San Francisco Opera Fall 2024 Preview

The San Francisco Opera season is opening this week on its traditional moveable date, the first Friday after Labor Day. There will be a sit-down dinner and an Opera Ball at City Hall across the street, with the opening night opera wedged in between. My friend Patrick Vaz, a true music lover, disdains the event with all its tipsy socialites but I have always enjoyed the evening. It's a bit like Opening Day at the San Francisco Giants, except attendees are wearing dresses worth thousands of dollars. For financial reasons, this fall season features only four opera productions rather than the usual five or six, but at least the administration doesn't seem to be actively trying to destroy their own cultural instution like the SF Symphony across the street.

The season starts with one of my favorite Verdi operas, Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball). The 1859 opera ran into censorship problems immediately because it was a fictional account of the real 1792 assassination of King Gustave III at a masked ball in the foyer of the Stockholm Opera House. No assassinations of royalty were to be depicted onstage in Italy in 1857, so the libretto was changed first to Poland and then to Boston in the colonial era, where it never really made sense. This well-reviewed production by Italian director Leo Muscato goes back to the original, and is set in Stockholm. The music is Verdi at his greatest and the assembled cast looks really promising, with the known excellence of tenor Michael Fabiano and soprano Lianna Haroutounian as headliners. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts in her ongoing survey of Verdi operas.

Appearing in repertory with Ballo is the 1998 operatic adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's bizarrely prescient 1985 imagining of a future United States where patriarchy has run amok. It was created by Danish composer Poul Ruders who asked the British multi-hyphenate actor Paul Bentley to write an English libretto for him. The adaptation has been widely praised and though the music seemed a bit too discordant for many initial reviewers, the consensus seems to have changed and the music is now being praised too. The opera has appeared sporadically in Europe and the U.S. (Boston) over the last 25 years, but this is a new co-production between the Royal Danish Opera, where it originally premiered, and the San Francisco Opera. The cast looks outstanding and the American conductor Karen Kamensek will be leading the excellent orchestra. The SF Opera isn't making a big deal out of it, but this is the first time in history when the majority of operas in the fall season are conducted by women. It's about time.

In mid-October, Richard Wagner's 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde arrives in a decade-old production from Venice's Teatro La Venice, directed by Canadian Paul Curran in what looks like a beautiful, minimalist production. Tristan will be sung by New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill and German soprano Anja Kampe will be Isolde. I am not one of George Bernard Shaw's Perfect Wagnerites, but most of my musically inclined friends are. They all seemed to like Eun Sun Kim's conducting of Lohengrin with Simon O'Neill last year so this five-hour soundbath should be right up their alley, and it might be what you are looking for too.

November belongs to George Bizet's 1875 Carmen, which has more recognizable tunes than any opera ever written. The Francesca Zambello production has been bouncing around the globe since it premiered at Covent Garden in 2006. It appeared here in 2019 in a poorly reviewed outing, but maybe things will be better this time with French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux making her debut in the title role and tenor Jonathan Tetelman as her murderous lover, Don Jose. A young newcomer, Benjamin Manis, conducts.

Golden Gate Park Dahlia Garden

It is so nice that Bay Area artists go off every year to the Nevada desert in late August, and create oversized outdoor sculptures at Burning Man, some of which end up back in San Francisco.

My adventurous friend Gramt from Palm Springs returned to Black Rock Desert this week for the first time in many years, and I felt a slight twinge of envy.

However, the truth is that I vastly prefer my desert adventure experiences to involve a swimming pool, palm trees, and a comfortable bed.

Besides, San Francisco is gorgeous right now and it's pleasant having a lot of people go out of town for a week.

So we visited the wildly blooming Dahlia Garden in Golden Gate Park, and though Austin looks stern in the above photo, he was actually in Delighted Dahlia Delirium

Merola Grand Finale 2024

The Merola Opera Program, a summer-long training session for aspiring opera professionals, closed out its 2024 iteration with a Grand Finale in the San Francisco Opera House last Saturday night. Though I didn't attend any of their public concerts this summer, the consensus from friends was that this year's roster featured a particularly talented group of singers. The grab-bag Grand Finale concert, with 23 singers performing 20 different operatic scenes, proved them right. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Here are a few of my favorite moments: Moriah Berry was an expert stage comedian and her soprano perfectly crystalline as Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale ("Pronta io son"). She was ably supported by baritone Olivier Zerouali as Malatesta.

