Friday Photo

The Mall

Washington, DC

April, 2025

 

Several Items Make a Post

Some not-random notes:

• SFS Chorus Director Jenny Wong has extended her contract with the orchestra through the 2028-29 season.
• San Francisco Girls Chorus has appointed Nicolás Lell Benavides as their 2025-26 composer in residence. (He is the composer of Dolores, which was a big hit at West Edge Opera this past summer.)
• Genevieve Graves is the new executive director of Volti (as of August; yes, I'm a little behind!). The press release noted that "She holds a Ph.D. from Santa Cruz University and a B.A. from Harvard University in Astrophysics, and brings over a decade of leadership experience across tech startups and data science consulting. She is an alumna of the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir and played a significant role as that organization rose to a level of national and international prominence. She went on to found a chamber choir at Harvard and to sing with additional choirs in Boston, the Bay Area and Santa Cruz."
• Are you a French horn fan? Jesse Clevenger, who played with SFS for two seasons, is playing a couple of pieces of interest with the Vallejo Symphony this Sunday: the world premiere of John Williams's Serenade for Horn and Strings and Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, the latter with Salvatore Atti. The Britten is a great masterwork. Also on the program are works by C.P.E. Bach and Stravinsky. October 26 at 3 p.m. and I'd go if I didn't have a conflict.

Emerging Black Composers

Kyle Rivera

Photo courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

No photographer credited.

San Francisco Symphony has announced that Kyle Rivera, currently a master's student in music composition at Yale, has won the fifth Emerging Black Composers Project prize. Congratulations to Mr. Rivera!

Before I post the press release, let me note the previous winners:

• Jens Ibsen
• Xavier Muzik
• Tyler Taylor
• Trevor Weston

"Additional prizes" have been awarded to the following:

• Jonathan Bingham
• Shawn Okpebholo
• Sumi Tonooka

Of the eight composers who've won or been awarded prizes, seven are men. And this is an anonymous competition. Is this a "pipeline problem"? Not enough women applying? Maybe there should be some recruitment. I'm certainly curious about the percentage of composers who are Black women.

The press release is below the jump. There are some typos - missing spaces - in the original.

Snapshot, 2026, at West Edge Opera

Snapshot is West Edge Opera's presentation of excerpts from new operas  or operas under development. Here's the schedule for 2026; be there or be square!

The 2026 Snapshot program will be presented at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley on February 28, 2026,  in San Francisco  at the Taube Atrium Theater on March 1, 202 and will feature Cry, Wolf, Threshold of Brightness, The Joining, and Case Closed—four daring works by composers and librettists exploring extremism, memory, power, identity, and the consequences of truth and deception.

Cry, Wolf

Composer: JL Marlor
Librettist: Clare Fuyuko Bierman

 It's a gorgeous Friday night at UCLA but instead of going out, Austin and Zach are inside, online, comparing their jawlines to pictures of strangers and trying to become "wolves". Cry, Wolf explores the ways that young men use love, friendship, and genuine care for one another to push themselves down darker and deeper ideological rabbit holes.

Threshold of Brightness

Composer: Niloufar Nourbakhsh
Librettist: Lisa Flanagan

Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad defied convention to write about life, culture & sexuality as freely as a man would, becoming a pariah and cut-off from friends and family. On February 13, 1967, after a violent incident, she finds herself in her childhood home at the start of a Solstice feast.
 
The Joining

Composer: Isaac Io Schankler
Librettist: Aiden K. Feltkamp

In the world of The Joining, golems are commonplace artificial companions for the citizens of the Underground. When disaster strikes and traditions must break, can the Undergrounders rely on the prosperous Overland to use the golems for good? 
 

Case Closed

Composer: Martin Rokeach
Librettist: Steven Blum

Michelle Ahearn is a local TV news reporter who is about to be aged out of a job. In one horrible moment she causes an accident that kills local football legend Case Stahl and then flees the scene; a story that she’s assigned to cover making her a star while the lie she’s chosen to live causes her to lose everyone she loves. 

Why Can't I Be In Six Places at Once?

