Goodbye, Robert Lepage, Hello, Richard Jones!

Interior of The Coliseum, London

November, 2019

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The English National Opera is launching a new Ring production, directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Martyn Brabbins . We've seen a couple of Richard Jones stagings in SF, a superb and well traveled Hansel und Gretel and a somewhat less successful Queen of Spades. They're starting out this fall -- they hope -- with The Valkyrie, with Rheingold, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods to follow. 

There's going to be a new translation, by John Deathridge. The previous production, of which I saw The Valkyrie in 2004, used a Jeremy Sams translation that I didn't like one bit. I am puzzled at why this revival doesn't use Andrew Porter's magnificent singing translation from the 1970s, but whatever.

I don't see any casting details on the ENO web site, but let me quote from the announcement:

English National Opera (ENO) is to bring Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the London Coliseum, starting with The Valkyrie this Autumn, subject to any further lockdown restrictions. Directed by the award-winning Richard Jones, and marking the first time in more than 15 years since ENO last staged The Ring, all four parts of The Ring Cycle will be staged at the London Coliseum over five years. Rhinegold will premiere in 2022/23 followed by a reprise of The Valkyrie, and new productions of Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods in 2024 and 2025 consecutively. The Metropolitan Opera is co-producing.

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).

What I Did with My November Vacation

Interior of the Coliseum, London*

I went to London and saw four (4) operas on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. You can read my review at SFCV.

In retrospect, I'm mildly surprised that they didn't do one of the 17th c. Orpheus operas, for which they would likely have swapped out The Mask of Orpheus. The night I saw Mask, the stalls (orchestra section) appeared to be sold out. No idea what was happening upstairs, because the circulation space at the Coliseum is not great, and the intermissions were short.

Hiring Daniel Lismore was probably a smart move in terms of ticket sales. He is famous, or maybe I mean notorious, and surely drew in audience members from the fashion world. Also, it took me a while to figure out the person in the stalls whom I thought was cosplaying the opera was, in fact, Daniel Lismore. He was dressed something like the photo on this page. (If you are using a screen reader: photo shows a person in a red hat. The person has large artificial eyelashes, has a face powdered white, and is wearing red lipstick. The person has a red veil on, covering from the sides of the face back; you can't see the person's ears or hair. There's also some irregular gold mesh falling out of the hat and down the person's face to their chin, also covering the veil from the hat to the jawline on the sides of the face. The person's head is in an upside down orange bowl.)

I'm seriously curious about the fate of the 400,000 crystals that went into the costumes for Mask. Will this production ever be brought up again, at ENO or elsewhere? Surely no US company will be interested; if they were to stage a Birtwistle opera, it would likely be Gawain or The Minotaur. (But personal to US opera companies: Yan-Tan-Tethera is the real entry-level Birtwistle.) I'm also curious, as noted in the review, about how ENO funded Mask.

Other things I'm curious about:

• Why major US opera companies don't do Orpheus in the Underworld, which has delightful music and can be very, very funny.
• Why I found this Gluck Orpheus and Eurydice so much more rewarding than West Edge Opera's production this past summer. Tentatively, the conducting was way better. Also, this was the Berlioz edition, although since WEO had a mezzo Orpheus, they might have been using that too.
• Why Glass's Orphée isn't done more often. I'm very sorry I didn't get to see it twice.

More of the interior of the Coliseum

* Why, yes, ENO does invite you to photograph the interior, and also film or photograph curtain calls. They also put sweet messages to audience members on the title screen before the show and during intermissions. "Happy anniversary, dearest!" Etc.

Theater Tech

If you donate enough money to San Francisco Opera, you get invited to various events. I've been to rehearsals of various types and to several technical discussions.

The English National Opera now has a special Web site, Inside Out, that is all about what goes on back stage, from the flies to the makeup room. Take a look!