Cal Bach Explores Vespers Music by Rovetta

Last night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the California Bach Society (Cal Bach) continued its 50th Anniversary season with a program entitled Venetian Vespers. During the seventeenth century St Mark’s Basilica was one of the most significant venues of sacred music. This was the period during which Claudio Monteverdi served as maestro di cappella, one of his major achievements being the composition of the Vespro della Beata Vergine (vespers of the Blessed Virgin).

Rather than undertake a presentation of this composition of epic proportion, Cal Bach Artistic Director Paul Flight chose, instead, to focus on Monteverdi’s successor, Giovanni Rovetta, presenting four of his settings of Vespers texts: “Dixit Dominus,” “Confitebor tibi,” “Lauda Jerusalem,” and “Laudate pueri Dominium.” Monteverdi himself was represented by a “Beatus vir” setting; and the program concluded with a Magnificat setting by Rovetta’s successor, Francesco Cavalli. (Those familiar with that name are more likely to associate it with his keen gift for creating ribald operas for the Venetian Carnival.)

There is a tendency to treat the Monteverdi Vespro as a work of major spectacle, complementing the many ornate details of the Basilica. Cal Bach provided the music in a much more intimate setting, with instrumental support provided by only a handful of musicians. These included two violins (Carla Moore and Cynthia Black), two cornetti (Alexandra Opsahl and Steve Escher), cello (Rocio Lopez Sanchez), theorbo and lute (Jon Mendle), and organ (Yuko Tanaka).

The entire program lasted only about an hour and a quarter, performed without an intermission. That framework further enhanced the intimacy of the occasion. Furthermore, while the emphasis was on the choral performance, “Lauda Jerusalem” was sung entirely by solo vocalists, one of whom was Flight himself. Thus, while the evening may have been modest in duration, it provided an impressively engaging diversity of intimate accounts of the efforts of three successive maestri di cappella: Monteverdi, Rovetta, and Cavalli. This modest lesson in music history could not have sounded better.

Cal Bach to “Visit” Seventeenth-Century Venice

St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where the pigeons often outnumber the faithful (photograph by Ricardo André Frantz, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license)

Towards the end of this month, the California Bach Society (Cal Bach) will continue its 50th Anniversary season with music from seventeenth-century Venice. The program will focus on Claudio Monteverdi, who served as maestro di cappella at St Mark’s Basilica, one of the major venues for seventeenth-century sacred music. Artistic Director Paul Flight will lead a performance of Monteverdi’s “Beatus vir” setting. The program will also include sacred music by two of Monteverdi’s disciples.

The better known of these is Francesco Cavalli. Much of Cavalli’s reputation came from the operas that he composed, but he was appointed maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in 1668. Cal Bach will sing his setting of the “Magnificat” text.

The other composer is Giovanni Rovetta, who served as maestro di cappella between Monteverdi and Cavalli. His contribution to the program will be a setting of “Dixit Dominus.” Flight will lead both the 30-voice Cal Bach choir and a Baroque instrumental ensemble, which will include Alexandra Opsahl and Steve Escher playing cornetti, violinists Carla Moore and Cynthia Black, cellist Rocio Lopez Sanchez, Jon Mendle on theorbo, and Yuko Tanaka, organ.

The San Francisco performance of this Venetian Vespers program will take place at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of its intersection with Franklin Street. The performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, February 25. General admission will be $30 with a $25 discount for seniors and $10 admission students and those under 30. A Web page has been created to process all ticket sales, and the alternative will be to call 650-485-1097. Sales should be finalized at least 24 hours before the concert. Sales at the door will be only be available if COVID-19 restrictions allow. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m. All concert-goers must submit proof of vaccination, and masks must be worn at all times.

Céline Ricci Revisits Pre-Classical Operatic Roles

Last night at the 906.World Cultural Center, mezzo Céline Ricci, Artistic Director of Ars Minerva, revisited her Women of the Mediterranean, which she had presented at the Italian Cultural Institute at the end of March in 2018. She was joined by the two vocalists that had performed last year, soprano Aura Veruni and mezzo Kindra Scharich. Instrumental accompaniment was provided by Kelly Savage at the harpsichord.

Once again the program began with an introduction to Ars Minerva itself and its mission to engage new audiences for the vast repertoire of Baroque operas, many of which were forgotten after their first performance. She made her case by reviewing the innovative approaches her productions have taken to the four operas presented thus far, La Cleopatra by Daniele da Castrovillari, Carlo Pallavicino’s Le amazoni nell’isole fortunate (the amazons in the fortunate isles), Pietro Andrea Ziani’s La Circe, and Giovanni Porta’s Ifigenia in Aulide. Arias from the last three of these operas were included in the recital that followed the introduction.

