Carmen, For The Very First Time

I took my spouse Austin to see his first Carmen at the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday, advising him beforehand that there were more recognizable hit tunes in this opera than anything he had ever seen. Austin loved it and so did the sold-out audience around us. The feeling was infectious, even though this jaded old operaphile was not particularly impressed by the cast or the production. What saved it for me was Bizet's 1875 musical score itself, a true marvel that somehow never gets stale, especially in this well-conducted performance by the young Benjamin Manis, who was making his house debut.

Let's start with the problems. Francesca Zambello's production, which dates from 2006, is minimalist, well-worn, and downright ugly. The role of Micaela, the good village girl who the hero is supposed to marry, is a dull stock character but she is given two of the loveliest soprano arias in the repertory. However, debuting Welsh soprano Louise Alder's voice was distinctly unlovely and one wished she'd just go back to her village. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

Act One is a tricky business to stage, with a garrison of soldiers next to a tobacco factory filled with cigarette girls, along with a children's chorus, multiple Sevilla residents, and the introduction of most of the main characters. It was a constant traffic mess and felt unconvincing in every detail.

Worst of all, the debuting French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux was a dud as Carmen. For some reason, she played the character as a bullying Mean Girl, and any seductive allure was sadly absent. Musically, she was fine, but it was difficult to believe that every man wanted to throw themselves at her feet.

Let's finish with what went right. Act Two outside of Lillas Pastia's tavern was well-staged, and the dance sequence choreographed by Anna Maria Bruzzese was delightful. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was a relaxed, convincing stud as the toreador Escamillo, and he even got to arrive onstage on a real horse, which excited the audience immensely.

I loved tenor Jonathan Tetelman in La Traviata a couple of years ago, and enjoyed him again as the sad sack soldier Don Jose who falls under the spell of Carmencita.

The final act, which starts with a parade coming into a bullfighting ring, was actually the best staging of the evening. Though it's an awful ending, with yet another man murdering a woman because she wants to leave him, the scene felt honest and Tetelman finally let loose with the best singing of the night.

My first Carmen, by the way, was the 1981 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production at the San Francisco Opera when it was new, starring the legendary Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza, which set me up for a lifetime of disappointment. If this is your first Carmen, you might love it like Austin too.

French Life and Death at the SF Symphony

There was a lovely concert in Davies Hall this weekend featuring the SF Symphony Chorus singing Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, marred only by the ugly war between management and the 32 paid choristers who are working without a contract. (The remaining choristers are skilled, unpaid volunteers accepted through auditions.) For a full account of the current mess, click here for Janos Gereben's recent wrapup at San Francisco Classical Voice.

The debuting guest conductor was Kazuki Yamada, a 46-year-old Japanese protégé of the late Seiji Ozawa. He is currently based in Berlin, conducting throughout Europe, and has always wanted to go up a hill on a cable car in San Francisco. In an opening speech, he mentioned that his cable car wish had finally been fulfilled. His entire program was French music except for the short opener, Entwine, written by Dai Fujikura, a 47-year-old Japanese composer based in London. The piece was commissioned by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and its moody astringency unfortunately took me right back to that time.

The pick-me-up immediately following was Ravel's 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major with Hélène Grimaud as the piano soloist, looking as French movie star as ever. She's a controversial musician because she plays with composers' phrasing and rhythms, but that's also what makes her fabulous as a live performer. You're never quite sure what you are going to hear. (For a fascinating 2011 New Yorker profile of the pianist by D.T. Max, click here.)

Though I do not have synesthesia like Grimaud, where music translates into visual colors, the concerto's soundscape was so colorful that hues were popping up in my brain throughout the performance. Grimaud gave a virtuoso performance and followed up with an encore by Valentin Silvestrov, a composer Grimaud is currently championing.

The second half of the program was devoted to Gabriel Fauré's 1890 Requiem, and at the entrance of the embattled SF Symphony Chorus, the audience rose in support and applause.

Fauré was an interesting working musician, toiling as a church organist, music teacher, and finally the head of the Paris Conservatoire where he was a progressive, nurturing mentor to Ravel, among other composers. His Requiem is an early work from his church organist days where he seemingly became sick of all the fire and brimstone Latin mass settings, and wrote a gentle choral work that emphasizes the opening lines "Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis (Give them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)."

Though the 40-minute mass is virtually all choral music, with a small orchestra, there are a couple of soloists who appear briefly. In these performances, it was soprano Liv Redpath and bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who were both fine.

The chorus sounded a bit too forceful in some of the more delicate moments of the score, but they convincingly took the audience to heaven in the final movement, In Paradisum, where they sang "Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat (May a Chorus of angels welcome you)."

