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.

Die Walküre at Disney Hall in Los Angeles

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by the recently deceased starchitect Frank Gehry for the LA Philharmonic, opened its doors in 2003. The building became an instant icon at its Bunker Hill location in downtown Los Angeles, background for a billion selfies, and it's aging beautifully.

Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan wunderkind conductor replaced Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009 as Music Director of the LA Philharmonic. He is decamping for the New York Philharmonic next year, and his last season with the LA orchestra is wrapping up with a series of special concerts, including Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, the second installment of the composer's monumental Ring Cycle.

In a strange bit of scheduling, each of the three acts of the four-and-a-half hour opera were being performed on three consecutive nights in two cycles. I attended Act One in cycle two, and it was my first time in the hall after reading extensively about the place for the last 23 years.

After the juggernaut of stainless steel and titanium on the exterior, the interior surprises with wood finishes everywhere.

There was a Friday evening reception before the concert where the audience was offered a free glass of wine, somewhat ameliorating the fact that most of the tickets to these concerts were selling for $350 a piece, meaning it would cost over $1,000 to see the entire opera.

The concert hall is striking, with great acoustics, but some weird sightlines. We were seated on a side terrace balcony that faced the opposite side of the hall rather than the stage, which necessitated a lot of neck turning while watching the stage action and trying to read the supertitles. (All production photos are by Elizabeth Asher, courtesy of the LA Philharmonic.)

The star of the evening was the huge orchestra, including six harps. The stage setup at the rear of the hall included huge chunks of crumpled paper designed by Frank Gehry himself, which was used as the backdrop for color projections. The back of the elevated stage hosted a Gehry-looking wooden hut while the front of the orchestra featured a raised catwalk which was used extensively by tenor Jamez McCorkle as he related his tale of lifelong woe.

McCorkle, who was the eponymous star of Omar, the recent opera by Rhiannon Giddens, was fantastic throughout, triumphing over the rather dull staging.

Perhaps through the fault of director Alberto Arvelo and dramaturg Cori Ellison, the customary romantic and erotic heat between incestuous twins Jamez McCorkle as Siegmund and soprano Jessica Faselt as Sieglinde felt lukewarm rather than incendiary.

Bass Solomon Howard as Hunding portrayed the usual loutish brute but was reduced to sitting at a table for most of his time onstage.

The beautiful voices of all three singers were strong and easily soared over the large orchestra throughout the hour-long performance. For a comprehensive review of all three evenings, click here for Michael Anthonio's account at Parterre Box and Harvey Steinem's review at Seen and Heard International.

Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Pocket Opera

Pocket Opera just successfully pulled off a seriously ambitious production last month: Benjamin Britten's 1960 adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. Britten composed grand operas like Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and Gloriana, while also composing chamber operas with small orchestras such as The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, and The Turn of the Screw. A Midsummer Night's Dream falls somewhere in between in terms of orchestral size, so Pocket Opera commissioned an orchestral reduction from Liam Daley with the blessing of the Britten estate. Daley did a marvelous job, making me miss the full orchestra on only a few occasions. There was no editing, however, on the opera itself or the huge cast of characters, and somehow General Director Nicolas A. Garcia managed to stage the proceedings on the tiny Legion of Honor stage last Sunday without everyone banging into each other.

The standout singer of the production was countertenor Kyle Tingzon as Oberon, the King of the Fairies in the scary, enchanted wood. One of the greatest operatic performances I have ever seen was by the late Brian Asawa as Oberon when the SF Opera last presented the work in 1992, and Tingzon was as good as Asawa. He's ready to sing the role on any stage in the world. The role of Puck was originally written as a speaking role for a teenage acrobat, and here was charmingly performed by Atlantis Clay minus the acrobatic tumbling. Oberon and Puck spend most of the narrative concocting maliciously nasty pranks, but Tingzon and Clay played the duo as amiable characters just having a bit of fun.

