & Aug 7

 

Francesco Cavalli’s Eliogabolo (1667), from the anything-goes Venetian opera houses of the 17th century is the third show of the season. The tale of a perverse and depraved Roman emperor, it almost feels like a modern show (an operatic Caligula, maybe) and in fact it never got its Venetian premiere, but not because it was too risqué. (It was replaced by an opera on the same subject by a different composer.) Maybe it was that Cavalli was too old-fashioned at the time, but in the 21st century, audiences have come around to Cavalli. The show has major productions at Theatre de la Monnaie (Belgium, 2004), the Aspen Festival (2007), Gotham Chamber Opera (NY, 2013), and Paris Opera (2016/17). Not bad for a modern opera. The West Edge production will star countertenor Randall Scotting in the title role, a part he can only hope leaves him clothed most of the time.   July 31, Aug 6 & 8

Michael Zwiebach is the senior editor/ content manager for SFCV. He assigns all articles and content, manages the writing staff and does editing. A member of SFCV from the beginning, Michael holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley.

BB.  This will all take place in The Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda in 2021.

Breaking The Waves at West Edge

Conductor: Jonathan Khuner
Director: .. Mark Streshinsky

Bess McNeill:.....................  Sara LeMesh (soprano)
Jan Nyman: ......................... .Robert Wesley Mason  (baritone)
Dodo McNeill: . ....................Kindra Scharich  (mezzo-soprano)
Dr. Richardson:  ....................Alex Boyer  (tenor)
Mrs. McNeill, Sara's mother:  Kristin Clayton (soprano)
Terry: .................................... Brandon Bell (bass-baritone) 

Breaking The Waves (2016), music by Missy Mazzoli, libretto by Royce Vavrek, was presented by West Edge Opera at The Bridge Yard in Oakland on Saturday night.  We are in rural Calvinist Scotland in the 1970s.  I think we may assume this was around the time that oil was discovered in the North Sea.  They keep referring to "the rig" which we may assume is an oil rig off the shore.

The community, or the ones in charge at least, do not like outsiders.  Sara, a child of the community, has fallen in love with Jan, a worker on the rig who is from Norway.  Dodo is another outsider who was married to Sara's brother who died.  Dodo and Sara are close.  Jan and Sara marry and are happy at first.  Soon Jan must return to working on the rig.  People don't think these things through.

The atmosphere was well captured by the production, and atmosphere is almost all there is.  Church fathers hover over everything.  Sara is very religious and prays constantly.  Unexpectedly, God answers through her.  This is a really tough part.  Jan is injured and asks Sara to go out and have sexual experiences and report back to him.  Her personality gradually disintegrates.  This is a true tragedy.  Her casket is sent out to sea, the only reference to waves. 

The music is pleasing and was well performed.  The orchestration included a synthesizer and an electric guitar.  My favorite of the singers was Kindra Scharich, but I usually go for the mezzos.

The Bridge Yard is very hard to find and very close to the freeway.  Most of the time the sound from the freeway was not disturbing.  The acoustics were not favorable to light voices.

Orfeo & Euridice

Conductor:  Christine Brandes
Director:  KJ Dahlaw

Orfeo:  Nikola Printz
Euridice:  Maria Valdes
Amore:  Shawnette Sulker

Orfeo & Euridice by Gluck played at West Edge Opera's current venue The Bridge Yard in Oakland.  A lot of fuss was made about the female/female pairing, but this is pretty common in opera. My problem was that nothing at all was made of the fact that the character Orfeo is a singer, probably a celebrity.  Oh well.  I enjoyed the singing.

Research tells me that this was the original 1762 Viennese version of this opera with an aria for Amore interpolated from the later 1774 Paris version. So nothing fishy.  In the original version Orfeo was sung by an alto castrato and wasn't sung by a woman until the much later 1859 version.

This opera is supposed to be revolutionary, but it never seems so to me.  Perhaps it is the Viennese context that makes it so.  Gluck's early career was as a standard Neapolitan opera composer whose operas were endless strings of da capo arias.  In this opera there are long scenes resembling recitativo accompagnato, but no detectable da capo arias.  We are back to Cavalli more or less, except now everything is tonal. 

A very long portion of the opera is taken up with ballet.  In the second part it is Orfeo avoiding looking at Euridice which doesn't really work theatrically.  For our eyes we don't see the revolution.  French opera never fell into the all da capo aria trap.

West Edge Summer Festival 2018

West Edge Opera has announced three operas for this summer:

• Debussey's Pelléas and Mélisande (1902).   This is to be directed by Keturah Stickan and is a change from the original announcement.  The cast sounds excellent.  Britten's Death in Venice was previously announced.

