ArtsSF

How long since a world-premiere opera got an instant standing ovation almost five minutes long? With several scenes en route evoking spontaneous applause? The Berkeley Ph.D. grad Mason Bates pulled it off July 22 with his first such effort, a bio-opera on “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.” In portraying the late iPhone creator, warts and all, it spotlighted his unique overdrive personality and headstrong brashness. Often his own worst enemy, the workaholic Jobs drove his coworkers and women in his life as hard as himself, with only his Buddhist teacher Kobun and his own wife Laurene injecting equilibrium into existentialism before the untimely illness and death.

Stellar, no-holds-barred singing by all five principals marks the powerful “Lucia di Lammermoor” currently at the Santa Fe Opera, with Brenda Rae in the title role. If in his most arresting drama the very Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti nudged the Walter Scott story away from Scotland, this production firmly transplanted it to Italy. Instead of kilts and bagpipe regalia, we get white-tie formals and gowns straight out of “La Traviata,” without so much as a Scottish moor or heath in the background (The minimal backdrop appears to be straight out of the US Steel factory).

The Russian opera-fantasy “The Golden Cockerel” brings the glorious music of Eastern exoticism by Rimsky-Korsakov onto the stage here, with voluptuous courtly costumes fitting the 1907 era when it debuted. But, saddled with a puerile libretto in Russian, not even the brilliant stage direction by Paul Curran could save this farcical tale about an impotent, buffoonish ruler more obsessed with personal comfort than the well-being of his people. The intent was clearly to satirize the real Tsar then, and perhaps even ruling luminaries of our time in this revival.