Rossini's "Le Comte Ory" at Merola Opera

Le Comte Ory is a rarely performed Rossini opera from 1828 that is based on a very naughty French sex farce, and it has some of the most sophisticated music the composer ever wrote. It was a complete treat to hear the work live for the first time last Thursday thanks to the Merola Opera Program which presented an extraordinarily accomplished production at the SF Conservatory of Music. The generously-sized orchestra, conducted by the Met conductor Pierre Vallet, required the removal of a few rows of audience seating, and was probably too large for the space as they were very loud through most of the evening.

It didn't matter much as the "emerging artists" onstage all had strong voices that easily carried over the orchestra. That was particularly true of tenor Minghao Liu in the challenging title role. He already sounds ready for big time stages. (All production photos by Kristen Loken.)

Though the music is Rossini at his best, it's easy to see why the opera is rarely performed. The plot is both blasphemous and risqué, set in a 12th century French town where most of the men are away fighting in the Crusades. The town's women have locked themselves away with the virtuous Comtesse Adele, who is waiting for her brother to return home. Le Comte Ory dons a number of disguises while trying to seduce the Comtesse and is repeatedly unmasked by Meg Brilleslyper as his male page Isolier and Wanchun Liang as his tutor/babysitter. Pictured above, they were both strong-voiced delights.

For the first act, Ory posed as a wise, holy hermit dispensing advice to credulous women in his quest to gain access to the Comtesse Adele.

The ruse works and the depressed Adele is given license by the fake wise man to open up and love a little. This induces a series of arias sung spectacularly well by Eva Rae Martinez. Also noteworthy was the rich, warm voice of mezzo-soprano Ariana Maubach as the Comtesse's best friend.

The opera has a lot of echoes of both Don Giovanni, with its rapey protagonist, and The Marriage of Figaro, except in this version the Cherubino pageboy character ends up happily ever after with the Countess, and the sexually foiled youg aristocrat slinks away rather than being dragged to hell.

In the second act, Ory disguises himself as a female religious pilgrim caught in a Rossini storm who asks for hospitality from the Comtesse.

He's brought along some bad boy pals and they ransack the wine cellar during a wild scene that alternates between solemn prayers and raucous drinking songs. The chorus has a lot to do in this opera, and the small contingent from the Merola Opera Program did such a wonderful job that they deserve to be named individually: Alexa Frankian, Chea Kang, Anna Maria Vacca, Christopher Oglesby, John Mburu, Joeavian Rivera, and Jim Yu. Also noteworthy was the straightforward direction of Garnett Bruce and the simple, flexible set of scenic designer Miriam Lewis.

The penultimate scene depicts the tenor Count in nun drag trying to sexually assault the soprano Countess who has switched clothing with the mezzo-soprano male page Isolier. What makes this outrageous, gender bending scene amazing is the the vocal trio, which is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music Rossini ever composed.

Over the last few years, the SF Conservatory of Music has made major improvements in their main concert hall. Productions have advanced from bare-stage affairs with a few props to elaborate, fully staged operas with sophisticated lighting and projection setups. It was a pleasure to see it being used so well for this Merola production.

The Schwabacher Summer Concert

The Schwabacher Summer Concert is an annual event that has aspiring opera professionals perform operatic scenes accompanied by a full orchestra. Created by the Merola Opera Program, which is a summer bootcamp for a couple of dozen young artists, the Schwabacher is usually a slapdash affair that features a few promising singers surrounded by others that are not quite ready for prime time. This year's outing from director Omer Ben Seadia at the SF Conservatory of Music, however, featured the strongest vocal roster and best staging that I have ever encountered at these concerts. The evening started with bass-baritone Justice Yates and baritone Gabriel Natal Báez in a silly scene from an early Donizetti comic opera, Il camponello, that was a delight. In particular, the young Puerto Rican baritone, Natal Báez, sang with a strong, richly warm voice that was a major highlight in all three of his appearances. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The first half of the program was a Donizetti-thon, with Il camponello followed by two scenes from the composer's Roberto Devereux. Donizetti's dramatic operas tend to be virtuoso vocal showcases, usually revived for operatic superstars, and there was a fear that the young singers would be overmatched. However, they all came through triumphantly, including mezzo-soprano Ruby Dibble as Sara, Roberto's beloved who has married the Duke of Nottingham on the orders of Queen Elizabeth.

