Love in a garret
At Opera San José, Puccini’s "La Bohème" worked its magic as always
La Bohème might or might not be the best opera in the standard repertoire, but it certainly offers the most robust blend of comedy and tragedy. Many of the works that trot across the stages of the opera house from year to year can bring you to tears (or at least aspire to). Fewer will make you laugh. None achieves both goals more thoroughly than Puccini’s evergreen masterpiece, or does it by drawing on the same instantly recognizable palette of harmonies and melodic motifs.
Like most opera buffs, I’ve attended more Bohèmes than I can count, and it never fails to hit home. The high jinks of the bromantic polycule in Acts 1 and 4 are just always funny, whether the director adds extra sparkle to the staging or not. Musetta’s Waltz is one of the most sublime combinations of eroticism and humor I know. And I have a writer’s soft spot for the moment in Act 1 when Rodolfo says, “I can knock this article out in five minutes, I know what I’m doing,” only to revert instantly to “I’m not in the mood for this shit at all.”
The tragic side of the piece is no less effective. Even if you don’t collapse into full-on sobs at Mimì’s final demise, the emotional intricacies of Act 3 — how do you negotiate a romance when one partner is slowly dying and the other is kind of a jackass? — attain a degree of expressive intensity unmatched anywhere else in Puccini’s oeuvre. The psychological math in Tosca, in Butterfly, and especially in Turandot never really adds up; whatever pleasure we take in those operas derives from their respective scores. But Bohème is the work of an artist who at least once in his creative life understood human beings as deeply as Mozart or Verdi did, and could channel that understanding into music.
All of this is a somewhat backhanded buildup to saying that the production currently running at Opera San José, even though it’s not especially dazzling either musically or theatrically, is still a delight, because it’s La Bohème! This offering hits all the marks. Director Michelle Cuizon shepherds the cast nimbly around the stage, getting all the laughs out of libretto and benignly startling the bejeezus out of the audience by sending singers into the hall at one opportune moment. During Sunday’s matinee performance, music director Joseph Marcheso’s conducting was overly deliberate at times, but he mined the score for all its soaring pathos.
Sunday’s highlight was the luminous, full-toned Mimì of soprano Kearstin Piper Brown (who shares the role with former Adler Fellow Mikayla Sager). Brown made a stylish contribution to Paul Moravec’s The Shining with Opera Parallèle last year as Wendy Torrance, but her performance as Mimì was on a whole nother level — winningly tentative in Act 1, tender yet fiery in Act 3, and graced throughout with a gleaming, tireless vocal sound that cut through even the heaviest orchestral textures. I look forward to hearing her again; we should get a hint about coming opportunities once she updates her website.
As Rodolfo, tenor WooYoung Yoon deployed a bright, clarion sound full of beauty and flexibility, but he proved a wooden stage presence; not even Mimì’s death could prompt him to show much emotion. Baritone Kidon Choi, on the other hand, was a vibrant, full-throated Marcello, commanding the stage at every junction. As Musetta, soprano Melissa Sondhi shaped her Act 2 showpiece with vivacious charm. And because the Bay Area’s unwritten operatic law prohibits any production without Philip Skinner, he was on hand for the traditional Benoit/Alcindoro twofer, singing with the same tonal assurance and canny theatricality he’s been bringing to local stages for decades. Incredible.
La Bohème: Opera San José, through Dec. 1. www.operasj.org.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, Iron Tongue of Midnight: “It's the kind of opera that's so spectacularly well-written and so theatrical that, if well-directed, you'll come out of it weeping, and, well, I certainly teared up regularly during the performance.”
Mozart, the director’s cut
The San Francisco Symphony’s matinee program last Thursday was an all-Mozart affair, which usually means repertoire that we’ve heard plenty of times before. Not this time. Yes, there were some chestnuts in the lineup, including the Masonic Funeral Music and the Symphony No. 39, led with nimble alertness by guest conductor Bernard Labadie. In his first local appearance in more than a decade, the Canadian artist gave every piece the propulsive crispness that is so necessary for Mozart’s music.
The afternoon’s draw, though, was the presence of the English soprano Lucy Crowe, who made a splendid Symphony debut with music from a little off the beaten path. In particular, Crowe offered an array of “insertion arias,” pieces that Mozart would occasionally have to write for the sake of a singer who didn’t care to perform the aria that was originally in the score and would rather have a bespoke substitution of her own, thank you very much. Those included alternate tracks from Idomeneo and Le Nozze di Figaro, as well as one written for a production of Giovanni Paisiello’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (not a typo — this was the predecessor to Rossini’s operatic treatment of the same material).