Things I could be doing from November 12 to 16:

• San Francisco Silent Film Festival
• Parsifal at San Francisco Opera (last performance)
• The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera (first performance, which I am reviewing, so I will be there)
• Modigliani Quartet plays Kurtage, Haydn, Beethoven at SFP
• Esmé Quartet plays Schubert String Quartet No. 15 in G Major, D. 887 at SFP
• Ercole Amante at Ars Minerva
• Berkeley Symphony, conducted by Ming Luke
• San Francisco Contemporary Music Players
• Gautier Capuçon's amazing recital called Gaia

Museum Mondays

 

Links Together

Elizabeth Catlett

National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC

April, 2025

Friday Photo

Metro Station

Washington, DC

April, 2025

 

Museum Mondays

Acid Rain, side view

Chakaia Booker, 2021

National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC

April, 2025

 

Acid Rain

Chakaia Booker, 2021

National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC

April, 2025

Friday Photo

Pom Pom Mushrooms

Berkeley Bowl West

Berkeley, CA

September, 2025

 

Berkeley Symphony: Lancaster, Adams, Haydn

Berkeley Symphony

Helen Kim plays Samuel Adams's Chamber Concerto; Edwin Outwater conducts

Photo: Louis Bryant III

Berkeley Symphony has a more-exciting-than-usual season lined up, because they are looking for a new music director, following Joseph Young's to-me-surprising departure at the end of the 2024-25 season. I missed the first concert, which I am now kicking myself for. I expect to get to the rest, if I am in town, because I'm trying to prioritize the regional orchestras, which, individually and in toto, have a higher percentage of programs that interest me than San Francisco Symphony does. I wish that weren't true, because the programming was so interesting under Esa-Pekka Salonen; it is reasonable to hope that things pick up now that the orchestra has a new artistic administrator.

ANYWAY. I made it to this past Sunday's Berkeley Symphony concert, which was held at First Congregational Church, oops, First Church, known to those who perform there as First Congo. It's a slightly difficult venue for larger ensembles, because it is very, very resonant. That makes it a joy for choruses, because we can really hear ourselves, but can muddy the music with an orchestra. This is kinda the opposite of Zellerbach Hall, where Berkeley Symphony used to perform; it is extremely dry because it's made of concrete. It's equipped with a Meyer Constellation system but that doesn't fix all of the sonic issues.

Edwin Outwater conducted Sunday's concert. He has major conducting responsibilities at the SF Conservatory of Music and is a pretty regular guest at SFS. I was certain the first half of the program (Yaz Lancaster's Gender Envy and Samuel Adams's Chamber Concerto) would be fine and dandy because I've heard him in new music before.

And indeed they were! Gender Envy was a sparkly curtain-raiser, moved there from its original place at the top of the second half of the concert. It ran through a surprising number of styles in its eight minutes, sounding folkish at times and kinda techno at others. It used some alternative playing techniques; I noted a few string players using their instruments for percussion, for example. Part way through, there was a canonical section, with the first violins, second violins, flute, and other instruments chiming in.

Samuel Adams's Chamber Concerto, for violin and orchestra in five movements, was on a completely different scale.  The program said it was 31 minutes long; while I didn't time it, I'm certain that it was longer than than, by up to ten minutes.

I have no complaints about the playing, on the part of violin soloist Helen Kim or the orchestra. (If Kim's name seems familiar, she was associate principal second violin in SFS for some years; a year ago, she became the associate concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony.) Kim is a most excellent violinist, very committed to new music. She plays with a penetrating tone that cut nicely through or rode on top of the orchestra, as required. 

Maybe it was the construction of the piece that made me think it was that much longer than the stated time. Adams has an exceptionally inventive voice, with a great ear for interesting sonorities; the orchestration of the Chamber Concerto is really beautiful. He sets up the work so that the orchestra and soloists are cooperative, rather than using the standard romantic model of the soloists and orchestra at loggerheads with each other.

But there are some real structural issues with the piece. More than once, I found myself writing "this movement is just too long." The composer's sonic fecundity gets away from him, and he just can't stop inventing new things. On top of that, whether as a performance choice by Outwater or because of how it's notated, the movements somewhat blended into each other. I can't swear that my notes are accurate as to what's in what movement. I do know that there was a pause that I thought was a moment between movements, but then I realized that most likely what followed was a continuation, not a new movement. That....was a little disconcerting. 

