Merola Grand Finale 2025

The Merola Opera Program, a summer boot camp for young professionals at the beginning of their careers, concluded Saturday evening with its annual Grand Finale concert accompanied by the magnificent San Francisco Opera orchestra conducted by Kelly Kuo. Based on the earlier Schwabacher Concert and the fully staged Le Comte Ory, this year's crop of singers is the most consistently excellent I have ever heard at Merola. (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The Grand Finale programming was its usual potpourri of arias and opera scenes that sometimes worked well together and sometimes not. My favorite moments included an exquisitely beautiful duet from Handel's Giulio Cesare between soprano Ana Maria Vacca as Sesto and mezzo-soprano Sadie Cheslak as Cornelia.

Charlotte Siegel gave a few star performances this summer, continuing with the Io son l'umile ancella aria from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. Some of the performers understandably appeared a bit frightened holding the stage alone in the huge San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, but Siegel has a regal diva energy that grabs you immediately and the glorious soprano voice to back it up. She seems ready to hit the big time.

She was followed by a delightful quartet from Verdi's Falstaff, with Chea Kang as Nannetta, Alexa Frankian as Alice, Meg Brileslyper as Meg, and Sadie Cheslak as Quickly. The direction by Merola director Elio Bucky was funny and engaging, which was true for the entire concert.

Bass-baritone Wanchun Liang gave an amusing, resonant account of the title character conspiring in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi.

Another star of the summer program was Minghao Liu. His high, flexible tenor was amazing as the title character in Le Comte Ory a month ago, and so was his tackling of the impossibly difficult aria Ah, mes amis...Pour mon ame from Donizetti's La Fille du regiment.

When Sheri Greenawald was in charge of Merola Opera programming, a lot of obscure, mediocre 19th century French opera was represented, but the new Curator and Artistic Director Carrie-Ann Matheson seems to have a fondness for Gaetano Donizetti instead. Joshua Kosman, on his Substack site On a Pacific Aisle, wrote an amusing complaint about the 66% Donizetti count at the earlier Schwabacher concert, and the Grand Finale offered more of the same with three selections from old Gaetano. This included a beautifully sung duet from Lucia di Lammermoor, with soprano Eva Rae Martinez as Lucia and baritone Gabriel Natal Baez as a surprisingly sympathetic Enrico.

Then there were two songs orchestestrated by Berlioz, including the composer's La spectre de la rose performed nicely by mezzo-soprano Ariana Maubach, and Schubert's Erlkönig, with Benjamin Dickerson above doing a good, creepy job of telling the story of a boy stolen by the elf king.

The concert ended with a series of English language selections, starting with soprano Sofia Gotch singing the Willow Song from Douglas Moore's Ballad of Baby Doe. Tristan Tournaud sang well in Lonely House from Weill's Street Scene, and bass John Mburu did magnificent justice to Jerome Kern's Old Man River. The final number was the duet Wheels of a Dream from the musical Ragtime by Stephen Flaherty and Terrance McNally, and it was a disaster. This was through no fault of the performers, bass-baritone Justice Yates as Coalhouse and Charlotte Siegel as Sarah. The problem was that somebody decided to amplify the two singers' voices, Broadway style, and after an entire evening of listening to fabulous unamplified voices filling a 3,000+ seat opera house, it sounded awful. To add insult to injury, the entire cast finished the concert singing a choral arrangement of Golden Days from The Student Prince. I can deal with Donizetti but I draw the line at Sigmund Romberg.