Tristan Tournaud as the jealous Roberto has a pretty tenor voice that blended nicely with Dibble's fluent performance.

This was followed by a couple of scenes from Anna Bolena with a magnificent performance by Charlotte Siegel as the doomed queen who has to deal with former lover Percy, sung by tenor Jin Yu, and her lovesick page Smeton, beautifully sung by Anna Maria Vacca (not pictured).

The scene culminated in the arrival of Enrico (Henry VIII) who has everyone arrested before their eventual execution.

After intermission, the program veered away from Donizetti into Puccini's Suor Angelica with mezzo-soprano Sadie Cheslak as The Princess being horrible to her niece, the pathetic Suor Angelica sung by soprano Alexa Frankian. This was an audience favorite (not pictured), but I preferred what followed: soprano Ariana Cossette as Leonora and mezzo-soprano Anna Maria Vacca singing the difficult aria/duet from Act I of Verdi's Il Trovatore (pictured).

The concert ended with Act II of Donizetti's comedy Don Pasquale, with the title role sung in a gorgeously resounding bass by John Mburu, accompanied by a nice performance from baritone Joeavian Rivera.

The antic direction by Elio Bucky helped to ameliorate the sadistic, unfunny story of a group of conspirators out to torture a rich, pompous old fool, and though soprano Chea Kang was never quite convincing as a phony innocent from the convent, she was thoroughly in her element as a hellraising whirlwind, and she sang the role as if it was written for her.

The orchestra, seated onstage behind the singers, was led by conductor William Long and they sounded lively and lovely in the all-Italian music. Special mention should also go to Galen Till, credited as the "Formalwear Coordinator." The Schwabacher concerts over the years usually had a mishmash of formal dresses and tuxedos that often clashed with the characters they were playing, but this year everyone was garbed in complementary but differentiated black clothing that looked good on everyone. Congratulations to everyone involved.

A Kickass Performance of John Adams's Chamber Symphony

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts for the public almost every day of the week and you can get tickets by making reservations at their website (click here). On Saturday evening, I was drawn to an orchestral concert led by student conductors because one of the pieces was the wild, rarely performed 1992 Chamber Symphony of local composer John Adams. Along the way, I ran into Chenier Ng, one of the most dedicated music lovers in the world.

The concert began with Haydn's Symphony No. 59, nicknamed "The Fire Symphony," in a surprisingly vivid performance conducted by Donald Lee III, who brought passion, interesting dynamics, and a liveliness that is often absent when San Francisco's professional ensembles play the composer's music.

According to the program notes, Lee is a multi-hyphenate musician: pianist, conductor, and vocal accompanist. If he can conduct Haydn this well, he can probably do anything.

This was followed by Adams's Chamber Symphony conducted by Chih-Yao Chang from Taiwan in an astonishingly accomplished, kickass performance. There is a well-known anecdote Adams tells about the genesis of this work. He was studying the score of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony at home while his 7-year-old son Sam was watching TV cartoons with their manic musical soundtracks, and the two merged in his mind like a surrealist Looney Tunes animation. He also notes that "Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play." No kidding.

Young musicians are often quite brilliant with contemporary music that confounds their elders and this performance was a good example, a more exact and exciting version than I heard 10 years ago at the SF Symphony. Concertmaster Aleksy Aretsky (above) was superb in both the Haydn and this outing, and Diego Rodriguez (above, back left) miraculously made my least favorite instrument, the piccolo, sound varied and gorgeous. This was especially important because at times the three-movement symphony sounds like a concerto for piccolo and chamber orchestra.

Conductor Chih-Yao Chang kept all the competing musical threads and cross-cutting time signatures clear, even when the score sounds like it's about to be a car wreck. He's got a bright future. I didn't stay for the second half of the concert, which was Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Piano Concerto #1 because no matter how good the performance, it would have sounded like weak tea after the Chamber Symphony.

