San Francisco Opera Fall 2024 Preview

The San Francisco Opera season is opening this week on its traditional moveable date, the first Friday after Labor Day. There will be a sit-down dinner and an Opera Ball at City Hall across the street, with the opening night opera wedged in between. My friend Patrick Vaz, a true music lover, disdains the event with all its tipsy socialites but I have always enjoyed the evening. It's a bit like Opening Day at the San Francisco Giants, except attendees are wearing dresses worth thousands of dollars. For financial reasons, this fall season features only four opera productions rather than the usual five or six, but at least the administration doesn't seem to be actively trying to destroy their own cultural instution like the SF Symphony across the street.

The season starts with one of my favorite Verdi operas, Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball). The 1859 opera ran into censorship problems immediately because it was a fictional account of the real 1792 assassination of King Gustave III at a masked ball in the foyer of the Stockholm Opera House. No assassinations of royalty were to be depicted onstage in Italy in 1857, so the libretto was changed first to Poland and then to Boston in the colonial era, where it never really made sense. This well-reviewed production by Italian director Leo Muscato goes back to the original, and is set in Stockholm. The music is Verdi at his greatest and the assembled cast looks really promising, with the known excellence of tenor Michael Fabiano and soprano Lianna Haroutounian as headliners. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts in her ongoing survey of Verdi operas.

Appearing in repertory with Ballo is the 1998 operatic adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's bizarrely prescient 1985 imagining of a future United States where patriarchy has run amok. It was created by Danish composer Poul Ruders who asked the British multi-hyphenate actor Paul Bentley to write an English libretto for him. The adaptation has been widely praised and though the music seemed a bit too discordant for many initial reviewers, the consensus seems to have changed and the music is now being praised too. The opera has appeared sporadically in Europe and the U.S. (Boston) over the last 25 years, but this is a new co-production between the Royal Danish Opera, where it originally premiered, and the San Francisco Opera. The cast looks outstanding and the American conductor Karen Kamensek will be leading the excellent orchestra. The SF Opera isn't making a big deal out of it, but this is the first time in history when the majority of operas in the fall season are conducted by women. It's about time.

In mid-October, Richard Wagner's 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde arrives in a decade-old production from Venice's Teatro La Venice, directed by Canadian Paul Curran in what looks like a beautiful, minimalist production. Tristan will be sung by New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill and German soprano Anja Kampe will be Isolde. I am not one of George Bernard Shaw's Perfect Wagnerites, but most of my musically inclined friends are. They all seemed to like Eun Sun Kim's conducting of Lohengrin with Simon O'Neill last year so this five-hour soundbath should be right up their alley, and it might be what you are looking for too.

November belongs to George Bizet's 1875 Carmen, which has more recognizable tunes than any opera ever written. The Francesca Zambello production has been bouncing around the globe since it premiered at Covent Garden in 2006. It appeared here in 2019 in a poorly reviewed outing, but maybe things will be better this time with French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux making her debut in the title role and tenor Jonathan Tetelman as her murderous lover, Don Jose. A young newcomer, Benjamin Manis, conducts.