The Opera Tattler

Reviews of Performances and their Audiences

Recent posts

  • Carmen

    Last night I attended San Francisco Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen with a certain friend. We agreed that the program’s cover, which has been used on every program all season, is hideous. The work featured is Diebenkorn’s Blue Surround (1982), that involves color aquatint, spit bite aquatint, etching offset, and drypoint with scraping. The dimensions are 55.8 x 48.2 cm for the image itself. Since we are philistines, we do not enjoy such works, and this was discussed even before we got to the opera because on our way we saw an advertisement for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, whose tagline was something like "come be moved."

    The opera itself was nice enough. The singing was fine, the music, of course, very familiar. The soprano Maria Bayo (Micaëla) has an exceptionally pretty and strong voice. Tenor Richard Berkeley-Steele did well in his role of Don José, his voice was not disappointing. Bass Denis Sedov was better in his role of Escamillo than as Achilla in Giulio Cesare. His voice was still a little thin.

    Carmen herself, the mezzo-soprano Marina Domashenko, was appropriate to the role. Her voice was a bit throaty and lacked a certain prettiness, which is just as well.

    The choreography was pretty good in this production, people seemed more committed to their movements than in Giulio Cesare. At times I did wish that Domashenko would stand up straighter, sometimes she was simply all shoulders, with her arms akimbo.

    They did well with the sets and costumes, everything was pretty and there were no disasters. I must say it was more pleasant to see Carmen at the opera house than at the Civic Center Auditorium, where I last saw this production during the 1996-97 season.

    Leave a Reply

  • Giulio Cesare

    The San Francisco Opera performance that I had been waiting for all season finally arrived, and I was not disappointed. Händel’s Giulio Cesare has quite a lot of beautiful and compelling music in it. It is an opera seria that premiered in 1724 at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and the title role was created for a particular famous castrato, Francesco Bernardi (known as Senesino) of Siena. The female lead of Cleopatra was written for the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni.

    The opera was a bit odd for modern ears, since so many of the main parts are high. One mezzo-soprano, two sopranos, three altos, and only two basses, no baritones or tenors at all. It took me some time to adjust, to figure out which voice went with which part. However the differences between the singers, especially countertenor David Daniels (Giulio Cesare) and the mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose (Sesto), were marked. Even though they can sing in the same range, and Daniels even sings a couple of the Sestos arias that on his Händel operatic arias recording. Daniels is simply a much larger person than Donose. The arias in question are "Cara Speme", in Act I, Scene 8 and "L’angue offeso", in Act II, Scene 6.

    David Daniels and Ruth Ann Swenson (Cleopatra) both have gorgeous voices. Swenson’s voice carries better though, and she has a lot of sass. Daniels was more stiff, and his arms sometimes appeared locked in space when he was singing something particularly difficult. Neither of them moved especially well, but Swenson was a better actor. The last time I saw Swenson was in Thomas’ Hamlet as Ophelia, which was a much less demanding part.

    Bejun Mehta (Tolomeo) and Ruxandra Donose (Sesto) both moved like water, they were very graceful. Mehta has a nice voice, but it is hard to tell since his part was on the small side. Donose was a little breathy and airy, but she sang her main arias well.

    Felicity Palmer (Cornelia) was adequate, sometimes her voice sounded quite grand, and other times not so much. She moved stiffly, something about the way she carried her shoulders made her look uncomfortable or old.

    Denis Sedov (Achilla) did not carry well in his low range, and it made him seem comical.

    The set was not horrible except for a screen made of metal fashioned into a map of the Mediterranean. They also had problems with platforms that rumbled far too loudly when moved, even with the orchestra playing and singing, they were quite audible. One of the screens did not come down properly in the third act, it was a landscape of desert, but Swenson played it off rather charmingly.

    The choreography was pretty poor, as usual. The movement in general looked unconvincing and unclear. The ballet dancer who played Terpsichore was rather delightful in her lightness though.

    The costumes were amusing because they were Renaissance mixed with Orientalism, however, they were very pretty.

