Gustavo Dudamel at SFS

Well, that was disappointing, and in some ways also dismaying: the widely-praised music director of a major symphony orchestra, who is also the incoming music director of a major opera company, going rather badly wrong with both Mozart and Mahler. As Joshua Kosman says, everything he did must have been a deliberate choice of some kind; to my ear, on some level Dudamel really doesn't have an organic feel for what Mahler requires. Not that Mozart is easy to conduct; quite the contrary!

Something that neither of us mentioned: he conducted both works from memory. That's...extremely impressive, given the length and complexity of the Mahler.

I had not heard Dudamel live before; the conductors I've heard at the LA Phil in the past were John Adams (conducting Nixon in China), Susanna Mälkki, Pierre Boulez, and, of course, Esa-Pekka Salonen. If you've heard Dudamel on a regular basis, please leave comments about repertory that you've liked him in.

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV

Previously, as in twelve years ago, with thanks to Michael Strickland for pointing me to his blog post:

• Dudamania, at SF Civic Center, by Michael Strickland
• Gustavo Dudamel Bewilders, by Joshua Kosman, SF Chron

File under "some things never change."

Museum Mondays

Tower of London Moat

May, 2014

 

Friday Photo

Ten pounds of assorted citrus

Oakland, CA

January, 2022

 

Radu Lupu

The Romanian-born pianist Radu Lupu died earlier this week at 76, on the same day as pianist Nicholas Angelich and Harrison Birtwistle. Lupu retired in 2019, and from the obituaries, I assume the cause was ongoing ill health.

His death has brought forth quite a few admiring memorials; see, for example, David Allen's NY Times obit ("Radu Lupu, a pianist of rare refinement whose ruminative, enigmatic performances and recordings wove spells over his listeners, induced awe among his colleagues and confirmed him as one of the finest musicians ever to have graced his instrument,") and Alex Ross's economium ("For me, Lupu was the supreme living practitioner of his instrument, a musician and artist of the highest order").

My experience of the pianist was rather different. I saw him twice, and while I can agree with ruminative and enigmatic as reasonable descriptions of what I heard, the overall effect was not one of weaving a spell. It was more like putting me to sleep. I remember being extremely puzzled by Lupu's rendition of a Mozart piano concerto at San Francisco Symphony; here's Joshua Kosman's review, in which his judgment was much like mine.

A few years later, I caught a Cincinnati Symphony at Carnegie Hall, a program on which Lupu played Bartók's third piano concerto, which would seem to be the most congenial to his style. Reader, Bartók should never bore you, but this did. Hell, Mozart certainly shouldn't bore you. (Also on the Cincinnati program was the marvelous Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra.) Here's Allan Kozinn's NY Times review. Related, because of Lupu's handling of Janáček and Bartók on a solo recital, Allan Ulrich's review.

I own that I should check out Lupu's Schubert, available on record, and perhaps another composer or two, but I can't say that I love the late Brahms that has gotten lots of links this week. Let's just say that I prefer more muscular and propulsive playing.....for just about every composer.

Harrison Birtwistle

Claire Booth (Hanna), Roderick Williams (Alan), Harrison Birtwistle (composer), Baldur Brönnimann (conductor), Omar Ebrahim  (Caleb Raven)

Curtain calls for Yan Tan Tethera

Barbican Hall, London, May, 2014

Birtwistle at 80

Well, damn. Harrison Birtwistle died this morning, age 87, and another giant passes from the music scene.

His music isn't performed often in the United States. To give you an idea, the NY Philharmonic performed six of his works in six seasons between 1974-75 and 2007-08; the BSO performed 14 works between 1970-71 and 2017-18. A number of those were at Tanglewood. The only music director of those orchestras to have conducted a Birtwistle work was (bet you can guess) Pierre Boulez. Christoph von Dohnanyi led Birtwistle works at both orchestras.

I've managed to see three of his operas and an assortment of his chamber works, but it's mostly been on visits to London. The Eco Ensemble performed Secret Theatre a few years back and that's it for local performances that I've seen. 

In 2014, there was a festival in honor of his 80th birthday, where I saw Earth Dances (LSO), the operas Gawain and Yan Tan Tethera, both semi-staged, and Oliver Knussen conducting the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in chamber music (link is to Mark Berry's review). In my last trip before the pandemic, I caught the ENO's Orpheus series, which included The Mask of Orpheus (link is to my review of the series).

