The 2025 Adler Concert

The annual Adler Fellows concert, showcasing the young musical artists training program at the San Francisco Opera, is always a bittersweet affair. For some, it's the beginning of a great operatic career while for others it may be the end of the road after spending two or three years in the program. Backed by the onstage San Francisco Opera Orchestra led by conductor Ramón Tebar, nine singers tackled a variety of arias and scenes in the small Herbst Theater. Though I have admired all of them in the small roles they have performed during the last couple of seasons onstage at the SF Opera, some of them seemed overmatched by the challenging repertoire selected for this The Future Is Now concert. But let's focus on the positive, starting with newcomer baritone Olivier Zerouali singing a rapid-fire Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville by Rossini. (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Bass-baritone Jongwon Han has been a stalwart in quite a few roles on the main stage over the last three years, and his smooth, resounding voice worked well in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Bellini's La Sonnambula.

Another major highlight was most of Act III of Puccini's La Bohème with soprano Olivia Smith as Mimi, tenor Samuel White as Rodolfo, Samuel Kidd as Marcello, and Georgiana Adams as Musetta. They all sounded ready to take on their respective roles on any stage in the world.

My favorite moment of the evening was baritone Samuel Kidd singing the title role in Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, which managed to make me all teary-eyed. If any opera house in the world is looking to cast a handsome young baritone with a gorgeous voice and innate musical brilliance in a production of this opera, they should look no further.

The Art of Manga at the deYoung

Unlike many friends, I have never been particularly drawn to comic books, graphic novels, or animation, so The Art of Manga at the deYoung Museum did not hold much appeal, but the exhibit turned out to be fascinating.

One reason for that is the design of the installation, which is beautiful and varied. Kudos to whomever is responsible at the museum, which organized the show.

Since Japanese is read from right to left, the installation was set up that way too.

However, it was amusing watching many museumgoers moving and reading left to right out of habit.

Each room is focused on one of ten contemporary Japanese manga artists, and the explanatory signage is clear and well-written, with a brief synopsis of the narratives of their major works along with graphic examples. Above is a still from PLINIUS by Yamazaki Mari and Tori Miki about ancient Rome, including Pliny the Elder experiencing the eruption of Vesuvius.

Another nod to Western culture is the forthcoming The Monstrous Ocean: The Curious Travels of Ahab by Ito Junji which retells the story of Moby Dick, except with more monsters.

The represented artists were well balanced by gender...

...and there was even a gay man, Tagame Gengoroh, whose My Brother's Husband has become a beloved sensation in Japan.

It involves a Western gay bear meeting up with his deceased spouse's identical twin brother.

Of course, the artistic tradition of comic books almost demands superheroes, and there were plenty of them in the exhibit too...

...along with what my spouse called out as, "Look, Nancy's on acid!"

Ercole Amante at Ars Minerva

Ercole Amante is a 1707 opera composed in Paris by an Italian woman, Antonia Bembo, that was never produced onstage until this weekend in San Francisco by Ars Minerva at the ODC Theatre. A concert version was performed in Germany last year, and the Paris Opera is producing it in six months, so it seems Ercole Amante's time has finally come at last. The composer was married young to an abusive Venetian nobleman, and she soon fled with her two sons to Paris where she was saved by Louis XIV, who hired her and housed her in a [presumably upscale] convent. She wrote this only extant opera late in her life, to an already existing libretto, about the abusive demi-god Hercules being an asshole to his wife and son when he decides he wants to swap them both out for his son's fiance. Many gods and goddesses are also involved, and the happy ending has Hercules receiving his karmic due.

Céline Ricci (above left) is an accomplished mezzo-soprano, who created Ars Minerva ten years ago to perform an annual Renaissance era opera, many of which have been stored in European music libraries for centuries. Ercole Amante has long been one of her passion projects since she shares the dual French-Italian origins of the composer and the two musical styles in this opera.

I saw and enjoyed all the Ars Minerva presentations from 2016 to 2021, but hadn't returned for four years because of life rather than disinterest. The projections this year by Entropy were as lovely as ever, although some of the animation became distractingly repetitive. The bare bones staging with anachronistic props by Céline Ricci was its usual mixture of sincere and comic. The tiny original instrument orchestra, conducted by Matthew Dirst at the harpsichord, was reliably splendid. And the costumes by Marina Polakoff were amusingly over-the-top.