Crowe’s contributions were splendid throughout, marked by silvery tone and tireless agility. The material called for it, too — when Mozart wrote a new aria to satisfy a diva’s vanity, that generally meant an increased level of showing off. In the Figaro aria, “Al desio, di chi t’adora,” the vocal writing just kept getting more and more ornate, and Crowe maneuvered her way through it flawlessly. In “Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben” from the early opera Zaide (not an insertion aria, but very much a showpiece), Crowe negotiated wide melodic leaps and expansive phrases without missing a step. She’s the real deal.
Elsewhere:
Nicholas Jones, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “the star of the program, as usual, was Mozart himself, inventive and engaging even when writing an aria for a grumpy soprano.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “Labadie performed similar miracles with the San Francisco Symphony, and I don't think I have ever heard them play Mozart so well.”
Close encountertenor
Last Tuesday, Nov. 19, brought one of those heart-wrenching scheduling clashes that concertgoers learn to hate and fear. In Berkeley, Cal Performances played host to pianist Igor Levit, with a program that featured, among other things, Liszt’s solo piano transcription of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — a lusty challenge for performer and audience alike, and one that Levit is profoundly equipped to face. San Francisco Performances, meanwhile, presented a recital by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose alluring vocalism and deep interpretive gifts are complemented by an unquenchably bubbly personal charm. A choice had to be made, and skipping either event was inevitably painful.
The user’s manual for music critics dictates that in a situation like this, when all else is equal, you opt for the event that is closest to you geographically. And so it was that I stayed on the San Francisco side of the Bay, and was rewarded with a wonderfully eclectic and charismatic recital in Herbst Theatre by Costanzo and pianist Bryan Wagorn.
Costanzo sings Handel, of course — every countertenor must — and he does it with an inimitable blend of cool precision and expressive urgency. In recent years, though, he’s become even more renowned as an interpreter of Philip Glass’ music, thanks in large part to his extraordinary performance in the title role of Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera. In Herbst, he sang a trio of Glass songs, including an excerpt from the 1986 David Byrne collaboration Liquid Days and a gorgeous excerpt from Monsters of Grace, the transfixing piece that Glass and director Robert Wilson created in 1999 based on the poetry of the Persian mystic Rumi. Glass’s style, with its crystalline clarity and motoric rhythms, is a perfect match for Costanzo’s ethereal tone.
The rest of the recital was rarely less enthralling. Supplication and Compensation, a bluesy diptych by the African American composer Joel Thompson, traded in gently mournful rhapsody. There were offerings by Liszt, Verdi, and Duparc, all delivered with burnished eloquence. And as an emblem of Costanzo’s ability to do just about everything, he concluded with an encore from his recent one-man Figaro, simultaneously playing both Susanna and the Count in their Act 3 duet. You can, if you wish, try to withstand Costanzo’s effervescent charisma and multifarious vocal gifts; but I’m not convinced it can be done.
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #243 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
African nation is angry at a non-EV? (10)
Last week’s clue:
Redesign of float is up in the air (5)
Solution: ALOFT
Redesign of: anagram indicator
float: anagram fodder
up in the air: definition
Coming up
Thanksgiving! That’s what’s coming up. But these people are still working:
• San Jose Symphonic Choir: The English oratorio was a musical form established by three of the greatest German-born composers (and then promptly run into the ground by actual English composers, which is a story for another day). The idea came from Handel, who wrote dozens of them after the London craze for Italian opera went belly-up, and he in turn inspired a pair of late-in-life efforts by Haydn. Mendelssohn, sadly, didn’t live long enough to cultivate the form fully, but Elijah, his 1846 masterpiece, boasts all the melodic suavity and dramatic presence of its illustrious predecessors. The upcoming performance by the San Jose Symphony Choir, led by artistic director Leroy Kromm, features bass-baritone Christian Pursell, a fine former Adler Fellow, in the title role. Nov. 30, Campbell United Methodist Church. www.sanjosesymphonicchoir.org.
• San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series: The San Francisco Symphony is packed with top-rank musicians, but orchestral life means we generally hear them working en masse. A wonderful complement to the orchestra’s mainstage programming is the chamber series, which offers the chance to hear these individual artists in a more intimate setting, interacting with each other one on one. This weekend’s program is devoted to sonatas and a piano trio by Beethoven, featuring concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, longtime former associate principal cellist Peter Wyrick, and pianist Anton Nel. Dec. 1, Davies Symphony Hall. www.sfsymphony.org.