A rather dull duet from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte ("Ahime! Che cosa avete?...Il core vi dono") was enlivened by the lovely interplay between mezzo-soprano Lucy Joy Altus as Dorabella and baritone Justice Yates as Guglielmo. Yates also returned for a great solo aria from Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones ("Lord, take this wanting from me").

A rarity from Mascagni, L'amico Fritz ("Suzel, buon di") was sensitively sung by tenor Michael John Butler as Fritz and soprano Viviana Aurelia Goodwin as Suzel, depicting a gentle flirtation while springtime is busting out all over with ripening cherries.

The showstopping number of the night was the famous duet from Bellini's Norma ("Mira, o Norma..."), performed by soprano Lydia Grindatto and mezzo-soprano Simona Genga as Adalgisa. They sang it better than a few professional sopranos I have heard over the decades at the San Francisco Opera. Grindatto also performed the title role in a quintet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and an operetta ditty from Emmerick Kalman's Die Czardasrustin ("Tanzen mocht ich"), and was superb in all three.

I have always wondered how the assignments at the Grand Finale are chosen because sometimes singers appear in two or three scenes while others barely get one. One example was mezzo-soprano Lindsay Martin as Sister Helen and soprano Elizabeth "Hanje" Hanje as Sister Rose in a scene between two nuns from Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking ("Now and at the hour of our death"). I would have loved to hear more from Hanje but this was it for the evening.

At least there were two appearances by the brilliant young tenor Giorgi Guliashvili, in the Lucia di Lamermoor scene and in a duet with soprano Alexa Frankian from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta.

The final 20 minutes of the long concert leaned into "light classical," beginning with Longing for Diamond Mountain, a Korean art song by Young Sup-Choi. It was performed beautifully by soprano Hannah Cho, baritone Hyungjin Son, and bass-baritone Donghoon Kang. All three of them were outstanding in various scenes on the program, as was Kara Morgan in her brief appearance as Charlotte in Massenet's Werther. Good luck to all of the young artists embarking on a professional career.

Public Transport to Petaluma

To escape the summer grey of San Francisco, we made a day trip to the Sonoma County town of Petaluma.

There is a Golden Gate Transit bus that will take one there, but what's the fun in that?

So we boarded a Golden Gate Transit ferryboat to Larkspur on Wednesday morning, testing out the new boat-train combo connecting San Francisco to Marin and Sonoma Counties.

The gorgeous trip on a high-powered catamaran takes about 30 minutes, and according to a crew member on the ferry, a new shuttle van would whisk us the half mile from the ferry to the SMART commuter train station.

There was no shuttle van apparent when we arrived at the ferry terminal, though, only a bit of misleading signage pointing pedestrians in the wrong direction.

We had taken this trip before to Santa Rosa so knew how to navigate our way across wide boulevards, jaywalking when necessary, and then climb up a shared automobile/bicycle roadway to the new SMART train terminus.

As often happens with car-centric suburban planners, the needs of pedestrians usually come last, if they are considered at all.

SMART, the new commuter train that stretches from Larkspur Landing to the Santa Rosa Airport is a smooth, modern marvel that goes through scenic marshes, foothills, and the occasional backyard.

To add to the pleasure, 65+ seniors ride for free, and on Wednesday there was a charming conductor keeping order and helping out with directions.

From the Petaluma station, it's about a 10-minute walk to downtown Petaluma which has a river running through it lined by restaurants with outdoor patios.

We tried out the fancy Luma Bar & Eatery which turned out to have lovely food and surprisingly unpretentious prices.

On our return to Larkspur Landing, we finally spotted the orange shuttle van to the ferry terminal in a nearby parking lot, but it turns out you have to download an app and reserve a ride in advance if you want to use the service. This struck us as absurd, especially since nobody on the boat or train was aware of that particular wrinkle.

We decided to try following the signage to the ferry terminal which took us over a bridge crossing several boulevards and freeways, in a direction opposite to the actual terminal.

To add possible injury to insult, the pedestrian path is also shared by bicyclists, many of whom seem to be in training for the Tour de France.

Pedestrian irritation aside, the trip was delightful.

And the boat ride back to San Francisco was fabulously wild.