Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
* Notes *
My preview of opera and classical singing this summer in the Bay Area is up on KQED Arts.
* Tattling *
In my mind I jokingly titled this piece "It Is All About Boobs and Butts and Dead Babies This Summer in SF." It wouldn't have done at all, especially because I did not include Jenufa in the preview.
Tenor Brian Thorsett (pictured left), well known to Bay Area opera fans, got a tenure track assistant professor position at Virginia Tech last year and subsequently moved to across the country. He is, however, still performing in here quite a bit, and will sing in the next Curious Flights concert on May 28 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
What are the challenges of being an opera singer in the Bay Area?
The Bay Area has a tremendous classical music scene, with lots of opportunities, tons of opera companies, and great instrumentalists. San Francisco audiences are very supportive and you can do opera in weird places. There were lots of times when I couldn't believe we were allowed to do certain things.
The challenges are the expense of living here and the traffic. I would perform 40 weekend a year (which is nuts), do outreach with San Francisco Opera, and teach, but still got priced out of the Bay Area. Also the traffic here is terrible, I was so happy to sell my car when I moved to Virginia. I was sad to leave the Bay Area, but thankfully there are airplanes, so I can come back to perform.
You have degrees in mathematics and piano, it's easy to see how the latter relates to singing, but does math relate at all to being a singer?
It sure does. For one thing, I really know how to count.
Seriously though, there is a sense of creativity to finding proofs in math that is not unlike being a singer. You can take 3 or 4 different paths getting to the answer. Just as when you have to come to an understanding about characterizing a certain role or even dealing with a technical issue in your voice, there is more than one way to go about it.
Math definitely broadened my horizons and fostered both an intellectual curiosity in me and an appreciation for the interconnectedness of things.
Your repertory is quite varied, spanning Monteverdi to David Lang. Do you have a favorite composer?
I don't think you can be a classical musician and not love Bach. The St. Matthew Passion is the pinnacle of Western art music, without a doubt.
I do also love working with living composers because there is a special kind of collaboration that happens. Recently I sang a Scott Gendel song cycle on love and I'm performing "American Death Ballads" by David Conte in July. So those two composers are my favorites at the moment too.
Tell me about the pieces you are performing with Curious Flights.
Well, the main piece is the Blitzstein, The Airborne Symphony, which is somewhere between unabashedly Romantic and Coplandesque. It is a fun narrative about the history of flight but goes beyond that. It is about striving, failing, but eventually being able to do something great. And it shows the downsides of this success too.
I'm also singing three Korngold songs, two from Give Us This Night and one from The Constant Nymph. Give Us This Night starred the mezzo Gladys Swarthout and the Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, it has a stunningly ridiculous plot. Weirdly enough the lyrics are by Hammerstein, so it was a Korngold and Hammerstein musical.
I don't know a single musician that isn't blown away by Korngold, but of course, he isn't performed that much. Part of it is because his music is out of print, and you have to hunt down songs if you want them. I had to call around, contacted Paramount and got someone to send me some PDFs. I did the piano reduction of the scores myself!
* Notes *
My review of Ars Minerva's The Amazons in the Fortunate Isles at the Marines' Memorial Theater in San Francisco is up on San Francisco Classical Voice.
* Tattling *
A couple of francophones behind me in Row F Seats 1 and 2 of the orchestra on had a difficult time not talking throughout the performance even though they clearly enjoyed being there.
Not mentioned in the review, but I was a little weirded out by the fake braids as it smacks of cultural appropriation, albeit secondhand, since the aesthetic was rather Burning Man-inspired. Also, it should be noted there were non-whites in the cast and orchestra, which can be a rarity for small Baroque ensembles.
I feel obliged to inform you that I am participating in a panel discussion entitled "Social Media, 24 Hour News Cycles and The Future of Reviewing Theatre" presented by the San Francisco International Arts Festival and San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. The event takes place this Thursday at 6pm at the Magic Theatre (Building D Third Floor, Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture). This takes place just before opening night of Pan Pan Theatre from the Republic of Ireland at 8:00pm.
