Merola Opera's "Ariadne Auf Naxos"

Every opera fanatic has their own favorite Richard Strauss opera. Most choose Salome or Elektra, both short and intense, while others prefer Der Rosenkavalier or Die Fau Ohne Schatten, both long and sprawling, with all four of them employing a humungous orchestra. My personal favorite is his 1912 Ariadne auf Naxos with its two-and-a-half hour running time and a 36-piece chamber orchestra. Unfortunately, the opera has not been performed in San Francisco for 24 years, so it's been a long stretch to hear it live. Fortunately, the Merola Opera program got everything right with their production on Thursday evening, and I fell deeply in love with the work all over again.

What Merola did right, first of all, was put up the money to staff the full orchestra of 36 players that the score calls for, including a celeste, a harmonium, and TWO harps. Under the direction of the young German conductor Ann-Katrin Stöcker, the complex, witty, quicksilver score was completely transparent, and sitting almost in the lap of the orchestra in the smallish auditorium was pure musical heaven. They sounded gorgeous throughout.

The plot of the opera is simple. A billionaire is hosting a lavish evening at his estate and has paid for a serious operatic premiere along with a saucy show featuring Zerbinetta and Her Four Lovers. The 45-minute Prologue is a backstage comedy, with the high art opera people and the low art commedia dell'arte people clashing while last minute theatrical emergencies are popping up all around them. The Prologue is usually a German comedy slog, but the Merola ensemble directed by Omer Ben Seadia actually made me laugh for the first time. There were two comic standouts. First, tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson as The Choreographer (moustache and unruly curls above) brought a hang-loose in the middle of chaos vibe that was specific and hilarious. Second, stage director Claire Choquette (purple pantsuit) performed the spoken part of the Billionaire's Chief of Staff with a deadpan crispness that got funnier every time she would deliver some variation of "Yes, you can have an opinion, but if you want to pay your rent, you'll do exactly what you've been paid to do." (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

When the offstage fancy dinner runs late, the Chief of Staff announces that both serious opera and sexy divertissement will have to be performed at the same time because the fireworks have to start at nine. "Figure it out amongst yourselves," they announce. The Composer, beautifully sung by mezzo-soprano Theo Claveles (purple suit), has a nervous artiste breakdown, and is consoled by both the Music Director, sympathetically sung by Enes Pektas, and Zerbinetta the seductive charmer, in a spectacular performance by soprano Emilie Kealani. What ensues after intermission is the insane combo.

The serious opera begins, depicting the mythological Ariadne longing for Death after she has been abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. She is joined by three nymphs performed by Jennifer Robinson as Naiad, Katherine Dobbs as Dryad, and Abigail Raiford as Echo. Some of Strauss's most sublime music is given to this trio, and the three sopranos did it justice.

I was apprehensive about this production with aspiring young professionals because this opera requires two world-class sopranos to tackle the incredibly difficult arias written for both Ariadne and Zerbinetta. I have heard enough young singers over the years making valiant, misguided attempts at climbing these particular aria Everests before falling, so I was prepared to be indulgent. What I was not prepared for was the sheer magnificence of soprano Adia Evans, whose voice was solid from the deepest contralto to the highest reaches. It felt very much like a star is born moment.

Soprano Emilie Kealani was similarly astonishing as Zerbinetta. The funniest part of the opera is hearing the deeply despairing laments of Ariadne immediately followed by Zerbinetta and her lovers telling Ariadne to just get over it. Zerbinetta's outrageously challenging aria Großmächtige Prinzessin, is as difficult and high-flying as the Queen of Night's big number in The Magic Flute, except it's twelve minutes long. Kealani nailed every note and was an athletic delight besides.

Zerbinetta turns out to be correct in her advice because the god Bacchus arrives on a ship, having narrowly escaped the clutches of Circe on a nearby island, and immediately falls in love with Ariadne. Tenor Matthew Sink did a fine job in a nearly impossible role where he has to sing full-blast for the last fifteen minutes of the opera with no warm-up.

Much speculation about the meaning of this opera tends to focus on high art versus low art, but the real conflict is between Germanic music and Italian music, which Strauss combines and contrasts ingeniously throughout the entire marvelous score.

The two-performance run, by the way, is sold out which feels tragic. Let's hope another 24 years doesn't go by before San Francisco sees another performance.

Mexico City Morning

We walked to the main drag of Mexico City, Paseo de la Reforma, this morning and were astonished to find that tens of thousands of bicyclists, rollerbladers and joggers had taken over the street while pedestrians walked alongside on wide sidewalks. We had stumbled onto Muévete en Bici, a car-free event on 55 kilometers of downtown Mexico City streets every Sunday from 8AM to 2PM. The separation of pedestrians (slow) and bicyclists/joggers (fast) made the whole event work in a way that San Francisco's occasional Sunday Streets do not.