The "rude mechanicals," workmen rehearsing a ridiculously terrible play, were a fun bunch, and didn't overdo their comic business. Kirk Eichelberger as the blustering, egocentric Bottom who wants to play every role, bellowed loudly and he was a fine ass.

The Pyramus and Thisbe troupe often steal the show, in the play and the opera, but in this production they were overshadowed by the quartet of quarreling lovers: a particularly fine Ellen Leslie as Helena, Leah Finn as Hermia, Kevin Gino as Lysander, and Spencer Dodd as Demetrius. Their interactions and their playing off of each other musically and dramatically was first-rate, and when all turns to cacophony among them at the end of Act Two, they were amazing.

I do have one serious complaint with the production, however. Britten specifically wrote the roles of individual fairies and larger chorus for boy sopranos. Unfortunately, only one boy soprano, the delightful James Coniglio, was cast as a Fairy and the rest were sung by adult women. They sounded all wrong. Britten composed some of the greatest children's music ever written, and knew what he wanted in terms of sound. The gender of the fairies isn't important, but a child's voice versus an adult's voice are two very different things, and part of what makes this opera so great is the ethereal sound Britten creates for fairyland. The finale, with the soprano voices of a countertenor, a silvery adult female soprano, and a chorus of child sopranos weaving in and out of each other, is one of the most beautiful things that Britten or any other composer has ever written. If and when Pocket Opera revives this production, and I hope they do, please cast the fairy roles appropriately. There are half a dozen great childrens' choruses in the Bay Area, so there's really no excuse not to do the music right.

Handel's Hercules in Berkeley

Artists, have hope! Sometimes it only takes three centuries for your failures to turn into successes. Such is the case with Hercules, Handel's 1744 oratorio that bombed at its London premiere and then was revived to wondrous acclaim in the 20th century. On Sunday afternoon at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances hosted the beginning of The English Concert's short U.S. tour with the three-hour Hercules, which was a magnificent dramatic and musical success. (All production photos, unless noted, are by Kristen Loken.)

The English Concert is an early instrument chamber orchestra formed in London by Trevor Pinnock in 1972. In 2007 Harry Bicket took over as Music Director, and his interest in Handel's music has led to a recent series of global tours with the composer's Italian operas and English oratorios. Last year's Cal Performances visit featured the opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto, and everyone I know who attended raved about the experience. You can now add me to the bandwagon.

One element of the pleasure was the excellence of the chamber orchestra, anchored by keen conducting from Harry Bicket. He also played the harpsichord continuo during the many dramatic recitatives along with Sergio Bucheli on the theorbo and Jonathan Byers on violincello. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Another virtuosic element was The Clarion Choir, a 20-person ensemble out of New York City. They have collaborated with The English Concert before and their performance on Sunday included some of the best choral singing I've ever heard. They even contributed a couple of singers for smaller roles, including Jonathan Woody as The Priest of Jupiter, whose rich bass voice was so strong that he sounded as if he could step in and sing Hercules in a pinch. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Also noteworthy was Alexander Chance in the nondescript messenger role of Lichas. Chance has a sweet, non-hooty countertenor voice, perfect diction, and a confident stage bearing that draws attention even when he's standing stock still.

The bass William Guanbo Su, whose career is just taking off at major opera houses around the world, gave an excellent performance as the demi-god strongman who returns from conquest with the beautiful young Pincess Iola. Her presence literally drives Hercules's wife Dejanira into jealous insanity even though in this version of the tale Hercules is innocent of any hanky-panky.

Dejamira is the oratorio's major role, here embodied by the 58-year-old Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg in one of the most thrilling performances I have seen on a concert stage. (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Hallenberg's English diction was exemplary and her acting so strong that it felt as if we were seeing a great actress attack a classic role like Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth. She was simply amazing.

The young soprano Hilary Cronin as Princess Iole was perfectly lovely and held her own when confronted by the jealous Dejamira. As my concert companion said at intermission, "Just let her keep singing one beautiful note after another at me, and I'll be happy." (Photo by Michael Strickland.)