Still, there were certainly many extraordinarily beautiful moments in the Chamber Concerto. It's quite dramatic, even cinematic, sometimes oceanic. There is at least one theme from the first movement, Prelude: One by One, that recurs in the last, Postlude: All Together Now. I'm sure that there's more connection between those two movements, but...there's so much interesting detail that it was hard to grasp the overall structure. 

No, I hadn't looked at the score beforehand, though...I spent a couple of hours before the concert in the UC Music Library and maybe I should have. I also didn't read the program notes, which had more than a few clues about what's going on the Chamber Concerto, which included quotations from a big work by another composer, some guy named John Adams, who might be a relation. Anyway, I'd love to hear this again sometime.

Then there was the second half of the concert, Haydn's Symphony No. 100 in G Major, nicknamed "Military" for its orchestration. I had never heard Outwater conduct anything composed earlier than Gershwin, so I was quite curious what his Haydn would be like.

Reader, it was terrific. His tempos were just right; there was plenty of wit; the orchestra played crisply and sounded like they were having fun. I'm always in favor of more Haydn and this was a pleasure to hear.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. I heard that nod to the Berg violin concerto too.

Museum Mondays, a day late

National Building Museum

Washington, DC

April, 2025

 

Kavalier & Clay at the Met

 

Cover, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I read Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay back around 2000 or 2001; my paperback copy of the book looks exactly like the graphic above, so I bought the book after it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. I loved the book's immense sweep and its colorful characters.

I raised an eyebrow when Mason Bates and Gene Scheer's Metropolitan Opera commission was announced, because, really, it didn't seem like a great candidate for an operatic adaptation, given the scope and complexity of the novel. I was surprised that the opera wasn't listed for an HD broadcast this season, and I decided against a quick NY trip, given various writing responsibilities I have. 

Now the reviews are coming in and it seems reasonable to start a media round-up.

• Joshua Barone, NY Times
• Justin Davidson, Vulture/New York, who incorporates a critique of Peter Gelb
• Heidi Waleson, WSJ (paywall)
• Sylvia Korman, Parterre Box
• Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (a glancing blow only)
• Alex Ross, The New Yorker (a body blow)
• George Grella, NY Classical Review
• David Gordon, TheaterMania
• Financial Times (so paywalled I have no idea who wrote it)

Friday Photo

Pink Oyster Mushrooms

Berkeley Bowl West

Berkeley, CA

September, 2025

 

Family Matters

Rigoletto

Act 1, Scene 1

San Francisco Opera

Photo: Cory Weaver

I spent a lot of time over the last week with Giuseppe Verdi, in the form of two of his middle period masterpieces, Rigoletto and La traviata. What these operas have in common is the intense parent-child relationships, a major theme in the composer's Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlo(s) as well.

San Francisco Opera just ended a top-notch run of Rigoletto, seen once more in the great Michael Yeargan production, the design of which is based on the works of Giorgio de Chirico. I've seen several of the bring-ups and it never fails to impress me. It is both shadowy and beautiful, its colors a little artificial, its architecture askew. Its lurid colors embody the decadence of the Duke of Mantua's court and the haunted spirit of the opera, where an assassin has the closest thing to a clearly-defined moral code. José Maria Condemi directed and did a terrific job with it.

My recollection is that the production has gotten a bit less decadent over the years; I have vague memories of women in breast-baring body suits and sexual behavior in the first half of Act 1 that ah went way beyond flirtation. I can understand why the Opera might have wanted to tone it down, but the atmosphere at court does justify that degree of decadence. Regardless, I love this production and as far as I'm concerned SFO can use it until I'm dead and gone.

In any event, this was a bring-up for the ages. I don't think of Rigoletto as being a conductor's opera, because the work is so great that it will be effective with a merely competent conductor, yet Eun Sun Kim made it a conductor's opera. I could hardly believe the range of colors she got out of the orchestra, the perfect rubato, the drama, the way the silences rang with tension. To me, her conducting sounded deeply informed by her Wagner conducting, which has been awesome in the last two seasons. This was just spectacular Verdi.

