Speculation

War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building

Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

Vintage postcard from my collection

San Francisco Opera's 2023-24 season is under way, with opera no. 3 of 8 opening in two days and the 2024-25 season announcement three-plus months away, so obviously it's time to speculate! Here's what I have on my Rumor & Gossip Operatic Future Seasons page:

I keep hoping that Matthew Shilvock will finally be able to stage his dream opera, which is Schoenberg's formidable Moses und Aron. As I mentioned a few years back, when he said this at a Wagner Society. meeting, there was an audible gasp in the room. The only staging in the US that I can recall offhand was at the Met, decades ago, with John Tomlinson. 

• Wagner TBD, conducted by Eun Sun Kim. We know it won't be Lohengrin. Matthew Shilvock did promise us Parsifal at some point. Note that Kim is conducting Parsifal in Houston in January, 2024.
• Verdi TBD, conducted by Eun Sun Kim. Maybe next season we will get Ernani, which was cancelled owing to the pandemic. My personal hope is for I Vespri Siciliani / Les Vepres Sicilienne, which I've never seen. An interview Kim in the Lohengrin program mentions Simon Boccanegra, a favorite of mine.
• Puccini, La Boheme. At the opening night gala for 2022-23, Matthew Shilvock slipped in the news that Pene Pati would be singing Rodolfo here soon. Pati is singing Nemorino in 23-24, so maybe next year.
• Samson et Dalilah, Brandon Jovanovich as Samson. Given when I heard about this, maybe in 2023-24 or the season after. Obviously not in 2023-24, so maybe next season?
• Madame White Snake, by Zhou Long. A friend spotted "this will be done at SFO in 2023" in the composer's bio in a San Francisco Symphony program. I asked SFO about it and the response was "San Francisco Opera has not made any announcement about this." Well, I knew that, and would bet that the composer's agent broke the usual restrictions on premature announcements and also that various people at SFO are now banging the walls or have their heads in their hands. Note: not done at SFO in 2023. Some year in the future?

Operas from the canceled 2020-21 season that haven't been staged included Rigoletto, which will surely be back at some point; Der Zwerg, and The Handmaid's Tale. I hope the latter two are staged eventually. The Handmaid's Tale, sadly, goes well with one of the more eye-rolling messages of Die Frau ohne Schatten.  Update, 12/23/23: The February, 2024, issue of Opera has, in its "We Hear That..." column the news that SFO will stage The Handmaid's Tale in the 2024-25 season. We'll know for sure in about five weeks, but...I think that news in this particular column is generally leaked provided by the companies in question.

Did I ever mention here who was sitting immediately in front of me at the Cal Performances staging of Michel van der Aa's Blank Out? None other than SFO music director Eun Sun Kim, general director Matthew Shilvock, and artistic administration Gregory Henkel. Blank Out was astonishing and I hope that they were on a scouting mission.

Update, 11/13/23: Given the success of Frida y Diego, Omar, and Dream of the Red Chamber, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Madam White Snake, Florencia en el Amazonas, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, or Malcolm X on next year's schedule.

Please feel free to speculate in comments....or send me email!

Speculation Ahead of the SFO Season Announcement

War Memorial Opera House

Photo: Lisa Hirsch

It's early December; time to speculate!

Here's what I have heard:

• Macbeth, Verdi, September 2020, cond. Sir Mark Elder. Found in Opera Magazine. However, I have also heard rumors that this has been swapped out for Rigoletto. 
• Cosi fan tutte, second in the Mozart/da Ponte series; John Chest as Guglielmo (Opera Magazine).
• Poul Ruders, The Handmaid's Tale; Sasha Cook as Offred (Santa Fe Opera program; Opera Magazine). Contralto Sara Couden has a role in this too.
• Fidelio, Beethoven; opening weekend; MDD Eun Sun Kim conducts. Simon O'Neill is Florestan; this is in his bio at Santa Fe Opera and at his management company.  Kevin Langan is Rocco. Thanks to the sharp-eyed Mateo Santos Perry for spotting this!
• Nicola Luisotti to conduct sometime during the fall of 2020 (source is Steven Winn's profile of Luisotti in the Elektra program guide). I expect that this is La Boheme, which Paul McKaskie mentions in comments.
• Donald Runnicles conducts something in the 2020-22 time frame; maybe it is here. Have heard a rumor of something "big and German", but you would expect something Big from Donald, if not big and German. Could this be Parsifal? Frau?
• The young tenor Clay Hilley makes his SFO debut in a new role, spring 2021, but we don't know in what.
• Maybe Adriana Lecouvreur? Maybe not!
• Rossini, Barber of Seville in June, 2021

I was going to have a blank bullet labeled "something for the new music director;" today's press release includes the news that Eun Sun Kim will conduct a new production of Fidelio. I should have guessed; Beethoven 250, blah blah. She was fulsome about the opera in today's press conference. I have a lower opinion of it, after three very different productions with different casts; the libretto is terrible; the tone varies from comic to deadly serious; he did not write well for the voice, but okay. 