Several years ago, I asked one of Birtwistle's publishers about U.S. performances of his operas, and they had never rented any of his opera scores for an American performance. Birtwistle was one of today's great opera composers, and I am sure that Gawain, Yan Tan Tethera, and The Minotaur could all be successfully produced here. I'm surprised that more choruses haven't taken up his Moth Requiem, a lament for vanishing species; it is extremely beautiful, scored for a women's chorus, harp, and flute. Yan Tan Tethera is an ideal Birtwistle gateway work; it is a charming story involving the right way to count sheep and an encounter with the devil. There's also a chorus of sheep! Gawain is a most serious and powerful work, based on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Birtwistle was a member of the so-called Manchester school, which also included the late Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, still living at 90 - a varied group! His music is complex, uncompromising, often outrageously loud, and well worth getting to know.

I spotted him across a courtyard on the Festspielhaus grounds during Götterdämmerung at the 2015 Bayreuth Festival, and at the next interval, I was able to get his autograph. Time to find that notebook and finally get it framed.

RIP Sir Harrison Birtwistle, one of the greats.

Obituaries and other useful links:

• David Allen, NY Times. I take issues with a couple of things in this obituary. Secret Theatre is a chamber work, not an orchestral piece. And it's hard to characterize The Mask of Orpheus as one of the composer's "most successful" operas, given that it has never been performed outside of London. I believe there have been only two full stagings, at the 1980s premiere and in 2019, plus a semi-staging at the Proms one year. Yes, it did win the Grawemeyer, but...
• Anastasia Tsioulcas, Deceptive Cadence
• Ivan Hewitt, The Guardian
• Jill Lawless and Robert Barr, Washington Post
• BBC obituary
• Bayan Northcott, classical-music.com
• Thomas May, Memeteria; includes a link to Birtwistle discussing his own music.
• Andrew Clements of The Guardian on Birtwistle's music
• Bryan Applewood interviews Harrison Birtwistle on the occasion of the 2019 Mask of Orpheus
• Bruce Duffie interviews Harrison Birtwistle
• Birtwistle at Boosey & Hawkes
• Birtwistle at Universal Edition

 

Museum Mondays

Architectural frieze

Villa Stuck, Munich

August, 2015

 

Friday Photo

Tinned Portuguese anchovies

Berkeley Bowl, Berkeley, CA

March, 2022

 

Museum Mondays

Interior of a railroad mail car

Museum of Science & Industry

Chicago, IL

November, 2016

 

Met HD: Don Carlos

The other week, I went to the encore of the Met Opera HD broadcast of Don Carlos, which was heroically sung and acted on one of the ugliest and most awful sets that I have ever seen. San Francisco Opera has had a mediocre production of the opera for about the last quarter century, but I'll tell you, I longed for it throughout the evening. I'm now having second thoughts about visiting Chicago for Lyric Opera's bring-up in September, because they are using the same damn production.  Chicago is using an older McVicar with sets by Richard Jones, whew. (My 2016 review includes some representative photos of the SFO production, and so does my blog post.)

I have questions for David McVicar! Was he inspired by his own production of Les Troyens, which makes effective use (mostly) of a unit set? See the (not very good) photo in Janos Gereben's 2015 review.

Or maybe he was inspired by the Hall of Faces in the House of Black and White in season 5 of HBO's Game of Thrones?

Regardless, it's amazing to me that no one said to him "This is too ugly to put on our stage! Are you out of your mind???"

Conversely, his direction of the singers was mostly very good: character movement on stage made sense and their interactions were well-motivated. Best of all might have been Matthew Polenzani's Carlos, who disintegrated slowly over the course of the opera, with Etienne Dupuis's Rodrigue close behind. No doubt that Dupuis was the most magnetic person on stage; he is a tremendous singer, handsome, and a great actor. The relationship between Carlos and Rodrigue was intense, intimate, very much the driver of much of the action in the opera.*

Oh, and both sang fabulously. Back in 2009, Polenzani gave one of the most beautiful displays of tenor singing that I've ever heard, in SFO's last bring-up of The Abduction from the Seraglio. His most recent appearance, as Carmen's Don José, did not work so well, but this! My gosh, vocally Don Carlos fits him like a glove, despite the length and difficulty. He said during one of the intermission interviews that it doesn't tire him the way some roles do, and he demonstrated that through a long, long evening. Dupuis has a beautifully expressive voice and a nice trill, and did I mention that he's got that special something? I mean. If you want to see more of him, come to SF in June for our upcoming Don Giovanni, the third in Michael Kavanagh's Mozart-Da Ponte series.