• Matt Marks' Mata Hari (2017) which premiered at Prototype Festival this year.  Tina Mitchell will play the title role.  This is to be directed by Paul Peers.

• Luca Francesconi's "sexual psycho-drama" Quartet (2011)  This will be directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer.  "Brutal fury."

The venue is Craneway Conference Center, Harbour Way South, Richmond, CA.  Tickets are available.

The Chastity Tree at West Edge

Diana, Cupid as female

Conductor:  Robert Mollicone
Director:  Mark Streshinsky

Diana, goddess of chastity (soprano):  Nikki Einfeld
Clizia, nymph (mezzo-soprano):  Molly Mahoney
Britomarte, nymph (soprano):  Maya Kherani
Chloe, nymph (contralto):  Kathleen Moss
Doristo, keeper of the tree (bass):   Malte Roesner
Cupid (soprano):  Christine Brandes
Endimione, shepherd (tenor):  Kyle Stegall
Silvio, shepherd (tenor):  Jacob Thompson

The Chastity Tree, originally called L'Arbore di Diana (1787) by Vicente Martín y Soler, is contemporary with Mozart's Don Giovanni and has the same librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.  It was performed with the original Italian da Ponte libretto.  It is important to notice that L'Arbore premiered in Vienna, while Don Giovanni was first presented in Prague.  Martin was Mozart's competition.  This opera faded from awareness during the 19th century, until it was suddenly revived in the 21st century.  I will never again think of Mozart as a slut.

My seat for this performance was an improvement over Saturday night.  I could see fine. The metal object shown above is intended to represent the tree.  Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her three nymphs make up a community sworn to chastity.  Diana has used her magic to create a tree that sings when the chaste nymphs walk beneath it.  However, if one of them is found not to be chaste, the tree pummels them with apples until they die.  At the start of the opera a group of women dressed in green with a large red circle climb up into the tree where they remained for most of the rest of the opera.  I decided that these were the apples.  They occasionally sing, do simple gymnastics and perform choreography.  In the overture the tree lights up and the pom poms wave when pleasant music plays, representing the tree when it is happy.

In her status as goddess of the hunt, Diana in mythology carries a bow and arrows.  Her arch rival and perhaps enemy Cupid is similarly equipped but uses his arrows to strike love into the hearts of humans.  This places them at complete cross-purposes.  As you might expect from a libretto by da Ponte, love or at least promiscuity wins in the end.  Cupid brings shepherds into the community of nymphs, making this a traditional nymphs and shepherds plot.  Only the unfortunate Silvio seems to miss out on the love making.

Hanky panky is everywhere, but Diana herself falls seriously for the shepherd Endimione, a beautiful young man.  The best music is for Diana.  Cupid is a boy, sung by a woman, but disguised as a woman throughout the opera, except he/she keeps the goatee and mustache.  Various characters suggest that Cupid might be a man, but he/she  remains in her pink dress until the end.  At the end a storm destroys the tree before it can throw down any apples.  Boy Cupid declares victory.

This is an entertaining opera which will henceforth inform my sense of the da Ponte comedies by Mozart.  The music is good but not great.  It's fun.  Enjoy. 

Hamlet at West Edge

Conductor:  Jonathan Khuner
Director:  Aria Umezawa

Hamlet:  Edward Nelson
Gertrude, Hamlet's mother:  Susanne Mentzer
Ghost of Hamlet's father:  Kenneth Kellogg
King Claudius, Hamlet's Uncle:  Phil Skinner
Ophélie, Hamlet's fiance:  Emma McNairy
Polonius, Ophélie's father:  Paul Cheak

Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas was presented by West Edge to open their festival at the Pacific Pipe warehouse in Oakland.  The abandoned train station which was the venue for last season was recently condemned by the city of Oakland due to a recent fire that resulted in casualties.  This resulted in a scramble to find a new space.  I for one was not particularly happy with this.

In a nearby building were people preparing for Burning Man.  Somehow you knew that this was a Bay Area phenomenon.  They played very loudly amplified low pitched thumpy music throughout this performance.  It was like your stereo was malfunctioning and all you could get were the lowest notes.  I thought it was very annoying.  There were three large doors in our space which were kept open.  One faced the other space where the noise originated.  It seemed to me that closing this door would have gone a long way toward reducing the thump thump roar not composed by Thomas.

I could go into a rant here.  Not the right repertoire, etc.  I liked the singing but couldn't see very well.  What if the stage were in the center of the space?  I don't know if this would work. I very much regret having to give this a pan.