The recital selections balanced these rarities that have established Ars Minerva productions as valuable insights regarding pre-Classical opera with selections by three more familiar composers, Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi, and George Frideric Handel (who was represented by three selections). Particularly interesting was the fact that many of the composers that Ars Minerva has “revived” (along with both Cavalli and Monteverdi) created operas to be performed during pre-Lenten Carnival festivities, primarily in Venice but in other cities as well. Thus, even when the underlying narrative was tragic, the Carnival spirit would be satisfied by low comedy. This meant that the singers themselves frequently had to deal with significant shifts in character, sometimes within a single aria.

Ricci seems to be consistently and imaginatively aware of this delicate balance of emotional dispositions. It has been evident in her full length productions, and it was just as evident in the delivery of the solo arias presented in last night’s program. Each aria was preceded by a brief (first-person) monologue describing the character delivering the song. Those introductions were so well-conceived that I found that I could set aside the English translations in the program book, preferring to focus on how the character embodied in the music was being established through minimal staging techniques.

The result was a highly satisfying evening that balanced well-conceived musicianship with imaginative approaches to staging in a minimal setting, affirming the impressive results encountered in Ars Minerva fulfilling its intended mission.

Jaroussky’s Erato Album of Cavalli Arias

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

About two months ago Erato released its latest album featuring French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. (Yes, I know I have fallen behind schedule. When it comes to keeping up with releases of recordings, I tend to focus on running in place, knowing that, sooner or later, I will catch up with anything that has fallen behind by more than a month.) Jaroussky is one of those artists that I know best by finding him on annual lists of GRAMMY nominations involving recordings that I have not encountered. Indeed, my only “real” encounter with him goes all the way back to 2012, when Virgin Classics released a DVD of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with Jaroussky in the role of Nero, working with William Christie conducting the musical resources of Les Arts Florissants, which quickly became one of my favorite ways to appreciate the “virtues of vice” in this decidedly non-standard opera.

Jaroussky’s latest album is entitled Ombra mai fu. The first thing the reader must be told is, “Not that ‘Ombra mai fu,’” to clarify that the album has nothing to do with the operas of George Frideric Handel. Rather, the entire album is devoted to the music of Francesco Cavalli, who, as a boy soprano at St Mark's Basilica in Venice, had the good fortune to be tutored by Monteverdi. Cavalli composed his own Xerse opera, which was first performed in January of 1654 and was based on exactly the same libretto by Nicolò Minato that Handel would subsequently use.

I have to say that I have been most fortunate in having many pleasant encounters with stagings of Cavalli’s operas, going all the way back to my “first contact” in the Eighties through a staged performance at Hunter College in Manhattan. Here in the Bay Area, Yefim Maizel had a particular fondness for presenting Cavalli operas in performances I saw given first by the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute and subsequently by Maizel’s own Opera Academy of California. Many of these operas were composed for performance during the pre-Lenten Carnival in Venice (for which Poppea was also composed), under the principle that one should indulge in as much ribaldry as possible to “get it out of one’s system” prior to the deprivations of Lent. Such ribaldry was abundant in Cavalli offerings, even when they were based on presumably serious subjects.

Nevertheless, while I continue to be unabashedly “hooked” on Cavalli, I have to say that his arias have their greatest impact when they are not deprived of context. Yes, this new Erato release abounds with opportunities to enjoy Jaroussky’s solid and expressive technique; and the same can be said of the Artaserse chamber ensemble that provides instrumental accompaniment without any explicitly acknowledged conductor. Nevertheless, the stylistic structures of these arias tend to be limited; and, about halfway through this new album, the attentive listener may be forgiven for feeling as if (s)he has heard one too many arias in lament form. (To be fair, that structure is one of the best platforms for exploring diverse paths of invention, not only in the manuscript but also in the interpretation of the marks on paper.)

Consequently, I continue to believe that the best way to get to know Cavalli is through full-length accounts of his operas, in which the arias assume their rightful significance along the path of the narrative thread; having acquired familiarity with Cavalli in this broader context, the listener may then appreciate the opportunity to enjoy some of those arias in isolation.

Ars Minerva’s Operatic Character Studies at IIC

Yesterday evening the Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano de Cultura, IIC) hosted its latest musical offering. The title of the program was Women of the Mediterranean, and it was conceived and presented by mezzo Céline Ricci, Artistic Director of Ars Minerva. She was joined by two performers from past Ars Minerva productions, soprano Aura Veruni and mezzo Kindra Scharich. All instrumental accompaniment was provided by Derek Tam at the harpsichord.