Martha Graham Dance Company at Cal Performances

Like Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky, the dancer/choreographer Martha Graham's name permeated the 20th century cultural landscape as an artist who fundamentally changed their art form. Though there have been plenty of chances to see Picasso's work or listen to Stravinsky's compositions, I realized that I had never seen a Martha Graham dance performed live before a couple of weeks ago, when Cal Performances hosted the Martha Graham Dance Company on their national 100th anniversary tour.

Graham was born in Pennsylvania in 1894 to open-minded parents who moved the family to Southern California 14 years later. As a teenager, she studied with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts before decamping to New York and founding her own company in 1926. It was an all-female troupe until 1938 when Erick Hawkins joined the group. Graham and Hawkins married in 1948 after the New York premiere of Night Journey, starring the two of them in a dance depicting the Oedipus story from Jocasta's point of view after discovering that her son is her husband. Hawkins left the company three years later to start his own, and the marriage was over in 1954.

The 30-minute work features angular movement and Graham's famed contraction/expansion movement vocabulary. I loved the Chorus in their Graham-designed costumes looking like extras from a Cocteau film, and Ethan Palma hopping about on his walking stick as Tiresias the Seer, but overall I was a little underwhelmed. Part of it was that the William Schuman score was in a dull, mid-century academic style and it was played too loud over the speaker system. Also, sculptor Isamu Noguchi's original set looked a little lost on the very wide Zellerbach stage. Anne Souder as Jocasta and Lloyd Knight as Oedipus are fine dancers, but didn't project the complex passions required for the roles.

Though Graham famously refused to have her dances filmed, believing in the sanctity of live performance, there are a few exceptions, including an experimental 1956 film of Night Journey made by Alexander Hammid, with a 62-year-old Martha Graham as Jocasta and a young Bertram Ross as Oedipus, along with Paul Taylor as Tiresius. It is amazing (click here).

Graham underwent a personal crisis in the late 1960s after she left the stage. In her autobiography, Blood Memory, she wrote: "I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did thirty years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted...[When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded...Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma." But she survived, got sober in 1972, and proceeded to choreograph another dozen or so dances before her death in 1991. After her demise, there was a messy battle of succession that did not work out well, but the company has been revived under Janet Eilber, a former Graham dancer and teacher who has been the company's Artistic Director since 2005.

One of Eilber's achievements has been the commissioning of new dances over the last decade by a roster of some of the best young choreographers of our time. The second piece on the program was Cortege, created by Amadi "Baye" Washington and Sam "Asa" Pratt who have been playing with each other since they were six year olds in Brooklyn together.

The 2023 Cortege is Baye & Asa's riff on Graham's antiwar Cortege of Eagles with a dynamic musical score by Jack Grabow and dramatic lighting by Yi-Chung Chen. It starts off as a centipede of dancers is revealed and then reconfigures as duos, trios, quartets, and group scenes. What it has to do with war I have no clue but it was a great vehicle to demonstrate how accomplished all the company's dancers really are.

After intermission, there was a performance of the once-lost, politically charged 1936 Graham work, Chronicle. Two of the movements from the original piece are still missing but films of three of the other movements have turned up and been reconstructed. It started with Spectre--1914 (Drums, Red Shroud, Lament), a solo dance in a spellbinding performance by Leslie Andrea Williams. Using only the simple prop of a two-toned cape, she mesmerized us to extraordinary music by Wallingford Riegger, a buddy of Henry Cowell who also wrote dance scores for Graham.

The all-female dances in Steps in the Street (Devastation, Homelessness, Exile) and Prelude to Action (Unity, Pledge to the Future) looked surprisingly contemporary, as if they could have been choreographed yesterday. Graham's legacy looks to be in good hands and I look forward to their Cal Performances return.

Favorite Musical Moments 2025

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to one of the richest, most varied classical music scenes in the United States. I only attended a fraction of what was on offer this year, and here are some of my favorite moments, starting with the world premiere in January at the San Francisco Symphony of After The Fall, a new piano concerto by Bay Area composer John Adams. He wrote the concerto for Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson who gave an incredible performance with David Robinson conducting.