    Leave a Reply

  • Die Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen

    SumijozauberfloeteLast Friday I attended a performance of Die Zauberflöte at the Los Angeles Opera. The production left much to be desired. Apparently Los Angeles Opera has the opera confused with something else.

    Mozart’s last opera is fraught with multiple meanings, but Los Angeles Opera strove to be appealing to the lowest common denominator, to people who don’t actually like opera or theatre or classical music. The sets and costumes were mostly absurd, something out of the circus, or Disneyland, or even a science fiction movie. The libretto was not translated particularly well for the supertitles that I tried to ignore. The choreography was horrid, for example, the Queen of the Night wore heels so high that she staggered around on stage like a mechanical bird in Act II. There also seemed to be technical problems with the background.

    The audience did not take the performance seriously, there was much chatter, cooing whenever something particularly cute was on stage, laughter and applause at inappropriate moments. The person next to me fell asleep at least once, and I overheard other people talking about how they nodded off as I roamed around after the performance. It was pathetic, since the performance was a mere 3 hours long, with a 20 minute intermission in-between acts. Considering how entertaining the performance was trying to be, and how glorious the music was, I can’t really sympathize with people who were so unengaged as to fall asleep.

    I’m glad, in a way, that someone is worried about making people like the opera. It just seemed that they were trying very hard, with something that is already very appealing. Though I am glad that this performance could delight people, it was reported that this production got rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times. I can see how it would be good for someone who had never seen an opera before, or for children. Too inaccessible is bad as well, avante garde experiments with staging and such can be much worse than going for a wide audience.

    Anyway, truth be told, I was very happy to go to an opera, especially a Mozart one. The music was, of course, delightfully pretty. The singing was all fairly even. Sumi Jo sang the part of the Queen of the Night to great effect, everyone knows the part is very difficult, so she got quite the applause. It was deserved though, her voice seems an impossibility, it is so beautiful and that part showed it to its best advantage. The Korean Americans were out in droves to see her, undoubtedly it brought out some people who wouldn’t necessarily go to an opera normally.

    Rodney Gilfry’s Papageno was indeed lovable, his German was particularly good and his baritone was nice. Andrea Rost made a sweet Pamina, her voice got a bit shrill on occasion, but was mostly just lovely. I found Reinhard Hagen (Sarastro) a bit quiet in his lower range. The three spirits were sung by youths from the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, and the three had voices like angels.

    Leave a Reply

  • A Pernicious and Corrupt Art

    Last Monday I went to see Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Metropolitan Opera. Ordinarily I would avoid Prokofiev (1891-1953) altogether, his music is too modern for my conventional sensibilities. Also, Tolstoy himself despised opera, calling it a pernicious, corrupt art form, an ungainly mixing of different modalities of art. However, my friends wanted to go to the opera, and they could not afford to go to Le Nozze di Figaro, as the inexpensive tickets were sold-out for the particular evening we were in town. The only other option was War and Peace, which P had been reading. The funny thing was that C started reading War and Peace and decided that she couldn’t go to the opera after all, because she wasn’t finished in time and she loved it too much to spoil it in the middle. They both read it in French, apparently half the book is in French, and they are both native speakers of French, so there you are. Seeing this opera made me want to read the book itself, but it has to wait for now.

    The opera was very impressive in scope, as it calls for about 60 roles, a huge chorus and a ballet. Just seeing that many people on stage is really incredible in and of itself. It was also the longest opera I have seen thus far, a mere 4.5 hours. The Metropolitan did the whole thing in one night, with only one intermission, which I thought was commendable. The music was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it was not particularly memorable though. Anna Netrebko does have a most lovely voice, though I believe her role in Falstaff at SF Opera showed her voice more to her advantage than this opera. Again, the Metropolitan had wonderful singers all around, good staging, clean choreography, and pretty costumes. The sets were very clever, the stage was set at an angle so that upstage was actually up from downstage, and there was a circular part of the stage that could spin about, like a gigantic Lazy Susan, except flush with the rest of the stage, not raised above it. The whole experience wasn’t nearly as good as Le Nozze, which goes to show that the music is essential to this opera business.

