Opera review: 'Heart of a Soldier'

San Francisco Opera has done its duty. Christopher Theofanidis’ “Heart of a Soldier,” which the company commissioned, celebrates the life of Rick Rescorla. If it hadn’t been for the diligence, foresight, leadership and valor of this former soldier, who was head of security at Morgan Stanley, the death toll at the World Trade Center on that fatal day, 10 years ago, might have been nearly double. He shepherded 2,700 office workers to safety and died going back into the south tower, hoping to help more.

The premiere Saturday night in the aptly named War Memorial Opera House was a patriotic occasion. The audience, once in its seats, was asked to stand and sing the national anthem, while a flag was projected on a video scrim in front of a set of the twin towers. Two hours later — and two hours before the calendar clicked over to Sept. 11 — the orchestra played what everyone could recognize as portentous music. The stage shook. The sky filled with falling papers. Office workers fell to the floor. The scrim showed smoke.

The audience was visibly shaken. At the curtain call a few moments later, many still had tears in their eyes. The great baritone Thomas Hampson, a larger-than-life Rick Rescorla, won our hearts. The standing ovation was the kind every composer and every opera company dreams of for a premiere. Lest no emotional button go unpushed, San Francisco Opera left us with this final image: extras in firefighter costumes, in full regalia, standing proudly in the towers as the cast took its concluding bows.

This was no place for critics. Under these circumstances, dare one call “Heart of a Soldier” — which was given a convincing and engaging production by Francesca Zambello and a committed performance conducted by Patrick Summers — a failed opera?

Opera review: 'Barber of Seville' in Santa Barbara

Rossini is hot in the international opera world. Imaginative musicians, directors and scholars are rediscovering the striking originality and inventiveness of his operas. There are dozens, most unjustly ignored, that are being freshly reinterpreted, which typically means scandalously provocative productions.

For its annual opera production at the Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara's Music Academy of the West stuck with the Rossini chestnut "The Barber of Seville." Sunday afternoon, at the second of two performances, the academy, which includes a famed vocal program run by the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, played it very, very safe.

This proved a “Barber” with an aesthetic that would have ruffled no feathers during the Eisenhower years. A parochial production enticed bright young talent into making opera hopelessly irrelevant to its generation, to anything whatsoever related to real life or what is going on in any of the opera houses that matter. Still, the Granada was full and the audience appeared to be enjoying itself very much.

Opera review: David Robertson conducts 'Wozzeck' in Santa Fe

In Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” a soldier is beaten down by the system, becomes moon-drunk, slits the throat of his girlfriend and drowns himself. The system is the army, society, sexuality, fatherhood, poverty -- and sonata form.

“Wozzeck” returned to Santa Fe Opera for the first time in a decade Saturday night with the revival of Daniel Slater’s strident production. What matters most in Berg’s opera is that system, that sonata form. We feel for Wozzeck’s descent into the abyss, and if we don’t want to be him we must, as he couldn’t, adapt to our surroundings. Those surroundings in this opera are in the orchestra, not the stage.

This, then, is a conductor’s opera. In Santa Fe Saturday, David Robertson, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, conducted his first “Wozzeck.” In an exceptional performance, he simply provided everything needed.

Opera review: Vivaldi's 'Griselda' revived in Santa Fe

Six years ago, Peter Sellars came to Santa Fe to remake a troubled opera. As both director and de facto dramaturge, he provoked the rewriting of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar,” helping turn it into one of the most warmly embraced and internationally celebrated American operas of the last decade.

This summer, Sellars’ job for Santa Fe Opera has been a surprising shaping and making meaningful sense of another musically promising but dramatically quixotic opera. Once again Sellars invited the Los Angeles artist Gronk to paint a spectacular backdrop that dominates the desert amphitheater, giving the feeling that the opera is taking place within living art.

But this time the challenge is very different, as are the stakes and the audience’s expectations. And this time, Sellars’ approach is more radical and controversial.

The opera is Vivaldi’s “Griselda,” written 270 years before the revised “Ainadamar.” Europe has lately been Vivaldi-crazy. Long forgotten operas are regularly being recorded and given sexy stagings. A “Griselda” restoration seems intended by Santa Fe to spearhead a Vivaldi opera revival on our side of the Atlantic.

