Fidelio at the San Francisco Opera

The current San Francisco Opera production of Fidelio is the most vital version of Beethoven's opera that I have ever seen. The 1805 work is a rescue tale set in Spain where a brave young woman disguises herself as as a male guard in a jail where her political prisoner husband is in secret confinement. Director Matthew Ozawa and production designer Alexander V. Nichols have updated the piece to a contemporary U.S. for-profit prison in a warehouse, and the result is energizing for singers and audience alike. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

The cast was as good overall as any I have heard, starting with Anne-Marie MacIntosh as Marzelline, the jailer's daughter who has fallen for the fake guy and with her father's blessing, is about to be betrothed. She was bouncy, funny, with a gorgeous soprano voice, and brought us into the contemporary jail/office setting with conviction. Her suitor, sung by tenor Christopher Oglesby, was delightful in his thwarted courting.

The opera itself is strange and clumsy, starting off sounding like a Mozart comedy and concluding as a precursor to Wagner, but the music has always been my favorite Beethoven work, partly for that raw awkwardness. The villain, Don Pizarro, is just about impossible to sing, with a series of high, resounding barks for a low bass-baritone. Greer Grimsley did as well as possible, and the fact that he resembled the current governor of Florida just added to the sense of evil. The baritone James Creswell as Rocco the jailer gave the best performance of that usually dull role I have ever experienced, while making the character believable. Creswell also made great impressions in small roles in Manon and The Marriage of Figaro at the SF Opera in the last few years before the pandemic, so my plea to the artistic casting director is to hire him back, often.

Please also bring back soprano Elza van den Heever who was magnificent in the title role. When I saw her last Friday, she was having a wild night, tripping over stairs, knocking props off the set, and almost tackling Rocco in a strong embrace, while singing her heart out. Some of her music is almost as impossible to perform as Pizzaro's, but she negotiated the difficulties well, and her voice was strong and heart-meltingly beautiful throughout.

She also brings complete dedication to her acting which in this production was crucial. Her imprisoned husband, sung by Russell Thomas, was not at quite the same dramatic level but he sang well, and seeing a contemporary staging set an American prison with a black man at its center felt resonant in all kinds of ways.

The expanded chorus was simply awesome in their two big scenes, and once new Music Director Eun Sun Kim had gotten over a weirdly bumpy overture, the music flowed well and the singers worked well with the orchestra and each other. There are two more performances, this Tuesday the 26th and again on Saturday the 30th. I can't recommend it highly enough, and I think there are probably plenty of tickets. Click here to find them.

Oakland Ferry Boat

Last weekend's final heatwave before blessed, longed-for autumn rains arrived was a perfect excuse for a boat ride, so we jumped on the ferry from San Francisco to Jack London Square in Oakland.

Across from us was a delightful Mission Bay couple on their way to visit breweries in Alameda.

After a lovely lunch at the outdoors, upscale, wood-fired pizza joint on the waterfront, we studied the Supply Chain situation in the Oakland harbor...

...and marveled at the gigantic U.S. Navy ship...

...named after astronaut John Glenn.

Cranes and trucks and railcars were in a constant state of motion...

...trying to make up for the disruption in trade on account of the 18-months-and-counting Covid pandemic.

This would seem to be an opportune moment to bring back more manufacturing jobs and facilities to the United States rather than cheaper locations abroad, but politics in this country is so screwed up right now that the opportunity will probably not be met.

Modern French Music at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony's new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, led a challenging, all-French music program this week that was stunningly successful.

The concert was bookended by two familiar Debussy works, starting with the 1894 Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, which the conductor/composer Pierre Boulez considered the "birth of modern music." It was a lovely performance, highlighted by Lorna McGhee's insinuating flute solos representing the horny faun on a warm afternoon.

The next piece was Oiseau exotiques (Exotic Birds), Messiaen's 1956 chamber concerto for piano, percussion, woodwinds, and horns.

The 47 exotic bird calls incorporated into the work are about as far away from lyrical, pastoral pieces like Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending as can be imagined.

These exotic birds are shrill, cacophonous, and brilliant sounding, and so is the entire 20-minute piece.

The piano soloist was Jeremy Denk who seemed to physically inhabit each bird while playing their voices from the keyboard. Certain composers like Mozart bring out the best in Denk's musicianship and Messiaen should be added to that list. It was a great performance, and a funny one too.

More birds followed after intermission, with the 2001 Aile du songe: Concerto for Flute and Orchestra by the contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. She is actually Finnish, but she's lived and worked in Paris for enough decades that her music can be considered French, especially this piece which takes flight from poetry by Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) who won the Nobel for literature in 1960. Before the performance, a video of Saariaho attempting to explain the work was shown, offering a few signposts for the five-movement work that is broken into two parts, with Birds in the Air and Birds on the Ground.

The flute soloist was Claire Chase, giving a knockout performance that guided one through the strange, textural dreamworld of the orchestral music. At the Friday evening performance, Chase looked like an animated Peter Pan who was about to fly into the air herself, and the musical movement where the bird (flute) teaches a village (the orchestra) to dance was thrilling.

The final work, Debussy's 1905 La Mer, used the full resources of a huge orchestra for the first time in the concert. Debussy's tone poem about the Mediterranean Sea has never been one of my favorites, but a great performance conducted with this orchestra by James Gaffigan a couple of years ago changed my mind (click here). Hearing it after the Messiaen and Saariaho could have made it sound old-fashioned, but instead underlined just how radically modern the work still remains. There's a matinee today (Sunday) where you can hear the final performance, and it feels Covid safe because you need to show proof of vaccination and wear a mask which the audience around me was doing quite responsibly. They were also a surprisingly young and enthusiastic crowd.

Escape from the Blue Angels

Fleet Week in San Francisco is fun except for the Blue Angels air show, whose rehearsals were so low over the city last week that I could make out faces in cockpits as they flew by my rattling apartment windows. On Saturday afternoon, I decided to escape the cacophony and jumped on a ferry boat to Sausalito.

As we were crossing the bay, the four-hour air show started with a United Airlines jumbo jet ascending and descending over the bay and city landmarks.

"Does pointing a jumbo jet at a city's downtown bring 9/11 to mind for you?" I asked a visitor from Boston, and she laughed. "It does seem a little tone deaf, especially after last month's 20-year anniversary."

Sausalito was delightfully uncrowded since most tourists were on the San Francisco waterfront.

The day was so blissfully beautiful that it was difficult to be anything but grateful to the universe.

On the ferry back, a family trio were on their way to the second game of the Giants playoffs early that evening, which was envy making until the Giants were eventually routed by the LA Dodgers.

On the back of the boat a Golden Gate ferry employee stood with a walkie-talkie, alerting the the captain of nautical obstacles.

"Speedboat quarter mile to the south heading directly at us, for some reason," he relayed.

The array of small boats along the San Francisco waterfront were a stunning sight...

...and a Boy Scout contingent on our ferry were enraptured by the daredevil planes in the sky.