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SYMPHONY
Abounding Contrasts
RECITAL
New Heights
CHORAL MUSIC
Split Personality
CHAMBER MUSIC
Foray into the Baroque
RECITAL
An Odd Mélange
SYMPHONY
Uneven Results
OPERA
Brundibar in Perspective
VOCAL MUSIC
A Luscious Songfest
LETTER FROM CHICAGO
Midsummer Marriage: No Flute
MUSIC NEWS
As the World Turns
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 11/15/05 Question of the Week
By Jeff Dunn
San Francisco Symphony
Janine Jensen
Vladimir Ashkenazy
(11/17/05)
By Stephanie Friedman
Matthias Goerne
Wolfram Rieger
(11/16/05)
By Mickey Butts
Cantabile Chorale
(11/20/05)
By Heuwell Tircuit
New Century Chamber Orchestra
(11/18/05)
By Stephanie Friedman
Deborah Voigt
Brian Zeger
(11/20/05)
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Oakland East Bay Symphony & Chorus
devorah major
(11/18/05)
By Janos Gereben
Berkeley Repertory Theater
Brundibar
The Comedy on the Bridge
(11/19/05)
By Michael Zwiebach
"Basically British"
(11/19/05)
By Jeff Dunn
. . . at S.F. Opera
By Janos Gereben
Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
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Next Sunday, the final performance of the current Fidelio brings the 2005 fall season to an end. It will also be the last one to fall under the responsibility of Pamela Rosenberg, the outgoing general director, or as she has also been named, chief executive officer. It's a sad coincidence, given that this Fidelio — miscast, indifferently directed, and diffidently conducted — has been such a disappointment. It is the first time in my experience that this opera has failed to move.
Properly, we can expect opera to move us. Yet none of the six operas of the fall season managed to do that, with the exception of certain scenes in Norma, for wholly musical reasons. The failure to move was the principal lack in the season's major project and signal success, John Adams' Doctor Atomic, which was so impressive in many other aspects. Adams produced his most interesting large score yet, the music finding a larger, less confining style and generating real excitement and movement. The absence of lyricism, however, kept the singers from engaging the emotions the subject should have generated; they could therefore not achieve the transport that is at the heart of opera. The libretto may have contributed to this problem. A libretto made up of connected elements from different sources does not provide the dramatic line and purpose of a text that comes from one poetic voice.
Notwithstanding this operatic reservation, the work was well done, well produced, well received, and that will go down as Rosenberg's major achievement here. She did initiate the idea and produce the commission.
As for the other works of this season, and of the preceding four seasons under Rosenberg's direction, it is revealing and sad when a major company keeps producing repertory operas at the level of a regional European company. L'Italiana in Algeri was satisfactory, but was far from matching the sparkle, brightness, and comedic standards of the previous (1992) performances and the Spring Opera Theater's production (1964, 1966, and 1978). It was a question of energy, the particular flair of the principals, and directorial imagination.
The number that director David Alden and designer Paul Steinberg did on Handel's Rodelinda this fall, while not the crazed nightmare Rosenberg's designated hit men created of Handel's Alcina in 2002, was nonetheless an awful example of how to produce an opera when you don't like or trust its music. Contemporizing the classic to Mussolini's Italy, the production wasted first-rate talent. If the company had had the good sense to broadcast these performances, music-lovers could have enjoyed them without enduring yet one more of the kind of spectacles that presumably entertain and divert other kinds of opera-goers.
This season's Forza del destino was in the same ballpark. It was saved by the brilliant conducting of Nicola Luisotti, and the singing of Željko Lucic (Don Carlo), Jill Grove (Preziosilla), Orlin Anastassov (Padre Guardiano), Lucas Meachem, (Melitone), and the chorus. The music carried the performance in spite of the gauche fantasies of director Ron Daniels and designer Roland Aeschlimann. The less said the better about the Leonora, Andrea Gruber, singing like a musical saw, wobbling all over the line, meanwhile carrying on with look-at-me histrionics. Gone! The use of Philip Gossett's new critical edition of Verdi's 1869 (Milan) version made the best sense yet of this sprawling work.
Visually, the production had to insult the audience and the opera, introducing soldiers in modern camouflage battle dress with automatic rifles (while their officers wielded sabers?). It was something about reminding us that war is hell, then and now. (Do you remember how John Cox ruined the ending of the last Così fan tutte with a squad of modern-day soldiers in battle dress leading Ferrando and Guglielmo off to a war — a war whose historical nonexistence was part of Mozart's and Da Ponte's joke?) One of director Daniels' hard touches in La Forza del destino was to edit the comic relief role that Friar Melitone is intended to play, turning it into that of an intense and angry evangelist. Daniels and Aeschlimann join the list of directing/designing talents of whom it might be fervently said, "If we never see their work again, it will be too soon."
Which brings up another point. What's to become of the updated opera productions like the ones that now take their places in the company's warehouse? The Daniels-Aeschlimann La Forza del destino can at least be salvaged by replacing the modern soldiers' dress, the camouflage-patterned backdrop for the battle, and the wacko finale scene where Leonora appears crawling up and down a minimalist modern sculpture. However, some of the other productions created and premiered during the last five seasons cannot possibly be revised and may never be revived.
It's hard, for example, to imagine a subsequent general director wanting to revive this season's new production of Norma. The lumber stack of Norma was perpetrated by James Robinson, director, with Allen Moyer and Anna Oliver (costumes) guilty of designing this thing. I expect that a fair majority in the audience hoped that the finale immolation fire of Norma and Pollione would consume the great pile of boards that passed for a set. It is interesting to speculate on how the San Francisco Opera's public would vote, yea or nay, on revivals of the Kat'a Kabanova and La Damnation de Faust from the 2002 season; The Mother of Us All (not a big-stage opera) and Doktor Faust (2003); and the Pikovaya Dama (Queen of Spades) (2004).