On to the singing. The originally-scheduled Duke, Giovanni Sala, dropped out in early August for the usual "personal reasons." I was not very impressed with Yongzhau Yu, who stepped in. He went sharp a lot; his voice is on the tight, thin, side; he didn't project the kind of allure that the Duke should have for both Gilda and Maddalena to become so attached to him.  I realize that with Sala dropping out so close to the start of rehearsals, it would have been difficult to find a first-class replacement because all the best tenors are booked solid at the start of a season.

I liked Amartuvshin Enkhbat's Rigoletto well enough. He has a tremendous voice of the right type, both powerful and beautiful. He is a little emotionally stiff and not a great physical actor, but his singing was first class.

Adela Zaharia, last heard as Donna Anna in the last SFO Don Giovanni, was the vocal star of the show, singing a really spectacular Gilda and presenting her as a more stubborn and self-assured character than you usually get. I will say that I do not expect to hear the role more beautifully sung than Ruth Ann Swenson back in the late 1990s –– Swenson had possibly the most beautiful lyric soprano voice I've ever heard –– but Zaharia has a much better dramatic sense and made a lot out of Gilda.

In the smaller roles, Peixin Chen was a fantastic, threatening Sparafucile, and Adler Fellow Olivier Zerouali made a huge impression on me as Marullo.

And then there was J'Nai Bridges as a sexy Maddalena, with tons more character than the usual Maddalena in that role, largely because, face it, she is a big star who has sung Carmen and a major role in Girls of the Golden West with SFO. You're not alone in wondering what she was doing in Rigoletto, so let's just chalk it up to luxury casting.

All in all, it was a very satisfying Rigoletto.

• Steven Winn, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills. Patrick's analysis of the role of honor in the opera is important to understanding how everyone behaves here, and I love his description of the sets. However, I've been privately arm-wrestling with him about Gilda for roughly as long as we've known each other. I think it's a misnomer to say that she "has sex with the Duke;" given her overprotected upbringing, what do we think she even knows about sex? Does she understand it well enough to give consent? She is extremely upset, and I don't think it's just shame, when she comes out of the room where she was locked up with the Duke. It's also worth keeping in mind that while she talks about going up to Heaven while she's dying, that's partly in relation to her dead mother, who she thinks is watching over her and whom she will join in Heaven. Being perverse and self-defeating is one thing; letting yourself be killed (SPOILER SORRY) in place of the awful man you're in love with is quite another.

Avery Boettcher (Violetta) and Brad Bickhardt (Alfred)

La traviata, Livermore Valley Opera

Act 2, last scene

Photo: Barbara Mallon

Then there was La traviata at Livermore Valley Opera where, once again, you get those very intense and overwhelming family relationships. In this case, Giorgio Germont shows up in Act 2 to do whatever he can to separate his son Alfredo from the woman he loves, because she is a former courtesan and Alfredo's involvement with her, which is very public, is about to wreck Alfredo's sister's engagement and the family's reputation. The Germonts are bourgeoisie, as far as I can tell; after all, if they were noble, Alfredo would get a little talking-to about being less public, but nobody would try to separate him from his lover. (See Baron Duophol, Violetta's once and future patron, for example.)

We've got more singing about life in Heaven here, when Violetta asks Germont to remember her to Alfredo's sister ("Dite alla giovine"), because Violetta, who is dying of tuberculosis, will watch over the sister from Heaven.

The big star of La traviata was, beyond a doubt, the spectacular Avery Boettcher, who gave a fabulous, three-dimensional, beautifully sung performance as Violetta. The character is on stage for about 90% of the opera, the exception being the scene in Act 2 where Germont tells Alfredo why he's better off without Violetta, so it's possible for the Violetta to pretty much carry the whole opera. That is more or less what happens here. I'd say that Boettcher is worth the price of admission for her tour-de-force performance, and you know, it's great to see opera at the Bankhead Theater, because it is tiny and small details of a performance register strongly.