Ricci created Ars Minerva in 2013 with the mission to engage new audiences for classical music through innovative productions of Baroque operas. The group’s first three productions all involved bringing forgotten music back to life. The first of these La Cleopatra by Daniele da Castrovillari, was presented in March of 2015, followed, a little over a year later, by Carlo Pallavicino’s Le amazoni nell’isole fortunate (the amazons in the fortunate isles). The most recent production was Pietro Andrea Ziani’s La Circe, which was given this past September. Ricci has not only performed in these productions but also covered just about all other aspects from background research to staging.

Céline Ricci in the role of Circe (from the Ars Minerva Web site)

As yesterday evening’s title suggested, the program was based on individual female roles from the operatic repertoire. The historical scope of the selections spanned the period from 1640 (Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone) to 1738 (Giovanni Porta’s Ifigenia in Aulide, the next project being prepared for presentation by Ars Minerva). In the past I have often written about how, through his operatic arias, George Frideric Handel was a master of disclosing character traits, often using ternary form to capture the conflicting forces behind those traits. That technique was displayed in all its glory in Ricci’s portrayal of Medea in Handel’s HWV 9 Teseo. However, the other powerful dramatic form in opera was the lament; and that aspect of Handel’s imaginative skill was presented by Veruni, singing the role of Cleopatra in his HWV 17 Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar).

These are but two examples (by the most familiar composer on the program) from an overall presentation that examined nine different female operatic roles, each involving a different personality in a different dramatic situation. Perhaps the most salient virtue of the program was Ricci’s ability to maintain audience attention through the diversity of the offerings and the brief spoken texts through which each character was introduced to the audience. While there was no unifying narrative flow across the entire program, Ricci’s approach to presentation elegantly transcended the fatal trap of reducing the selections to Winston Churchill’s “one damned thing after another.” Through her conception and realization of the program, the attentive listener was drawn to not only the distinguishing musical properties of each selection but also the rich diversity of personalities that could be so penetratingly depicted through those musical properties.

Ars Minerva to Visit Italian Cultural Institute

courtesy of the Italian Cultural Institute

The next music event to be hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano de Cultura, IIC) will involve a visit from Ars Minerva. Those who have been following this site may recall that this year’s concert season began with a full-length fully-staged production by Ars Minerva of the seventeenth-century opera La Circe, composed by Pietro Andrea Ziani with a libretto by Cristoforo Ivanovich. Based in San Francisco and created by Artistic Director and mezzo Céline Ricci, Ars Minerva has been pursuing its mission of bringing forgotten music back to life since its formation in 2013.

At the end of this month, Ricci will come to IIC to present her latest project, Women of the Mediterranean Baroque Arias. Ricci has prepared a selection of arias by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, Carlo Pallavicino, George Frideric Handel, Pietro Andrea Zani, and Giovanni Porta to survey the different ways in which those composers developed female characters through the arias they composed. She will be joined by two other vocalists, soprano Aurélie Veruni and mezzo Kindra Scharich (both of whom had been in the cast of La Circe). Accompaniment will be provided by Derek Tam at the harpsichord.

This concert will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28, and will probably last for about two hours. IIC is located in the Civic Center at 601 Van Ness Avenue, Suite F. Admission is free, but registration is required to assure having a place. IIC has created a registration page specific for this event. Anyone who registers may also add the names of a maximum of two additional guests. Those wishing further information may call IIC at 415-788-7142.

Beyond Spectacle

The Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI) program of seventeen opera and operetta scenes took place last Thursday; and my Examiner.com piece about this performance appeared the following morning. However, this event seems to have lodged in my memory more securely than many more polished "professional" performances; so I feel a need to sort out some of the afterthoughts that have managed to linger for several days after my "official examination" went to press, so to speak. Many of those afterthoughts emerged from the setting of the event, which was the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As its name implies, this space was not conceived or designed with staged events in mind, although it does have a modest orchestra pit. Nevertheless, it has been engaged for a variety of innovative staging efforts, not only for the productions of La Calisto and "Suor Angelica" in this summer's BASOTI season but also in a stunning dramatization of the Conservatory's Blueprint Project production of The Soldier's Tale, whose director, Giles Havergal, seemed to have come up with ways to use every conceivable part of the Rehearsal Hall space.