There is nominally a romance in the opera, between the title character and Elisabeth de Valois, who becomes his stepmother instead of his wife about 10 minutes into the opera, after they have met and fallen in love. But the central relationships are really between Carlos and Posa, between Carlos and his father, Philippe II, and between Posa and Philippe. Also between everyone and the church. Also there's Princess Eboli, who is A) a good friend of Elisabeth 2) in love with Carlos 3) having an adulterous affair with Philippe (which you find out about 

somewhere in...uh, I think it's Act IV of this monster, which is five hours long with intermissions).

This production, like so many others, dropped the scene where Elisabeth and Eboli exchange veils. Honestly, why? That scene is critical for three reasons. It establishes their friendship, which you need to know to understand Elisabeth's hurt feelings when she discovers Eboli's betrayals; it's related to Eboli's Veil Song, and it sets up the catastrophic misunderstanding in the later garden scene.

As for the women, I like Sonya Yoncheva, though McVicar didn't give her much to do dramatically; she mostly sang very beautifully. I wondered how well Eboli suited Jamie Barton; both arias seemed slower than usual, and at least for the Veil Song, I thought it was to accommodate the speed with which she could sing the ornaments. McVicar's direction of both had odd moments. Eboli practically sneered at one point; Elisabeth swung her hips in what seemed a modern manner. Folks, these are 16th c. Spanish nobles. Treat them like that on stage.

The remaining men didn't fare as well as one might want. I didn't particularly like Eric Owens as Philippe. He was okay, not great. Ditto John Relyea's Grand Inquisitor; there was a lot of posturing and movement, but...Andrea Silvestrelli was more restrained and scarier in SF. (Okay, I admit that I will be lucky to see another Philippe in Rene Pape's class.)

Then there were McVicar decisions that I found bizarre: I mean, no auto-da-fe is complete without an acrobat made up like Heath Ledger's Joker, right? McVicar likes to throw in acrobatics where the libretto doesn't call for them, like the acrobats during "Gloire à Didon" in Les Troyens. Then there's the very end of the opera, where what usually happens is that Philippe comes to take Carlos in for...torture? questioning? and his father mysteriously appears and spirits Carlos away. That isn't what happens here, and I think I will pass on describing it other than to say, well, that's certainly an interesting fantasy.

Lastly, the orchestra sounded dandy under Patrick Furrer's leadership; YN-S was out sick.

* I note that Alex Ross, seeing the opera earlier in its run, found Polenzani wooden, and I also note that good direction can tell quite a different story in the HD broadcast from what you see live. Case in point: Karita Mattila dominated the stage in the 2016 SFO Jenufa, but the balance among the principal singers was much more even in the eventual stream of the opera in the summer of 2021, because the camera didn't focus on her. Live, well, you could not take your eyes off her.

Friday Photo

Flowering tree

February, 2020

Oakland, CA

 

News from the Other BSO

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has a new president and CEO: Mark Hanson, who resigned from the CEO position at San Francisco Symphony last July. His resignation remains a mystery: it was sudden, without prior indications of issues, and with a brief and rather cool note from the orchestra. He left after only four years with the orchestra and with an apparent record of success: he hired Esa-Pekka Salonen, maintained labor peace with the musicians, and kept the orchestra running during the first year-plus of the pandemic.

There's been a fair amount of past mismanagement at Baltimore and they are searching for a new music director because Marin Alsop has concluded her tenure there.

• Press release
• Joshua Kosman, SF Chron
• Mary Carole McCauley, Baltimore Sun

Museum Mondays

Assumption of the Virgin Mary?