Agrippina at West Edge

👍🏻
Music Director/Conductor/Harpsichord: Jory Vinikour
Stage Director: Mark Streshinsky

Agrippina, wife of Claudio: Sarah Gartshore (soprano)
Nero, her son: Celine Ricci (here a mezzo, originally castrato)
Poppea: Hannah Stephens (soprano)
Ottone, Claudio's friend: Ryan Belongie (here a countertenor, originally a woman)
Claudio, emperor of Rome: Carl King (bass)
Pallante: Nikolas Nackley (bass)
Narciso: Johanna Bronk  (here mezzo, originally castrato)

Agrippina is an opera by Handel that was composed in 1709 for Venice.  Why have I never seen or heard of this opera before?  I imagine it is very important to know that it was composed for Venice because the commercial theater there was fond of sexual plots.  Poppea, La Calisto, that kind of thing.  Proper handling of the sexual plot by West Edge Opera has made this an amusing Baroque opera without any distortion of the story.  Structurally it is a Neapolitan opera with an endless series of da capo arias. In Venice both women and castrati sang.  Shortly after this Handel moved to London.  It is important to know that in Venice Agrippina was a hit.

Poppea is the sexual center of attention here as she was in Monteverdi's opera.  She tells us how to draw men's attention and lists for us three men who are interested in her:  Nero, Ottone and the Emperor Claudio.   She is most attracted to Ottone and does not like Claudio at all.

Agrippina has but one objective--she wants her son to become emperor of Rome.  She has no interest in her husband's interest in Poppea and instead uses it to manipulate Claudio for her own ends.  This is a surprisingly good plot.  The opera ends when she wins.  Here I want to complain.  They flashed words on the surtitles screen explaining what happened to the characters after the opera had ended, but they went by so fast I had no idea what they actually said.  A bit slower might be better.  Slower or not at all.

One feature of this opera was brief full-on male nudity.  Agrippina is singing, finishes her aria and says to an unseen man that he needs to get lost.  Nude man jumps out of the bed and runs off stage.  Full male nudity is much rarer in the theater than female and is therefore still entertaining.  People entered down the center aisle of the theater, including Claudio who spoke political phrases in English like an American politician.  I shook his hand as he passed.

The hit tune from this opera is "Come nembo," or at least that's what it's called in Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno which was composed for Rome.  In Agrippina it has a different text.  It is known because Cecilia Bartoli has recorded it.  Here it is sung by Celine Ricci.

The quality of the singing was excellent throughout, the make or break feature of any Baroque opera performance, with the peak experience coming from Celine Ricci.  Here is Celine in her incredible costume and makeup as Nero.

Photo by Cory Weaver.

Neapolitan opera, the kind Handel wrote, is probably the most difficult genre to stage successfully.  It works to do silly, mostly irrelevant things as was done in Partenope recently at the San Francisco Opera, and in Agrippina it works just to stage the opera as it is revealed in the libretto.

I won't again try to watch 2 operas in a day, but nevertheless I was very pleased with this.

_____________________________

I so enjoyed writing about and listening to Agrippina from West Edge that I immediately bought the All About History magazine with the featured article about Nero.  So what is current thinking about Emperor Nero who apparently killed off all possible successors?

I was especially interested in the current thinking on who burned Rome.  The argument goes from one side that Nero burned Rome to kill Christians.  The other side say the Christians burned Rome so Nero would take the blame.  Crucial factoid in this argument is that the rumor that Nero burned Rome is in fact contemporary with the actual burning.  It is possibly tacked on later that it had anything to do with Christians.  The article seems to conclude that it was not arson.  Just a fire.  A really huge fire.  The argument against Nero setting it is that his own houses burnt down.  This point of view is completely new to me.

I knew the story that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  The curious story is that Nero considered himself an artist and gave performances at an array of venues.  His citizens who had formerly loved him came to find him disgusting, a lower class artist type engaged in an activity not suitable for the heir of Julius Caesar.

This last may be relevant, at least a little.

Powder her Face

Photo by Cory Weaver. 

👍🏻
Music Director and Conductor: Mary Chun
Stage Director: Elkhanah Pulitzer

The Duchess: Laura Bohn
The Maid, and other characters: Emma McNairy
The Duke and other characters: Hadleigh Adams
The Electrician and other characters: Jonathan Blalock

One of the operas for the summer festival of  West Edge Opera is Thomas Adès' Powder her Face, a purportedly biographical opera about Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. The composer waited until her death in 1993 to dig up all this old dirt--the opera dates from 1995.  Perhaps it's necessary to be British to fully enjoy this.  Everyone but the duchess had very light blond hair.

