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February 28, 2006
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Mickey Butts, Executive Director and Publisher
From the beginning, the American West embraced the complex, colorful, and passionate art form of opera. An 1851 La Sonnambula in San Francisco's Adelphi Theater (and, even more surprising, an 1854 Daughter of the Regiment in Honolulu) predates even some basic creature comforts. Just after the beginning of the Gold Rush (1848) and statehood (1850), but before indoor plumbing for most people, in a city of some 35,000 brave souls, you could hear Bellini and Donizetti arias soon after their first performances in faraway Rome or Milan. As opera historian Robert Commanday has observed, "Though San Francisco had jumped from a village of tents and frame huts to a teeming hub city in two years, in 1851 it was still a frontier town with treacherous mud streets that could swallow up drunks and animals, with canvas, wooden, and adobe buildings that burned regularly in great conflagrations, many saloons, gambling halls, and already an international population. When the first visiting opera company, the Pellegrini Troupe, landed, it housed itself initially in tents made of bedsheets, then in a prefabricated house it had brought along." And yet the sound of music suffused the air, even with the mud below. The tradition continues today, in a somewhat better paved city, and its vigor has spread. With the San Francisco Opera on hiatus until the summer season, this is the time to get out there and hear the regional opera companies, whose spring programs are in full swing. When Classical Voice took a quick survey of active opera companies in the Bay Area, we found 13 of them — mostly alive and well, some impressively so. A full acccounting can be found in a companion article titled "The Vital Stats of the Bay Area's Opera Companies." The picture is even more impressive when including full or excerpted opera performances by other organizations, such as the San Francisco Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (see "Opera Without Staging"). But this account is limited to opera companies only. The 13 are:
For an opera fan, this is an adventurous, rewarding place, with rich resources that go far beyond the obvious and world-renown San Francisco Opera, the nation's second-largest company after the Met. The companies in and around San Francisco vary widely in size, scope, and finances. And yet, big and small, opera companies are all in the same business: dispensing expensive magic. This is how life goes in the trenches of small opera: City Concert Opera Orchestra board chair (and soloist, chorus member, and one-man administration department) Dan Stanley was not at home when the rare-as-hen's-teeth Le vin herbé scores arrived and some dastardly Martin fan stole them from his front porch. So Stanley and CCOO Music Director Thomas Busse spent Christmas inputting the score and printing out parts for the performance, which was just 10 days away. They even managed to get in five rehearsals, while average citizens were celebrating the New Year. You cannot buy dedication like that. Bigger companies tend to steal the show, but small can be beautiful. Berkeley Opera manages on some $216,000 a year, a fraction of San Francisco Opera's $57 million budget. Nevertheless, Berkeley has produced a long list of world and West Coast premieres and large-scale projects, such as the American premiere of Legend of the Ring, a condensed version of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Oakland Opera, another postage-stamp–sized company, has put on Phillip Glass' La belle et la b’te and Akhnaten, as well as the premiere of White Darkness, written by company founders Thomas Dean and Lori Zook. In June they will present Anthony Davis' X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Busse's CCOO doesn't even have a budget (San Francisco Foundation covers the approximately $30,000 it costs annually to run the enterprise), but it produces singularly interesting works, such as Udo Zimmermann's White Rose and a seldom-heard treatment of the Tristan legend, Frank Martin's Le vin herbé. Even the more sizable Opera San José does things its own way. Never in the red, the organization pursues the German model of a resident company, but with the twist of developing and showcasing young professionals. After two decades in a tiny theater, the company has moved into the renovated 1,100-seat California Theatre. Founder and General Director Irene Dalis marvels, "How wonderful and scary will it be not to have the excuse we have had over the years? It's one thing to have a stage that holds a dozen people, and another to produce opera in a real theater with a real orchestra pit and a stage the size of the San Francisco Opera's." The cost of opera, to producers and consumers alike, is always an issue. Possibilities range from $10 (standing room seats) to $235 at San Francisco Opera. Opera San José holds to a uniquely high minimum price of $65. Other companies are making heroic efforts to bring opera and new audiences together at affordable prices. The resurgent San Francisco Lyric Opera, for example, produces fully staged works with orchestra in the Legion of Honor's beautiful theater, charging from $15 to $28 and welcoming children under 12 for free. SFLO's Barnaby Palmer says the company's purpose is simple: "We provide affordable, accessible opera, creating the next generation of opera patron, while providing a venue for young, developing singers to perform." Some impecunious but generous organizations do wonders with pennies in the education field. West Bay Opera has its Opera in the Schools program, this year presenting a reduced version of The Daughter of the Regiment, involving speaking, singing, and super parts for students at 44 elementary schools in the Palo Alto region, bringing Donizetti's music to some 20,000 children. Martinez Opera focuses on outreach and children's programs, community events, "naive audiences, and people who have never heard live opera in this largely blue-collar community," according to Martinez Opera's executive