Plaster cast of medieval sculpture

Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine

Paris, France

February, 2019

 

Friday Photo

Doors to the Chrysler Building, NYC

November, 2013

 

San Francisco Symphony 2022-23

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Photo by Minna Hatinen, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco Symphony announced its 2022-23 season today. I'm going to start out with the two most jaw-dropping items on the schedule:

• Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Busoni! Piano! Concerto! with Igor Levit. This program includes the men of the SF Symphony Chorus, because of course no piano concerto is complete without a men's chorus. This will be the SFS premiere of the work. Levit also plays a solo recital, a chamber music program, and LvB piano concerto No. 5 on a program with the Eroica (Salonen conducts).
• Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater, the composer's second opera, staged by Peter Sellars. I reviewed this opera at its US premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2008; it's a great piece and Sellars did a fine job directing it then. There's nothing in the press kit about who the singers will be. Note that this means that we'll get a one-two punch of Saariaho's operas in San Francisco, because her most recent opera, Innocence, is a San Francisco Opera co-commission that will be performed in that company's 2023-24 season. We just need someone to stage Saariaho's first, the gorgeous L'amour de loin. 

We'll have 15 weeks of Salonen conducting, if I'm reading everything right!

Here's what I find particularly interesting on the season.

• E-PS, Yuja Wang: Nielsen Helios Overture, Magnus Lindberg "New Work for Piano and Orchestra", which must be Lindberg's Third Piano Concerto, which was announced with the same conductor and pianist on the NY Phil's schedule (I have asked about this); Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra.
• Mirga 
  Gražinytė-Tyla and the CBSO have a program of Britten, Elgar, Adès, and Debussy, but I am willing to take bets on whether she conducts. The orchestra cancelled in 2020 because of the pandemic; she cancelled twice owing to pregnancies, and...she is having her third child some time this year.
• MTT has four programs, perhaps a partial make-up for the months of his last season as music director lost to the pandemic. There's a Brahms program; Danny Elfman's Cello Concerto, an SFS Commission, with Gautier Capuçon; a mostly-French program including Debussy and Messiaen; 
• There's a piece on one of the Youth Symphony programs by SFO clarinetist José González Granero.
• Robin Ticciati's debut program includes Jörg Widmann's Violin Concerto (Alina Ibragimova) and Mahler 4 (Ying Fang).
• Leif OveAndsnes plays Janáček, Vustin, Beethoven, and Dvorák on a solo recital.
• Edwin Outwater conducts a program that include a new work by Gabriel Kahane called emergency shelter intake form that includes a Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics.
• E-PS conducts Sibelius 5, unfortunately the other half of the program doesn't interest me much.
• E-PS conducts a new work by Samuel Adams, unfortunately on a program with Bruckner 6.
• Herbert Blomstedt conducts Dvorak 8, which I love, and a symphony by Jan Vaclav Vorisek.
• E-PS, Yuja Wang; Gabriella Smith Tumblebird Contrails, Salonen Nyx, Rach 3
• Cristian Macelaru leads a program of Marsalis, Tarkiainen, and Shostakovich, and the soloist is Russ de Luna, English horn. The press release says that the big English horn piece is a world premiere.
• Dalia Stasevka makes her debut with a program of Anna Meredith, Sibelius 2, and Sibelius Violin Concerto (Joshua Bell)
• Thomas Wilkins makes his orchestral series debut conducting a program on which Branford Marsalis is the saxophone soloist.
• Philippe Jordan conducts Britten's War Requiem, with Ian Bostridge and Iain Patterson.
• Giancarlo Guerrero leads a program with a big new Julia Wolfe piece on it.
• Manfred Honeck leads a program that includes a work by Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano, Rach Rhapsody with the excellent Beatrice Rana, and the Schubert Great C Major Symphony (compare with the amazing performance by Blomstedt a few years ago).
• Last of the season, after Busoni and Saariaho, is Salonen conducting a program with a new work by Reena Ismail, some songs with Julia Bullock, and Daphnis et Chloé.

