Manon at San Francisco Opera

The 1731 novel Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost depicting the rise and fall of a pleasure-seeking young woman in Paris has spawned adaptations galore over the centuries, from French films to a full-length ballet by Kenneth MacMillan and two major operas, one by Puccini and an earlier 1884 version by Jules Massenet. The San Francisco Opera is currently presenting the Massenet version in a revival of Vincent Boussard's stylish, minimalist production from 2017 with soprano Amina Edris as the title character and Music Director Eun Sun Kim leading the orchestra in an exquisite, colorful rendition of the musical score. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

The story begins with the teenage Manon being sent off by her family to be shut away in a convent. She is met at an inn by her cousin Lescaut, a neglectful young guardian who is more interested in drinking and gambling than looking after her. Meanwhile, the rich old Epstein Class of the time, depicted by Stephen Gaertner as De Breigny and Steven Cole as Guillot de Morfrontaine, take notice of the beautiful teenager and offer her enticements to join them and their entertaining harem trio consisting of Sofia Gotch as Poussette, Laura Krumm as Javotte, and Taylor Raven as Rosette.

Coming to the rescue is a young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, who is outraged that Manon's family is cruelly shutting her away, and the pair impulsively escape to Paris together where they cohabitate in a barely furnished garret while apparently making love day and night.

It is here in Act Two that Pene Pati sings a famous aria, En fermant les yeux (Le rêve), where he relates his daydream of living in a cottage in a forest with his beloved. Pati's rendition was so achingly beautiful, singing softly over the simple, wave-like accompaniment of the orchestra, that I burst into tears, especially knowing how the rest of the tale plays out. He is kidnapped soon after by a group hired by his father, the Comte des Grieux, sung powerfully by bass-baritone James Creswell, and Manon goes off with De Bretigny to be a rich man's courtesan.

Act Three begins with Lescaut, sung by the handsome Brazilian baritone Vitor Bispo, leading fellow bon vivants at Paris's boulevard Le Cours-la-Reine, where Manon makes a spectacular entrance involving a high wall and balloons. It was at this point that Amina Edris seemed to falter vocally and dramatically. The role requires a high, sparkling soprano voice (think Beverly Sills or Ruth Ann Swenson) and a surfeit of charm. Edris is beautiful and an accomplished singer, who was totally believable a few years ago as Cleopatra in John Adams's Antony and Cleopatra opera, but she didn't convince as Manon at all for me, even though she's sung the role in France to acclaim a few times.

The performer who stole every scene in which he appeared was the 77-year-old character tenor Steven Cole as the rich, lecherous Guillot de Morfontaine, who's had his eye on Manon since the beginning of the opera. He was by turns funny, creepy, charming, and authoritative, and it's amazing that he's still performing at such a high level.

Meanwhile, des Grieux has taken vows to become an abbé, musing that his only misgiving is his still smoldering love for Manon. Usually, the character of des Grieux comes across as a sap while Manon, for all her flaws, is the vital center. However, in this production, Pati is so sympathetic as an actor and singer that you end up caring more about him than his gold digging ex-lover.

During the St. Sulpice scene, with its Flying Jesus overhead, Manon seduces des Grieux and comes across as a greedy person who wants it all, both riches and true love.

When Manon urges a reluctant des Grieux to gamble so they can live in the style to which she has become accustomed, the scene just feels nasty, and her final death scene as a prisoner marching to Le Havre had me muttering, "Well, she deserves it," which is not the intended emotional response. The production is definitely worth seeing, though. Besides the glorious orchestra, there are dozens of small roles capably filled, and Broussard's direction of the chorus was brilliant. Instead of clunkily moving on and off the stage, they were used abstractly and with wit. Above all, the Pene Pati performance is instantly legendary.

Mary, Queen of Scots at SF Opera

I saw Mary, Queen of Scots, a 1977 opera by the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, at its 1979 West Coast premiere at the Curran Theater. Nearly fifty years later, it has been revived at the SF Opera in a bare bones, modern dress co-production with the English National Opera, and it's a happy surprise to report that the piece has aged brilliantly. The libretto, written by the composer, takes place during the six years of Mary's return to Scotland as an 18-year-old widow of the King of France before she has to flee for her life to England. (All production photos are by Matthew Washburn.)

Baritone Thomas Mole sang well and was smoothly convincing as Mary's Protestant, illegitimate half-brother James Stewart who offers her loving counsel while while not so secretly seeking the Scottish crown for himself.

There are quite a few current and former Adler Fellows in the cast and they all acquit themselves well, especially tenor Thomas Kinch in a powerful, frightening performance as James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the Catholic military man who in this telling brutally rapes Mary before becoming her third and final husband.