What I got from seeing these two operas in close proximity was a renewed respect for and love of middle-period Verdi. Yes, these operas are done too often; yes, the casts are not always first class; yes, yes, yes, but they are as popular as they are because of how brilliantly put together they are, how well Verdi creates drama, how well he sets the text, how vivid his characterizations are, the emotions they bring up for the audience. 

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. "Most mesmerizing was her commanding traversal of Act 3, from a wrenching “Addio del passato” through Violetta’s quavering death throes." 

 

InterMusic SF: San Francisco Music Day

War Memorial Opera House

Vintage postcard, collection of Lisa Hirsch

InterMusic SF will put on its annual San Francisco Music Day on Sunday, October 19, from 12 noon to 6 p.m., at the Veterans Building, which is the neoclassical building at MacAllister and Van Ness, across a courtyard from the War Memorial Opera House. It's the far building in the postcard above.

Barbara Heroux, former Executive Director of the contemporary music vocal ensemble Volti and former Artistic Director of Lamplighters Music Theatre. will be the emcee for the whole day.

I can't put the entire schedule here, but you can see it at this web page and buy tickets here. So much to hear!

West Edge Opera 2026

West Edge Opera's 2026 Festival will include the following:

• Britten, The Turn of the Screw. Mark Streshinsky, dir; Jonathan Khuner, cond.
• Handel, Rinaldo. Emily Senturia, cond.
• Geter, American Apollo. Nataki Garrett, dir., Kedrick Armstrong, cond.

There will also be an orchestra preview of Claude & Marcel, by Alyssa Weinberg and Stephanie Fleischmann. This opera will premiere in 2027.

The Metropolitan Opera in Saudi Arabia

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The Metropolitan Opera has decided to accept $100 million from Saudi Arabia (gift link) and will perform there for three weeks annually over a five-year period.  From the NY Times story I linked to:

Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, its restrictions on free speech and its role in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, have led some in the West to call for shunning the kingdom. But in recent years both the Biden and the Trump administrations have sought closer relations with Saudi Arabia. And the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has relaxed some rules in the kingdom, tried to diversify its domestic economy beyond oil and worked to reshape its global image through large investments in business, sports, tourism and culture.

Under Mr. Gelb, the Met has been a vocal champion of political freedom and human rights in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, cutting ties with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and with artists who had supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including the star soprano Anna Netrebko.

Mr. Gelb said his support for cultural exchange with Saudi Arabia was different. He called the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, which American intelligence officials said had been approved by Prince Mohammed, “a horrendous event.” But he said he had been encouraged by the new social freedoms given to Saudi women, saying that the country was “trying to improve itself in the eyes of its own population and in the eyes of the world.”

Yeah, no. This is part of a general artwashing campaign on the part of Saudi Arabia. I know about this in part because recently I started getting press releases about various Saudi artistic endeavors.

The story I linked to doesn't even mention that the 9/11 attackers were largely Saudi and the plot was masterminded by a Saudi. It doesn't mention that the Saudis have bribed the Trump family through a gigantic amount of money that Jared Kushner is managing.

Related: read this Guardian story about comedians performing in Saudi Arabia.

It really sucks that the Met has fallen on bad financial times. Maybe Gelb should figure out how to get fund-raising back on track instead of accepting money from Saudi Arabia.

 

Museum Mondays

Ruth Asawa

Detail of a drawing of the rings of a redwood tree

Ruth Asawa Retrospective, SF MOMA

August, 2025

 

Runnicles at San Francisco Symphony

Donald Runnicles

Courtesy of his website

Well, I was extremely happy with this week's SFS program, which featured Donald Runnicles conducting Berg's Seven Early Songs and Mahler's First Symphony. For the Berg, he had mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts as soloist, and...her performance was a revelation.

Roberts has sung at SF Opera five times since 2013, in these roles:

• Giulietta, Tales of Hoffman
• Carmen, Carmen
• Bao Chai, Dream of the Red Chamber
• Dorabella, Così fan tutte
• Offred, The Handmaid's Tale

Seeing her in these roles would not have prepared you for the vocal splendor she brought to the Berg, which was gorgeously, immaculately sung. Over in Europe, where she was a member of the ensemble at Deutsche Oper Berlin, she's been singing roles like the above, but also the great Wagner mezzo and Zwischenfach roles. I can imagine that they are magnificent, and I can only hope that she'll be in future Wagner productions at SFO, in roles that would be ideal for her.

