Pearl
Fishers and Queen
of Spades at San Francisco Opera (HS)
Bizet: The Pearl Fishers, San Francisco Opera,
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor,
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 14 June 2005.
Tchaikovsky:
The Queen of Spades, San Francisco Opera,
Donald Runnicles, conductor, War
Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 15 June 2005.
The two final operas
of the San Francisco Opera 2004-2005 season demonstrate
again all the good things and the bad things about Pamela
Rosenberg's tenure as general director. David Glockley
arrives from Houston Grand Opera later this year to replace
her.
A Rosenberg-hatched
marketing package for three scheduled June productions is
called "The Gamble of Love," comprising a reprise
of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte from the fall 2004 portion of
the schedule, Bizet's early bauble
The Pearl Fishers and Tchaikovsky's dark
tale from Pushkin, Queen
of Spades. Finding tenuous intellectual connections
among musically unrelated operas has been one of Rosenberg's
sincere attempts to broaden the audience for opera. She
has favored intellectual productions to emphasize the relevance
of opera and only occasionally populated the stage with
singers with real star quality. When it all comes together,
and it has from time to time, it could be thrilling.
Pearl Fishers hasn't been seen at San Francisco Opera for decades.
A product of a 24-year-old Bizet,
it has a few moments of brilliance that stamp the work as
one from the composer who would produce Carmen
13 years later. It has two certified golden moments -- the
tenor-baritone duet "Au fond du temple saint"
in Act I and the tenor aria "Mi par d'udire
ancora" in Act II. There
are also some glimpses of Bizet's
delicate touch with orchestration, but this love triangle
story is a creaky dramatic vehicle at best.
One good reason to mount
this opera might be to showcase great singers in the three
prime roles. If a conductor who can draw out the perfumed
French exoticism in the score, you might have a winner musically.
What we got was three solid but not very magical singers
in a colorful, intermittently witty series of cartoonish
sets and gaudy costumes fashion designer Zandra
Rhodes made for San Diego Opera. It's meant to evoke the
exotic setting -- a seaside village in Ceylon -- as is Bizet's
music, but German conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing
made the score sound like pretty plain stuff.
Norah Ansellem floated some lovely sounds as Léďla,
the virgin priest at the apex of the opera's love triangle,
and looked rather fetching in her two-piece magenta and
yellow outfit, a gigantic red jewel in her navel bobbing
around with every breath. Tenor Charles Castronovo
sang tentatively but with appealing sweetness as the wayward
Nadir, who yields to his passion for Léďla
and sets the potboiler plot in motion. Baritone William
Dazely, who sings regularly at
Covent Garden, had commanding presence and real musicality
as Zurga, the village leader who shares Nadir's love for Léďla.
As good as both men
looked in their costumes, star-quality singing might have
made up for the prancing dancers who seemed to be poised
(or posed) to take over every scene.
As hard as Pearl Fishers struggles to give us eye
candy to distract us from its shortcomings as a full-fledged
opera, the gray Queen of Spades production underlines the
nasty undercurrents among the characters and their raw pathologies.
For this much meatier opera, Richard Jones' dark production
borrowed from Welsh National Opera attempts to portray in
the staging what the characters are going through psychologically.
Interior sets are cramped
and perspectives skewed. Depictions of exteriors are minimalistic. A Moscow public park in the opening scene consisted
of three benches placed diagonally on a bare stage. The
same empty stage later served as the palace, and the three
benches returned to be the river embankment scene, which
leaves Lisa nowhere to drown herself.
The director has her pull a plastic bag over her head just
before the scene blacked out, a shocking moment but weak
on several counts. It happens fast and unexpectedly, and
it's an anachronism. Even if the production updates the
action a full century to 1890 (when the opera debuted),
they didn't have plastic bags in those days either.
To make up for the lack
of scenery, director Roy Rallo
has crowds of choristers and extras move across the stage
from time to time. It stylizes the crowd scenes, but it
also gets irksome. I kept thinking of Paul Taylor's dances
wherein a solo dancer or several in a group flash across
the stage for the sheer joy of it. Only this was not about
joy.
One of the best touches
in the production is the use of puppetry for the famous
ballet pastoral in Act II. Chris Pirie, who designed the
puppets for the original Welsh production, creates a charming
interlude with a tiny shepherd and shepherdess, each manipulated
by two men, and life-size puppets of an old man and, ultimately,
the countess character in the opera. They enact a more direct
reflection of the opera's plot than the Daphnis
et Chloe story usually done
as the ballet.
Later the table on which
this occurs reappears, even bigger, as the card table for
the final scene. It is tilted up at a sharp angle. For the
barracks scene, the set makes it look as if we are peering
down at Gherman in his bed (actually
stood upright), and a realistic puppet of a full-size skeleton
emerges from under the covers representing the countess.
This draws nervous laughter and gasps fro the audience.
The skeleton appears later in the final scene, looking down
as Gherman gambles away his last
cent on an ace, only to have it come up the queen of spades.
All this stuff makes
us pay less attention to the vocal shortcomings of the cast,
who do act their roles well. Tenor Misha
Didyk summons up a smallish sound
as Gherman, the army captain obsessed
with gambling who irrationally falls in love with a woman
already betrothed. Soprano Katarina
Dalayman's often squally tone makes Lisa, the woman who is
the focus of Gherman's obsession,
less attractive. Baritone John Hancock sings Prince Yeletsky
suavely, caressing the famous aria, fearlessly scaling its
high tessitura, and played him like one of Monty Python's
upper class twits. OK, maybe not quite that exaggerated,
but the character comes off as not the sharpest tack in
the drawer, which helps explain why Lisa would opt for the
distracted but brooding Gherman.
The most dramatic and
complete performance of the cast is Hanna Schwarz's Countess.
You can tell she was once the Venus of Moscow, and she still
believes it. Her little rendition of the song by Grétry
was a marvel of delicacy -- at once beautiful to hear and
clearly the production of an old woman's voice. Other singers
who made strong impressions were Adam Klein as Chekalinsky, Tómas Tómasson as Tomsky and Katherine
Rohrer as Paulina.
And oh, what a difference
a conductor makes. With music director Donald Runnicles
whipping up the orchestra to close to fever pitch, the dark
Russian soul of this score burst out strongly. The Haydn
pastiche of the pastoral came off with all its delicacy
intact. The only
conductor I've ever heard get more out of this opera's music
was Valery Gergiev. The propulsiveness
of what was coming out of the pit put the best light on
a solid if ultimately less than stellar cast, but its swept
the bizarre and compelling story to its ultimate conclusion.
Harvey Steiman