He also threatens her second husband, Lord Darnley from England, in a wonderfully weaselly performance by tenor Christopher Sokolowski. Instead of supporting the queen, he looks to gain power for himself and when Mary does not cede it, he becomes a dissipated mess.

Lord Darnley is also deceived by an Iago-like plot, and drunkenly murders Mary's devoted friend, David Riccio, handsomely sung by baritone Hadleigh Adams.

The indestructible bass-baritone Philip Skinner gives a powerful performance as Mary's only true supporter, Lord Gordon, and he is central to the final moments of the opera involving James, Mary's baby with the deceased Lord Darnley.

The musical score is in the sound world of Benjamin Britten, but very much Musgrave's own style, which is dramatic, spiky, and constantly surprising. Her setting of the English text is also remarkable, often making the supertitles superfluous. The orchestra sounded sensational under debuting conductor Clelia Cafiero, and the staging by director Stewart Laing felt like the antithesis of director Claus Guth's work in Simon Boccanegra. Mary's complicated political narrative with many conspiring characters was clear and compelling, although it took a while to adjust to the chorus garbed in Pacific Northwest puffer jackets hiking through a British Baking Show tent guarded by police stanchions.

Although the opera pretty much disappeared after its first five years of performances, this revival makes it clear that it deserves to have a long life. Key to the production's success is soprano Heidi Stober in the title role. I have heard Stober in multiple roles at the SF Opera, from Handel to Poulenc, but this was the greatest performance musically and dramatically that I have seen from her. She was victim, tyrant, mother, and politician from one scene to another, while being sympathetic as all of them, and I hope she gets to perform the role again. This revival makes it clear that the opera deserves to have a long life.

Simon Boccanegra at SF Opera

Verdi's 1857 opera Simon Boccanegra, revised and expanded by the composer in 1881, has always been an overcomplicated, narrative mess but there is also lots to love. It starts strangely with a half-hour prologue that sounds like a Russian opera with baritones and basses butting heads in 14th century Genoa. There is also a long, magnificent father-daughter duet scene bathed in love rather than the controlling creepiness of Rigoletto, and in an unusual twist the soprano heroine and tenor hero are still alive and happily united at the finale. Above all, the music is Verdi at his considerable best, and it's a joy to report that the orchestra under Music Director Eun Sun Kim sounded magnificent throughout, and the large cast was superb, without any weaknesses. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

However, the 20-year-old staging by German director Claus Guth for the Hamburg Opera was Euro Konzept at its most deliberately alienating and ridiculous. The overarching premise is that Simon Boccanegra, dying from an assassin's poison, reviews his life in his last moments, so there are people walking backwards, supernumerary doubles, a giant mirror and painting acting as transparent scrims, and a meteor peeking through the roof of a palatial room that serves as the unit set.

The prologue is set in the midst of political warfare between the upper-class patricians and the lower-class plebians, culminating in Boccanegra's elevation to Doge, ruler of the city-state Genoa. It's impossible to distinguish between the warring groups because the colorless, modern costumes all look the same. Baritone Gabriel Natal-Baez made a fine main stage debut as Pietro, taking orders from Paolo, the politically scheming bad guy sung forcefully by Aleksey Bogdanov. The title character is sung by the Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat, who is not a particularly expressive actor but whose voice is perfection in this role.

The two young lovers, Amelia and Gabriele, were sung by Italian soprano Elenora Buratto and U.S. tenor Joshua Guerrero in their dual debuts at the house. Buratto began a little unsteadily but recovered quickly for a splendid performance while Guerrero was a lovely surprise with a creamy, even, surpassingly beautiful voice that helped balance out all those bass-baritones.

Christian Van Horn played the major character of the exiled patrician Fiesco (sitting above), grandfather to Amelia, and mortal enemy of Simon. Vocally it was a great performance but the director had everyone walking about the stage like expressionless zombies, so there wasn't much he could do dramatically. This was particularly irritating during the scene where Simon and Amelia realize that they are a long-lost father and daughter duo after 25 years of separation, and instead of embracing and acting out the joy of the reunion, they awkwardly walked around a huge table in a trance, ruining the emotional moment.

The long first act ends with the Council Scene which was added to the opera during the 1881 revision, and it's a thrilling finale. A mob storms the palace, there's a debate about whether to go to war with Venice or live in peace, and Simon gives a stirring speech about healing old wounds and uniting as one people. The chorus sounded great, but none of the staging made much sense.

When the curtain was raised after intermission, the symbolic meteor had moved halfway from roof to floor, and the audience burst into spontaneous laughter at the absurdity. More achingly beautiful music was sung while dastardly plots and hopeful reconciliations were being devised.