As it happens, Deutsche Opera Berlin is where Runnicles headed after SFO, a position he'll be leaving at the end of the 2025-26 season. He is also the chief conductor designate of the Dresden Philharmonic this season, a position he will hold for some time to come. I was wowed by his Mahler, and I've been a fan of his for years, so I consider the people of Dresden to be lucky indeed.

[Update, 9/30: I have now had three people whom I'd consider to be very knowledgeable ask me why Runnicles isn't the music director of S.F. Symphony, and another speculating that maybe he could be principal guest conductor. Well, see the above; he seems to be very happy working in Germany, and also, he doesn't really have an ongoing relationship with the orchestra.]

My review ran very long and I could not compliment every solo player, much as I wanted to. Yubeen Kim and the whole flute section were marvelous; Eugene Izotov was spectacular at many crucial moments and the double reeds were amazing in the Klezmer interjection in the third movement; Carey Bell, as ever, was wonderful and so was Matthew Griffith on E-flat clarinet. Joshua Elmore was right there in a number of critical moments. I loved the timpani / double bass duet at the beginning of the third movement, so kudos to Ed Stephan and Scott Pingel. Then there were the brass, with principal trumpet Mark Inouye fabulous throughout, and all of the horns and trombones, plus Jeff Anderson on tuba:

Horns – Michael Stevens (Principal), Jonathan Ring, Jack Bryant, Jessica Valeri, Roy Femenella, Amy Sanchez, Meredith Brown and Alicia Mastromanco

Trombones – Ben Smelser (Principal), Paul Welcomer, Chase Waterbury and Kyle Mendiguchia

Reviews:

• Lisa Hirsch, S.F. Chronicle / SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International 
• Michael Strickland, S.F. Civic Center
• Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills

Joshua Kosman and I aren't usually this far apart. I didn't hear the clumsiness he does in the Mahler, which maybe I'd describe as extroverted and exuberant. (I even asked my SFCV editors, in email, why I hadn't gotten the word "exhilarating" into my review.) But back in the SFS centennial season, I liked the BSO's visit more than he did. I heard grandeur, he heard lack of discipline. I'd love to revisit those programs, lead by Ludovic Morlot, to see how I'd react to them today. JK could well have been entirely correct, given Seiji Ozawa's overlong tenure and James Levine's health problems and divided attention. Or maybe I like a particular style of big-boned conducting that he doesn't.

Department of Speculation

Post, 2011 SFO Ring

San Francisco Opera hasn't announced when they're doing the Ring next, though since it's known that Eun Sun Kim will conduct, it'll be before her contract expires at the end of the 2030-31 season. Given the problematic financial environment for the arts just now, well, it could be a ways out. [Update: A couple of people have mentioned to me, and I have now seen with my own eyes, that Opera says it'll be in June, 2028. They're usually quite well informed.]

Still, as I wrote in my Santa Fe Die Walküre review, we're at a moment of generational change in Wagner singing. Let's take some time to speculate as to who might be in the next SFO Ring. I have absolutely no inside information on casting; these are strictly my hallucinations. Also, my lists are in alphabetical order, not the order in which I'd like to see these roles cast.

Wotan

• Nicholas Brownlee
• Ryan Speedo Green (singing his first this year, in Santa Fe and LA; apparently signed for the next Met Ring)
• Brian Mulligan (sang it in Europe, in concert, with YNS)

Fricka / Waltraute / Norn

• Jamie Barton
• Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
• Raehann Bryce-Davis
• Irene Roberts
• Sarah Saturnino
• Annika Schlicht

Alberich

• Tomas Konieczny
• Falk Struckmann

Brünnhilde

• Lise Davidsen (can SFO pay her fees?)
• Christine Goerke
• Anja Kampe (an impressive Isolde last year in SF)
• Camilla Nylund (an impressive Kaiserin in 2023 in SF)
• Tamara Wilson

Sieglinde

• Vida Miknevičiūtė
• Irene Roberts (I know, I know, she's a mezzo, but believe me she has the vocal chops for this)
• Elisabeth Strid
• Suggestions from Charles Bush, hoisted from the comments, with my own comments added:
• Jennifer Holloway
• Elza van den Heever. By the end of 2025-26, she'll have been back at SFO for three productions, which makes her a strong candidate to be included in the Ring.
• Rachel Willis-Sorensen. I hear that she is aiming away from Wagner, but yes, she'd be great. Such a beautiful voice.