Other notes:

• No indication of whether and when the Elektra and Bluebeard's Castle from the cancelled season might be rescheduled.
• The season includes 30 works new to SFS, including four world premieres, three U.S. premieres, and one west coast premiere.
• Florence Price Violin Concerto No. 2 with Randall Goosby, E-PS conducting.
• E-PS conducts Mahler 2 and a new work by Trevor Weston.
• I wished I liked the program with Christopher Purves better; he is hands down the best Alberich I have seen. But it's the Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin; Suite from Psycho; and HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! Even with Purves and E-P, it's a maybe for me.
• Israel Philharmonic, Lahav Shani, Paul Ben-Haim Symphony No. 1 paired with Mahler 1.
• The film series include The Godfather and you bet I'll pay to see this great film with its score played by a great orchestra. (Pacino was robbed, twice.)
• The SoundBox curators include Pekka Kuusisto, Nico Muhly, Conrad Tao.
• Oedipus Rex this season and Adriana Mater next season are the start of a four-year collaboration with Peter Sellars. This will include a staged version of Messiaen's s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ in 2024 and Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen featuring Collaborative Partner Julia Bullock in 2025

At the SFS web site:

• Press release
• Season calendar
• Season overview

Museum Mondays

Golden arm and hand

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

November, 2013

 

Friday Photo

Mérode Altarpiece, by Robert Campin

The Cloisters, NYC

February, 2010

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Effigy of Don García de Osorio (detail)

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

November, 2019

 

Professor Jane Carr

Professor Jane Carr, far left, judging a kata contest.

Healdsburg, 1987

Professor Jane Carr, 10th degree black belt, whom I'd known for nearly 40 years, died early in March at 83, following health problems, the details of which I'm not privy to, that culminated in a severe stroke. 

Prof. Carr started practicing jujitsu in 1960 not long after her first or second daughter was born. She was school head of the Redding Jujitsu Academy for at least the last 45 years, I think longer.

 

She was incredibly tough and consequently got hurt many times when she was coming up through the ranks. Bad knees, bad shoulders, thrown on her head once, etc. I remember her saying sometime in the last few years that she hoped the folks she was talking to - in a class or a side conversation - would be more careful with their bodies than she was. 

 

She taught Danzan Ryu jujitsu and, not at all incidentally, some very serious self-defense classes. I was once present when she described how she ran the final class: she divided up her dojo, which is quite large, into screened-off sections, with one self-defense student in each, and then she would enter each section and attack, with the student having to then defend herself against a high-ranking black belt. If you survived that, well, you were well-equipped to survive a physical attack by a less-well-equipped  person.

 

Prof. Carr taught these classes in part because of her own history of childhood sex abuse, I think by a family member. She was extremely forthright about this, unusual, I think, for a woman of her generation.

She had thousands of students over the years, in part because she had a large and active kids' program. I saw her teach a kids' class once and it was inspirational. She had rules and expectations that the kids would follow them; she was completely respectful of them as individuals, and she knew how to safely challenge them to their limits.

 

She was married four times (twice divorced, twice widowed) and had two daughters from her first marriage; she had several grandchildren.

 

She was enormously influential in the American Judo & Jujitsu Foundation and trained I-don't-know-how-many black belts, as well as being sensei to two other women currently on the AJJF board of professors, one her own daughter. I have fond memories of a short self-defense class that she taught at camp one year; I had bruises from blocking full-speed strikes for a week. And also fond memories of her beautiful jujitsu; at the 2015 AJJF convention, when she was 75 I remember her demonstrating techniques from one of the advanced lists of techniques, and I'll tell you that I have not seen them done more beautifully than she did them that day.

When I started jujitsu in 1982, Prof. Carr and Prof. Betty Maillette, who founded my first dojo, were the only active professors who were women. They were very different in teaching style and how they lived their lives. They were not natural allies and I suspect that there might have been some friction between them. I've always been sorry about that, while understanding the reasons. They were both important to my training, and because Prof. Maillette retired from jujitsu around when I started, I had quite a bit more mat time with Prof. Carr. Because I was in Prof. Maillette's dojo and a student of her students, I still trained more in her tradition than Prof. Carr's.

 

RIP Laurel Jane Carr-Rhyn, to give her her full name as printed in her obit. All of Danzan Ryu will miss you.