A Dozen Favorite Musical Moments of 2022

The following is not a "Best of The Bay" list because there were a few concerts I did not attend where subsequent reports from trusted friends made me feel like I had missed out. No, this is a list to make you feel like you have missed out. The dozen favorite performances are in chronological order, featuring a huge range of artists, starting with the 94-year-old conductor Herbert Blomstedt returning to Davies Hall last February. Blomstedt somehow seems to be getting better with age as he demonstrated leading the San Francisco Symphony in Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. More at this link.

The next week at Davies Hall the young guest conductor Perry So had programmed a remarkable assortment of music by Asian composers working with Western classical forms. The exception was Western gay hippie Lou Harrison's 1997 Concerto for Pipa and String Orchestra performed by Wu Man, for whom it was written. It was a daring, wholly successful program of music that had never been played at the SF Symphony before. More at this link.

Mozart's La Clemenza de Tito, was given the best production I have ever seen of that problematic opera in a wildly creative production at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which was co-directed by young genius James Darrah. More at this link.

In May, pianist Sarah Cahill joined up with the adventurous Friction Quartet for a Noe Valley Ministry chamber music concert of contemporary music sandwiching Dvorak's "American" String Quartet. A young violist, Mitso Floor, was filling in and was sensational. It's good to read that he recently, officially joined the quartet permanently. More at this link.

In June, SF Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and stage director Peter Sellars revived their production of Stravinsky's oratorio Oedipus Rex with the composer's Symphony of Psalms added on as an epilogue. The Symphony Men's Chorus was superb throughout, and so were the cast of soloists. Plus, it was lovely seeing tenor Sean Panikkar in the title role finally having the career he deserves. More at this link.

The SF Symphony finished their 2021-22 season in July with a thrilling concert that featured the local premiere of Berkeley composer John Adams's piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? The fiendishly complex work was written for pianist Yuja Wang but performed at these concerts by Víkingur Ólafsson, who was extraordinary. More at this link.

The annual American Bach Soloists Academy was canceled this summer on account of the Omnicron outbreak but the group still held a series of concerts at Herbst Theatre in August, including a surprisingly excellent performance of Handel's obscure oratorio, Belshazzar. The entire cast was wonderful and so was the pickup chorus, but pride of place went to soprano Maya Kherani sailing through some impossibly difficult music with apparent ease. More at this link.

The San Francisco Opera was celebrating its centennial and commissioned famous local composer John Adams to write another opera. The result was a brilliant distillation of Shakespeare's strange, sprawling play, Antony and Cleopatra. It's a major work and it was exciting to be part of the world premiere. More at this link.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra under its Music Director Daniel Hope offered an odd amalgam of radio play, jazz/cabaret/classical music concert, focusing chronologically on Berlin and the U.S. in 1938 when Hitler was ramping up to the Final Solution. The September performance was at the Presidio Theater, a gorgeously restored Art Deco style movie theater dating from World War Two. Operatic baritone Thomas Hampson was joined by "chansonnier" Horst Maria Merz, who was riveting. More at this link.

The pianist Yuja Wang gave the premiere of yet another piano concerto written for her, this time by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. The October concert, conducted brilliantly by Music Director Salonen, also featured a fabulous performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. More at this link.

The San Francisco Opera had a banner fall season this year with more successes and fewer stinkers than the usual batting average for an opera company. The first new company production of Verdi's La Traviata in close to 30 years was one of the happiest surprises. The production was colorful, traditional without being dull, and the two leads, South African soprano Pretty Yende as Violetta and American tenor Jonathan Tetelman as Alfredo, worked beautifully together. More at this link.

The unexpected stunner of the season was Gluck's spare, beautiful 1762 opera Orpheus and Eurydice with a star turn by the young Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński in a creative marvel of a production by director Matthew Ozawa and his production collaborators. More at this link.

Sarah Cahill Partners Up

Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill, legendary for her skillful introduction of new music to the world, headlined the first Faculty Recital Series of the year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on Monday night. Though most of Cahill's performances are as a soloist, she loves to play with others and I've seen her perform with string quartets, solo violinists, orchestras, and other pianists. Last night was a two-piano extravaganza with Regina Myers, a longtime two-piano collaborator.