Our destination was the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultapec Park...

...which was one of the most beautifully designed, medium-sized art museums I have ever encountered.

There was a special exhibit devoted to Remedios Varo, the Spanish surrealist who fled Nazi Europe for Mexico City where she worked until her death in 1963.

More impressive was their permanent collection of Mexican artists from the first half of the 20th century, including the great Juan O'Gorman's 1949 La Ciudad de México...

...and David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1947 El diablo en la iglesia (The devil in the church)...

...along with José Clemente Orozco's frighteningly pertinent 1947 El tirano (The tyrant).

There was even a sweet 1953 Naturaleza muerta by Frida Kahlo to complement her 1939 keystone masterpiece in the collection, Las dos Fridas.

The painting traveled to SFMOMA in 2008 (which I wrote about here), but it was in a crowded, poorly designed Kahlo retrospective. At the Museo de Arte Moderno, the painting is given its own dark room which is hidden in plain sight so it remains uncrowded. There was a comfy bench to rest on in front of the painting, and some people sitting on the floor. Everyone was quiet as if we were all communing with a holy shrine. It was one of the great art museum experiences of my life.

Across the Paseo de la Reforma was the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo devoted to contemporary Mexican art.

The wild, wonderful architecture was more interesting than most of the exhibits. However, like the Museo de Arte Moderno, admission is free all day for everyone on Sundays, yet another example of how much more progressive Mexico is feeling these days in relation to the regressive United States.

We have been staying in the touristy, upscale Zona Rosa section of town but finally found a great, autentico Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood filled with locals. What made it even better was that the majority of workers and customers were gay, but we also saw cops, friends and lovers of every persuasion eating and drinking there.

I'm not going to name the place because United States hipster expats have been invading the city for the last decade and I don't want to add to the despoliation. Let's just say it's close to the Insurgentes metro station.

Austin finished the day's adventure at CHU-CHO, a dessert parlor that has put chocolate, ice cream, and churros together. As their signage states, "Un churro cada dia le da alegria" (a churro a day brings happiness).

Biergarten World Cup

World Cup mania in the Americas has been a joy to watch and on Saturday afternoon I went to the outdoor Biergarten in Hayes Valley to cheer on the Norwegians in their quarterfinal match against England.

The screen showing the game was actually just a large TV set up in a shipping crate and the true fans were sitting on the ground right in front of it.

I despaired of finding a seat until spotting Kyle and other acquaintances from the Hayes Valley Saturday Morning Trash Pick-Up, and they invited me to join them.

Next to us at the picnic table were two San Franciscans who had played in adult soccer leagues and knew what the heck they were talking about.

Like most of the crowd, they were rooting for Norway too.

When the match went to overtime, we decided, "oh, hell, let's have another beer," and my new soccer mate bought us a round. Though Norway eventually lost to England, the afternoon could not have been more fun.

French Organ Music at the SF Symphony

In the SF Symphony's last subscription concert of their year-long season last Thursday, conductor Stéphane Denève led the orchestra in an all-French program that prominently featured Davies Hall's monster Ruffatti organ. In a charming speech introducing the program, we learned that the final "s" is NOT silent when pronouncing Camille Saint-Saëns and that the French music on the program was actually influenced by German models from Beethoven and J.S. Bach. The short opening work was Guillaume Connesson's 2012 Flammenschrift, which was described as a riff on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but it sounded more like Prokofiev's Parisian-era music to me, which is not a bad thing. (Photos, except noted, are by Brittany Hosea-Small.)

Though not marketed as having anything to do with SF's Gay Pride Weekend, the concert certainly could have been, since its two main composers, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns, were Gallic Friends of Dorothy. Poulenc's composition was his 1938 Organ Concerto in G Minor, a strange piece for organ, strings, and timpani that alternated between dour pronouncements from the organ soloist interspersed with flashes of witty, zippy music in the strings familiar from Poulenc's other compositions.

Afficionados of organ music are a select breed of their own, and they seemed to be entranced by the performance of Olivier Latry, Notre-Dame's titular organist since 1985. Though I know many organ music worshipers, I have never been a member of the organ cult myself, since the sound of it registers as trying to walk through liquid. The volume dynamics were odd, too, either soft or extremely loud and not much in between.

After a couple of curtain calls, the orchestra started to leave for intermission but sat back down quickly when Latry swiveled around onto the bench for a long, solo encore that was enjoyable and made me feel like a philistine for not appreciating his art. (Photo by Michael Strickland

The second half was Camille Saint-Saëns's 1886 Symphony No. 3, "Organ" in a punchy performance that rattled the hall during its famous last movement.