Culture Watch: 'Selma Jezkova' by way of Bjork

Selma Jezkovà

(DaCapo DVD)

Selma Jezková is the title character, played by Björk, in Lars von Trier’s film “Dancer in the Dark.” The Danish composer Poul Ruders has turned that film into a melodramatic opera, which will be given its U.S. premiere Friday night as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. The production will be imported by Royal Danish Opera, which premiered the opera last year, now released on DVD.

It’s a strange transference from Björk’s music (and three songs from “Sound of Music”) to that of Ruders’ edgy, dark Danish modernism, which is here in grim conflict with gloomy neo-Romanticism and ironic sentimentality. At 70 minutes, the opera is half the length of the film. Context is replaced by intense focus on Selma, a Czech immigrant to the U.S. who sacrifices her life to save the eyesight of her young son. It is a cruel, heartless opera, made riveting and bearable by Ruders’ score and Ylva Kihlberg’s powerful performance as Selma.

RELATED

More Culture Watch picks from Los Angeles Times writers

-- Mark Swed

Opera review: Gustavo Dudamel conducts 'Turandot' at the Hollywood Bowl

"Carmaggedon," schmarmaggedon. The freeways flowed Sunday evening. And if the turnout for “Turandot,” Gustavo Dudamel’s Hollywood Bowl night at the opera this summer, was less than the 13,000 who came for his “Carmen” last year, a crowd of 9,254 is still a healthy box-office figure.

Those of you who stayed home to make the trip easier for the rest of us, you missed a wild and wonderfully old-fashioned night of over-the-top opera. But thank you, and here’s your reward: KUSC will broadcast the performance on Aug. 13 at 2 p.m. Mark your calendars.

This was Dudamel’s first time conducting Puccini’s final opera. It was also the first Turandot for the warm and glorious Wagnerian and Straussian soprano Christine Brewer, to try out the role of the ice princess.

There were "Turandot" veterans as well. The Korean soprano Hei-Kyung Hong had been Liù in the Los Angeles Opera production of “Turandot” in 2002 and sang the role of the slave girl again two years later in a concert performance by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in the amphitheater. Tenor Frank Porretta, who appeared as Calaf in a “Turandot” at Opera Pacific in 2004, was asked to fill in for Francesco Hong, indisposed with laryngitis.

But mainly the attention was on Dudamel. Last summer, the rumor was that he was being groomed to become the next music director of La Scala. Now the rumor is that negotiations are taking place in Milan. An editorial in the June issue of the influential British magazine Opera called the prospect of a 30-year-old Venezuelan with limited opera experience at the iconic Italian opera house desperate and cynical. “For the sake of La Scala and … Dudamel himself, let’s hope that both sides will come to their senses,” John Allison concludes his tirade.

Opera review: Peter Brook's 'A Magic Flute' in New York

Peter Brook’s “A Magic Flute” -- which is a highlight of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival and which ends its two-week run in New York on Sunday -- is Mozart magically reduced.

At 86, the legendary British theater and film director has said that this “Flute,” which toured Europe and will head to South America, is his swan song at the Théatre des Bouffes du Nord, where Brook has been based –- and made theatrical and operatic history -- for nearly four decades.

There are seven singers, two actors and a pianist. The stage is bare but for bamboo poles. The opera is shortened to 90 minutes and performed without a break. Gone are the three ladies, the three boys, the chorus, the orchestra, the overture, nearly an additional third of Mozart’s score and a certain amount of silliness.

Various reports of the U.S. premiere of this production imported from Paris have included “stripped down,” “streamlined,” “muted,” “distilled.” It has been called a “slimmer,” a “slender” and even a “drive-by” version of, as well as a “tasting menu” from, Mozart’s beloved opera.

Thursday night, I saw it differently.

Opera Review: Rigoletto at Santa Monica Bay Woman's Club

There is a small, fairly new (founded 2008) opera troupe on the Westside that chooses to bear the freight of a famous name, calling itself the Los Angeles Metropolitan Opera. Of course, there is no relation to the Met that you know in New York, nor for that matter a previous Los Angeles Metropolitan Opera Company whose proposed “Aida” back in 1984 collapsed in a blizzard of bouncing checks.

Nevertheless, this Los Angeles Met set up shop on the tiny stage of the ancient Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club on Saturday night for a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Bare-bones pretty much sums things up. The sets consisted of just a single chair, a couple of tables, a trellis and a simulated-stone wall with door. The “orchestra” was music director Galina Barskaya playing a Yamaha Motif XS8 synthesizer, simulating a piano, strings, flutes and some rather androgynous electronic instruments.