It goes without saying that these three productions had little in common from either a dramatic or a musical point of view. However, I would argue that the setting established a commonality of its own. That commonality can be appreciated when we recognize that the constraints imposed by the Conservatory Recital Hall would probably have made a significantly positive impression on Aristotle, at least on the basis of the text of his "Poetics." The sixth section of this treatise itemizes six components of tragedy, one of which is spectacle (οψις). Aristotle clearly does not think particularly highly of this element, which is indicated by its penultimate position on his list. He gets more specific in the opening paragraph of the fourteenth section:

The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play—which is the better way and shows the better poet. The plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one. To produce this same effect by means of the spectacle is less artistic, and requires extraneous aid. Those, however, who make use of the spectacle to put before us that which is merely monstrous and not productive of fear, are wholly out of touch with tragedy; not every kind of pleasure should be required of a tragedy, but only its own proper pleasure.

The operative adjective in this critique is "extraneous." Spectacle may facilitate the visualization of the plot; but, when the text is properly crafted, the audience should be able to take care of such visualization on its own (perhaps with the suggestion that visualization in the imagination of the viewer has more impact than visualization made explicit through spectacle).

Consider, now, my selection of the "Presentation of the Rose" scene from Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier as the high point of the first half of last Thursday's scenes program; and consider, more specifically, how this scene tends to be staged in a large opera house. That staging is usually set (if one is to be faithful to the libretto) in the extreme opulence of both the Faninal mansion and Octavian's entrance (often with an uncountable number of footmen), all of which are reinforced in extremis by Strauss' lush orchestration. Clearly, there was no way that any of this opulence could be conveyed in the Conservatory Recital Hall. However, rather than feeling this as a loss, I found myself better appreciating how much the music itself actually expresses about these two young people; and I realized how easy it is for all of that expressiveness to get "drowned in the spectacle" (which is exactly the point that Aristotle was trying to make)! Now, we all know that audiences love to be dazzled by Strauss' spectacles (and his wife was good at translating that love into monetary value, at least according to Alma Mahler's memoir); but this bare-bones approach was of great value to those of us more interested in what goes on at the heart of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's text. I would not have traded the BASOTI staging for any other, regardless of any "resource advantages" afforded by the trappings of "grand opera."

Strauss was not the only composer to benefit from this more intimate point of view, but the other significant example was an unexpected surprise. In this case the scene came from the fourth act of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore. This was the opera whose production was selected by the San Francisco Opera for a simulcast in AT&T Park; and, as I wrote last October, neither the opera nor its staging were "well served by the shortcomings of the ballpark setting." I then reinforced this point with a rather critical assessment of the lead soprano:

Sondra Radvanosvsky (Leonora) never quite had a secure command of the virtuosic demands of her part; and the camera ended up exaggerating her trials, turning an acceptable performance into an unpleasant one.

In a business as competitive as opera, a phrase like "acceptable performance" is generally taken as an example of "damning with faint praise;" and I realized that my choice of words was still haunting me as I listened to a student soprano perform Leonora's principal aria from the fourth act as one of the BASOTI scene selections. Listening to the latter performance, I discovered subtleties in Verdi's setting of Salvadore Cammarano's text that, as far as my experience was concerned, turned a potboiler melodrama into a tragedy that would have been more acceptable to Aristotle's standards.

In this case the differentiating factor of the Recital Hall was not one of spectacle, however. It was one of the raw physics of acoustics. In a space as large as the War Memorial Opera House, the human ear is just not going to pick up the subtleties of inflection that can register in the more intimate setting of the Conservatory Recital Hall. Thus, if there is to be a comparable effect in the Opera House, the soloist will have to exaggerate that effect; but this is one of those cases where exaggeration cannot avoid distortion. Thus, while we tend to identify Verdi as a paragon of opera at its grandest, there are any number of examples where the demands of the drama itself require intimacy. Verdi knew how to translate that intimacy into music, but his translations simply do not hold up particularly well in the physical scale of today's opera houses. Thus, while it is hard to imagine a performance of the "Anvil Chorus" in the Recital Hall that would be anything by ludicrous, we really need to get physically closer to a character like Leonora to appreciate just what makes her tick in Cammarano's scenario; and the Recital Hall allowed the audience to do this.

What does this mean for the future of opera? The economics of opera production pretty much require that large audiences be accommodated for each performance. The San Francisco Opera has been experimenting with video projections in the upper balcony to provide better visual intimacy without forcing everyone to purchase opera glasses (or military-strength field glasses). However, the acoustic problem remains; and it may be that performances that honor opera music at its most intimate may demand more attention to matters of physics than were considered by past generations of opera performers.

So Many Concerts; So Little Coverage!

