Opera 2019

Stage of the The Coliseum, home of the English National Opera

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

November, 2019

(ENO encourages you to photograph the house and curtain calls and circulate those photos on social media. Other houses could follow suit, ahem, Festspielhaus and WDCH.)

Mark Berry has done his opera count for the year, so here is mine. I saw two different productions of two operas and will count each as a 2 rather than a 1. My out-of-town locations were Santa Fe, London, Paris, and Los Angeles.

Glass (Ahkenaten, Orphée), Handel (Orlando, Saul), Gluck (Orpheus), Dvorak (Rusalka) - 2

Berlioz (Les Troyens), Birtwistle (The Mask of Orpheus), Bizet (Carmen), Britten (Billy Budd), Davis (The Central Park Five), Floyd (Susannah), Gounod (Romeo), Freschi (Ermelinda), Humperdink (H&G), Janacek (Jenufa), Mazzoli (Breaking the Waves), Monk (Atlas), Mozart (Nozze), Offenbach (Orpheus in the Underworld), Poulenc (Dialogs of the Carmelites), Puccini (Manon Lescaut), Ravel (L'enfant et les sortileges), Rouders, (The Thirteenth Child), Scarlatti (Il primo omicidio), Shearer (Howards End America), Weil (Threepenny Opera) - 1

No Wagner, no Verdi, really? Really. I go out of my way to see rarities, new operas, and works I've never seen before. This year I saw several great rarities: I do not expect to see The Mask of Orpheus or Atlas again, though in both cases I wish I could.

The operatic surprises of the year for me were the beauty of Glass's Orphée and how extremely funny Orpheus in the Underworld was. (You have to love an opera with a character called Public Opinion, after all.) I have to note as well that I loathed Dialogs the first time I saw it, 20 years back at the ENO. The Met HD broadcast changed my mind right around, and now I love it. No idea what I missed the first time; it may be that I have more sympathy for and understanding of Poulenc's style now.

If I were naming the best productions I saw: John Dexter's Dialogs, Phelim McDermott's Ahknaten (Met HD), Robert Carsen's Rusalka (Paris Opera), Yuval Sharon's Atlas, David Alden's Jenufa, Tcherniakov's Troyens. Yeah, there's some controversy about the Tcherniakov, but I would say 95% of it worked for me, and the cast was tremendous all around.

Atlas was just wonderful, so beautiful and with such a great production and performers. (No photo as I don't have access to the press photos, but look around the web. It was gorgeous.)

Special mention to West Edge opera for Breaking the Waves and to Ars Minerva for Ermelinda, for great work on a small budget.

I think that the cast of SF Opera's Rusalka overall worked much better than Paris's, as an ensemble and because Rachel Willis-Sorensen and Brandon Jovanovich were better in every way than their counterparts in Paris. That said, Paris's Michelle De Young was an utterly terrifying Jezibaba and Karita Matilla dominated the stage as the Foreign Princess; both were unforgettable in their respective roles. I liked David McVicar's production, seen in SF, fine, but the Carsen production is a stunner and worth seeking out on video. I understand that its physical size and staging mean that it can only be done at the Opéra Bastille, which has special stage mechanisms.

My personal rising stars:

• Will Liverman, outstanding as the Foreman in Santa Fe's Jenufa and as Horemhab in the Met's Akhenaten. Gorgeous voice, excellent musicianship, superb stage presence, handsome man.
• Sarah LeMesh, for her heartbreaking Bess in Breaking the Waves and those songs at The World of Grazyna Bacewicz.
• Pene Pati, for stealing the show in Gounod's weirdly boring Romeo and Juliette and for the huge positive change since Rigoletto a few years ago.
• Sara Couden, who was hilarious in Ermelinda and sang fabulously. The last time I saw her, as Penelope in WEO's 2015 Il Ritorno d'Uilisse in Patria, she looked mighty uncomfortable on stage. No more!! She was a real wow in every way.

Special mention to Brandon Jovanovich, for a terrific Enée, a role that has truly become his since his first performances in Chicago, and a beautifully sung and acted, cast-against-type Prince in SFO's Rusalka; and to Karita Mattila, stunning as the Old Prioress in Dialogs and the Foreign Prince in Paris's Rusalka.

Finally, I'm sad about whatever the hell is going on with Bryan Hymel, who dropped out of three productions I saw in roughly the last year (Les Huguenots and Les Troyens in Paris, Romeo in San Francisco).