At the end of act two, the curtain came down with a supertitle advisory for the audience to stay in their seats for a brief pause. This was the third scene change of the evening involving the same un-brief pause, all so the roof and meteor could be swapped out for new positioning. The audience laughed again as the black object was now plopped on the floor, just like the dying Simon whose poison in Act Two was finally kicking in during Act Three.

It was a treat hearing this favorite opera live again after an absence of a few decades, but the cold, grey Northern German take on a warm, colorful Italian subject just felt perverse, and I missed the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea that is woven throughout the score. There are only two more performances left, due to the orchestral strike that delayed the season's opening, and it's very much worth attending to listen to the opera in such a sturdy musical performance. Just close your eyes and think of Italy.

SF Opera to Flower Piano

The San Francisco Opera traditionally opens its annual season on the Friday after Labor Day concurrent with a huge society fundraising dinner and ball. Because the beginning of Rosh Hashanah fell on that date this year, the opening was moved to Saturday, September 12th. However, because of a threatened strike by the SF Opera Orchestra over a new contract, the gala was moved to Thursday, November 12th in case negotiations didn't work out.

The opening featured what is reportedly a dark, Euro Konzept production of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, a complex, narratively confusing, musically gorgeous opera with lots of roles for dark bass and baritone voices, rather like Don Carlo or Macbeth.

The final dress rehearsal was early Tuesday evening, and I went to the Veterans Memorial Park next door where Sid Chen was practicing his 24-minute pre-opera talk that attempted to explain the baroquely complicated narrative along with the cultural and political setting. Sid did a masterful job unraveling all those strands but it was truly a near-impossible task.

Meanwhile, orchestral musicians were on the sidewalks of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street with protest signs decrying the deep cuts to compensation in an era where inflation is out of control, particularly in the Bay Area.

On Saturday evening, the parking lot for Opera House workers was full at 7PM, and tuxedoed patrons were arriving at the Opera House, but there was still no official word of a settlement from either side. I usually go standing room to the opera opening every year in the same spirit as sports fans go to the opening game of the SF Giants baseball season, which both start with a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. "Let's play ball/let's sing!"

Instead, this year I went to the SF Conservatory on Saturday evening for a concert by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, an amateur orchestra staffed mostly by the gay community. It was an interesting program of Barber (The School for Scandal Overture), Respighi (Ancient Airs and Dances Suite 2), Korngold (Cello Concerto), and Chausson (Symphony No. 1). On my way home, I ran into a pair of men in tuxedos walking down Franklin Street, and asked them if the opera had gone on. "No, about ten minutes before the curtain was supposed to open, they canceled the performance, with everybody in their seats waiting for it to start."

On the Sunday afternoon following the opening, the SF Opera company traditionally puts on a free performance in Golden Gate Park of operatic hits that attracts thousands of people. This was canceled too so many of the would-be operagoers walked to the nearby SF Botanical Garden for an eleven-year-old festival called Flower Piano, and the line to enter stretched for over a block. Thankfully, the location is huge and the dozen different locations for concerts are spread across the gardens, so it wasn't claustrophobic. The festival runs daily through September 20th and is free if you have San Francisco proof of residency. (Click here for more information.)

I ran into friends who had been in the Opera House the night before and who had changed their Opera in the Park plans for Flower Piano, where they had already seen Spencer Day perform at one location and SF Symphony musicians performing chamber music at another.

We met at the Great Meadow where pianists Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers were performing a dual piano concert. The Berkeley pianist Cahill has been a star attraction from the event's inception (click here for a 2016 account), and it was a joy seeing her again.

Plus, their matching floral jumpers were the perfect look for a beautiful day.

2026 Merola Grand Finale

Over the last couple of decades, I have written eight posts about the summer-ending Merola Grand Finale at the San Francisco Opera House. As Joshua Kosman notes in his short wrap-up of this year's concert of aspiring professional opera singers, "Good luck to any critic trying to write about it, though. There’s no story on offer aside from Here are the Merolini to give you one last glimpse of what they can do." (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Somebody once left a comment on one of my Merola posts to the effect that "you always say that this year had the best overall crop of singers ever," and they were probably right about the repetitive hyperbole. This year I am not making that claim, however, and if you can't say anything nice, refer to people who can. Steven Winn wrote an extensive, appreciative listing of his favorite moments at SFCV, Charlise Tiee at the Opera Tattler did the same, and educator Matthew Travisano offered a sweet-spirited account at Parterre Box.

Most of the operatic greatest hits selections were love duets, and one of my favorites was Ariana Maubach as Charlotte and Charles Styles as Werther, singing Il faut nous separer from Massenet's Werther. Styles's voice is too small to be singing this role in a large opera house at this point in his career, but it's a very pretty tenor, and his interaction with mezzo-soprano Maubach made me remember how lovable this opera can be.