I'm going to call this as I see it.  This was like two different operas:  the serious, intensely emotional performance of Laura Bohn, something I might possibly call a masterpiece, and everything else.  Let's just say I don't normally watch porn.

Fake sex is only marginally interesting.  I tried to figure out what about the opera suggested the sex.  The judge comes out and says, "Order, Silence, Justice."  Then he says a bunch of other stuff, and then repeats the first three words.  The first time he says them they are drawn out and kind of wavy, but the second time he just says them.  So the first time the wavy music is used to express someone doing fellatio on him under his judge's robes.  So fioratura is sexual.  This goes with the Lucia I saw recently.  Ho hum.

I don't think I would want to see this opera again, but I'm sort of a fuddy-duddy.

Laura Bohn was magnificent.

West Edge Summer Festival 2017

Not to worry.  The abandoned train station in Oakland where West Edge Opera holds their performances has been fixed up some.  I just liked the picture.

West Edge Opera has already announced their season for 2017.  As usual, it will consist of three operas from three opera periods.

Hamlet, 1868, by Ambroise Thomas.  This opera comes with two possible endings:  tragic and happy.  In English speaking countries you will usually see the tragic ending.  Emma McNairy will sing Ophelie.

The Chastity Tree or L'arbore di Diana, 1797, by Vicente Martín y Soler.  The exciting feature of this selection is that the libretto is by Lorenzo da Ponte.  The composer is a Spanish contemporary of Mozart. 

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, 1990, by Libby Larsen.  I must make a correction.  The program says that this is being presented in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Mary Shelley's novel, but the correct statement is the 200th anniversary, since the novel was first published in 1818.

For serious opera freaks we love them because they rarely dip into the top 50.  Only Hamlet is an opera that I have seen before.

The Cunning Little Vixen

Gold-Spur, Sharp-Ears.    Photo by Cory Weaver.

👍🏻
The story of The Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček, composed 1921-23, is from a serial that ran in a Czech newspaper.  West Edge Opera presented it in the Oakland abandoned train station as a series of titled vignets.

Conductor:  Jonothan Khuner
Director:  Pat Diamond

Sharp-Ears, the Vixen:  Amy Foote, soprano
Gold-Spur, the Fox:  Nikola Printz, mezzo-soprano
Forester:  Philip Skinner, baritone
Forester's wife:  Rachel Rush, contralto
Schoolmaster:  Joseph Raymond Meyers, tenor
Young Vixen:  Hannah Guyer

There are a number of anthropomorphized animals in this story, sometimes recognized, sometimes not.  My favorite recognition was seeing a group of women dressed in white and thinking "Chickens.  Those are chickens."  The chickens come with a rooster.  The humans understand what he's there for, but the hens don't really seem to.  Vixen escapes her captor after killing the rooster because he lords it over the hens.

It was visually delightful, and musically fun.  It is possible to stage this opera from either extreme of delightful children's story or tragedy, or anywhere in between.  I think our production has certain adult features but is otherwise on the fairy tale side.  Vixen dies and is replaced by one of her children.

My favorite performers were Amy Foote as Sharp-Ears and Philip Skinner, a favorite at West Edge.

The orchestra included what appeared to be an electronic marimba.  This I've never seen before.  West Edge has recently established a very high standard of performance, and they have met it here.  Go if you can.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

Music Director: Gilbert Martinez
Stage Director: Mark Streshinsky

Ulysses: Nikolas Nackley
Penelope: Sara Couden
Minerva: Kindra Scharich
Telemaco: Johanna Bronk
Eumete: Michael Desnoyers
Iro: Ted Zoldan
Antinoo/Neptune: Aaron Sorensen
Anfinomo: Jonathan Smucker
Pisandro/Jupiter: Gary Ruschman
Melanto: Charlotte Goupille-Lebret

Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria was presented at the old American Steel Works in Oakland which has been converted into an artists' studio, represented by the giant Buddha sculpture above.  The opera was sung in Italian.  I believe it was cut down from the original length.  There is so much to write about I'd better get started.

In English the title means The return of Ulysses to his homeland.  Ulysses is also called Odysseus.  He spent 10 years in Troy where he most famously invented the Trojan Horse.  Then he spent another 10 years wandering throughout the Mediterranean.  These journeys home to Ithaca are called The Odyssey, and it is the very end of The Odyssey which is the subject of this opera.