Siegmund

• Clay Hilley
• Brian Jagde
• Brandon Jovanovich
• Jamez McCorkle
• Simon O'Neill
• Russell Thomas
• Suggestions from Charles Bush, hoisted from the comments, with my own comments added:
• John Matthew Myers. I've seen him twice, in Gurrelieder, jumping in for Jovanovich, and as Iopas in the truncated Seattle Les Troyens. He's very impressive.
• Michael Spyres. HELL YES.

Siegfried

• Daniel Brenna
• Clay Hilley
• Simon O'Neill?
• Andreas Schager
• Stefan Vinke
• Suggestions from Charles Bush, hoisted from the comments:
• Klaus Florian Vogt (?)
• Michael Spyres (!?!)
  

Loge / Mime

• Russell Thomas
• Brenton Ryan
• Suggestions from Charles Bush, hoisted from the comments, my own comment added:
• Sean Panikkar. Oh, I wonder if he's a plausible Siegmund? He was wonderful in the L.A. Satyagraha and more recently as Stravinsky's Oedipus at SFS.

Hunding / Hagen

• Peixin Chen
• Jongwon Han
• Soloman Howard

Who do you like?

Friday Photo

City of Rocks State Park

Faywood, NM

July, 2025

 

Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera 

Rod Gilfry as Owen Hart, Caroline Corrales as Kitty Hart, Nikola Printz as Jad Boucher, Samuel White as Howard Boucher, and Jamie Barton as Sister Helen Prejean

Not long ago, I looked over the notes I had from the 2000 world premiere run of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's first opera together, Dead Man Walking. At the time, several years before I became a professional music writer, I didn't think all that much of it. I was therefore somewhat surprised by the opera's popularity (it has had 82 bring-ups to date, all over the United States and Europe), except for the obvious appeal of the story and the excellence of the singers who were in the premiere.

I saw the 25th anniversary production last Saturday, and boy, was I ever wrong. I did not have enough experience with new opera to adequately analyze the music and libretto. (I'm not the only one to have made this mistake; a friend said the same had been true of him back then.)

So I'll come down on the side of Joshua Kosman, whose review a couple of weeks ago mentioned that back in 2000 he'd called it a masterpiece. Dead Man Walking is a remarkable opera, for the strength and singability of the libretto, which is superbly structured, for the excellence of the text-setting, for the beautiful and imaginative orchestration. It's no wonder the opera has been produced so regularly over such a long period. It's an amazing record for a modern opera, and particularly amazing when you keep in mind that Dead Man Walking was Heggie's first opera.

The opera opens with a rape and double murder, and there is no doubt that Joe de Rocher and his brother are guilty. He's not going to be pardoned, his sentence isn't going to be commuted to life imprisonment. The opera isn't really focussed on him; the subjects are Sister Helen's journey to find true Christian forgiveness for the terrible crime he has committed and the terrible harm the crime and its aftermath have had on the families of the murdered teenagers. (Here I'll note that I am not a Christian and would feel no call to forgive a murderer for such a crime. Nonetheless, for many reasons I'm opposed to the death penalty and have been my entire adult life.)

Patrick Summers, who has lived with this opera since 2000, conducted the performance very beautifully. Jamie Barton sang with luminous beauty as Sister Helen, and acted with a kind of understated, plainspoken tartness. Brittany Renée, superb in Omar and La Bohème, was here terrific as Sister Rose, who teaches with Sister Helen. Susan Graham, who created the role of Sister Helen, has come full circle and was deeply moving as a fragile, frightened Mrs. de Roche. Ryan McKinney, one of the go-to baritones for new American opera, was an all-too-human Joe de Rocher. Rodney Gilfry was heart-rending as Owen Hart, father of one of the dead children. Caroline Corrales, Nikola Printz, and Samuel White were all excellent as the other parents of the children.