Also in January, the New Century Chamber Orchestra gave a wonderful concert at the Presidio Theatre, highlighted by a performance of the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto with pianist Inon Barnatan and trumpeter Brandon Ridenour as soloists.

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale have been fairly rudderless since Nicholas McGegan stepped down as Music Director and his replacement didn't work out. In March, the 47-year-old Irishman Peter Whelan conducted a delightful performance of Handel's Alceste. Soon after, he was named the new Music Director, starting in the 2026-27 season.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts on almost every day of the week, and there are treasures abounding. In April, I went to an orchestral concert led by student conductors that featured a thrilling performance of John Adams's incredibly difficult Chamber Symphony, led by Chih-Yao Chang.

I've never been particularly moved by La Boheme, Puccini's sentimental weepie about young artists in mid-19th century Paris, but the San Francisco Opera production this summer actually moved me to tears with its fine ensemble cast and production.

The saddest artistic news of the year was the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior of the SF Symphony Board which managed to so alienate Esa-Pekka Salonen that he refused to renew his contract as Music Director. His final concert was a barn-burning performance of Mahler's huge Resurrection Symphony in June.

The happiest artistic news of the year was the literal last-minute rescue by a venture capital family foundation of The Oasis, a nightclub at 11th & Folsom Streets specializing in drag shows, performance art, cabaret and whatever catches the fancy of D'Arcy Drollinger, its hardworking genius impresario. I caught a sophisticated, filthy cabaret show there in June called Noctornal Omissions featuring John Coons and Jonah Wheeler.

Verdi's Requiem was scheduled to open the 2024-2025 season last year with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, but there was a walkout by the SF Symphony Chorus after serious mistreatment by the SF Symphony Board. Finally, an anonymous donor contributed a few million dollars so that the union choristers could continue to be paid, and at the very end of the season, the Requiem was finally performed with James Gaffigan conducting. Even though I'm a longtime Verdi worshiper, I had never warmed up to the massive choral work until this performance at the end of June, which was magnificent.

The Merola Opera Program for aspiring opera professionals put on an absolutely gorgeous production in August of a rarely performed Rossini opera, Le Comte Ory. This was the composer's penultimate opera, written right before his swan song William Tell, and the music is some of the best he ever composed. The young cast did it full justice.

In Oakland, West Edge Opera commissioned and nurtured Dolores, a new opera by Nicolás Lell Benavides about the California labor organizer Dolores Huerta. The titular heroine is still alive in her 90s and attended a number of the performances. Even better, Benavides's music for a small orchestra and voices was consistently brilliant.

The annual Other Minds Music Festival, headed for decades by founder Charles Amirkhanian, took place in October at the Brava Theater on 24th Street this year. One evening of the new music festival's programs was dedicated to composer Samuel Adams performed by a full roster of Bay Area musicians, including Sarah Cahill and the Friction Quartet. It was a perfectly joyful evening.

Also in October, the American Bach Soloists gave a wonderful early music concert called The Grand Tour at St. Mark's Church on Cathedral Hill. Featuring works by Handel, Vivaldi, and J.S. Bach, it was a reminder of why this group under Music Director Jeffrey Thomas is such a treasure.

The San Francisco Opera finished its shortened fall season with two productions that the company conceived and built themselves, and both were invigoratingly successful. First up was Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, with tenor Brandon Jovanovich giving a sensitive performance as the title character and a supporting cast that was pretty much flawless. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducted the four-hour-plus score beautifully.

Next up was the world premiere of The Monkey King, a new opera by composer Huang Ruo with a libretto by David Henry Hwang. Much of its sold-out success can be attributed to a fantastic production involving thousands of yards of silk, puppetry, dancing, flying, and ingenious staging by director Diane Paulus and puppeteer/designer Basil Twist. Plus, the tenor Kang Wang in the title role was sensationally good, heading up a strong cast and chorus playing gods, monks, undersea creatures, and monkeys. It exceeded everyone's expectations.