Doing us proud
San Francisco Opera's inaugural Pride Concert was a joyous celebration
The stage of the War Memorial Opera House has heard countless thrilling renditions of music by Mozart and Wagner over the decades. It’s less common to encounter Indigo Girls, Lesley Gore or Freddie Mercury in that august performance space, and less common still to come away thinking “Yes! Goddamn!”
But these were among the rewards of the San Francisco Opera’s Pride Concert on Friday night, a celebration of queer musicians that reached far beyond the company’s traditional bailiwick to embrace an array of operatic, pop and Broadway offerings. Drag queen Sapphira Cristál, her hair and costuming becoming ever more elaborately baroque as the evening progressed, was the emcee; music director Eun Sun Kim got the ball rolling briefly with the overture to Candide before handing off conducting duties to Robert Mollicone for the rest of the program.
Naturally, the world of traditional opera was well represented in the program, curated by the company’s Gregory Henkel. There were vocal selections by Jake Heggie, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Camille Saint-Saëns — in other words a tour through openly, closeted, and suspected gay composers, respectively — as well as a bit of Leonard Bernstein and Reynaldo Hahn.
Still, the splendors of the evening rested primarily on the strength of the popular numbers. Opera singers who can venture into the world of pop music without making you cringe just a little are a rare and valuable breed; the technical and expressive requirements are so far from their training that not everyone can make the adjustment. But Friday’s corps of singers — mezzo-sopranos Jamie Barton and Nikola Printz, and baritone Brian Mulligan — had this stuff down. They sang with freedom, flair and excitement; you could hear them putting their personal stamps on each number. There was never a moment when the music stiffened into formality or became awkwardly folksy.
Barton and Printz joined forces for a buoyant account of the Indigo Girls anthem “Closer to Fine,” making the duo harmonies ring through the hall with particular vibrancy. In Melissa Etheridge’s “Uprising of Love,” Barton’s swaggering zeal, accompanied by visual imagery from generations of gay protest marches courtesy of video designer Tal Rosner, felt downright inspirational. And although I’ve never managed to acquire even the slightest appreciation for Queen’s music, even I could tell that Mulligan’s rendition of “You Take My Breath Away” was a thing of tender beauty.
It's worth taking an extra moment, though, to marvel at the career trajectory of Nikola Printz, who has recently made an artistic sprint from apprentice to star in what feels like the blink of an eye. When I began covering Printz’s local appearances a decade or so ago with West Edge Opera, they (pronoun alert) sounded like a promising but still unformed singer. They did a stint with the repertory company at Opera San José, followed by a stint as an Adler fellow with the San Francisco Opera; it all seemed to be progressing a little slowly.
Nonetheless, Printz has always had a knack for standing out in a crowd. Their approach to repertoire, exemplified by a superb pansexual 2022 recital, has been all-embracing; their singing is both weighty and florid, with an agility that can catch you off-guard. (On Aug. 10 at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, Printz is scheduled to premiere a new song cycle by Heggie to poems by Taylor Mac.)
And now here they were sharing a stage with two genuine luminaries of the opera world, and joyously holding their own. Printz’s rendition of “You Don’t Own Me,” the pop hit made famous by Lesley Gore and later by Dusty Springfield, was nothing short of breathtaking — a full-on manifesto of personal liberation delivered with a blend of defiance and jubilation. Bonus points to whoever changed the lyric “Don’t say I can’t go with other boys” to “Don’t say I can’t go with girls and boys.”
San Francisco Opera has often partnered with San Francisco Pride over the years on a variety of community events, but this was the first instance of an actual Pride Concert. Let’s see it become a regular feature of the company’s calendar.
Elsewhere:
Tony Bravo, San Francisco Chronicle: “The pop half of the program took flight with Barton and Printz’s delightfully light, yet soulful, ‘Closer to Fine’ by the Indigo Girls. Singing the hit, re-popularized in 2023 by the Barbie movie, there was no ‘opera singer doing pop music’ stiffness.”
Lisa Hirsch, SFCV: “It was a joyous occasion in the War Memorial Opera House, drawing an enthusiastic audience dressed to the nines and applauding wildly for all onstage.”
Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box: “The second part of the concert featured an eclectic array of queer cultures, ranging from folk, pop, and jazz to disco anthems. Here, all three soloists shone the brightest, as they were visibly relaxed and having a good time on stage.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #274 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Break down and get rid of islands? (5)
Last week’s clue:
Fires up section of concert orchestra (7)
Solution: TORCHES
Fires up: definition
section of: hidden inside…
concerT ORCHEStra
Coming up
• San Francisco Civic Music Association: As white supremacism becomes, once again, the unapologetic law of the land, every pushback is something to be celebrated. This weekend, conductor John Kendall Bailey leads an orchestra of committed amateurs in a program of music demonstrating the point. Your guess is as good as mine on the brain-scrambled program title “Mozart to Mendelssohn: Celebrating Black Composers” (naming was presumably outsourced to AI) but the lineup, which features music by Joseph Bologne, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and William Grant Still, is unimpeachable. July 6, Herbst Theatre. www.sfcivicmusic.org.
Nikola Printz's 2022 recital still stands out in my mind as one of the greatest things I've ever seen. A link to my SFCV review was a belated addition to my Pride Concert review, as was a link to the recent Brian Mulligan artist spotlight.