Monday's blog post about that recent performance of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie by the Redwood Symphony, from which I tried to extract a lesson in acquiring knowledge of the musical world apparently disturbed a hornets' nest; and I was so occupied with the provoked hornets that I did not have time to write yesterday! Now that I have made a few revisions to the post to anonymize the circumstances and my stings are beginning to heal, I feel as if the main thing I learned is the extent to which acquiring that knowledge is impeded when there is only one source of information. If I truly believe, as I wrote, that "much (if not most) of what we know emerges from our 'conversations' with others" (either face-to-face or through what we read and our capacity to reply and/or comment, now facilitated by the Internet), what happens if there are not enough individuals to make for a beneficial conversation? Every now and then there will be an event for which I read multiple accounts (I shall not waltz around nouns like "review" or "criticism"); but they are vastly outweighed by those events for which I never read an account. If, as I keep arguing, it is the case that we go to concerts in order to learn how to listen, then there is a painful shortage of opportunities for conversations over our listening experiences.

While I have come to write this in the wake of a concert in the San Francisco Bay Area, my guess is that this is a pretty common problem in the United States, if not in many countries around the world. London seems to be one of the few cities where I have been able to read multiple accounts of events; but, if you take into account the number of events that show up in the calendar listings, even there the coverage barely scratches the surface. I suppose this is ultimately one of those cases where I really wish there was more to "long tail" thinking than the hard data appear to endorse. There are any number of performances of music out there on the long tail in terms of attendance figures. The irony is that many of them can be really useful for those learning how to listen and could make for extremely rich conversations about listening experiences. However, the newspapers do not have room to cover such events; and, whether or not they own up to living in an echo chamber, the bloggers tend to focus on the same events that the newspapers cover (perhaps because the newspapers cover them). To be fair San Francisco Classical Voice ran a review of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto; but this provoked a controversial exchange of comments (which seems to have been removed from the archives) over whether student performers should be reviewed (or, for that matter, named). (I have written about this problem myself. My position is that there is plenty to write about concerning the music and even the matter of performing that music without putting students under pressure by naming their names. I also have my own problem with San Francisco Classical Voice, which is that, all too often, I find myself reading something "by some great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it. Such writing seldom furthers any conversation about listening experiences!) Meanwhile, as I hope some of my own posts have indicated, the Bay Area offers a plethora of opportunities for listening to chamber music (not to mention the free Master Classes at the Conservatory, which are an excellent approach to learning to listen); yet coverage seems to be restricted to a limited set of "prime" events in an even more limited number of venues.

There are those who seem to believe that getting coverage is primarily the responsibility of the performer. I am sure there are any number of Gilbert and Sullivan fans happy to endorse the "stir it and stump it,/And blow your own trumpet" philosophy; but is that not asking a bit much of a performer who is probably putting no end of waking hours into making sure that the performance has high enough quality to be so "stumped?" Established professionals can often outsource this task to an agent; but those trying to establish themselves, so to speak, are rarely so lucky. I suppose this is one reason that so many performers throw all of their effort behind winning competitions, since competition awards tend to provide a "fast track" to establishment; however, as I continue to observe, that track does not always lead to occasions for better listening experiences.

Sadly, the bottom line appears to be that the interests of good listening experiences and the interests of professional musicians are at frustrating cross-purposes. My guess is that Igor Stravinsky could not have anticipated such a situation when he enjoined us all to be better listeners. After all, he was in a highly reputable (not to mention pretty comfortable) situation when he issued that injunction all those decades ago. It is not worth arguing over whether the situation for performers is better now than it was when Stravinsky put that stake in the ground; but my guess is that the "great man" did not give much thought to the implications of what he said for anyone other than himself! As result, he has laid a rather massive burden on not only the performers but also all of us who are so committed to keeping our conversations about music going!

Good People and Good Fortune

Watching the first performance of George Frideric Handel's Ariodante, presented this afternoon by the San Francisco Opera, I found myself thinking again about Daniel Mendelsohn's proposition that "Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas." There may be a somewhat loose analogy that applies to good fortune. We are, of course, used to the dramatic arc through which good fortune is interrupted by bad fortune and restored by the conclusion of the plot. Mendelsohn uses this approach to elaborate his proposition in his New York Review article about the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha:

Aristotle, in his Poetics, refers to plot as a knot tied by the author (he calls it a dêsis, a "binding up") out of the manifold strands representing competing wills or desires or ideologies; an ugly and worrisome knot that will, in due course, ultimately come undone in a climactic moment of loosening or release of tension (the lysis, or "undoing")—a concept that survives in our term "dénouement."

This is why "bad people" are so important, since they are the ones doing that necessary "binding." This Aristotelian model still holds for most plots we encounter. It is certainly there in Ariodante, but this opera presents an interesting problem of scale. How long must we wait for the "binding up" to being in earnest?