director, Maria Billingsley. When it comes to new works and commissions, the local picture is, well, varied. In spite of Kurt Herbert Adler's splendid record of 25 U.S. premieres, important debuts (including Leontyne Price), and the establishment of the Merola program, San Francisco Opera has produced only eight world premieres in its 82 years: Norman Dello Joio's Blood Moon (1961), Andrew Imbrie's Angle of Repose (1976), the Charles Ives anthology Meeting Mr. Ives (1976), Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons (1994), André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire (1998), Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (2000), Tigran Chukhadjian's Arshak II (the original version, in 2001), and John Adams' Doctor Atomic (2005). Against that rather stodgy record stands Berkeley's already-mentioned tiny company with its many West Coast premieres, one world premiere down (John Thow’s Serpentina) and one to go (Clark Suprynowicz's Chrysalis this year), and a half dozen original David Scott Marley adaptations, from Berlioz's Beatrice and Benedick to The Riot Grrrl on Mars (after Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers). Opera San José has commissioned and premiered three works already in a little over two decades: Alva Henderson's West of Washington Square, Henry Mollicone's Hotel Eden, and George Roumanis' Phaedra. In Walnut Creek, Festival Opera is planning the 2007 West Coast premiere of Ned Rorem's Our Town, whose world premiere is just next week, at Indiana University. In Europe, opera is publicly funded, even today. For a full decade after the Berlin Wall came down, that reunified city carried a $25 billion deficit, yet it still maintained three large opera companies (and a dozen orchestras). More recently, the Berlin city government decided to wean opera away from the public trough, but the process is slow and has created public upheaval. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a tiny fraction of opera's cost is underwritten by government grants, but the rest must come from individual and corporate beneficence. Tickets provide no more than 40 percent of local companies' total income, and in some cases much less, which means those sales aren't paying for the pricey sets and costumes. Individual arts patrons and sponsors are a rarity today — San Francisco's Gordon Getty is a major exception — so it's up to foundations and corporations. Luckily there are active ones on the local scene. To name a few, there are the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (assisting Festival Opera, Lamplighters Music Theatre, Opera San José, Pocket Opera, San Francisco Opera, and West Bay Opera), Knight Ridder (aiding Opera San José), the Carol Franc Buck Foundation and the Fleishhacker Foundation (both helping fund San Francisco Lyric Opera), and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation (helping support Berkeley Opera). But drumming up funds remains an ongoing issue for every one of these organizations. Oakland Opera Theater cofounder Lori Zook explains, "We pay between 80 and 110 people, as contractors, per year, depending on the productions we're doing. It's a point of pride that none of our singers, musicians, or designers ever works for free." In spite of financial risks, however, the Bay Area's widely varied opera companies keep the performances coming. The sheer presence of so much activity in this expensive and admittedly esoteric musical field speaks for itself. Having made it through both good times and the dark days following the dot-com crash, local opera today may struggle financially, but musically it's thriving. (Janos Gereben is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.) ©2006 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved SFCV is a not-for-profit enterprise supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. If you enjoy what you find here and want to see our work continue, please consider making a contribution. By virtue of a generous matching grant, it will be doubled. Your contribution (tax-deductible) may be made by credit card
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From September 1, 1998 to September 13, 2005, SFCV has published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces, and weekly editorials, 2,182 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 52 symphony orchestras (459 reviews), 89 chamber groups (267), 36 new-music ensembles and programs (234), 39 opera companies (306), 29 choral groups (133), 15 music festivals (101), 33 early-music ensembles (170), 24 chamber orchestras (88), 6 musical theater groups (14), as well as numerous world music groups (14), recital presenters (374), youth music ensembles (10), and other organizations (12).
Michelle Dulak Thomson, Editor Richard Thomas, Associate Editor
Both Mickey Butts and Michelle Dulak Thomson read all e-mails sent to editor@sfcv.org. Mickey oversees the overall quality of the site, assigns and edits features, and manages overall operations and all business-related issues; Michelle assigns and edits all reviews, assigns and edits features, selects photos, and edits the main page. (Richard copyedits articles and oversees production.) To reach either Mickey or Michelle individually, click on our names in the list above. (To reach SFCV founder and emeritus editor Robert Commanday, send e-mail only to bob@sfcv.org.) Items relevant to the Music News column should also be directed to Janos Gereben at janosg@gmail.com. To post information about upcoming events, please fill out the form on the Calendar submissions page. (Due to the small size of our staff, we cannot post events for you, although we read with interest any press releases sent to editor@sfcv.org.) To receive this weekly journal as a free e-mail newsletter, or to unsubscribe, visit the Subscription page. Also, many (although unfortunately not yet all) previous reviews and articles are available in our Archives. To retrieve earlier pieces, click on "Archives," enter the category and/or specifics of the search query, then click "Submit." If an article fails to appear, please notify us by e-mail (editor@sfcv.org). |