There was a self-conscious effort to reproduce the original instrumentation for this work.  Apparently we now know exactly who played because in Venice there are payment records for the musicians.  The performance used two violins, two violas, a viola da gamba, an Italian Baroque harp, a theorbo, two harpsichords and something called a director. It has a small keyboard with two bellows extending out the back.  It creates an organ like wheezing sound which was used exclusively to accompany the god Neptune.  When it was time to play it, Penelope's handmaiden Melanto would come out and operate the bellows.

This is what it looked like without the decorations, but Wikipedia calls it a Regal.

I enjoyed very much the sound of this orchestra.

An unlisted character in the form of a lamb hand-puppet appeared, first carried by the goddess Minerva and then by Ulysses' sheepherder friend Eumete.  The puppet reminded me of Lambchop, so when Eumete came over by my seat and held him up to me, I asked if he was Shari Lewis.  He went a bit out of character.

Ulysses returns first to visit his old friend Eumete.  An unusual theatrical device used the goddess Minerva to bring continuity.  She appears in almost all the scenes except for the ones where the suitors get together to plot.   Kindra Scharich, a beautiful singer, was Minerva.

While Ulysses is visiting with Eumete, Minerva brings his son Telemaco to meet his father riding on a red and white Vespa.  This was a highlight. 

In the end Ulysses kills all the suitors and his wife takes him back.

Monteverdi operas sound like nothing else in the world.  The ethereal effect is quite striking and moving.

As One

Music Director/Conductor Bryan Nies

Hannah Before: Dan Kempson
Hannah After: Brenda Patterson

Sunday's West Edge Opera presentation was As One by Laura Kaminsky, libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed.  This opera premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 2014 so this was only the west coast premiere.

This is an opera for today.  I mean literally today.  I think possibly they decided to present it before it became so very timely.  It is about one person's transgender identity and retraces a life from about 12 years old.

It is theatrically very creative.  A single individual is presented as two characters--one male and one female.  When the story begins, primarily the male personality sings.  They alternate, and in the end only the female is featured.  Both stay present on the stage throughout.  I might have preferred more duets.

Nothing specific is ever said.  No names and generally no place names either.  We move with them to what sounds like the Bay Area after high school, until an almost violent incident occurs.  "What are you?" is asked.

This is followed by moving to an isolated area in Norway for intense introspection and meditation combined with searching for the northern lights.  There is much anguish and much failure to see the storied lights.  Finally a breakthrough occurs, and the northern lights are seen.  "I sent everyone my new name."

It's most like a first person novel.  There are no other singing roles, but situations are created with silent actors.  A group of girls laugh.

I didn't know how I would react to this, but in the end I felt it worked well theatrically, especially considering what a difficult subject it is.  The room was very hot.  Instead of an orchestra, the piece was accompanied by a string quartet.  The text was clipped and choppy with little help from the music in achieving any lyricism.

Lulu from West Edge

Dr. Schoen & Lulu

👍🏻
Music Director and Conductor: Jonathan Khuner
Stage Director: Elkhanah Pulitzer

Lulu: Emma McNairy (soprano)
Dr. Schoen/Jack the Ripper: Philip Skinner (baritone)
Alwa, Dr. Schön’s Son, a composer: Alex Boyer (tenor)
Countess Geschwitz: Buffy Baggott (mezzo-soprano)
Wardrobe Assistant/Schoolboy/Groom: Erin Neff
Schigolch: Bojan Knezovic (bass)
The Athlete: Zachary Altman
Painter/Journalist/African: Michael Jankosky (tenor)
Prince/Servant/Marquis: Joseph Meyers

Saturday night was the opening of Berg's Lulu from the West Edge Opera.  It was presented in the abandoned train station near the tracks in Oakland and was in German. 

It could be said that I have been in search of Lulu (see Barbara Hannigan review, see Christine Schaefer review).  Perhaps Lulu is woman, at least woman from a man's perspective.  Occasionally different productions play out the story a bit differently.  In Barbara Hannigan's Lulu I clearly thought that Dr. Schoen wanted Lulu to shoot him, but clearly in this version he wants her to shoot herself so he will not have to go to prison for her death.  She shoots him instead.  Maybe I should watch it again.

West Edge can be very proud of this Lulu.  They held back nothing.  The sexual intensity up to the time Lulu is arrested for murdering Dr. Schoen is spectacular and includes many sexual encounters. Emma McNairy is a brave and talented young woman.  Philip Skinner has a Bay Area following.

Lulu has so many costume changes that she is assigned a dresser who follows her about the stage. When I look in Wikipedia, I see the dresser listed as a character.  Perhaps the ones I've seen don't feature all these different looks.