In Ariodante my simplistic three-stage reduction of Aristotle pretty much corresponds to the three acts:

1. Ariodante loves Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland. She returns his love. His father approves their marriage, and they are destined to become the next King and Queen of Scotland. The only problem is that the Duke Polinesso also loves Ginevra; and Ginevra's lady-in-waiting, Dalinda loves Polinesso. Polinesso enlists Dalinda to help him get even with Ginevra for her spurning him; this will be the dêsis of the plot.
2. Polinesso convinces Dalinda to wear Ginevra's clothes. He then romances the disguised Dalinda in front of Ariodante to convince Ariodante than Ginevra is not pure. Ariodante goes off and jumps off a cliff. His brother Lurcanio (who happens to have been spurned by Dalinda) pleads with the King for justice and accuses Ginevra of being the cause of Ariodante's death. The King denounces Ginevra as impure and has her put in chains. (Is that bound up enough for you?)
3. Ariodante survives his leap. He encounters Dalinda, who tells him everything. Polinesso offers to defend Ginevra's honor before the King and is mortally wounded in a duel with Lorcanio. Ariodante returns to court and sets everything right. Dalinda marries Lorcanio, and Ginevra marries Ariodante.

While is this as neat a division as you are likely to get, the problem is that music tends to be at its most interesting where bad fortune is involved. Put another way, there is only so much you can take of people singing about how happy they are (as was nicely satirized in the El Dorado song from the musical Candide). Perhaps Handel planned his first act for its "publicity value," providing every member of the cast with the opportunity to sing at least one da capo aria (which I previously compared with Shakespeare giving every one of his characters a soliloquy). No matter how interesting the music is and how good the voices are, this tends to get very top-heavy very quickly. It becomes a classic case of "one damned thing after another!"

This puts a tremendous burden on the conductor to make sure that there really is more to the succession of arias than that Churchillian put-down. Handel does not help very much; but, at this particular performance, I suspect there was more variety in the "text" of the score than conductor Patrick Summers managed to elicit from his orchestra and singers. Each aria certainly had an ample share of virtuosic demands; and some (but not all) of the performers (Susan Graham and Richard Croft doing the best jobs) found their way through to nuanced shadings while jumping through their respective hoops. Nevertheless, this was not the sort of first act that left one sitting on the edge of one's seat eager to find out what will next ensue.

Nevertheless, returning from intermission for the second act (rather than bailing on the whole affair) was extremely rewarding. This is one of those cases of dêsis in which both of the principal characters get to have mad scenes. Handel did not invent the overcome-with-grief aria (since that can be traced back to Orpheus after losing Eurydice in Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo); but, as I previously wrote, he could do this sort of thing very well indeed (so well that he was known to transplant one of those arias into a new opera). In this opera Handel is as good as he ever gets with Ariodante's mad scene. The strings have their prototypical "sighing motif;" but they set off a solo bassoon line which is profound enough to belong in its own concerto. Meanwhile, the vocal line runs through enormous intervallic leaps in both directions, all at a slow but steady pace. This particular staging required Graham to sing the final passage lying on her back, which she did without having any problems with projecting her voice to the entire audience. Ginevra's aria, which concludes the act, is not quite as sophisticated musically but carries the greater dramatic burden. Ariodante is all set to kill himself; Ginevra, on the other hand, is still in the dark as to why she is about to be imprisoned and even more uncertain about what will happen to her. Ruth Ann Swenson's acting was definitely at a high point during this aria.

This left the third act for the lysis. In terms of timing, it was a lot more conducive to the attention span than the first act was. This was due, in part, to there being one duel fought and another almost fought (before Ariodante reveals himself to Lurcanio). After that, Dalinda spends a bit more time than she should trying to make things right with Lurcanio, particularly after all the first act arias about how wonderful things are going to be; but we eventually find our way through to a double wedding and joyful chorus.

Finally, it is worth noting that the arrangement of the orchestra was rather similar to that employed by the San Francisco Conservatory students in their production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto. Most of the instruments were modern, including a cello for much of the continuo work. However, the continuo also included a harpsichord (two in the San Francisco Opera production, one for the conductor); and both productions included a theorbo. This is basically an overgrown lute with a sufficiently long neck to allow plucked strings to sound bass notes that have a rather eerie sound (definitely not like the low notes on a harp). This instrument is amazingly effective when profundity of emotion (particularly grief) is paramount. I was impressed with how well the Conservatory production had employed it and delighted to find it being used equally well by the San Francisco Opera. Now, if they can only figure out a way to put a bit more pace into that first act!

