Cultural Confusion

Having lived in Singapore, I have a great interest Asian music and how it is perceived and experienced through Western ears. I have written about this phenomenon with respect to both Stewart Wallace, in his opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Andrew Imbrie's interest in Korean instruments. During Paul Roberts' Master Class this afternoon at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I was reminded that Claude Debussy provided another pair of ears fascinated by the perception of Asian music. However, Roberts' efforts to convey the nature of Debussy's perceptions reminded me of the extent to which Western perceptions at the beginning of the twentieth century were far less "clinical" (if not acute) than they were at the beginning of the twenty-first.

The music in question is "Pagodes," the first of Debussy's set of three Estampes. As a point of reference, consider the introductory paragraph for the Wikipedia entry for "Pagoda:"

A pagoda is the general term in the English language for a tiered tower with multiple eaves common in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Some pagodas are used as Taoist houses of worship. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most commonly Buddhist, and were often located in or near temples. This term may refer to other religious structures in some countries. In Myanmar and Thailand, "pagoda" usually means the same as stupa or chaitya, while in Vietnam, "pagoda" is a more generic term referring to a place of worship. The modern pagoda is an evolution of the Ancient Indian stupa, a tomb-like structure where sacred relics could be kept safe and venerated.^[1] The architectural structure of the stupa has spread across Asia, taking on many diverse forms as details specific to different regions are incorporated into the overall design.

The casual ear might mistake this composition for an effort on Debussy's part to depict some kind of Chinese landscape; but, as Roberts correctly observed, the musical influence is that of gamelan, which is strictly Indonesian. Thus, if one wanted to be pedantically accurate, the landscape would be one of stupas, rather than pagodas. Unfortunately, there would also be a problem of just where this landscape would be. The work begins with the gradual insinuation of the multiple layers of gamelan sound, which would be entirely appropriate for the terrain around the Prambanan temple in central Java. (This is actually where I had one of my earliest experiences of gamelan, listening to the ensemble that accompanied a performance by the Ramayana Dance Troupe on the temple grounds.) However, as Debussy builds his music to a climax, he also suddenly moves us to the neighboring island of Bali, known for its more sharply defined (and usually louder) sounds. In other words, when it came to non-Western music, Debussy was as much of a dilettante as was the fictitious foil he created for his critical writing, Monsieur Croche!

Honoring Andrew Imbrie

Cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau's Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was dedicated to the memory of Andrew Imbrie. The composer and Berkeley faculty member died at the beginning of last December, roughly around the same time as the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen. While Stockhausen's music received considerable "memorial attention" during 2008, particularly in Europe, last night was my first opportunity to hear any of Imbrie's music. He was represented on Fonteneau's program by two short pieces: the 2002 "Duet for Two Friends" and the 2006 "Melody for Gayageum."

It is unclear whether the "friends" of the 2002 composition were Fonteneau and clarinetist John Sackett, who gave the work its first performance, or whether the friendship referred to the scoring for cello and bass clarinet. There is certainly an affinity between these two instruments, so the work provided an opportunity to explore the subtleties induced by their different sonorities. Thus, the work could be approached more as an intimate conversation than as a conventional duet. For jazz listeners such a conversation is not particularly new. Charles Mingus may have played bass, rather than cello. However, he often approached his instrument more as a cello than as a jazz bass; and this was certainly the case in his improvisations with Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet. These two could go on at great length covering extensive ground that was as technical as it was emotional. Imbrie's work was far more modest, although just as technically demanding. Indeed, the intimacy of the engagement seemed to have progressed to a point where these "friends" had little to actually say beyond just enjoying their mutual presence.

The gayageum is basically a twelve string Korean zither. Thus, as was the case with Stewart Wallace's score for The Bonesetter's Daughter, Imbrie's 2006 composition seems to ask to be approached in terms of Asian music heard through Western ears. My own problem was that, while I was familiar with the music that inspired Wallace, I knew absolutely nothing about the gayageum. I was thus confronted with a lack of contextual knowledge that would elevate this work beyond just another introspective cello solo. Fonteneau certainly helped by offering some introductory remarks about the general thematic structure, but the question of how a traditional Korean instrument figured in the conception of the work remained unanswered.

The "bookends" for these rather modest works were more "monumental" in nature: Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 102, Number 2 sonata in D major and Johannes Brahms' Opus 38 sonata in E minor. Brahms was working on this sonata during the same time when he composed his Opus 34 F minor piano quintet, and both works display similar levels of emotional energy and intensity. While the resources of the sonata are not as extensive as those of the quintet, Fonteneau invested the performance with all the emotion it demands and was more than ably supported by pianist Jeffrey Sykes. Similar qualities emerged from their performance of Beethoven, although this was a work from his final years. Listening to these works in succession, I realized that Brahms' sonata was definitely not "haunted by Beethoven's shadow." There may have been a sense of a torch being passed, but it is through the passing of that torch that a work like the Opus 38 can be heard as both retrospective and prospective. If there was a problem with shadows, it was that these two works ultimately made it difficult for very much light to shine on the more recent compositions by Imbrie.