The Adler Fellows Concert 2024

The annual Adler Fellows concert on Friday featured nine singers in San Francisco Opera's elite apprenticeship program, and some of the voices were so huge in the small Herbst Theater that it became a bit overwhelming. Following are a few of my favorite things from the evening. (All but one of the photos by Kristen Loken.)

First off, the young conductor Benjamin Manis did a wonderful job leading the SF Opera Orchestra in a wide range of music, from Handel to Rachmaninoff, while being very attentive to his young vocalists. Manis is currently leading the orchestra in the current production of Carmen next door at the War Memorial Opera House. Secondly, stage director Omer Ben Seadia kept it simple and clean, without silly props or gimmicks. She concentrated on the singers' acting to convey the meaning of their arias since there were no surtitles, which was sort of refreshing.

Manis's conducting was particularly good in the selections by Mozart. The program started out with a lively performance of The Marriage of Figaro Overture followed by the first scene from the opera with soprano Arianna Rodriguez as Susanna and bass-baritone Jongwon Han as Figaro. They were delightful, vocally and theatrically, and Jongwon Han's rendition of the aria Se vuol volare was expert.

Mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz knows how to command a stage, and they were thrilling in the mad aria Where shall I fly? from Handel's oratorio Hercules. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

They were also a sympathetic mezzo friend to soprano Caroline Corrales in Sorgi, o padre from Bellini's Bianca e Fernando. Corrales was a knockout earlier this year as Moira, the lesbian rebel in The Handmaid's Tale. Though I thought she was forcing her voice in the challenging Ernani, involami from Verdi's Ernani, a nearby friend who knows much more about voices than me predicted Corrales was going to be a serious star of the future.

Speaking of challenging arias, tenor Thomas Kinch sang Gott, welch Dunkel hier! from Beethoven's Fidelio with a huge voice and remarkably accurate pitch. He later sang Mamma, quel vino e generoso" from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana with soprano Georgiana Adams as Mamma Lucia.

Samuel Kidd has a bright, clear baritone and an innate musicality. When he appeared in a small role this fall as Christian the Sailor in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, I secretly wished he was singing the lead role of Renato instead. On Friday, he sang two obscure French arias, O Nadir, tendre ami de mon jeune age from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers and O vin, dissipe la tristesse from Thomas's Hamlet. Somehow, Kidd made them both interesting.

I also loved baritone Jongwon Han, returning for the little-known aria O tu, Palermo from Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani. He's another person who knows how to marry text and music with intelligence, and his voice is a joy to hear.

Though it was not the final piece of the evening, All along? from Puts's The Hours should have been. The finale to that recently composed opera is a lightweight nod to the female trio in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Nikola Printz, Arianna Rodriguez and Olivia Smith did a lovely job with it.

Tchaikovsky and Elgar at the SF Symphony

Driving back to San Francisco from Palm Springs on the day after that disastrous U.S. election, we heard Dianne Nicolini on KUSC introducing some piece of light classical music "to help process our feelings," which made me laugh. In a similar spirit, I attended Thursday's San Francisco Symphony concert which was featuring a pair of popular favorites by Tchaikovsky and Elgar, the musical equivalent of comfort food, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.

The debuting guest conductor was the 41-year-old Nicholas Collon, who founded London's Aurora Orchestra 20 years ago. The concert actually started with an edge, the 2007 Three-piece Suite by Thomas Adès extracted from his scandalous 1995 opera, Powder Her Face. West Edge Opera offered a remarkable production in 2016 at the abandoned Oakland train station (click here for an account), and the suite brought back vivid memories of both its lewdness and inventiveness. The opera was written for a small, jazzy chamber ensemble where the sour tangos and frenzied sexuality are more potent than in this large reorchestration, but it was a fun reminder of the original.

Next up was Tchaikovsky's 1875 Piano Concerto #1 with the 30-year-old American pianist Conrad Tao as the soloist. The familiar, ultra-Romantic opening measures set the template for many other composers, including Rachmaninoff's subsequent piano concertos, and Tao attacked the keyboard with abandon. If he was trying to show that he could play the piano faster and louder than anybody else, he clearly succeeded. At moments, it felt like a punk rock version of the concerto, and though I wouldn't want to hear it performed that way all the time, the result was exciting and made the overplayed music sound new and unfamiliar.

After the usual standing ovation, Tao returned for an unusual encore, his own transcription of Art Tatum's 1953 jazz rendition of "that unfamiliar song, Over The Rainbow." It was a kick.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Edward Elgar's 1895 breakthrough compositon, Enigma Variations, a set of 14 orchestral miniatures depicting friends and family, including the composer himself. Collon's conducting was a bit of a mixed bag, but the central Nimrod movement, which Dianne Nicolini seems to broadcast every other day on classical radio stations, was exquisite perfection. It helped to process a few feelings.

