Daphne at Seattle Opera

Heidi Stober as Daphne

Photo: Sunny Martini / Courtesy of Seattle Opera

No photos available of her in the outfit she changed into for

 the transformation scene: yes, it was green.

I reviewed Seattle Opera's concert performances of Richard Strauss's Daphne for Parterre Box. I've got a couple of things to add, mostly about Heidi Stober.

I first saw her in 2008, at Santa Fe Opera, where she sang Tigrane in Handel's Radamisto. My vague recollection is that she was a last-minute substitute, but it's been many years, so take that with a grain of salt.

She wasn't a newcomer at that point; her professional opera debut was in 2001. She is now 48, and lemme say, in Daphne she sounded about 25, by which I mean her voice is completely fresh, vibrant, glowingly beautiful, utterly mobile. I don't know what combination of nature, training, and ongoing care it takes to sound that good when you've been singing professionally for 25 years, but she has it.

Back in 2022, San Francisco Opera produced Poulenc's great opera Dialogues of the Carmelites as part of its centenary season, the work's first staging at SFO in forty years. Dialogues had its U.S. premiere at SF in 1957, one of many prescient U.S. premieres under Kurt Herbert Adler. Of Stober's performance in Dialogues, Joshua Kosman wrote: 

Soprano Heidi Stober’s appearances with the company have been reliable sources of joy ever since her 2010 debut in Massenet’s “Werther.” But her performance as Blanche added a new and even deeper level of psychological specificity to her expected vocal brilliance.

I felt much the same in 2022, and her vocal splendor in Daphne just reinforced my sense that Stober has entered a new phase of musical and vocal magnificence. There are interviews in the program with her and David Butt Philip (the astonishingly good Apollo) and she mentions hoping to sing the Marschallin. Fine by me and SFO hasn't performed it since the 2006-07 season. Regardless, I'm looking forward so much to hearing her in the future, in Strauss or anything else.

I could not squeeze into my review a couple of points that weren't even visible to most of the audience for Daphne. I attended both performances, first on a cheap seat in the second tier, second on press tickets in the orchestra.

From the second tier, I could see the alphorn that plays a role in the opening of the opera very clearly. It must have been about eight feet long and was very impressive indeed. And from up there I could see that Miles Mykkanen, playing Leukippos, had some green dye in his hair.