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.

Bulrusher at West Edge Opera

West Edge Opera opened their annual summer festival of three opera productions last Saturday in the Scottish Rite Temple at Oakland's Lake Merritt.

The opener was Bulrusher, the company's first commissioned world premiere, and it attracted a good crowd, including legendary mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, above right.

Bulrusher started life as a 2006 play by Eisa Davis about race, sex, maternity, and nature-based mysticism in the secluded Northern California hamlet of Boonville in 1955. The composer Nathaniel Stookey (above left) has been working on his operatic adaptation for over half a decade and the music is complex and often exquisite.

The overall results, however, were mixed. Emily Senturia conducted the chamber orchestra in a lovely performance, highlighted by Keisuke Nakagoshi on the piano. The scenic and projection design by Yuki Izumihara, with its depictions of river and forest, was unobtrusively evocative.

The direction by NJ Agwuna, though, was often clumsy, especially the decision to rearrange a group of circular benches into a new configuration after each of the many scenes, which stopped the flow of the opera while never really adding any scenic versimilitude.

The bench moving was handled by a musically talented quintet (Lily Bogas, Phoebe Dinga, Julia Hathaway, Michael Jesse Kuo, and Carmello Tringali), who functioned as more of a Greek chorus than individuated Boonville townspeople. They were also directed to stand and sit around with colored light globes in various scenes which looked more goofy than magical. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The soprano Shawnette Sulker did a fine job as the 18-year-old title character who was found as a baby floating in a basket down the Navarro River. Raised by the town's schoolteacher, she has lived as something of an internal exile because of her race, clairvoyant powers, and the refusal of her guardian to let her speak Boontling, the local slang (for instance, "heel scratchin" for "sex"). At first, some of the dialogue was incomprehensible, but like the invented slang in A Clockwork Orange, it soon became understandable in context.

Among the many plot strands, there was a love triangle between the schoolteacher (Matt Boemer), the town brothel's Madame (Rebecca Cuddy) and the other black person in Boonville, Logger (Kenneth Kellogg).

Much of the narrative was set in motion by the arrival in a storm of Vera, a young refugee from Alabama, who is Logger's niece. Mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter was amazing in the role, with a large beauty of a voice that sailed over the orchestra. She was also genuinely funny and offered a jolt of energy every time she was onstage.

The other major character, Boy, is an obnoxious, lovesick teenager whose role could have been easily cut in the translation from play to opera, but he was performed with endearing charm by tenor Chad Somers.

At first, there seemed to be a serious disconnect between the interesting things going on in the orchestra pit and the rather dull, declamatory singing onstage. About 30 minutes in, the orchestra and vocal lines finally meshed during a tender scene where Logger braided Vera's tangled hair while filling her in on the local info ("It's Indians who are treated like colored folk around here"). Bass-baritone Kenneth Kellogg matched Briana Hunter in vocal power and acting chops, and their scenes together were a delight.

Though the mixture of realism and myth didn't quite work for me, the multi-racial Northern California story created by Eisa Davis was consistently fascinating, and Stookey's music both ambitious and accomplished. There are two more performances: Sunday the 11th at 3PM and Thursday the 15th at 8PM. Click here for tickets.

Theater of Fate at American Bach Soloists

The American Bach Soloists had a pared down summer festival this year at St. Mark's Lutheran Church, which concluded with a program of Italian secular cantatas by Handel and Vivaldi.

This was the organization's 35th season since its inception by music director Jeffrey Thomas (above right, with harpsichord player Corey Jamason).

The period instrument orchestra seems to be going through a generational change, including the brilliant young violinists Tomà Iliev from Bulgaria and Tatiana Chulochnikova from Ukraine, both of whom attended the American Bach Soloists Academy in recent years.

Tomà Iliev was particularly fun to watch as he partnered with violinist Noah Strick as the two leads in the concert's opening piece, Corelli's 1712 Concerto Grosso in C Minor, Op. 6 No. 3. Iliev is not only good-looking but a ferociously talented musician besides (click here for an ABS interview/demonstration on YouTube).

The Corelli was inserted as a long overture to the main event, Handel's dramatic monologue, Agrippina condotta a morir, written when he was a young man visiting Italy. The 1708 work depicts the Roman empress Agrippina's feelings as she is led to her execution on the orders of her son Nero. In ten recitatives and nine arias, the doomed empress vacillates between curses ("Let his black heart be torn in pieces, and then fed to the birds") to guilt ("How, O God, can I wish for the death of him to whom I gave life?") The piece is a challenging beast for a singer, and soprano Maya Kherani was superb.

The second half of the program was devoted to two Vivaldi pastoral cantatas (Cessate, amai cessate and Amor hai vinto) with mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit as soloist singing about the torture created by love. Coit was astonishingly good, tossing off virtuosic ornamentation with what sounded like effortless ease. The interplay between the orchestra and singer was delightful, and was a reminder of how much fun Vivaldi's vocal music can be.

For a concert finale, the two singers performed the love duet Bramo aver mille vite from Handel's 1735 opera Ariodante. It was a sweet end to a charming concert.