The results were predictably modest -- and weighed down by the musical accompaniment. Despite Barskaya’s keyboard skill, the Yamaha’s characteristically mushy attacks made the pacing seem more sluggish than it actually was. Sometimes she was able to get nice results -- the imitation flutes in “Caro nome” -- but the Overture sounded hideous on the Yamaha, as did the silent-movie organ timbre for Monterone’s music.   

The voices were OK for the most part -- and in the case of Erica Lazerow Davis’s often opulent-voiced Gilda, more than OK -- and the acting followed the usual routines for this opera, with Terry Welborn’s Rigoletto making a decent stab at probing this complex character.  

“Macbeth,” “Die Fledermaus” and “Eugene Onegin” are planned for 2011-12, but I would suggest that this company would be better off exploring off-the-beaten-path chamber works that the big boys downtown and elsewhere are not pursuing. And, please, if you can’t afford an orchestra, use a piano.

-- Richard S. Ginell

Photo: Rigoletto (Terry Welborn) is comforted by Gilda (Erica Lazerow Davis). Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

 

Opera review: San Francisco Opera presents a new 'Ring' Cycle

 

When San Francisco Opera completed its new “Ring” cycle with “Götterdämmerung” on Sunday at War Memorial Opera house, the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme's exhilarating Brünnhilde got a huge ovation. Francesca Zambello, the first American woman to direct Wagner’s macho four-opera epic, was loudly cheered (if also booed by a handful).

The other notable moment during Sunday’s curtain call was when conductor Donald Runnicles hugged a despondent-looking tenor, Ian Storey, clearly trying to buck him up. This Siegfried had had a bad day vocally.

In fact, all the men, in one or another, appear to have nothing but bad days in this woman’s “Ring,” Unlike Achim Freyer’s fanciful, echt-German Los Angeles Opera “Ring” last year, Zambello’s production is a mirror to America, magnifying the mess big business moguls and particularly rapacious oil men have gotten us into.

Developed jointly for Washington National Opera and San Francisco Opera, Zambello’s “Ring” began with “Das Rheingold” in Washington in 2006, but that company has been unable to finance a full cycle. “Rheingold” reached the Bay Area in 2008 and “Die Walküre” last summer. “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung,” which I saw Friday night and Sunday afternoon, were saved for this year's complete cycle.

Opera review: David Lang's 'The Difficulty of Crossing a Field' given Southern California premiere by Long Beach Opera

Long Beach Opera on Wednesday night presented the Southern California premiere of David Lang’s opera “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” at Terrace Theater.

This basic, if unimaginative, declarative sentence, is factual. And misleading, just like the imaginative work under question.

“The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” is not about that difficulty but the difficulty of existence. The work is not exactly an opera (although, under current operatic law, anything can be an opera if it wants to call itself one) but a hybrid opera/play, unlike any other I know. And the Terrace Theater is not that Terrace Theater. The address hasn’t changed, but the audience sits, for this marvelous production, on the stage looking out into the auditorium. The performers ride up and down on the pit elevator and take over the seating area.

“Difficulty” was commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco nine years ago. The idea was by Mac Wellman, the experimental playwright, who turned to a one-page story by Ambrose Bierce. In it, Mr. Williamson, a plantation owner in Selma, Ala., walks across a field in 1854 and vanishes into thin air, leaving his wife and daughter, his brother, his slaves and witnesses (of nothing rather than of something) mystified by an erasure.

San Franciscans were not amused by the piece or production in a small 250-seat theater (local reviews were scathing). The orchestra was the Kronos Quartet; the music is repetitive, hypnotic. The striking text has the quality of a latter-day Gertrude Stein (“the hole’s a who,” “the why’s a why not”), mesmerizing whether spoken as incantation or sung as aria.

Cary Perloff’s production was a traditional costume drama, which meant it was shocking. Slaves were slaves and an overseer, an overseer. We had to deal with history of what is and what is not. The slaves find a mystical explanation. A white judge hopes to settle a property dispute with reason, the most artificial justification under the circumstances. Mrs. Williamson loses her mind. The Williamson girl has an inkling of the parallel universes that physicists are now beginning to conjure up.