The Pigeon Keeper at Opera Parallèle

Craig Irvin (Thalasso), Shayla Sauvie (Kosmo), Angela Yam (Orsia), Bernard Holcomb (Pigeon Keeper / Teacher / Widow Grocer) in David Hanlon and Stephanie Fleischmann's The Pigeon Keeper

Photo: copyright 2025 Stefan Cohen, courtesy of Opera Parallèle

Opera Parallèle's The Pigeon Keeper, by composer David Hanlon and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, is the first work I've heard from the Opera for All Voices project. San Francisco Opera was originally one of the lead companies, along with Santa Fe Opera. The other participating companies were Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Minnesota Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Sarasota Opera and Seattle Opera. 

Here's crucial paragraph from SF Opera's 2017 press release about OFAV:

The consortium is working together to commission new American operatic works that are flexible in scope and scale, with the potential to be performed in smaller venues and off the main stage while striving for rich storytelling and artistic integrity. The first new work, composed by Augusta Read Thomas with a libretto by Jason Kim, will receive its premiere in 2019 at Santa Fe Opera. The second commission, by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Kimberly Reed, is slated to premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2020. Complete information including cast, creative team and performance schedule will be announced at a later date. Additional commissions will be chosen through an open invitational and in partnership with a panel of esteemed jurists.

The 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons were curtailed by the pandemic, obviously. Ruth Nott, who headed SF Opera's Department of Education in 2017,  left the company at the end of 2019. She's now managing director of Opera Parallèle. 

SF Opera never performed the Kaminsky. I'm sorry about that, because I liked the music for Kaminsky's As One, with librettist Kimberly Reed and Mark Campbell, despite the issues in the libretto.

OFAV has as part of its remit creating operas for all audiences (of all ages) and diverse subjects, with each opera on a small scale, making them financially accessible. They are also supposed to be short.

These constraints are certainly a challenge to the librettists and composers. They have to write operas that eschew the musical impact that you can have with a big orchestra–think about the scale difference and emotional impacts of two great operas, Dido and Aeneas and Les Troyens–and the dramatic impact of, well, traditional tragic operas that include such subjects as murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. They're still supposed to be serious operas on significant subjects.

I think that Hanlon and Fleischmann did an excellent job, particularly within those constraints. As I noted in my review, I felt as though the opera could have an alternative, bigger orchestration that would give it even more impact. I'd be very interested in hearing the first opera they wrote together, After the Storm.

Review round-up (to be updated later this week):

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle. See below for some commentary.
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Michael Antonio, Parterre Box

Joshua Kosman writes:

Why won’t Dad take him in? you may ask. It’s a good question, which the libretto doesn’t really answer. Nor does it persuasively address several other questions: Why are the residents of the village so nasty, including the schoolchildren? Why is the Pigeon Keeper who lives in the village such a pariah — aside from the fact that he doesn’t speak the language, hangs out with birds, and makes weird goo-goo eyes at everyone? (OK, that one’s actually pretty easy.) And most bewilderingly, why does the fisherman suddenly change his mind? For such a climactic plot point, this turnabout needed more justification.

The child is one of the hated refugee-outsiders is why. That's why everyone is nasty to the child; it's why everyone, including Orsia, is nasty to the Pigeon Keeper. I believe that when the child spontaneously sings the lullaby that the mother used to sing, the father's heart is unlocked. This is the closest thing to magical realism in the plot: the mystery of the child's origins and how he knows the song. Maybe it's a common folk song, but how does he pull it out at the moment when he sings it?

UPDATED: March 12, 2025

 

Santa Fe Opera 2021

John Crosby Theater, Santa Fe Opera

Photo by me

Santa Fe Opera just announced their plans - some of them, anyway - for 2021. It's a fine season that I'd be happy to attend, between Nozze, Britten Midsummer Night's Dream (a wonderful piece and a superb setting of the play), Eugene Onegin (maybe I'll like it this time around), and, of course, the John Corigliano / Mark Adamo The Lord of Cries, which is, perhaps, what Adamo's Dracula opera has morphed into.

I've put the majority of the press release after the cut. Note the hot and cold running countertenors (Anthony Roth Costanzo as Dionysis in the Corigliano; Iestyn Davies as Oberon in MSND). Angel Blue is a wonderful singer; I have seen her only once, eleven years ago, and I still remember the beauty and spin of her voice.

No mention of rescheduling Tristan und Isolde or Rusalka, both of which I had hoped to hear this year.

