An Amazing Month of Opera in San Francisco

An unusual bounty of opera, from the familiar to the off-beat, is being presented in San Francisco this June. First up this weekend is a pair of contemporary operas presented by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble at Z Space on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. The opener is Dorothea, a 15-minute "micro-opera" about the photographer Dorothea Lange by composer Christopher Stark. This is paired with composer Laura Schwendinger's Artemisa, about the female Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 - c.1656), who had one of the wildest biographies imaginable. The painting above is of Susanna and the Elders with the artist posing as the wronged innocent. The opera recently had its premiere at Trinity Wall Street and you can see/hear that production on Vimeo by clicking here. The complex music gets better the more you listen to it, and a great cast has been assembled this weekend that uses some of my favorite local singers like Marnie Breckenridge, Kyle Stegall, and Nikki Einfeld. Click here for tickets and more info.

The San Francisco Opera puts on three operas each June and this year's trio looks great on paper, although the banners going up all around the neighborhood are certainly strange.

"OPERA IS ALIVE" is a truly banal marketing slogan, especially when paired with "OPERA IS GRIPPING," "OPERA IS MOVING," and other emotional adverbs over black and white stock photography faces.

First up is Bizet's Carmen in a well-worn Francesca Zambello production new to SF Opera but used at Covent Garden and elsewhere repeatedly. Carmen is only true warhorse of the month, but one which I am looking forward to because mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges is making her role debut in the famous role. Bridges was striking in John Adams' Girls of the Golden West a few years ago, and it will be interesting to see what she makes of the Gypsy heartbreaker. Matthew Polenzani is cast as her Stalker Lover, Don Jose. He was superb in the demanding title role in The Tales of Hoffman at SFO in 2013, and I'm hoping he is still in his prime for this difficult role. One of my favorite conductors, James Gaffigan, will be making his SF Opera debut and am looking forward to hearing what he does with an opera that has more familiar top tunes than you can count.

Next up is a new-to-SF production of Handel's Orlando, with a fabulous, five-member cast which includes mezzo Sasha Cooke, Heidi Stober, Christian van Horn, and the new countertenor sensation Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. The well-reviewed 2011 Scottish Opera production by director Harry Fehr updates the ancient Orlando narrative to a World War Two psychiatric hospital in London, and why not?

The final production is Rusalka, Dvorak's version of The Little Mermaid, with favorite tenor Brandon Jovanovich as The Prince, the remarkable mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as The Witch Ježibaba, and soprano Rachel Willis‐Sørensen singing to the moon in the title role. The well-reviewed 2014 David McVicar production is from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the music is very beautiful.

On June 15th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Other Minds Music Festival will be presenting The Pressure, a commissioned world premiere by Oakland composer Brian Baumbach. It is not being billed as an opera but rather a multimedia "horrortorio." Here's a description from the OM website: "...a tale of gothic horror told in music, harking back to world of German expressionist silent film­­ with a story straight from the Twilight Zone. A snake oil peddler comes to town – a town suffering from painful barometric pressure – and promises a cure. There are unforeseen consequences… be careful what you wish for. It features more than 24 performers including The Lightbulb Ensemble and Friction String Quartet, 3 keyboardists, a vocal quartet, and the composer as narrator. Making their debut will be an array of newly created gamelan-style instruments in original tunings." Whenever bass Sid Chen or The Friction Quartet are involved in something, it's usually fascinating.

At the end of June, the SF Symphony is presenting Ravel's one-act L’Enfant et les sortilèges in a production from Opéra National de Lyon. Conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the production stars mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard who was so great in another Ravel one-act at the SF Symphony, L'heure espagnole, back in 2015. She's joined by a host of other singers, including Marnie Breckenridge and Nikki Einfeld, who are also in Dorothea and Artemisa, so we have come full circle.