First up was the 1991 Three-Day Mix by Jamaican/British composer Eleanor Alberga. It was described in the program by the composer as a fun bit of music, nothing serious, but it turned out to be way more complex than that description, with intricately intertwined piano lines unknotting themselves into dance rhythms and then knotting up again in a different way.

Next up was Meredith Monk's Ellis Island, which was written for a 1982 short film she made, and in this context sounded like a meditative sorbet between 3-Day Mix and Errollyn Wallen's crazed 1990 The Girl in My Alphabet.

Written for four pianists on two pianos, the work begins with the most intense, gnarly disonnances possible and then somehow morphs into variations on The Girl from Ipanema while straddling strikingly different musical styles with elegant conviction. The pianists having a blast with the piece were Jerry Kuderna, Monica Chew, Regina Myers and Sarah Cahill.

Mr. Kuderna was a last-minute replacement for an ailing Allegra Chapman, and gave one of the great sight-reading performances imaginable. His partner, Monica Chew, was probably the real heroine of the performance as she traded places on the piano benches with Kundera depending on whether the treble or bass had the trickiest line at the moment. It was immense fun to watch and hear. Also on the program was Elena Kats-Chernin's Dance of the Paper Umbrellas, a lovely piece that used the two pianos in the most traditionally tuneful musical dialogue of the evening. The final piece was Riley Nicholson's 35-minute world premiere commission, Up, and I didn't stay for it because my stomach was rumbling. Stephen Smoliar enjoyed it, however, which you can read about here.

Kinetic Transformation with SF Contemporary Music Players

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players gave an adventurous concert last Friday at the SF Conservatory of Music. It started with the marvelous young cellist, Hannah Addario-Berry, playing Gloria Justen's Flowing-Turning Dance, a piece Hannah commissioned for her 2016 album, Scordatura. It was a lovely opening, a modernist take on a Bach cello suite with overtones of Eastern European folk tunes.

The second piece was the West Coast premiere of David Coll's 2016 Caldera for the weird combination of bass clarinet and marimba, made even odder with the addition of tinfoil to both instruments for strange, scraping effects. Jeff Anderle (pictured above) and Haruka Fujii were the wildly virtuosic soloists, and I really enjoyed the piece, with its soft, scratching opening exploding into both instruments unchained, or at least unmuted with tinfoil.

The first half of the concert ended with Henry Cowell's revolutionary 1935 String Quartet #3 (Mosaic) which has five short movements that can be played and repeated in any order that the players prefer with the proviso that the dance-like fifth movement should finish off the work in a single iteration. Being a huge fan of Cowell in general and his United String Quartet in particular, I was looking forward to hearing this for the first time but the performance was strangely soporific, and I longed for a more energized ensemble with different choices in both the order and repetition of the movements.

The second half started with Anna Clyne's 2006 Steelworks for bass clarinet, percussion, flute, prerecorded digital track, and a four-screen multimedia display. The 15-minute motoric work was lively and absorbing. In the middle of the piece, the digital track stopped and there was a long pause while they tried to figure out how and where to restart.

Rather than being a disaster, it felt like a performance that was perfectly consonant with the remainder of the indeterminate program. The fine performers were Tod Brody on flute, the remarkable Haruka Fujii on percussion, and Jeff Anderle on bass clarinet again.

Artistic director Eric Dudley introduced the final piece, a rare performance of John Cage's 1958 Concert for Piano and Orchestra. In the photo above, he is giving an overlong speech to his donor base while flanked by one of the two sign language interpreters for a large sector of the audience which was deaf, attracted to the concert by the appearance of a local dance luminary, Antoine Hunter (photo below), who is also deaf.

The original performance was a collaboration between two high priests of modernism, the publicly closeted couple of choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. The performers, anchored by the pianist Kate Campbell in this performance, play whatever they want whenever they want within certain rigorous guidelines set up by Cage. The score, which was projected above the ensemble, is a series of calligraphic notations that are meant to evoke sounds that are up to the performer. Hunter had choreographed his own dance in between all the performers which didn't have anything to do with the music, but that was part of the point.

Pianist Campbell did a fine job at whatever it was she was playing, and the interjected squawks and sawing from the surrounding instrumentalists was interesting for about five minutes, but I found the 30-minute work nearly interminable. Cage, as usual, has the best words: "“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”