* Notes *
Susan Graham (pictured left, photograph by Dario Acosta) is singing Berlioz's La Mort de Cléopâtre with San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas this weekend. The piece, a replacement for the previously announced Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, is quite suited to Ms. Graham. Her clear high notes and fully developed sound work well with its descriptive, declamatory nature.
The orchestra supported her in a characteristic glimmering way. The basses were particularly nice at the end. Graham sang "L'île inconnue" from Berlioz's Les nuits d'été song cycle as an encore.
The Berlioz was sandwiched by more 19th century music including Brahms' rather odd Variations on a Theme by Haydn and Schumann's Fourth Symphony. The cello and oboe were lovely in the Schumann, which was recorded for a future release.
* Tattling *
There was light talking during Brahms and even some whispering during Schumann, though we were asked emphatically not to make noise because of the recording.
* Notes *
Opera Parallèle has opened yet another impressive production with Peter Maxwell Davies' chamber work The Lighthouse, which has a three performance run this weekend at Z Space in San Francisco. Scored for only about a dozen instrumentalists and three singers, the music is rich and vivid. The tense atmosphere of the narrative, which involves the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers, however, was not terribly dramatic.
The boredom, fear, and claustrophobia of being in a lighthouse without knowing when relief will come definitely comes through in the music. Tenor Thomas Glenn (Sandy, Officer 1), baritone Robert Orth (Blazes, Officer 2), and bass-baritone David Cushing (Arthur, Voice of the Cards, Officer 3) all are clearly talented, and are carefully characterized.
Orth's brightness was particularly macabre in "When I was a kid our street had a gang," and the banjo playing from David Tanenbaum here was also splendid.
Maestra Nicole Paiement kept everyone clear and together. It did not seem to matter at all that hornist Susan Vollmer played from offstage in the prologue and percussionists William Winant and Ben Paysen were separated from the rest of the orchestra.
Director Brian Staufenbiel employs a metal frame version of a light house. The scenery involves large panels of fabric manipulated by four dancers in hooded unitards, culminating in a fog scene in which ghosts appear to the lighthouse keepers. The layers of fabric swirl and obfuscate and make good use of the space.
The libretto, written by the composer, is spare, the piece is only 72 minutes long. While it is creepy, I did not find it as stirring as the music, the central conflict of two characters not getting along and being cooped up together is easy to relate to but isn't necessarily great theater.
The end also seemed to demystify the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, as Davies has stated his opera "does not offer a solution to the mystery," but I could not help feeling that whatever did happen, it was obviously more mundane than supernatural.
* Tattling *
The announcement to turn off cellular telephones and locate emergency exists before the performance sounded like something out of Disney's Haunted House.
* Notes *
SF Opera Lab hosted a cine-concert version of Les Triplettes de Belleville in mid-April. The 2003 animated film was projected on the south wall of the Atrium Theater as composer-conductor Benoît Charest not only lead seven instrumentalists and the chanteuse Doriane Faberg, but also played guitar.
The last evening of the run, on April 23, was completely immersive and charming. The piece has little dialogue and it is easy to take in the performers and the film at the same time without losing the thread of the narrative.
While the piece has many traditional instruments such as bass, saxophone, and such, it also requires playing a bicycle and newspaper.
Tattling *
Even the smallest children at the concert were utterly silent during the movie. This was a much different experience than seeing films with SF Symphony playing, perhaps because of the intimacy of the venue.
* Notes *
Opera San José's 2015-2016 season ends with a musically impressive but dramatically wanting A Streetcar Named Desire (pictured left with Matthew Hanscom, Ariana Strahl, and Stacey Tappan; photograph by Pat Kirk), which opened last weekend. The orchestra has never sounded better and there is much fine singing, but the minimalist production is not completely successful.
André Previn's opera, based on the famous play by Tennessee Williams, first premiered in the Bay Area nearly twenty years ago at San Francisco Opera. The production at San José, designed and directed by Brad Dalton, features a rather bare stage in front of the orchestra. The two rooms are represented by furniture — a bed, two tables, and eighteen chairs — that are moved around by seven rough-looking male supernumeraries.