    My favorite part of the opera was when they were having a celebration in the second part of the opera, and they had a huge red chicken made of cloth, it was like an enormous puppet. There were also red sparkles at this part. I couldn’t believe I was seeing this in real life, it was awfully surreal.

    Naturally, we must include the obligatory complaint about certain audience members. There was a lady and her child who was around 12 or so. The child ate elaborate chocolates that she unwrapped from cellophane for the second half of the first part of the opera. It was very loud, the people in front of her turned around to give her dirty looks, and my companions both noticed and were disturbed. Unfortunately, she was not directly next to me, or else I would have had her stop immediately. I had to wait until the intermission to ask, kindly as I could manage, that they not eat during the opera as it was distracting. One of the ladies in front of them smiled on me approvingly, so I felt a bit more justified in my request. They were quiet the rest of the opera, which was very nice. Why people cannot manage to do one thing at one time boggles the mind. Is there not a time and a place for different things?

    Leave a Reply

  • Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met

    Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera was quite simply the best opera I have ever been to. Everything was amazingly marvelous. The difference between the San Francisco Opera and the Met is vast, despite the fact that they get some of the same singers and conductors and so forth.

    First of all, Mozart is my favorite opera composer, and I’ve seen Le Nozze before in San Francisco. It simply blew me away, because it was just so much better than Puccini, Bizet et al. It was the longest opera I had seen at that point, yet I was fully engaged in it. So I was perfectly willing to see it again at the Met.

    The Metropolitan Opera lives at the Lincoln Center. The building is, sadly, quite ugly, and also gigantic, though the acoustics seem to be good. They don’t have a projection screen for supertitles, which great because I never need that kind of distraction. Instead they have a small screen on the backs of the seats, which one can leave on the off position. I don’t understand why one can’t just read the libretto, or learn Italian, but I’m crazy.

    Money cannot buy happiness, so they say, but it can buy very good opera seats. Our seats were center third row orchestra, and we managed not to sit behind giants, so the view of the stage was good and the sound was good there. I could even see and hear the conductor, which is a rarity for me. I’ve been to operas that Donald Runnicles has conducted at San Francisco Opera, but I’ve never seen him up close. He looks very different than the photograph that he uses in the programs.

    All of the singers were consistently good and at the same excellent level. This was a striking difference between the Met and SF operas. The singers were as good as the ones at the Volksoper in Vienna. Rebecca Evans was charming as Susanna, her voice was sweet, warm, and clear as ever. I’ve seen this Welsh soprano as Adina in the San Francisco production of L’Elisir d’Amore, in which she was also brilliant. Melanie Diener had the part of the Countess, and her voice was colder and airier. It was a nice foil, actually. Ferruccio Furlanetto also did a splendid job as Figaro, he also has a warm rich voice.

    Leave a Reply

  • Manon is not nice.

    We went to see Manon at Opera San Jose. It was very small and pretty as a production, with clever and simple sets. The opera had speaking parts in French, which I did not anticipate. It was especially strange when the audience clapped after these parts, as if it had been some wonderful aria. This only really happened in Act III, which had me very confused as it was, since they took out the first scene of it. Act III is supposed to start off in a park at the Cours-la-Reine, where Manon learns that Des Grieux has become an abb, and only later does the scene change to the sacristy at St. Sulpice. At any rate, French spoken by American opera singers is considerably worse than French sung by said singers. Or at least, the accent is more obvious.

    Manon was played by Sandra Rubalcava, who had a nice voice that was occasionally shrill, but mostly just in Act I. She was wonderful in her aria "Adieu, notre petite table" in Act II and at L’Htel de Transylvanie in Act IV. The music was pretty, but not very memorable, though there were very pleasant overtures for all the acts. The word "Manon" was used an incredible amount. The character of Manon says her own name many times, and her dying words are "Et c’est l l’histoire…de Manon Lescaut!"

    I enjoyed that the San Jose Opera asks its patrons to please unwrap their candies before the performance begins. This was not terribly effective, however. Apparently, I have very sensitive hearing, because a lady sitting next to my pesky friend was unwrapping and eating candies for the first ten minutes of the opera, and I could hear not only the cellophane wrapper noise, but the clicking of the candies against her teeth. She had eaten about five candies before I asked her as politely as I could to desist. I also received a scathing look in the ladies’ room from a middle-aged lady putting on her makeup. Her friend was gushing about how gorgeous the lady in question was, and I merely glanced up at her in the mirror, and was met by the most caustic of looks. It was very entertaining. I must remember to be so pleasant when I get older.