Acquaintances Old and New

It is a bit disconcerting to begin a month like May with two posts on the theme of the arrogance of power in the public sector; so it is probably good for my spirits that the end-of-term events at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music are continuing in full force. Since my program for the Opera Theatre production of Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto included a list of Vocal Department performances, I decided to shift from chamber music and check out last night's Opera Workshop. This consisted of eleven scenes, each directed with minimal staging and costuming and piano accompaniment. I was struck by how many of those scenes were familiar, as a result of my opera-going experience; but I was equally struck by how the non-familiar ones appealed to my ongoing sense of curiosity.

Most interesting is that I finally had a chance to hear an extended excerpt from The Dangerous Liaisons by Conrad Susa (who happens to be Chair of the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory). Unfortunately, I was not in San Francisco when this work was premiered in September of 1994 by the San Francisco Opera; and, equally unfortunately, the Wikipedia "community of musicologists" seems far less thorough in accounting for living composers than they are with those of more distant centuries. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia stub for Susa includes the tidbit that his composition teachers at Julliard "included William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti and, so he says, P. D. Q. Bach." As I understand the history, "P. D. Q. Bach" was "born" out of Peter Schickele's efforts to inject a bit of humor into the Julliard traditions of both composition and performance. These attracted enough attention that he was able to escalate them from "internal" Julliard events to public ones, which eventually provided him with a touring schedule that he probably had never anticipated.

Whether or not Susa was involved with any of those "internal" events certainly does not bear on his treatment of Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. More relevant is that the opera seems to have emerged after Christopher Hampton had adapted it for the stage (and then reconceived for film director Stephen Frears). It also postdates the Milos Forman film, Valmont, with a script adapted from Laclos by Jean-Claude Carrière.

I was in Los Angeles when a production of Hampton's play went on tour and enjoyed his conception for the stage far more than either of those two films. I felt that Hampton had found the right way to keep the staging focused on the narrative line without unduly compromising the epistolary structure of the novel. This, then, was the personal context I brought to my first exposure to the approach that Susa had taken in conjunction with his librettist, Philip Littell. Here, again, Wikipedia provided only a stub; but fortunately the stub provided a breakdown of the scenes in each of the opera's two acts. From this I could assume that what I saw at last night's Workshop was the opening scene of the opera. I find this important because, unless I am mistaken, both the play and the films provide us with a fair amount of background on the primary protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, background that emerges from the initial letters of the novel. Susa and Littell, on the other hand, drop us in medias res, allowing the protagonists to reveal their characters (and, for that matter, establish themselves as protagonists) in a highly charged (and populated) social gathering.

Having discovered this information only this morning, I find myself in a position of "retrospective evaluation" of the performance I saw last night. Because I did not know where the scene fit into the overall conception of the opera, I found it a bit muddled; and I felt that there was not enough subtlety in the way in which the characters communicated. Looking back on it now as a scene that establishes first impressions, I have a better understanding of why the characters' behaviors were more overt than they had been in the previous versions I had seen; and I can appreciate that the approach that Susa and Littell took can work in an operatic setting, even if it departed significantly from adaptations for other media. The result is that I am now far more curious about seeing this opera in its entirety than I was after my initial exposure to the scene.

Having gone on at length about a "new acquaintance," I would like to conclude with a few remarks about an old one. The Susa excerpt was followed by the opening scene of the "opera portion" of Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss. This was conceived as an "appendix" to Molière's play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which, among other things, is a satirical look at the correlation between the rise of a bourgeois class and the rise of mediocrity in the arts. The "opera" is preceded by a Prologue, which may best be described as an operatic depiction of Murphy's Law. Everything imaginable goes wrong; and the opera that is being rehearsed becomes mashed-up (yes, in the contemporary sense of that phrase) with the low humor of a commedia dell'arte troupe. Furthermore, it is clear that everyone involved in this affair was obtained at cut-rate prices, thus reinforcing Molière's original point about mediocrity.

There are a variety of ways in which this can be staged. My personal preference tends towards beginning in a total morass of incompetence from which, by the end of the opera, something authentically sublime emerges. This provides opportunities for the opera seria characters to "play on the same turf" as the "official" comedians. This is particularly the case in that opening scene, which is a trio for Nyade, Dryade, and Echo. In the first place the very fact that Echo does little more than repeat means that she can be portrayed as the dimmest bulb in this particular Christmas tree. However, this particular staging conceived of all of them as being not particularly bright, going through "classical" motions with only the vaguest sense of what they were doing (but all staged with the same intricacy as the Marx Brothers at their zaniest). All this then takes place while they are singing some of the most luscious music ever written for three female voices. Thus, going back to the overall plan, we begin in the realm of the ridiculous; but we are already receiving cues of the sublime that will shortly come.