Mozart Takes on Free Will

The 2008–09 season of the San Francisco Opera is beginning to feel a bit like a seminar in an undergraduate humanities program. We began with a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, which offered up a tragic perspective on republicanism as practiced in fourteenth-century Genoa. We then moved on to the cultural studies (featuring a major sidebar on the sociology of mothers-in-law) of Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter. Then we had Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, which may well have told us more about the psychology of dreams than we could get from even the closest reading of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Anyone who was hoping to settle back into the art-for-art's-sake world of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera seria, Idomeneo, Re di Creta (K. 366), may have received a jolt from John Copley's conception, which situated the opera firmly in the domain of the opposition between free will and divine control. Whether or not Mozart was thinking in such terms is obviously open to question; but in Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook we can read the Mozart obituary by Adolph Heinrich von Schlichtegroll, which claims that the operas "Mozart esteemed most highly" were Idomeneo and Don Giovanni, the latter taking an even more dramatic approach to the confrontation between a libertine's free will and the divine force that ultimately consumes him. So we have good reason to believe that Copley was not overstepping Mozart's bounds in his approach.

Mozart, on the other hand, was definitely overstepping the bounds of opera seria, taking full advantage of the Mannheim resources at his disposal (as was emphasized in the book Mozart: The Early Years 1756–1781 by Stanley Sadie and Neal Zaslaw). This was not just a matter of exploiting "Mannheim dynamics" for the sake of dramatic impact. It also involved using the orchestra to greater advantage than was usually the case in opera at that time. Most important were his efforts towards a seamless flow of the action, resulting in arias whose conclusions would then immediately launch the next phase of the action. That seamlessness was further reinforced by having the recitativo passages accompanied by the full orchestra, rather than a keyboard-based continuo. This was a technique that Christoph Willibald Gluck had engaged with powerful effect in his Iphigénie en Tauride, which predated Idomeneo by about two years. Mozart was well aware of Gluck's innovative departures from the opera seria traditions of the time; and his "inner twenty-year-old" was probably champing at the bit to show off how he could strut the same stuff and take it to the next level.

When we move from the orchestra pit to the stage, we see that Mozart is also showing off what he could do with his resources. Most striking is probably the extent to which he uses multiple voices to greatest dramatic effect. Thus, the only duets we hear are embedded in choral passages and are sung by secondary characters: two Cretan women praising Idamante and two Trojan prisoners celebrating their liberation. (Could that latter pair have been an inspiration when Ludwig van Beethoven was working on Fidelio? The prisoner duet is there even as early as the 1805 Leonore version.) The first time the major characters sing together is in the second act terzetto for Idamante, Elettra, and Idomeneo, just before the former two are to board the ship that will take them for Argos, as Idomeneo has commanded. By this time we have a full grasp of just how conflicted the emotions of these three characters are, and Mozart's pen was stoked to let those conflicts weave through a counterpoint that displaced the usual dialog between soloist and orchestra. After the resulting catastrophe thwarts Idomeneo's wishes, we are back on "aria turf" until those conflicted characters come together again, this time in a quartet with Ilia added to the mix. This is dramatic emphasis at its best, and it allows us to appreciate that Mozart could be as good with subtlety as he could be with show-off display.

All of these skills were exhibited in the best possible light in yesterday afternoon's San Francisco Opera performance. Conductor Donald Runnicles has always had an excellent sense of how to pace Mozart, so the flow of the music was flawlessly delivered to support the flow of the drama. However, for those interested in whether or not the uncontrollable fates always have the upper hand over free will, we need to consider the case of the part of Idamante. For reasons that I shall not try to understand (let alone explain), the San Francisco Chronicle decided to give "full-court press" (pun intended) publicity to the return of Alice Coote to San Francisco to sing this role. This effort then begat a review that came a bit too close to suggesting that Coote was the only reason for seeing this product. Could this review have provoked the fates into visiting Coote with a back injury? The scenario of Idomeneo would certainly encourage us to ask that question, but the more important question was how prepared the San Francisco Opera was to go this particular distance without her. It turns out that she was replaced by first-year Adler Fellow Daniela Mack, who had just made her San Francisco Opera debut as one of the raunchy members of Marietta's theater troupe in Die Tote Stadt. This may not have been a "star is born" occasion (since Mack already has a rather impressive resume); but she definitely did not disappoint. There were a few awkward moments with the staging, and the astute ear could hear the way she was finding her voice in her first aria. However, she was on solid ground by the end of that aria and remained there for the rest of the performance. If the fates were trying to humble a public relations push, then Mack's free will trumped those fates as surely as the free will of both Idomeneo and Idamante prevailed over the force of Neptune!

