Since the tenure of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Adler Fellowships, founded in 1977 to support performance-oriented residencies for the most advanced young artists, is based on the calendar year, December always sees the presentation of an annual “warp-up” performance by the Adler Fellows of that year. These are “sampler” programs, designed to provide a platform for the strengths of each of the Fellows and drawing upon the full scope of repertoire from the pre-Classical period to the present. Adler Fellowships are assigned not only to vocalists but also to keyboardists, who serve as apprentice coaches and frequently provide continuo support for music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and earlier composers.
The vocalists for this year’s “graduation ceremony,” held last night in Herbst Theatre, were sopranos Mary Evelyn Hangley and Natalie Image, mezzos Ashley Dixon and Simone McIntosh, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, tenors SeokJong Baek, Zhengyi Bai, Christopher Colmenero, and Christopher Oglesby, and bass-baritone Christian Pursell. Both of this year’s apprentice coaches, Kseniia Polstiankina Barrad and César Cañón, provided harpsichord continuo when the score required it. The instrumental music was provided by members of the SFO Orchestra; and last night marked the first appearance of Eun Sun Kim serving as conductor after the announcement of her appointment as SFO Music Director this past Thursday. With the exception of the opening overture, the one that Leonard Bernstein composed for Candide, all performances were staged by Roy Rallo, albeit in the limited space between the area occupied by the Orchestra and the edge of the Herbst stage.
The program itself was a diverse assortment of seventeen arias and duets, nine before the intermission and the remaining eight afterwards. In such abundance it is no surprise that considerable variation in repertoire engendered equally considerable variation in performance quality. Indeed, while there was no shortage of virtuoso turns during the first half of the program, any sense of compelling engagement between the performers and the score only began to emerge after the intermission. To some extent this was an overall shallowness in the repertoire itself, meaning that only a few selections from the entire program ever maintained a secure hold on memory.
Zhengyi Bai and Simone McIntosh (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the San Francosco Opera)
Memory was strongest when it came to the only selection by Gioachino Rossini. In the comic opera genre Rossini is particularly notable for his power to amuse. That power was epitomized in Rallo’s staging of a scene from Le comte Ory in which the title character (Bai), disguised as a hermit, encounters his page Isolier (McIntosh), who does not recognize him. The “action” involves two men infatuated with the same woman; and both Bai and McIntosh knew how to present the full comic depth of Rallo’s vision.
Christopher Oglesby and Ashley Dixon (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the San Francosco Opera)
On the instrumental side Kim had the opportunity to work with instrumentation at its richest during the “first encounter” duet between Cinderella (Dixon) and Prince Charming (Oglesby) in Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon. My personal appreciation of Massenet’s music owes much to a master class that conductor Michel Singher gave for the Opera Academy of California many years ago. Pulling out a full orchestral score, he showed the vocalists being coached the many subtle undercurrents of instrumental activity that make Massenet’s work so engaging (at least when it is properly performed). Kim’s sensitivity to those rich details provided just the right context to capture the dramatic intensity of first the encounter itself and then its interruption at the stroke of midnight.
Sadly, these were two glowing highlights (which happened to be performed back-to-back) in a landscape that consisted of a drab background punctuated by turns of virtuosity in the foreground. All of that virtuosity was clearly well prepared. However, most of those turns emerged as display for its own sake, rather than in the service of the dramatic setting and the music establishing that setting. Indeed, the very nature of any drama was, to a great extent, obscured between the absence of titles in English and summary texts that could not be followed in the darkened audience area.
The program book for the evening included a gallery of Adler Fellows performing in SFO productions. In reviewing those photographs, any number of satisfying experiences of the work of those Fellows came to mind. I just wish that more of those experiences had managed to resonate over the course of last night’s “farewell concert.”
No comments:
Post a Comment