There isn't a good sense of what is inside and what is outside, it isn't clear what the supernumeraries are doing on stage besides changing the set (often unnecessarily, since much of the action simply happens in the same two rooms) and echoing the look of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in stage and film versions of the play.
The scenes that reference the upstairs of the building are especially problematic. The upstairs neighbor Eunice stands on a chair to represent her calling from above at one point, and at the end of Act I Stanley interacts with Eunice, Blanche, and Stella all upstage, but with him downstage facing the audience.
Dalton also makes use of ghosts, having the young collector played by Xavier Prado stand in for Blanche's ill-fated husband and Teressa Foss (who also is cast as the nurse) wander through as one of Blanche's dead relatives. Perhaps this is to re-enforce how crazy Blanche is, but it was more of a confusing distraction than anything else.
All this said, I do very much appreciate Dalton's creativity, and that he did not simply recreate the well-known set of the play or film. Having the orchestra behind the singers also worked very much in the piece's favor, the playing never overwhelmed the voices.
Maestro Ming Luke had the orchestra sounding cohesive and perfectly in tune. Despite the fact that the conductor was behind the singers, there was hardly any synchronization issues. The screens above the ground floor of the audience used to cue the characters apparently worked very well. The jazzy parts of Previn's music swung and sounded idiomatic.
The singing was excellent. Tenor Kirk Dougherty had the perfect amount of awkwardness for Harold "Mitch" Mitchell, and his scenes with Strahl were convincing. On the other hand, baritone Matthew Hanscom lacked a certain sexual dangerousness for the role of Stanley Kowalski. Though Hanscom's voice is strong, his performance comes off as cartoonish.
Soprano Stacey Tappan (Stella Kowalkski) had a strong Opera San Jose debut, her voice is sweet and her post-coital hum at the end of Act I came off beautifully. Soprano Ariana Strahl also had a fine debut with the role of Blanche DuBois, and sang with a devastating brilliance and incredible ease. Her clarion tones were a wonderful contrast to Tappan's, you could never mistake one for another. In the end the drama does come through in the music, Stahl portrays Blanche's harrowing experiences with conviction, and the performance was satisfying despite the flawed staging.
Tattling *
There was the usual light chatter when the orchestra played but no one was singing.
A watch alarm was heard in the last act.
October 22-30 2016: La Cenerentola
November 11-13 2016: David T. Little's Soldier Songs
February 18-26 2017: Falstaff
March 10-12 2017: Peter Brook's La tragèdie de Carmen
April 22-30 2017: La traviata
The 2016-2017 season at San Diego Opera was announced April 16.
* Notes *
SF Opera Lab had its first new production premiere last night with Svadba-Wedding last night. The a cappella opera for six female voices by Serbian Canadian composer Ana Sokolović is the perfect scale for the Atrium Theater and director Michael Cavanagh's made use of the whole space.
Sokolović's opera is pretty without being cloying, the Balkan rhythms employed hold much interest. This is much closer to being avant-garde than most of the world premieres we've heard at the War Memorial in the last decade. There were moments when the music reminded me of Kitka, but Sokolović has a very charming and peculiar point of view. Often there is much humor in the onomatopoeic sounds the singers produce. The piece is short, a mere 60 minutes, but has a timelessness to it, and not at all in a bad way.
There are many instruments used by the singers including metal drinking cups with chains and spoons; tom-tom drum; gong; rainsticks, and ocarinas (ancient wind instruments). The voices have a haunting quality, there seemed to be three sopranos and three mezzo-sopranos. The singing was clear and had an immediacy in the small room.
Cavanagh's staging uses a central round platform and five other littler platforms all around the room. The audience is seated at round tables, much like a wedding reception.
Tattling *
It was hard for the audience members to talk much, given how immersive the performance was, and how the singers basically surrounded us at different moments.
After the performance was an actual reception, complete with croquembouche, champagne, and a DJ.
The Opera Tattler 
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