Goings-on at San Francisco Symphony

Davies Symphony Hall at Night

Regular readers and fans of San Francisco Symphony know that the orchestra has many openings, following a large number of retirements and the death of principal cellist Michael Grebanier. (The list in my link doesn't include the recently retired principal harp Douglas Rioth and associate concertmaster Nadya Tichman's decision to step down from that post.) SFS has conducted auditions for several of the openings (principal flute, principal cello) and recently it has looked as though candidates are getting trial weeks. We've seen the following players in the orchestra recently:

• Erik Gratton, principal flute of the Nashville Symphony, in the Creatures of Prometheus concert and the program with the Bryce Dessner violin concerto on it.
• Denis Bouriakov, principal flute of the LA Philharmonic, program with Song of the Flaming Phoenix
•  Sébastian Jacot, principal flute of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, in the Ogonek/Stravinsky program. He's the guy with the wooden flute, a novelty in a US orchestra
• Austin Huntington, principal cellist of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (Liszt/Scriabin)
• Rainer Eudeikis, principal cello of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Creatures of Prometheus)

If you've missed SFS principal trumpet Mark Inouye, he has been on leave but expect to be back soon.

 

Nikola Printz Schwabacher Recital Media Round-Up

Nikola Printz, mezzo-soprano, with Jon Mendle, guitar (and theorbo).

They're performing Schubert.

Photo by Kristen Loken, care of San Francisco Opera

Last week, I got to hear (and review) a truly remarkable recital by Nikola Printz, mezzo-soprano. Fabulously sung and acted, marvelously chosen repertory, great collaborators. What more could you ask?

Printz will be in the Merola Opera program this summer, so look for more opportunities to hear them then.

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Mike Strickland, SF Civic Center 

Friday Photo

 

Métro stop

Blvd. Richard Lenoir

Paris 2019

Trinity Church Fires Julian Wachner

Monument in the Trinity Church graveyard

Well, that didn't take long. On February 28, Trinity Church learned of a sexual assault allegation against its choir director Julian Wachner, who runs their very well-funded music programs. (Trinity owns real estate in NYC and has an investment portfolio worth $6 billion, which is not a typo. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have held on to real property since the 18th c.) He was put on leave within the last couple of days, as Javier C. Hernández reported yesterday. Today, Trinity fired him, issuing a statement indicating that it "concluded based on recent information that Julian has otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position."

I saw some comments on Facebook indicating that Wachner has a reputation for bullying people he works with in various capacities, which would be sufficient reason, in my opinion, to fire someone. Trinity's statement says that the investigation into him is ongoing.

Compare and contrast Trinity's actions with those of, say, the Metropolitan Opera, which heard those rumors about James Levine for decades before finally being forced to conduct an investigation that found credible evidence of his misbehavior.

 

Museum Mondays

 

Household Shrine and Household Goods from Villa B

Last Supper at Pompeii

Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

August, 2021

Friday Photo

Dry ice from food delivery service

Oakland, CA

February, 2022

 

Regional Opera Companies

On Twitter this morning, I mentioned that I appreciate Joshua Kosman taking note in his LVO Otello review of the value of what regional companies do. That production is a stellar example of what a small company can do with imagination, strong casting, smart direction, and great conducting. In addition to LVO, West Edge Opera, Opéra Parallele, Opera San José, West Bay Opera, Ars Minerva, and other small companies do vital work.

These companies are often able to stage works that the heavy hitter in our neck of the woods - San Francisco Opera - doesn't do, or hasn't gotten to, or fears they can't sell tickets to. These days, I'm seeing way more operas new to me at the smaller companies than at SFO, because they're not invested in staging Butterfly / Traviata / Barber / Magic Flute all the time. SFO is bigger, needs to sell more tickets, and is more risk-averse because of the size of their house and the size of their budget. 

SFO has a spectacular centennial season coming up, and yet the only two works on it that I've never seen are the two commissions. Even with all of the hoopla and fundraising associated with the season, they couldn't get above presenting eight operas. As recently as the 1980s and 90s, they were scheduling far more operas. Look at 1990-91: I'm counting....15 operas, although Suor Angelica and Pagliacci must have been a double bill. There were also four concerts! There were more subscribers, which meant more room for risk, more operas with fewer performances of each, and more choices for opera goers. Now, with fewer subscribers, there are real limits on what companies think they can sell. Wondering why you haven't seen Wozzeck or Lulu at SFO in a while? That's why.

So treasure your regional opera companies. They're taking chances, staging rarities, reviving recent works that haven't been heard since their premieres, spotlighting wonderful singers who don't appear on the international circuit, and doing this all on small budgets. Buy tickets, donate if you can, support their work.