Media Round-Up: Tristan und Isolde, San Francisco Opera

Annika Schlicht (Brangäne) and Anja Kampe (Isolde)

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV and SF Chronicle. SF Opera decided to call this opera Tristan and Isolde, so my review follows that convention, but this is my blog and I'll stick with the one-letter-different German.
• Opera Tattler
• My own tattling: at the October 23 performance, I was in the orchestra section, row H, audience left, just off the center aisle. To my left, in row G or H, someone's phone went off two or three times, mercifully not very loudly, but DURING THE ACT 1 PRELUDE.
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills. A beautiful meditation on what it's like to experience Tristan.
• Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box
• Gabe Meline, KQED. "Its effect is to warp time itself."
• Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International. 
• Thomas May, The Gramophone. "This is Kim’s first outing with Tristan, yet her devotion to the score yielded a ravishing transparency of detail and colour, always in sync with the deepest layers of Wagner’s soul drama. In the performance I attended (the second of the run), she showed a preternatural grasp of Wagner’s structuring of time that made sense of the shift from nervous anticipation to a zone beyond counting in the second act and that was at its most compelling in the dark night through which Tristan ventures in the third."
• Michael Milenski, Opera Today
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. I did not see the 1991 Tristan he references, but I certainly was there for the 1998 and 2006, which were redeemed primarily by Donald Runnicles.
• Joshua Kosman, S.F. Chronicle, 1998
• Joshua Kosman, S.F. Chronicle, 2006
• Joshua Kosman, essay in the digital
  program. You'll have to scroll to get there, but it's about a crucial aspect of the opera, one that a review just can't discuss at any length.

Check back in a few days for more reviews.