Hyphenated Identity

Having invoked Daniel Mendelsohn's proposition that "Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas" in examining Simon Boccanegra, the first offering in the new San Francisco Opera season, I was reminded of it again while watching the second offering, The Bonesetter's Daughter. Unlikely as it may seem, these two operas share the common theme of reconciliation. However, while the former involves a reconciliation that sustains the strength of the republic of fourteenth-century Genoa, the latter involves the reconciliation of a contemporary "hyphenated American" with her past and, therefore, with her own sense of identity. If today there is no longer any question that the collaboration of Giuseppe Verdi with Arrigo Boito made a good subject for an opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter probably comes closer to the difficulty that Mendelsohn had in mind. One may appreciate reconciliation with one's identity in a novel (and, in the case of The Bonesetter's Daughter, novelist Amy Tan found many readers who did appreciate it); but would that appreciation translate to opera?

As I previously wrote, Mendelsohn based his argument on an Aristotle's approach to the nature of tragedy. Let me reproduce his key premise, as he published it in The New York Review:

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."

Mendelsohn invoked this logic in writing about the Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha; and it is actually provides a perfectly reasonable frame for both the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the principle of Satyagraha that played such a strong role in how he lived his life. What distinguishes the conception of the opera by Glass and his librettist Constance DeJong is the dénouement, which has less to do with Gandhi's own life and more to do with the passing of the Satyagraha principle over time down to Martin Luther King.

In Tan's case the "knot" is that of the "hyphenated American;" and, in casting her novel as an opera libretto, Tan made this clear in the Scene 1 of Act I, where we encounter the tension of Chinese-Americans and Jewish-Americans, brought together by the protagonist's marriage, gathered at a Chinese restaurant for a birthday celebration. Can this make a good subject for opera? (George Balanchine is famous for once saying there are no mothers-in-law in ballet. How, I wonder, would he have reacted to an opera that puts two mothers-in-law together on the stage?) Having now seen The Bonesetter's Daughter as an opera, I have no trouble answering my rhetorical question in the affirmative.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the success of this work is that the production itself was highly "hyphenated." Composer Stewart Wallace invested considerable time in exposing himself to traditional Chinese music, not so much for the sake of appropriating it but in order to convey his own experience of what it meant to hear those sounds through Western ears. Thus, the suona, a double-reed instrument with the impact of a trumpet, plays a major role, which is as much dramatic as musical; and Chinese percussion instruments deftly coexist with a Western battery. The character of the bonesetter's daughter was sung by Qian Yi, trained in traditional Chinese opera and bringing that characteristic vocal sound to her performance. However, the hyphenation extends beyond the score. Director Chen Shi-Zheng conceived of a staging that combined the techniques of contemporary theater with the traditional skills of Chinese acrobats. The very experience of watching this production is one of hyphenated identity.

All this might sound like too much; and I have to confess that my first sight of the acrobats during the Prologue took me back to Peter Hall's catastrophic staging of Verdi's Macbeth for the Metropolitan Opera, in which he wanted to "fly" the witches and expected them to sing Verdi's score at the same time! However, Chen did not repeat Hall's blunders: Every performer stuck to what (s)he was trained to do; and everything came together like the tiles of a mosaic from which the narrative then emerged. To say too much about that narrative would be to spoil the critical revelation of the plot. If this opera has the staying power of even one of Verdi's lesser efforts (like Macbeth), that revelation may eventually have less surprise, as the story will have become more familiar; but for now those new to the opera should be allowed to let its impact run its course.

Thus I would prefer to put the narrative aside and make an observation about Wallace's "Western ears." As I have frequently written, the music of the present cannot help but be informed by the music of the past. While listening to Wallace's score, I found myself thinking about how Igor Stravinsky had drawn upon his own exposure to indigenous Russian music and turned it into a voice of his own. There are occasional flashes that would indicate that Stravinsky was very much part of Wallace's own listening experience, as was Ligeti, with his capacity for weaving fine textures from a prodigious number of independent voices. (I have to confess that Ligeti may have been on my mind since, once again, I had an opportunity to hear a contrabass clarinet, such as the one Ligeti had used in "Lontano.") Yet there also seemed to be a clear invocation of Maurice Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye suite in the final scene, almost as if to emphasize that this was a tale more timeless than the Tan novel itself. The score was thus a reflection of Wallace as Western listener as well as a discoverer of traditional Chinese sonorities.

Finally, credit must be given to David Gockley for taking on this project. Since coming to San Francisco, he has added two world premieres to the company's repertoire, Appomattox being the first. He has given us two significantly different operas, each of which is worthy of that aforementioned staying power in a business in which all "product" is highly volatile. We should all be following the San Francisco Opera to see what future seasons will bring.