    Leave a Reply

  • SF Opera’s 2002-2003 Season

    I am filled with delight because the San Francisco Opera has announced the 2002-2003 season. I particularly want to see Turandot (September 7 – December 8, 2002), Otello (October 9 – November 1, 2002), Alcina (November 19 – December 7, 2002), Il Trovatore (June 15 – July 5, 2003), and La Cenerentola (June 7 – July 6, 2003). I also would love to see Die Entführung aus dem Serail again, and it will have been about a year since we went to see it in Vienna, since it is showing from October 15 until November 2. It promises to be an exciting opera season.

    Today I also planned a trip to New York, and of course, attempted to get tickets for the Metropolitan Opera, to see Le Nozze di Figaro and War and Peace. I’ve never been to New York, and it is about time that I go, especially since I have a couple of very dear friends living there now. It will be wonderful to go see the art museums there as well. I’m curious about the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and I’ll definitely go to the Met and the Frick. I fear that I may not want to leave New York once I’ve seen all its glories. At least I live here and not somewhere totally isolated. It seems a lot of people move out here to California on purpose, so it must not be that bad. I have no sense of perspective, being from the scariness that is Los Angeles: I have no concept of actual weather, the Bay Area mostly doesn’t seem that liberal to me, and I had to learn to pinpoint fake breasts after many years of just having no clue.

    There is no doubt that my household shall keep its one New Year’s resolution, which is to see more operas this year than last year.

    Leave a Reply

  • Budapest and Vienna

    We went to the Hungarian State Opera twice to see La Bohème and Manon Lescaut. They were having a Puccini Festival, so now I’ve seen more Puccini than anything else as far as opera goes. The opera house is so gorgeous, inside and out, though I’ve only been on the inside of five opera houses. The Markgräfliches Opernhaus in Bayreuth is the most fancy I’ve seen and the Wiener Volksoper the least.

    In Vienna we went to see Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio at the Volksoper, and the difference between Puccini and Mozart was marked. Mozart is just incredible, even difference between his stereotype of "oriental" music and Saint-Saëns’s shows this. The romantics just don’t compare, not even to me, a person who really doesn’t have much musical sense one way or other. I’m visual to a fault. The set and costumes were not to my taste, the set consisted of a modern glass palace that spun around, and the costumes were retro 40’s. However, the singing was marvelous and so was the acting.

    Leave a Reply

  • Aphasiac

    Two weekends ago I went to see Falstaff with a friend who graduated in Linguistics with me. It was much fun, the opera is funny and the staging was excellent. They had a wonderful model landscape background that included minute houses and even cows, and they did a fabulous rainy scene at the beginning. The crayoning on the walls that Nannetta and Fenton do is a bit much though. I’ve been told by my composer friend that the opera is horribly unmelodic. I suppose it is true, there is a lot of tittering. Anna Netrebko, who played Nannetta, has a beautiful voice, and is also very lovely to look at. I wish I had seen her in L’elisir d’amore, but she didn’t sing until later in the season.

    Leave a Reply

  • Pumpkin Eater

    Halloween is my favorite holiday, though I think I could do without the time change that always happens before it. We went to Tosca with our lovely friends and had a splendid time. The opera was beautiful, all the singing was adequate. Eva Urbanov has a pretty voice. It was odd seeing the same production again with different singers, but I liked it, everything was nicely familiar. The second act was especially good, the music is best in that act. For some reason I find the overtures in Tosca to be strange, I don’t know what it is.

    Quite a few of the audience were dressed in costume, which was fun. I went dressed in an Egyptian belly dance costume that I don’t dance in as I do a different style of belly dance. It consists of a forest green velvet top and a matching skirt that is half velvet and half chiffon in a lighter shade. There are silvery beads and sequins here and there as trim. It is a very silly outfit.

    Leave a Reply