It was extremely well done, but nevertheless with some problems.  The severely reduced orchestra seemed to work well in the parts of the score that are by Berg, but seemed fairly uninteresting in the last two scenes which were orchestrated entirely by Friedrich Cerha.  After her time in jail, Lulu seems to acquire maturity.

Lulu is growing on me.  I am gradually coming to the feeling that it is a 20th century masterpiece.  Forgive me if I am slow in arriving at this opinion.  This particular one is spectacular.

Don't miss this.

West Edge Summer Festival

Hydrogen Jukebox  

The Cast

Soprano 1:  Sara Duchovnay
Soprano 2:  Molly Mahoney
Mezzo:  Nicole Takesono
Tenor:  Jonathan Blalock
Baritone:  Efrain Solis
Bass:  Kenneth Kellogg
Narrator:  Howard Swain

Conductor:  David Möschler

Where to begin?  This "opera," Hydrogen Jukebox, by Philip Glass on words by Allen Ginsberg was presented by West Edge Opera at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley.  When I used to visit this part of Berkeley, this was a BART parking lot.  They have replaced about half of it with this building, a center for people with disabilities.  They can go directly from the Ashby BART station into the basement of the building. 

The picture above shows the entire cast.  The Narrator, an actor who does not sing, is the guy in the center.  The stage for this production was on the south end of the large space and was quite tiny, with ladders going to the next floor.  At one point the invisible conductor climbed down one of these ladders and played the piano.

I was interested in these words by Glass:

"For me there are two considerations in setting text to music. There are the words themselves, which need to be set in the most natural way. With Allen's poetry I was most intent on respecting the music that was already in the words. Then there is the musical environment into which the words are set. In the poem Aunt Rose, for example, I used a 5/8 rhythm — a kind of lopsided rhythm — 1-2, 1-2-3. I heard the rhythm from the description of her toot: it's a picture of someone who walks with a limp. That's the only specific relation of the music to the words."

The result of this approach for my ears was a piece where the words dominated the music.  It also made for a very repetitive rhythmic feeling because Ginsberg's poetry tends to use a stagnant rhythmic pattern.  (Ok.  Pile on.)  I know.  Glass is always repetitive--he calls it "repetitive structures"--, but this is the only time it has actually seemed monotonous to me.  Maybe he's simply too respectful of the honored poet.

The opera uses 20 poems or fragments of poems on virtually any subject.  In one Jaweh and Allah are warring, a concept I loved.  Another deals with Aunt Rose.  Another is about smoking grass--very timely, don't you think?  There were homosexual and heterosexual couples.  Uncle Sam makes an appearance.  A flag is held up but carefully refolded and placed in a box.  It reminds you that there were once liberals in America.  I was astounded by how timely it all was even though the opera was from 1990 and many of the poems from much earlier.  I expected to be more shocked by this.  The world has changed a lot.

There was no real plot or characters.  The words were so dense and complicated that ones eyes were preoccupied with reading them with little time left for watching the action.

It's wonderful how Glass will make an opera out of anything.  Appomattox is still the most boring.

The End of the Affair 

The Cast

Sarah Miles:  Carrie Hennessey
Maurice Bendrix, her boyfriend:  Keith Phares
Henry Miles, her husband:  Philip Skinner
Mrs. Bertram, her mother:  Donna Olson
Mr. Parkis, detective:  Mark Hernandez
Lance, his son:  Ben Miller
Richard Smythe:  Michael Jankosky

Conductor:  Jonathan Khuner

The End of the Affair by Jake Heggie (2007 version) was staged at the north end of the large space.  This work is far more of a conventional opera with characters and a story, and takes place near the end of WWII in London.  It is based on a story by Graham Greene.

The plot is about an event and how it affects everyone involved.  Maurice and Sarah are in bed making love when a bomb strikes.  Maurice gets up to warn people about the bomb when another bomb causes a building to fall on him.   It's a bit like the movie Little Dorrit where the same story is told from two different perspectives.

At the beginning we see the story from Maurice's perspective.  The bomb strikes, he gets up, and Sarah leaves him with no explanation.  He spends the next 18 months trying to understand this, and ultimately hires a detective.  At the end of act 1 we see the incident portrayed from Maurice's point of view, and we fade to black.

The detective has stolen Sarah's diary, and Maurice reads the story from Sarah's side for the first time.  The building falls, Sarah sees Maurice and assumes he is dead.  She prays, "God, I will give him up if you will only let him live."  To her he is dead and then comes back to life.  She has summoned and received a miracle.  How can she not do what she has promised?