This brings us to why I wanted to single out these two particular scenes. Both are fundamentally revelatory. They feed the viewer's need to anticipate what will be coming next. In Dangerous Liaisons it is a transition from seemingly vapid parlor talk to the foolish circumstances under which one of the protagonists will die. In Ariadne the transition is from laughable mediocrity to a reminder that the best of art can elevate, whatever the surrounding context may be. Any evening that can present us with both of those transitions back-to-back is transcendent in its own special way.

Entertainment in the Seventeenth Century

My guess is that, when the San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre began preparing their performance of L'Egisto, there was not a whole lot of familiarity with the music of composer Francesco Cavalli; so both composer and opera were probably even greater unknowns to most of the audience. At least I had the advantage of seeing L'Ormindo, the opera that Cavalli composed almost immediately after L'Egisto back in the days when I would take the train from Stamford to New York for as wide a variety of musical offerings as my schedule could manage. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to confess that about all that my wife-to-be and I can remember from that event were the really eye-dazzling costumes by Beni Montresor. Beyond that I think the performance was in the Auditorium of Hunter College but would not bet anything serious on that. According to the Wikipedia entry for L'Ormindo, it was performed by the Pittsburgh Opera in February of 2007; but I doubt that this had anything to do with the Conservatory's decision to prepare L'Egisto as this year's full opera project. A more likely explanation is that director Richard Harrell had recently staged Cavalli's La Calisto for the San Francisco Opera Center and wanted to give this composer another try.

I certainly cannot blame Harrell for his interest. Cavalli's obscurity today is one of those cruel artifacts of history. As Nathaniel Marken's program notes observed, L'Egisto was one of the greatest hits of the opera repertoire in the latter half of the seventeenth century, at least "up and down the Italian peninsula." There could be a variety of reasons for this. For one thing it may have one of the largest casts of solo voices in the opera repertoire (at least if you do not count Der Ring des Nibelungen as a single opera); so, whatever one may have thought about the plot, one could always attend a performance as a "monster" recital (in the same sense of the "monster" piano concerts arranged by Louis Moreau Gottschalk two centuries later). However, the plot itself is rather a departure from the prevailing esthetic in that it is not tragedy, comedy, or history; rather, as we learn from the Wikipedia entry, it was called a favola dramatica musicale, favola being Italian for "fairytale" or, if you want a similar-sounding English word, "fable." Whether or not this was a deliberate effort to situate the work beyond the pale of Aristotelian esthetics, there is something decidedly different about the plot; and, if Aristotle is being rejected, then this may be because his belief in the theatre as a source of education is also being rejected. L'Egisto is there to entertain and nothing particularly more.

That emphasis on entertainment may explain the large cast. In the interest of variety, we have mortals (such as Egisto himself), gods (such as Venus and Apollo), demigods (such as Cupid), allegorical figures (such as the Four Hours), and even four heroines from a rather diverse collection of other fables (Semele, Phaedra, Dido, and Hero). Furthermore, all characters are decidedly human in their strengths and weaknesses (which, in the case of the elderly nurse Dema, includes sexual appetite), which means that the Aristotelian classification of characters as noble or base is also being rejected. Perhaps the work was so popular because, while the composer and librettist (Giovanni Faustini) may have been Italian, the "culture" of the plot is more in keeping with the humanist outlook of Northern Europe.

This sounds like quite a lot to cram into a single opera. So anyone familiar with the background of this opera was probably braced for a very long evening. However, the other thing I remember about the performance of L'Ormindo that I saw was that it was very skillfully edited down to a form that honored both plot and music without demanding the endurance required for sitting through Das Rheingold. I assume that both Harrell and conductor Christopher Larkin had a hand in editing L'Egisto down to a length sympathetic to the audience sitting in the Cowell Theater, in which case they both came up with a good strategy for moving the plot along at a brisk pace without depriving any of the singers of their respective opportunities for virtuoso display (which may include the first real mad scene in the history of opera as we know it). So, if this was an opera that was intended primarily (if not entirely) to entertain, then the "teamwork across time" of the "creative staff" of Cavalli and Faustini and the "production staff" of Harrell and Larkin came off totally successfully.

While most Conservatory performances take place only once, four performances were scheduled for L'Egisto (with two casts), All of my impressions came from Opening Night, meaning that three performances remain: tonight, tomorrow night, and Sunday afternoon. I suppose that the strongest of those impressions is that Cavalli really does not deserve the obscurity his ghost must currently endure. There is nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake when properly executed, and this particular execution has shown itself to be a real gem. Besides, how likely is it that this kind of lightning will strike again in the near future?