Another duet was performed by mezzo-soprano Theo Claveles as Didon and Matthew Sink as Enee, singing Nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie from Berlioz's Les Troyens. It may be my favorite operatic love duet in the world, and the pair did it justice.

Near the end of the three-hour long concert, there was a huge bolt of energy from tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, singing the grotesque Aria of the Worm from Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles. The young singer has stage charisma to burn and it was a joy to see him light the place up. Johnson's evolving career should be be interesting to watch.

Merola Opera's "Ariadne Auf Naxos"

Every opera fanatic has their own favorite Richard Strauss opera. Most choose Salome or Elektra, both short and intense, while others prefer Der Rosenkavalier or Die Fau Ohne Schatten, both long and sprawling, with all four of them employing a humungous orchestra. My personal favorite is his 1912 Ariadne auf Naxos with its two-and-a-half hour running time and a 36-piece chamber orchestra. Unfortunately, the opera has not been performed in San Francisco for 24 years, so it's been a long stretch to hear it live. Fortunately, the Merola Opera program got everything right with their production on Thursday evening, and I fell deeply in love with the work all over again.

What Merola did right, first of all, was put up the money to staff the full orchestra of 36 players that the score calls for, including a celeste, a harmonium, and TWO harps. Under the direction of the young German conductor Ann-Katrin Stöcker, the complex, witty, quicksilver score was completely transparent, and sitting almost in the lap of the orchestra in the smallish auditorium was pure musical heaven. They sounded gorgeous throughout.

The plot of the opera is simple. A billionaire is hosting a lavish evening at his estate and has paid for a serious operatic premiere along with a saucy show featuring Zerbinetta and Her Four Lovers. The 45-minute Prologue is a backstage comedy, with the high art opera people and the low art commedia dell'arte people clashing while last minute theatrical emergencies are popping up all around them. The Prologue is usually a German comedy slog, but the Merola ensemble directed by Omer Ben Seadia actually made me laugh for the first time. There were two comic standouts. First, tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson as The Choreographer (moustache and unruly curls above) brought a hang-loose in the middle of chaos vibe that was specific and hilarious. Second, stage director Claire Choquette (purple pantsuit) performed the spoken part of the Billionaire's Chief of Staff with a deadpan crispness that got funnier every time she would deliver some variation of "Yes, you can have an opinion, but if you want to pay your rent, you'll do exactly what you've been paid to do." (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

When the offstage fancy dinner runs late, the Chief of Staff announces that both serious opera and sexy divertissement will have to be performed at the same time because the fireworks have to start at nine. "Figure it out amongst yourselves," they announce. The Composer, beautifully sung by mezzo-soprano Theo Claveles (purple suit), has a nervous artiste breakdown, and is consoled by both the Music Director, sympathetically sung by Enes Pektas, and Zerbinetta the seductive charmer, in a spectacular performance by soprano Emilie Kealani. What ensues after intermission is the insane combo.

The serious opera begins, depicting the mythological Ariadne longing for Death after she has been abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. She is joined by three nymphs performed by Jennifer Robinson as Naiad, Katherine Dobbs as Dryad, and Abigail Raiford as Echo. Some of Strauss's most sublime music is given to this trio, and the three sopranos did it justice.

I was apprehensive about this production with aspiring young professionals because this opera requires two world-class sopranos to tackle the incredibly difficult arias written for both Ariadne and Zerbinetta. I have heard enough young singers over the years making valiant, misguided attempts at climbing these particular aria Everests before falling, so I was prepared to be indulgent. What I was not prepared for was the sheer magnificence of soprano Adia Evans, whose voice was solid from the deepest contralto to the highest reaches. It felt very much like a star is born moment.

Soprano Emilie Kealani was similarly astonishing as Zerbinetta. The funniest part of the opera is hearing the deeply despairing laments of Ariadne immediately followed by Zerbinetta and her lovers telling Ariadne to just get over it. Zerbinetta's outrageously challenging aria Großmächtige Prinzessin, is as difficult and high-flying as the Queen of Night's big number in The Magic Flute, except it's twelve minutes long. Kealani nailed every note and was an athletic delight besides.

Zerbinetta turns out to be correct in her advice because the god Bacchus arrives on a ship, having narrowly escaped the clutches of Circe on a nearby island, and immediately falls in love with Ariadne. Tenor Matthew Sink did a fine job in a nearly impossible role where he has to sing full-blast for the last fifteen minutes of the opera with no warm-up.

Much speculation about the meaning of this opera tends to focus on high art versus low art, but the real conflict is between Germanic music and Italian music, which Strauss combines and contrasts ingeniously throughout the entire marvelous score.

The two-performance run, by the way, is sold out which feels tragic. Let's hope another 24 years doesn't go by before San Francisco sees another performance.