Will anyone soon forget, in that last-named opera, the image of Lisa whipping out a plastic bag and pulling it over her head to commit suicide (instead of plunging into the river)? Blame Richard Jones, production; Roy Rallo, director; and John Macfarlane, designer. Or Kat'a (Katerina) in Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova (2002) leaping into a film of water on the stage (representing the river Volga) and then her "drowned body" being carted off through the puddle "Volga" on a modern hospital gurney? Blame Johannes Schaaf, production; Erich Wonder and Falko Herold (costumes), designers. Where do they find these people? I repeat: If we never see their work again ...
One of Rosenberg's major actions was to order the destruction of a large number of warehoused productions (reportedly as many as 60) on the grounds that they were in terrible disrepair and could not be used again without expensive rehabilitation. No doubt much of this housecleaning was justified, but how much we won't know until that day when a list of the excised productions and a list of those remaining are published. The Wagner Ring production was said to have been included in that clearing-out process, and the costumes sold at auction. Consequently, the next Ring here, built from scratch, would entail an enormous investment — $10 million, perhaps $12 million. We'd have been happy with the old one, the money put into the singers and musical preparation. The sets and costumes for Messiaen's St. François d'Assise are also said to be gone. In that case it is hard to imagine either a revival of that work very soon or a request from another company to borrow it. Who knows what other fine productions from the past still exist? Is Gerard Howland's and the late Pier Luigi Pizzi's splendid Macbeth production, given just once in 1994, still on hand?
Time and reader patience do not permit a complete review of the San Francisco Opera's past five years. There were a few successes: Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen comes to mind. In that time we did not hear enough of the great operatic voices of this age, certainly not enough of them given the company's stature, history, and budget. A lot of money was spent, and some of it unwisely. The indiscretionary outflow started with the engagement of Landor Associates to redesign the company's graphic image. The cost was said to have been close to a million and a half dollars in the final settlement of the contract. "Rebranding," it was called. If anyone can stand up, and with a straight face claim that the project's wedge logo of the word "Opera" was effective, never mind worth it, I will tip my hat. The money represents one new production or the refurbishing of two or three worthy productions for revivals, a significant raise for the chorus, and the commissioning of a new opera. Did the San Francisco Opera benefit from the expensive hiring of a staff dramaturge, and then other ad hoc dramaturges serving specific productions? Is anyone willing to bet that the incoming administration will continue that practice?
The last five years have also been a public- and press-relations disaster. The press department, effective to start, turned into a gate-keeping operation whose principal function was to keep journalists walled off from opera staff, departments, and even at one juncture, financial information required to be public. (Eventually, the information was released.) Meanwhile, a public relations consultant, resident in Palm Springs, was engaged. For much of last year, just two people operated the department, then one, until David Gockley, arriving months in advance of his official installation as general director, rebuilt the department. Rosenberg held one press conference annually — very formal, proper, and unproductive affairs. It became clear that Rosenberg was uncomfortable dealing with the press, not, apparently, realizing that journalists represent the public and have always been the Opera's conduit to the public here since 1852. There's another theory. She wanted to avoid questioning that would reveal just how radical was her viewpoint about opera, and her intentions.
Meanwhile, although the company invested in expensive published materials and communications, its Web site and printed programs were badly designed. We can anticipate a wholly redesigned Web site that is user-friendly, appealing to look at, and easily navigable. We have certainly seen the last of the repellent program magazine covers, with their ugly, contrived, posed photographs only superficially relevant to the particular operas and not at all to opera in general. They all looked like crass magazine ads. Rebranding? Ah, marketing — so that Everyman might identify with the product. Dumbing down the image, in other words. In the past, the Opera's program covers featured carefully selected works of art related to the subject matter of the opera in question, and signaling something beautiful. There was class. What Claire Myers, the current program editor, and her so-called design consultant, Susan L. Wells, have produced gives the company a black eye every time a patron looks at their magazine.
Have any of the 80 members of the San Francisco Opera Association's board of directors protested the vulgar look given their company? Those whom I know are people of good taste and good judgment. Do they comment at all on the company's direction, specific productions, or artistic policies? They are trustees, after all, with a legal as well as ethical responsibility. Herein lies the nub of the problem. It's easier to go along and let the officers and the officers' choice of general manager/chief executive officer run things. It's not good form to raise an objection; better to say, "Who am I to question?"
It comes down to a question of taste, of class, of quality. The first thing that needs to happen under the new opera leadership is to set a standard once more, to project the San Francisco Opera as an institution whose productions and performances respect the composers, librettists, artists, and the public. The bottom line should not be permitted to drop below the very good. Then the company will again find class, not through slogans or marketing strategies that misrepresent the operas and the art, but through the pride of striving once again for high artistry in everything. There must be quality control at the level of the production.
During the past five years, the orchestra, chorus, individual artists, and production departments exercised quality control, dependably and independently and on their own cognizance. That was compromised when quality control of productions was left up to unsupervised guest producers and directors. When artists' performances in rehearsal indicated a vocal problem — an inability to hold pitch or perform at the expected level, for instance — they were not paid off and sent away. The Magic Flute and The Damnation of Faust were just two of the most egregious instances of that.
There must be artistic oversight — the exercise of responsibility to protect the work, all the participants, the company as a whole, and the public. The 80 directors on the Opera Association's board must step up to the plate. They must insist on standards and company performance that properly represent them, the City, the company, and its audience. Most important, they must aim for the best that opera can be. The San Francisco Opera can learn from its history and regain its place and class.
(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
©2005 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved
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