The cast had strengths and weaknesses. From left to right: Nina Jones as Licco, the servant to Hercules's wife Deianira, was simply wonderful throughout, while company stalwart Kindra Scharich as that wife with the big hair was superb. Baritone Nick Volkert was a welcome presence in a quartet of roles including Neptune and a dead king, and Aura Veruni as Juno the Goddess of Marriage was a delightful schemer. The disappointment was baritone Zachary Gordin who certainly looked the part of Hercules but much of the role seemed to be written for a bass which was too low for his pleasant voice.

Soprano Lila Khazoum as the fiance Hyllo was lovely but occasionally had pitch problems on Saturday evening, while tenor Max Ary as Hercules's son Hyllo had difficulties with the higher regions of the role which sounded like it was written for a countertenor. Bottomless, deep-voiced contralto Sara Couden, meanwhile, was obviously having a ball playing the comic Page, and her duet with Nina Jones was one of the highlights, positing that only idiots get through love unscathed by Cupid's arrows.

Plaudits also go to Melissa Sondhi in the monster outfit above as Venus, who conspires with Hercules in his dastardly plans. It was a fun evening.

Boy Meets Grail: Parsifal at SF Opera

The new production at SF Opera of Parsifal, Wagner's final opera from 1882, is a happy surprise. The nearly five-hour work has been both worshiped and reviled by everyone from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to composer Claude Debussy, and its narrative of an innocent fool redeeming a corrupt world can easily be interpreted as a symbolic, misogynistic paean to White Male Christian Nationalism, which is how Adolf Hitler saw it. (Production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

What nobody disputes is that the opera contains some of the most sublime music in the Western classical tradition, and the performance by Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducting the large SF Opera Orchestra and an accomplished cast of singers was uniformly exquisite. The production, which often looked like a Japanese-inflected version of The Magic Flute, was wonderful, filled with surprising details while remaining clear and unfussy.

Previous appearances at the SF Opera by Korean bass Kwangchoul Youn were not that impressive, but his account of the wise old knight Guernemanz was extraordinary. His 45-minute narration of the back story that begins the opera can be a boring slog, but in this case his deep, mellow voice and composure somehow turned the scene into a fascinating tale.

The Swiss mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner played Kundry, the only major female character in the entire opera. Like Emilia Makropolous in Leoš Janáček's opera, Kundry has lived a very, very long time. This is because she laughed at "the Redeemer" on the way to his death, and has been cursed to be the embodiment of Female Seductive Evil ever since. The role is usually a showcase for over-the-top scenery chewing, but Baumgartner performed the part cooler and more sympathetically than usual, sounding great in both lyrical and wildly dramatic moments.

Baritone Brian Mulligan returned for another fine outing as King Amfortas, grievously wounded by the holy spear that was inflicted on The Redeemer, after the King gave into his lustful desire for Kundry at the behest of the evil wizard Klingsor. This brings to mind Nietzsche's denunciation of his onetime friend and idol Wagner with a famous quote in his essay Nietzsche contra Wagner: "The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics."

German bass-baritone Falk Struckmann was genuinely scary as Klingsor while using the cursed Kundry as his lure to defile the holiness of the Knights of the Holy Grail who wandered into his enchanted garden filled with Flower Maidens.

Best of all, tenor Brandon Jovanovich performed the heroic, innocent fool who learns compassion in a title role that seemed to be written for him. Since his SF Opera debut playing Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly a few decades ago, Jovanovich has been singing heavy roles in major opera houses around the world, and any worries that his voice might have been run ragged were quickly dispelled. He was a magnificent and deeply sympathetic hero.

The production team of director Matthew Ozawa, choreographer Rena Butler, set designer Robert Innes Hopkins, costume designer Jessica Jahn, and lighting designer Yuki Nakase Link worked wonders together, and even the Flower Maiden scene which can come across as unintentionally silly, was equal parts pretty and mysterious.

Dancing in operas, other than those from the French Baroque period, often looks ridiculous but the movement works well in this production, and even deepens the fairly static narrative. Having a dancer incarnate Parsifal's dead mother worked well, though Kundry wearing the same outfit while trying to seduce Parsifal raised some disturbing questions. "Don't you want to feel what it was like when your father created you?" is a paraphrase of one of Kundry's come-ons.

Our hero resists her seductions, however, and after years of wandering returns to the Grail community in Act III with the holy spear he has wrested from Klingsor, heals King Amfortas with it, and redeems Kundry along with the entire community. In the original libretto, Kundry crumples happily to her release in death, but in this feminist gloss of a finale, she and Parsifal appear to bring yin/yang and male/female back into balance, a hopeful ending for dark times.