June Opera Is Bustin' Out All Over (in San Francisco)

San Francisco will be the opera capital of the United States this June with at least six shows opening around town, starting with three major productions at the San Francisco Opera for their annual summer season (click here for tickets).

It starts with Mozart's The Magic Flute in a a 2012 production co-created by the Komische Opera in Berlin and the LA Opera by Australian director Barrie Kosky. It's presented as a silent film with over 800 separate projections on a blank wall with singers appearing on rotating vestibules. (For an interesting explanation of the design, click here for the SF Opera blog.) It sounds like a gimmick but has been successful enough to have over 40 appearances all over the world. Best of all, the problematic spoken text in either German or English will be replaced by silent film interstitials, a lovely solution. I am particularly looking forward to hearing how Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts Mozart, which can be tricky, and also tenor Amitai Pati singing the role of Tamino. By the way, the huge spider above is the Queen of the Night.

This will be followed by the American premiere of the recently deceased composer Kaija Saariaho's final opera, Innocence. A co-commission of SF Opera, the work has already premiered in Aix-en-Provence, France and a few other European cities, and a new production is being built here. Set simultaneously at a wedding and at a school shooting at an International School in Helsinki, it's been declared a modern masterpiece by a number of music critics. Its appearance here is a very big deal.

Finishing up the season is Handel's 1730 comic opera, Partenope, about the first Queen of Naples being besieged by suitors for three and a half hours. The Christopher Alden production appeared here in 2014 and I walked out after the first act because I didn't know the music and the zany, madcap staging set in 1920s Paris at an artistic salon felt heavy-handed. However, in anticipation of seeing it again, I have been listening to various versions of the once-obscure opera on YouTube, and the music really is insinuatingly gorgeous, which makes me look forward to hearing it live with an international cast.

Across the street, the San Francisco Symphony's soon-to-be-departed Music Director Esa Pekka Salonen is conducting a quartet of interesting concerts in June, starting with a double-bill of Ravel's full-length Mother Goose ballet accompanied by the Alonzo King Dancers and Schoenberg's 30-minute opera, Ewartung, depicting a woman going mad in a dark forest. Peter Sellars is staging both, and the soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams has to carry the entire work on her shoulders since it's a monodrama. West Edge Opera produced this last summer in a reduced orchestration, and it will be exciting to hear it in its full splendor. Performances are from Friday, June 7 to Sunday, June 9 (click here for tickets).

From June 21-23, Opera Parallele is giving the West Coast premiere of a 2016 American opera, Fellow Travelers, composed by Gregory Spears whose music has been praised to the skies. Commissioned by Cincinatti Opera, it's an adaptation of a Thomas Mallon novel about a love affair between two publicly closeted gay men working government jobs in Washington, D.C. during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s when commies and homos were interchangeable scapegoats. I haven't read the book or seen the Amazon Prime series that recently aired, but am looking forward to hearing the score and seeing Joseph Lattanzi, who created the role of Hawkins Fuller. The performances are being held at the little jewel box Presidio Theater. Click here for tickets.

Pocket Opera is midway through their 2024 season, and will be presenting Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor in one of company founder Donald Pippin's genius English translations. I have never seen the opera but have been hearing and reading for decades that it's one of the best Shakespearean adaptations in the operatic repertoire. To make it more interesting, I am a huge fan of Kenneth Kellogg who is singing Falstaff and Rene Harms who is singing Alice Ford. It's being performed at the Legion of Honor on Sunday afternoon on June 30 (click here for tickets).