Mary Cassatt At Work

San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum is currently hosting an exhibit called Mary Cassatt At Work. It's an overview of the pioneering American feminist artist Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). She was born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family and managed to overcome innnumerable obstacles to becoming a working woman artist of the 19th century. One of those obstacles was her stockbroker father who refused to support her in her studies, which started at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when she was 15. (Pictured is Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878.)

She hated the dreary instruction and gender discrimination at the Academy (no live models for you, girl!) and decamped to Paris with her mother, who fiercely supported her daughter. She took private lessons from teachers at the Ecole de Beaux Arts because women were not allowed to actually attend the school. (Pictured is Portrait of Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, The Artist's Mother, 1885.)

Mary bounced back and forth between Europe and Pennsylvania until finally moving permanently to Paris in 1874, with some of her family in tow, and she became a working artist. (Pictured is In The Loge, 1878.)

She had several paintings accepted to the prestigious annual Salon, but grew disenchanted with the sexist selection process and their stodgy aesthetics. (Pictured is Woman in a Loge, 1879.)

She fell in love with some pastels in an art gallery window by Edgar Degas, and the two artists soon became fruitful, friendly collaborators in oil painting, pastel drawing, and printmaking. (Pictured is At the Theater, 1879.)

She joined the plein air Impressionists, which was once a radical art movement before it became ridiculously popular in the 20th century. (Pictured is Woman at her Toilette, 1880.)

Cassatt was well represented in the famous 1879 Impressionism exhibit, and with the proceeds of her sales bought single paintings by Monet and Degas. (Pictured is A Goodnight Hug, 1880.)

Her subject matter from that time forward was almost invariably depictions of women and children. (Pictured is Children Playing on a Beach, 1885.)

They are not formal portraits because none of the women or children are ever looking at the artist or the viewer. It was also interesting to read that many of the doting mothers were actually models with borrowed babies. Cassatt never married or had children but she obviously had a fascination for the subject of womanhood and maternity. (Pictured is A Kiss for Baby Ann, No. 3, 1897).

While her brother Alexander became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mary used her connections with American society friends to advise them on purchasing Impressionist works. Cassatt insisted the art should eventually be donated to American art museums, which is how New York's MOMA ended up with so many priceless Impressionist paintings. She also became a major supporter of the American suffragette movement. (Pictured is the only work depicting males in the current exhibit, Portrait of Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son Robert Kelso Cassatt, 1884.)

Cassatt's own tastes grew a bit stodgy after the 1890s and she rejected the crazy new movements of the 20th century like Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. In 1910, she visited Egypt for the first time, and proclaimed "I fought against it but it conquered, it is surely the greatest Art the past has left us ... how are my feeble hands to ever paint the effect on me?"

Shostakovich and Brahms at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony presented two major works this weekend, conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The first half was Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto #1, composed in 1948 but unperformed until 1955 when Stalin was safely in a grave. Because my brain is a memory sieve these days, I couldn't remember if I had ever heard the piece before. Thanks to this blog's search engine it turns out that I had heard the awesome German violinist Christian Tetzlaff perform as soloist with Susanna Malkki conducting the SF Symphony in 2015. The forgotten review started with: "one of the most stupendous, virtuosic, soulful musical performances of my long concertgoing life."

Unfortunately, that was not the case with Saturday evening's performance where violinist Sayaka Shoji was the soloist. This was her debut with the orchestra, and for me it was disappointing. This is difficult, expressive music, and she seemed to play every note perfectly while missing the meaning throughout. (All onstage production photos, except for the final one, are by Stefan Cohen.)

The four-movement work starts with a long Nocturne, which should set a sad, meditative tone but instead felt like being stuck in a dull way station. Shoji handled the fast movements better, but completely missed the diabolical sarcasm of the second and the village fiddler joy in the fourth. The long, slow third-movement Passacaglia is the heart of the work, ending with an extended cadenza for the soloist which should make you want to stand up and cheer at the end, but that wasn't the case on Saturday.

I had been talking up the exciting violin concerto to Austin and James, above, and felt like a liar when they both came to intermission with a "meh" expression.

Shostakovich composed the concerto for the legendary Russian violinist David Oistrakh and there are a number of his great recordings of the work on YouTube. If you are interested, click here.

The second half of the program was devoted to Brahms' Symphony #4. After another blog search, I was reminded of a masterful rendition by Herbert Blomstedt and the SF Symphony in 2020, right before the pandemic. Salonen's Brahms was quite a different experience, but completely valid and interesting in its own way. He took the symphony at a much faster pace than I am used to, excepting the slow second movement, and it worked brilliantly.

The individual soloists in the orchestra were a continuous delight, from Eugene Izotov on oboe to Ed Stephan on tympani, who led the orchestra's muscular, driving rendition with ferocious energy.