There is very much of a Catholic overlay to this story.  Mother makes a point of telling us that she had Sarah baptized Catholic when she was 2.  In the Catholic world miracles continue on to today.  God has chosen to bless Sarah with a miracle, and then when she dies others are also blessed.  Lance is cured of his disease, and Smythe loses his birth mark.  Parts of this sound pretty dubious to me from a religious perspective, but Pope Paul VI approved, so who am I to complain?

West Edge successfully invoked the mysterious mysticism of the plot.  Scenes of WWII bombed London are projected on the back.  Throughout the first act Sarah appears as a sexual fantasy object whom Maurice meets when he is thinking of her.  Her mysterious, haunting presence permeates every scene even when she has no lines.  She walks like a benign ghost over the stage.  For me the staging was marvelously effective.

Sarah gives herself to God.

All of the singing and acting was marvelous, especially Carrie Hennessey, Keith Phares, Philip Skinner, and Donna Olson.

Well done.  The music is 21st century romanticism.

I apologize for not making it to La Boheme.

Vanessa

 

Marie Plette as Vanessa and Nikola Printz as Erika

Samuel Barber's Vanessa (libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti) had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 with Eleanor Steber as Vanessa.  Like Patricia Racette in our Dolores Claiborne, Steber stepped in very late in the preparation process.  In my mind it's Kiri te Kanawa.

A company currently without a house, West Edge Opera decided to produce this opera anyway in a semi-staged version.  We get those in Sacramento, and they consist of the full orchestra on the stage with the singers in front.  The singers move and act as they would in a fully staged opera.  It's a large orchestra, so the Thrust Stage at Berkeley Rep left only a little space for the actors.  But not to worry.  Vanessa is about love with only minimal action.  The singers all had big voices sufficient to carry over the orchestra.  Thank you.  This was helped by the outstanding vocal writing of Samuel Barber.

I could hear but not see what turned out to be a synthesizer at the back of the stage.  I wasn't sure what this was supposed to represent.

The question is is the plot of Vanessa a circle?  Do we end where we began?  Here is the great one singing Vanessa's opening aria.  Perhaps this isn't fair, but nothing will give you a better idea of the wonderful music in this opera.

Vanessa has been waiting for Anatol to return for 20 years.  She has waited with perfect patience with her niece Erika and her mother, sung by Malin Fritz, a lovely tall woman who lurks silently in virtually every scene.  The stately old Baroness adds exactly the right gloomy atmosphere to this strange, romantic story.

When Anatol appears, it isn't really Anatol but his son, also Anatol.  Are you staying with me?  Anatol is a fortune hunter who has spent his life hearing his father talk about the mysterious Vanessa.  He wants to see for himself.  Vanessa is the complete romantic and immediately accepts this new Anatol as her lover.  She is happy.  He, however, has wooed and spent the night with Erika, and later proposes to her.  Erika is not the romantic Vanessa is.

There is no perfect recording on YouTube of the quintet from Vanessa, but this one is pretty good.  We fell in love with this piece.

The entire cast were well cast for their parts, especially given the lack of scenery or theatrical makeup.

Vanessa:  Marie Plette
Anatol:  Jonathan Boyd 
Erika:  Nikola Printz
Baroness:  Malin Fritz 
Doctor:  Philip Skinner 

At the end Vanessa and Anatol move to Paris and leave Erika alone with the old Baroness.  So will she wait quietly alone for 20 years like Vanessa?  I prefer to imagine not.

 

Berkeley Hoffmann

On Sunday afternoon I went to Berkeley to see The Tales of Hoffmann by the Berkeley Opera. The opera was present in the Julia Morgan Theater on College, a small venue, and was sold out. It was done in English in a new translation by David Scott Marley. The words sounded very natural and easy to understand. There was spoken dialog.

Hoffmann has four sets: the bar near the Nuremberg opera house, the residence of Olympia and Spalanzani, Antonia's house, Venice and a return to the bar of the opening scene. For the Berkeley production it was done in a single set with only small modifications from scene to scene. There is a long note in the program describing the edition used for this production. The three heroines are in the order Olympia, Antonia, Giuletta.


Nicklaus/Muse, sung by Nora Lennox Martin, sings more here than I remember. She has about three arias, if I recall correctly. Nora got better as she went along and in general made a good impression.

It is unusual for one person to perform all four heroines. Olympia is a coloratura while Antonia and Giuletta sing heavier music. I only know of Beverly Sills singing everything. In Berkeley Angela Cadelago did all four roles and did them all quite nicely. I loved her Olympia who sang the entire aria without moving her mouth. She has a soubrette-like voice and had to struggle a bit with the heavy dramatic music, but she managed it adequately. Her performance of Antonia's aria, my favorite part of the opera, was beautiful. She is both a musical singer and an excellent actress.