Susan Graham as Mrs. Patrick De Rocher in Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's "Dead Man Walking."

Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

I liked Leonard Foglia's staging and the uncomplicated unit set that works for the convent, the schoolroom, the prison.

I came out of the 2000 performances mostly remembering Susan Graham singing "He Will Gather Us Around," a beautiful hymn that Heggie wrote for the opera, and Frederica von Stade's brilliance as Mrs. de Rocher, the other of the condemned man. I'll remember a lot more this time around.

Two performances remain; catch Dead Man Walking while you can.

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Lily Janiak, S.F. Chronicle
• Nicholas Jones, SFCV
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• Matthew Travisano, Parterre Box. Interesting insights into the weaknesses of the opera.
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Michael Strickland, S.F. Civic Center. Again, interesting insights into weaknesses
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• San Francisco Opera, Dead Man Walking at 25 website: oral history and lots more about the creation of the opera.

Relocated Noise

Alex Ross's long-running blog, The Rest is Noise, has relocated from TypePad to WordPress. If your feed reader or other indicator (there's a Blogger function that acts like a feed reader...) fails to pick up new posts, that is why: the domain name has not changed, but its IP address has. So delete the old feed and search for the blog name, then add that feed. That is what I had to do on Inoreader, my current feed reader.

(If you don't have a feed reader, you should. Never –– well, almost never –– miss an article, which I say because Inoreader seems to occasional skip a Parterre Box article, and I don't know why.)

Shawnette Sulker and Sara Couden in Concert

Star singers Shawnette Sulker (soprano) and Sara Couden (contralto) are giving a 90-minute concert of arias and duets by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Delibes this Sunday. Zachary Gordin is their collaborative pianist and the concert is under the auspices of Festival Opera, which has a fine ongoing series of recitals.

They are both terrific and I would go see this if I weren't reviewing La Traviata at Livermore Valley Opera.

Concert details:

4 p.m.

Sunday, September 28, 2025

Piedmont Center for the Arts

801 Magnolia Ave.

Piedmont, CA

$40

Museum Mondays

Eggplants

Watercolor

Ruth Asawa Retrospective

SFMOMA, August, 2025

 

Friday Photo

Cactus

City of Rocks State Park, New Mexico

July, 2025

 

So Do They All

Nicole Koh (Despina, as the Doctor), Ricardo José Rivera (Guglielmo), Jonghyun Park (Ferrando)

Opera San José Cosi fan tutte

Photo: David Allen

I had a fun time covering Opera San José's hilarious production of Così fan tutte, directed by Alek Shrader and conducted by Joseph Marcheso. The twist of this production is that the audience gets to vote on how the opera ends. It's a gimmick, but a fun one; I kept my eyes open during Act 1 for the setups for the various endings. I can report that the opening-performance audience went for the straight ending, where everyone winds up with their original lover. Personally, I'd favor everybody heading off on their own, preferably after heaping abuse on Don Alfonso, sadder but wiser.

• Lisa Hirsch, S.F. Chronicle (feature)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV (review)
• Related: Harvey Steiman, Seen & Heard, reviews Renée Fleming's production of Così, in which the soprano finds her own entertaining resolution for the plot.

I'm hoping to have further reviews to post later this week, but we'll see.

It's Official.

Screenshot from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra website

My SFCV article updating SF* orchestra personnel for 2025-26 noted that Timothy Higgins was "on leave" from San Francisco Symphony, because no announcement had been made by the CSO about his appointment.

Now there's a press release and, as you can see from the above, he's on their website. With Christopher Bassett on leave and back in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Nick Platoff's resignation (he's now the principal at Houston), the SFS trombone section is currently down to Paul Welcomer.

Higgins might return to SFS at the end of the season. The labor settlement undoubtedly make SFS more attractive than it was, say a week ago, and the weather is better here. But the cost of living is higher than in Chicago and they've got a new music director coming in, one who has a reputation for working very respectfully with musicians, while who knows who will get the appointment in SF.