This morning Opera San José (OSJ) made available an opera it had premiered in 2017 for free viewing through YouTube with separate videos for the first and second parts of the production. The opera is a new approach to the Cinderella narrative, whose music was composed by Alma Deutscher, who was thirteen years old at the time. Deutscher returned to OSJ five years later to revive their production and to serve as conductor.
It would be fair to say that Deutscher is firmly confident in her abilities as both composer and conductor. She probably even relishes the efforts of the video production team to superimpose occasionally her conducting on top of the image of the staging of the opera itself:
I suspect that there has been more than a little bit of skepticism over her capabilities. Nevertheless, I appreciated her contemporary take on the narrative and her ability to keep the narrative moving without ever lingering on any particular episode for too long. In addition, she brought an arch wit to reflecting on operas of the past, even when they did not involve the Cinderella narrative.
As a result, it was not entirely surprising that one of the episodes included a lapse into the travails of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, even if that action took place only in the orchestra pit. There was also an amusing moment when the stepsisters lapsed into “Beckmesser mode” with a nod to Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Finally, it struck me that the way in which Cinderella (soprano Natalia Santaliz) and the Prince (tenor Joey Hammond-Leppek) encounter each other reminded me of Pamina and Tamino in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
For all of those cross-references, there was still more than enough originality to go around in the text of the libretto; and I came away from watching today’s video with thoughts that I might revisit the work in the not-too-distant future.
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