I was less impressed with Adam Flowers as Hoffmann. His list of credits would make him seem more impressive than he turned out to be.


From left are Nicklaus, mother, Hoffmann, heroine, villian.

We saw a full-fledged adaptation based on posthumously discovered notes by Offenbach. It worked well for me.

[See Kinderkuchen History 1870-90]

Computer Opera

You've all seen pictures projected on scrim at the opera house. This has been going on since Edison invented the light bulb and maybe longer. Now I have seen an opera where the entire set is a giant computer screen, like something Steve Jobs would use for a presentation. It was beyond my wildest imagination.

The opera is Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, sung in Hungarian and presented by the Berkeley Opera. Wow! There's no pit in the Julia Morgan Theater, so the orchestra sat behind the computer screen and the two singers -- Paul Murray as Bluebeard and Kathleen Moss as Judith -- worked in front. They kept contact with the invisible conductor through video monitors.

I'm actually getting to love this opera, sort of Bartók's own Pictures at an Exhibition. The seven doors open one by one and Bartók's music aurally portrays each scene. The drama lay primarily in the computer art playing on the screen behind the singers. From the outside the castle presents as giant ice blocks. Inside we see the damp stone walls Judith describes. Then fabulous half realistic / half abstract pictures show us what is behind each door as the music progresses from torture chamber, to armory, to treasury, to garden, to sweepingly vast and deserted kingdom, to an ocean of tears, and finally to Bluebeard's past three wives. Created by Naomie Kremer from photographs and computer manipulation of images that bleed and transform before our eyes, rather like a kaleidescope, it was a film to match Bartók's wonderful music, a visual treat.

What does it all mean? Does Bluebeard kill her? Are the other three wives dead? Does the presence of blood everywhere indicate death? Is Judith just there out of curiosity, or does she really love him? Or is it merely a ménage à cinque. The ambiguity is not resolved.

I was less satisfied with the performance of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts) which came after. The boy, sung by Misha Brooks, seemed to be having trouble controlling his voice. It may be starting to change.

The production is very complicated and didn't always hang together. It involved ballet, puppets, and singers who stood along the side of the theater while the dancers created the visual aspect. There were frogs, a squirrel, cats, a bat, a dragonfly and a giant mama. Mama scolds the boy who then throws a tantrum and tears up everything in sight. I suppose the two parts are the scene inside the playroom where boy makes mayhem and the later scene out of doors where the animals get their revenge.

Behind the dancers and puppets is the same computer screen where some of the action is played out and atmospheres are created. I felt the artistic vision was less complete and less satisfying than Bluebeard.

Romeo / Juliet

Saturday I attended a fascinating theatrical experiment in Berkeley at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Berkeley Opera has attempted a complete integration of William Shakespeare's play and Charles Gounod's opera into a single Romeo and Juliet drama. How does one think of these things?

No attempt was made to preserve the meaning of Gounod's libretto. It was like watching R&J, the musical. Shakespeare's familiar play would start and then the characters would burst into song. An effort was made, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to fit the words of Shakespeare into the music of Gounod. The credits say "Lyrics by Amanda Moody." I think that's not the same as saying you are translating Gounod's opera into English. Gounod is doing an opera and wants arias and duets that Shakespeare knows nothing about. Thus the requirement for a lyricist.

During the overture the characters came out one by one and posed in the spotlight while their names appeared on the supertitles. It is a large cast. In general throughout the play/opera they kept the Montagues on the left side of the stage and the Capulets on the right. Shakespeare's moral at the end was omitted.

So how did this work? It was fun. The biggest problem was that no attempt was made to preserve the phrasing of the music created by the original text. I didn't feel Gounod in this result. Does a choppy, fragmented English style still feel like a high Romantic French opera? Or for that matter, does it feel like Shakespeare? For me it didn't. If you find Gounod corny, this might just be the thing for you. I'm fine with jettisoning the meaning, but I would like the musical style to stay.

Can the cod pieces. Our hero was strangely emasculated by the loss of his toward the end. Juliet also had a wardrobe malfunction in the death scene. There's no business like show business.

The orchestra was placed behind the set with monitors placed in the audience to stand in for Jonathan Khuner, the able conductor. Elena Krell played/sang Juliet. She is a good singer and actress with a somewhat fluttery vibrato. Jimmy Kansau will never sing at the Metropolitan, but he did project a vigorous romantic hero and did an excellent job of crooning Gounod. They were sexy together, and isn't that the main thing?

No one believed Richard Mix--an excellent singer--with his look of an aging wild man was the Prince of Verona.