A New Production of Mozart’s THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

Directed by Laurent Pelly

Opens the 64TH Season on July 10

John Corigliano & Mark Adamo’s THE LORD OF CRIES

Directed by James Darrah

Receives its World Premiere on July 17

A New Production of Tchaikovsky’s EUGENE ONEGIN

Directed by Alessandro Talevi

Opens on July 24

A New Production of Britten’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Directed & Designed by Netia Jones

Receives its Company Premiere on July 31

Soprano ANGEL BLUE IN CONCERT

with 2021 Season Artists and The Santa Fe Opera Orchestra led by John Fiore on August 7

Two APPRENTICE SHOWCASE SCENES performances

on August 15 & 22

3 New Productions; 1 World Premiere; 30 Performances; 23 Debut Artists

21 Returning Artists; 5 Former Apprentices; 3 U.S. Debuts

SF Opera Annual Meeting

I was able to go to the annual meeting of San Francisco Opera this year. It was held on Wednesday, April 11, at Herbst Theater, just across the courtyard from the opera house.

There were financial and artistic reports, and also some singing. I don't have the program in front of me, so this is largely from memory. I may make some updates when I find the program.

The company's financial condition is improving, in that the endowment has been going up, owing to both contributions to it and the stock market, and the draw on it is going down. After two seasons of 9.5% draw (gulp - that is a big, bad number), the next report will show a 4.5% draw on the endowment. Ticket sales are....as projected, producing about 21% of income. As recently as the 90s, this number was much higher, and there's no denying that everybody would like that number higher.

Someone asked, during the Q&A, about getting younger people into the house, and I was not thrilled by John Gunn's answer, which was along the lines of "Young people are often raising kids, and when their time and money frees up, then they come into the house." Sorry, won't do: young technical people making $150,000/year and up often have the time and disposable income, and really can afford to hire sitters, and many of them are making that kind of salary for years before they have kids.

Matthew Shilvock talked about the artistic side of things. He mentioned three pillars of the company's artistic vision: Community, Total Art, and Cutting Edge, if I have this right. Unfortunately, he picked the company's new Tosca production to introduce how these concepts apply, and, you know, every big company has to have a Tosca production and nobody expects it to be especially visionary. The opera is too damn grounded in specific locations on a particular day in time. Everybody knows what the Castel Sant'Angelo looks like. This was....not very convincing.

Things were a little livelier during the Q&A. I got in line with a question, and I know the poor man was thinking "OMG DO I HAVE TO HEAR ANOTHER BIRTWISTLE QUESTION FROM HER" because I could practically see the sigh of relief when I asked about Opera for All Voices instead. 

No, actually, I couldn't; he has a good poker face. (I sort of regret not asking about Birtwistle. :) In any event, a few people later, Ilana Walder-Biesanz asked about diversifying the repertory and got a non-answer from, I think, John Gunn, who dodged around a bit to mention performers, which was not her question. Shilvock jumped in at this point, without any specific repertory to name, to say that "we're in discussions with a very exciting woman composer," which of course left us guessing. 

Here are some plausible candidates for the composer they're talking to - and bear in mind that Shilvock's phrasing was vague enough that we should presume there's no contract yet. In alphabetical order, and I'm listing these composers because they're all composed well-received operas:

• Unsuk Chin
• Jennifer Higdon
• Laura Kaminsky
• Missy Mazzoli
• Meredith Monk
• Olga Neuwirth
• Rachel Portman
• Kaija Saariaho
• Du Yun

And there are a whole bunch of women out there who've written important or interesting works in other genres that SFO might be willing to commission (remember, Jake Heggie had not written an opera when he got the commission for Dead Man Walking).

In any event, I hope the discussions lead to a finished work, and I'm looking forward to more news about this.

UPDATE: Of course, I'd be happy to see performances at SFO of existing operas by any of the above composers. L'Amour de Loin, Breaking the Waves, Alice in Wonderland, Atlas, Adriana Mater, etc.

Opera for All Voices

I somehow managed to file an important press release from San Francisco Opera without reporting on it. I stumbled across the same press release, more or less, on the Santa Fe Opera web site yesterday and accordingly made an update to my future seasons page.

These two companies are the lead commissioning organizations for a consortium of companies seeking to expand the range of composers represented on stage, the stories that are told, and the scope of commissioned operas. (You might think of this as the ¨fewer white men¨ initiative.) The first two commissions are already in place, plus the press release announces how future commissions will work. Those commissions are to Augusta Read Thomas and Laura Kaminsky. The Kaminsky commission will be performed at SF Opera in 2020, presumably in the fall  of 2020-21, because we know already that The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs will be performed in the 2019-20 season. San Francisco won´t try to bring up two new operas in one season.

The whole press release is after the cut.