The Handmaid's Tale at SF Opera

The 2000 English-language opera The Handmaid's Tale by Danish composer Poul Ruders and English librettist Paul Bentley, just finished its seven-performance run this week at the San Francisco Opera. Based on Margaret Atwood's prophetic 1985 novel depicting patriarchy gone full authoritarian in the United States, it was yet another triumph in General Director Matthew Shilvock's championing of contemporary opera, which seems to be in a new golden age right now. For most of the 20th century, you would be lucky to hear a new opera once in a decade at the big opera houses of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and they would usually be one-off affairs that were never produced after their premieres. (Andrew Imbrie's 1976 Angle of Repose at the SF Opera is a good example.) Two former San Francisco General Directors are partly responsible for reinvigorating the art form in this country: Lotfi Mansouri with his introduction of supertitles in 1983, and David Gockley who gave the world premieres of 35 operas during his tenure at Houston Grand Opera, including John Adams's seminal Nixon in China. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

I saw the final performance on Tuesday evening, while the U.S. Vice Presidential debate was happening, featuring Republican JD Vance who seems like a character straight from this war on women narrative. The opera's action is graphically violent and horrifying, with onstage depictions of rape and execution by hanging for various crimes such as "gender treachery" (think homosexuality). Rouder's complex musical score complements and intensifies the sheer awfulness of this Christian-based fascism.

Recorded history and its operatic depiction is usually a man's world, so it was gratifying to see such a huge cast where only a few of the characters were male. This allowed for a wide range of female singers to shine on the War Memorial stage, and there was not a weak performance in the bunch. Sarah Cambidge was appropriately terrifying as Aunt Lydia, who seemed to be channeling Evelyn Dockson in the 1950 women's prison film Caged. Katrina Galka was poignant as the half-mad Janine who thinks she's still a waitress in the Before Times, and Sara Couden's astonishing contralto voice was a highlight as she played a sympathetic maid in the Commander's home.

Musically, my favorite moment of the opera was when the Commander's wife Serena Joy is seen on video singing Amazing Grace while at least two or three other things are going on in the orchestra and onstage, creating an eerie cacophony. Lindsay Ammann made a striking SF Opera debut as Serena, a former Christian singing star relegated to a shunned, venemous, stay-at-home wife for the Commander.

The childless Serena is forced to participate in the breeding of our heroine, Offred, a ritual rape by the Commander modeled on a tale in Genesis. "Rachel was unable to get pregnant, so she offered her handmaid, Bilhah, to Jacob to have children for her. Leah, who had no trouble conceiving, gave Jacob her handmaid, Zilpah." Bass John Relyea was handsome and oddly sympathetic in the role, even though the character was one of the founders of Gilead's dystopian universe (JD Vance came to mind yet again).

A secret cadre of resisters pops up throughout the opera, including Ofglen, sung gorgeously by soprano Rhoslyn Jones (above right). Mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag as the ultra-liberal Offred's Mother gave a fine, funny performance as the ultimate I Told You So matriarch. Tenor Brenton Ryan continues to make a big impression in small roles at the SF Opera (Janek in The Makropulos Case, the Novice in Billy Budd, and Eros in Antony and Cleopatra). As Nick, the Commander's chauffeur who becomes our heroine's lover and possible rescuer, he brings some welcome kindness and sensuality to the harsh narrative.

Adler Fellow Caroline Corrales (above left, with the bunny ears) was sensational as Offred's lesbian feminist friend who manages to escape from handmaid hell, but who is caught and brought back to a bordello where the unsurprisingly hypocritical male elite has their sexual fun away from the rigid Christian doctrines they are enforcing on everyone else.

Finally, mezzo-soprano soprano Irene Roberts as Offred was magnificent in very challenging vocal music while onstage for almost every moment of the three-hour opera. The last time I saw her was as the adorable Dorabella in the great 2021 production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, and this was quite a stretch. She is seen above with her Before Times double, the French mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh.

The constant flashbacks were the weakest dramaturgical moments for me and the sentimentality around Offred's longing for her kidnapped daughter felt out of place in such a rigorously unsentimental work. It didn't matter. The conductor Karen Kamensek and the SF Opera Orchestra did a fabulous job with what sounded like difficult music, although I would have to hear the opera again to make any pronouncements about the score itself. The staging by English director John Fulljames was clean and persuasive, and the set design by the English artist Chloe Lamford was hyper-functional for the 30+ quickly changing scenes. (Lamford also created the revolving two-story set for Saarijaho's Innocence this summer and she is my new artistic heroine.) Finally, the sound design and mixing engineer Rick Jacobsohn pulled off a small miracle. According to program notes, the entire opera was amplified but I didn't hear any evidence of that, which is the highest possible compliment.