The Kaminsky Opera for All commission is supposed to be up next season, but it's not clear to me whether this is a main stage production or not.

So, listed above are four pretty definite items and two additional bullets for former music directors, with Runnicles a maybe, leaving two items open, or one if Adriana is on the schedule; the company cannot go below eight operas, I believe. Maybe one of these is the Saariaho commission? Except for the small number of singers mentioned about, I have no idea about casting.

Finally, there are eight items above, but Adriana seems unlikely to me (though who knows!) and no one has any idea whether Runnicles will be here or what he might be conducting.

Pure Speculation

One of the consequences of the changing of the guard at San Francisco Opera is the advent of a general director who is perfectly happy on social media and whose name is appearing on a monthly email newsletter to subscribers. I've now seen enough of his writing and speaking - and sense of humor - to be confident that Matthew Shilvock is writing the newsletter himself. (Note: you could almost play Shilvock Bingo with the newsletter and speeches. He likes "incredible" a lot. :) Between his tweets and these newsletters, we know something about his travels and what he is seeing out there.

For example, we know that Matthew was in Santa Fe last summer, and during the fall he saw Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin from the Met general director's box, in company with Peter Gelb, Kaija Saariaho, and Amin Maalouf, the work's librettist. More recently, he saw Evelyn Herlitzius, our upcoming Brünnhilde, in Barcelona, starring in Strauss's Elektra. (I will interject a small complaint here about the fact that every damn opera company in Europe seems to be producing Patrice Chereau's Elektra, his last opera staging, but we are not.)

One ought not draw conclusions based on Travels with Matthew, but if one were prone to overthinking things, one might speculate a bit. And this is complete speculation; I know nothing other than what is out there in public.

1. Santa Fe Opera has commissioned an opera by Mason Bates called The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Bates is a popular guy in San Francisco, with SF Symphony commissions and a Beethoven/Bates Festival to his name, not to mention, a Grammy-nominated CD.

If I were the general director of a prominent opera company that is situated at the north end of Silicon Valley, in a city overrun with young (and not so young) nerds who work for companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and, yes, Apple, and I had an interest in attracting more young, well-off audience members, well, I would be chatting with Santa Fe about doing the second bring-up of an opera about the loved and hated founder of Apple. Note: as announced, it also has a smallish cast, which, in these economic times, is always welcome.

2. L'Amour de Loin is among the most successful recent operas, owing to the shimmering beauty and intensity of its music. Coincidentally, it also has a small cast, with just three characters and what looked like a subset of the huge Met chorus. It can easily be done on a unit set with no scene changes. There have been enough different productions that SFO would have a choice of stagings and would not have to develop its own production.

This would be a great choice for SFO to put on, especially given (ahem) that I think the main stage has never seen an opera composed by a woman. (Rachel Portman's The Little Prince was done at Zellerbach in 2008.) Saariaho is one of the greatest composers of our age. If SFO doesn't do this one, let me heartily recommend Adriana Mater, which is what the company should have done in 2015 rather than the pretty awful Two Women, because it is a much more effective and affecting look at the consequences of war and rape.

Pure Speculation Ahead of the Official Announcement

San Francisco Opera will announce the full cast of the 2018 Ring in September, or so I was told a while back. Herewith some unadulterated speculation.

Known, because David Gockley said so at a member event:

Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Wotan: Greer Grimsley
Brünnhilde: Evelyn Herlitzius

Likely, Because it's On His Web Site:

Loge: Stefan Margita (or if not, local fav William Burden, who sang the role in DC)

My Guesses, and That is What They Are; Nobody Has Told Me Anything; I Know Nothing, Jon Snow:

Alberich:  Gordon Hawkins or Eric Owens
Rheinmaidens: Your guess is as good as mine. Could be Adler Fellows, could be good local singers
Fricka: Elizabeth Bishop, who has sung the role in this production, or Jamie Barton, or Ekaterina Semenchuk, whom SFO seems to like
Freia: Melissa Citro
Donner: Christian Van Horn, because he's so good on Rattle's Rheingold
Froh: Brian Jagde
Fafner: Stephen Milling, because I can dream, even though he hasn't sung on the West Coast in more than ten years
Fasolt: Andrea Silvestrelli
Mime: David Cangelosi
Erda: Ronnita Miller

Sieglinde: Anja Kampe or Heidi Melton or maybe even Rachel Willis-Sorensen
Siegmund: Brandon Jovanovich or Brian Jagde or Stuart Skelton, unless there's a miracle and they've hired JK
Hunding: Stephen Milling or Andrea Silvestrelli
Valkyries: Generally a flock of Adler Fellows and singers from smaller roles in the Ring

Siegfried: Jay Hunter Morris and quite possibly an additional tenor
Forest Bird: Stacy Tappan

First Norn: Ronnita Miller (or the contralto singing Erda)
Second Norn: The mezzo singing Waltraute
Third Norn: Your guess is as good as mine
Waltraute: Jamie Barton or Elizabeth Bishop
Gunther: Christian Van Horn
Hagen: Andrea Silvestrelli or Stephen Milling
Gutrune: Melissa Citro