ArtsSF

This operatic double-bill ended in rousing fashion, with the closing “Balls” improbably linkinga historic tennis match with singing in technological wizardry beyond anything we’ve encountered before, even on major stages. In “Balls,” imagine reenacting the historic 1973 women’s lib tennis victory of Billie Jean King (without tennis balls) over the outspoken sexist Bobby Riggs, the single most publicized event of women’s sports coming of age, with 90 million viewing it worldwide. This required vintage televideo images, a videographer along the…

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SAN FRANCISCO—The imposing early English opera “Dido and Aneas” by Purcell came to us with an incomplete score for string orchestra. In an important U.S. premiere, the latest completion comes to us via Errollyn Wallen’s “Dido’s Ghost,” unveiled by Philharmonia Baroque at the Herbst Theatre in a semi-staged version. It turns a torso into an engrossing masque-opera of great vitality running nearly two hours in length, assuming you can follow the complex interweave of characters. Purcell’s 17th-century drama, based on…

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The latest sensation in opera is the unorthodox “Omar,” written by the polymath folksinger Rhiannon Giddens, winner of a Pulitzer, MacArthur “genius” award and Grammy. With co-composer Michael Abels, she turned out the multicultural drama now staged at the San Francisco Opera. It is based on the true story of Omar ibn Sayyid, a 19th-century African-Arab Islamic savant and author who had been forced into slavery and shipped off to the cotton fields. The work is unique in opera annals,…

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For our computer era we get the ultimate lightning opera, ideal for commuting city toilers in a perennial rush. All 20 scenes are pressed into 80 minutes of fast-flashing scenes, or four minutes an average segment. You’re carried along as if riding the crest of a wave. Packed in are gigabytes of drama about the flawed genius of the handheld, a brainy superman with super weaknesses. If only he’d have taken time to hold hands more often in his abbreviated…

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The current drama of long-simmering vengeance “Il Trovatore” being a riveting experience is merely part of the story. The SF Opera managed to tighten the action greatly by eliminating two of the three intermissions, playing it in just 2.5 hours—a midweek blessing, especially for those heading to their offices in the morn. One of the heroes was the revolving stage—-yes, stage, take a bow—-enabling lightning-fast scene changes merely by a huge wall rotating from side to side, thereby bridging the…

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SANTA FE, NM—-Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” all about opera’s most famous water nymph, is too striking a fairy-tale drama to dissolve into a meandering finale. The composer with the rich romantic patina clearly had a far finer musical instinct than a theatrical one. At the risk of heresy, I’d propose engaging some current rewriter master (like formerly Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel or Alfano) to revise and tighten up the dawdling ending of an otherwise sterling opera-tragedy. In other regards, a reprise of this 1901…

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Santa Fe, NM—Did we see the Mother Lode country with its colorful miners living it up, maybe? Or the giant water sluices of Hoover Dam’s power plant? Any guess about site or scenery is possible at “The Flying Dutchman,” an opera that composer Richard Wagner thought he wrote about seafarers. And about a curse, like a majority of the operas the first week of August here. So once again (as in “Rusalka”), the revisionist decorators have struck with their zany…

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SANTA FE, NM—-Monteverdi’s opera “Orfeo,” like the ancient Greek tragedy, executes all the high drama, gore and bloodshed offstage. But this staging has the title character jumping through hoops suspended high in the sky for close to a half-hour in the most startling operatic tour de force I’ve encountered in 60 years of opera-going. The acrobatic Orfeo is the dramatic tenor Rolando Villazón, who I hope gets a nightly hazard pay supplement, like at Covent Garden, where one veteran London…

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The S.F. opera house was like a trip to Mexico City, starting with the lobby and numerous patrons in flower-capped formals, thanks to a contingent that had never been to opera before. Then came the new work in Spanish, and a fantasy based on the real-life couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, both of them art-world, New-World luminaries—-their loves, their spats, their splits, their reconciliation. For the 50-year-old composer with a strong lyrical bent, this was a promising initial venture…

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Too bad composer Richard Strauss has fallen out of favor these days, given his great work in both opera and tone poems. Happily, for its centennial year the S.F. Opera has revived the spectacular fairy tale for adults, “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman without a Shadow), for which a crowd of critics congregated from near and far for the June 4 opening. This may well end up the superior operatic experience of 2023, just in time for the troupe’s…

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