San Francisco Opera: The New Season

San Francisco Opera held their press conference to announce their 2008–09 season, which was reported in yesterday morning's San Francisco Chronicle. Most subscribers have probably received the new Season Subscription Brochure by now. Those of us with electronic mail have also been notified through the latest "E-newsletter," which also included a link to the new homepage for the San Francisco Opera Web site. It offers (probably through Flash) a sequence of the color photos for each opera used in the brochure, with a caption that names the opera, gives the dates of its run, and provides a "LEARN MORE" button. There is also a convenient row of thumbnail images underneath the main display and a list of all the operas in hyperlinked text on the right. It is all very attractive. However, what may be more interesting while the powers that be play their language games over whether or not we are in a recession is the final sentence of Joshua Kosman's Chronicle article:

[General Director David] Gockley also announced a nearly 50 percent reduction in the price of side orchestra seats and discounts on full and half series subscriptions.

In other words, in the midst of times when people are going to be more careful how they spend their money, Gockley is mounting a full-court press (not the best metaphor to go with his San Francisco Giants baseball cap) to make his offerings more affordable without compromising the quality of those offerings. Since the Opera is a business, there is no avoiding worrying about the bottom line; and while most businesses focus on cutbacks that will reduce expenses (often in the context of that absurd cliché about working smarter rather than working harder, recently picked up in the script for The Wire), Gockley would rather look at the other pan of the balance and take on the problem of increasing revenue. Will it work? The only legitimate answer is another cliché, the one about "the opera ain't over," which, ironically, I also tend to associate with basketball.

For my part I am very picky about what I like in any opera production, and I have now seen enough San Francisco Opera productions to know better than to anticipate my reactions. For now, then, let me just walk through the list of productions, offering some personal reflections. Since I, too, would like to see more people going to the Opera, I hope this will be of help to those wondering whether or not this will be the season for getting a first taste:

• Simon Boccanegra (Giuseppe Verdi): As unfamiliar as this opera may be to most folks, a strange twist of fate made it the source of one of my earliest exposures to opera in general and Verdi in particular. The reason is that my parents owned an album of 78s called A Night at Carnegie Hall, which consisted of most of the music from a little-known film called Carnegie Hall. One of the records in the album had Ezio Pinza singing "Il lacerto spirito," from the Prologue to Simon Boccanegra. This remains the high point of the opera for me, partly because there was a profundity to Pinza's voice that I have never heard equaled (admitting that this may just be the exaggerated memory of a first impression) but also because, even at a very young age, the soulfulness of that music really got to me; and I have not heard that equaled in any other part of the Verdi canon. I have always found it ironic that this aria is not sung by the title character, but by Jacopo Fiesco, who seeks vengeance against Boccanegra. However, what he sings is not the usual blood-and-guts revenge aria but a meditation on his grief which is almost elegiac in nature. The whole opera is deeply embedded in fourteenth century Genoese politics, which would not make the best of plot lines for a beginner. Boccanegra will be sung by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who was made to look very silly as Don Giovanni in a production here that was about five years ago. This production is shared with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where it was conceived by Elijah Moshinsky, who did not make any of it look silly at all. I am looking forward to seeing Hvorostovsky under the more favorable circumstances. Donald Runnicles will be conducting; and I have been consistently happy with how he negotiates his Verdi (even when I am not all that happy with what Verdi has composed).
• The Bonesetter's Daughter (Stewart Wallace): This is a world premiere being co-produced with the Dallas Opera. I know Wallace only as the composer of Harvey Milk, which, for me at least, made more interesting political statements than musical ones. However, I am not sure what I would have wanted out of an opera about the life and times of Harvey Milk, except that, unless I am mistaken, the documentary about Milk did not use any music at all. The title of the new opera, of course, comes from the novel by Amy Tan, who has assumed the task of librettist for this work. I am no big fan of Tan's. I know The Joy Luck Club only from the film version (for which Tan collaborated with Ron Bass on the script); and I am afraid I found it excessive along just about every possible dimension. However, having seen Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera in Santa Fe in the summer of 1989, I am fascinated with the idea of dealing with cross-cultural issues through a synthesis of the musics of the two cultures. Therefore, I cannot help but be curious about what both the music and the production will be like.
• Die Tote Stadt (Erich Wolfgang Korngold): This is the first opera of the season that I am really excited about seeing. I was first exposed to Korngold's "dead city" through one of Ted Shawn's pioneering efforts in modern dance; but that had virtually nothing to do with the opera. I heard a New York City Opera performance of the opera one afternoon in my car back when I was in Los Angeles; and shortly thereafter I bought the RCA CD recorded in Munich in 1975, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting such voices as René Kollo, Carol Neblett (whose father was my piano technician in Los Angeles), Benjamin Luxon, and Hermann Prey. This is another opera with a musical high point that comes early, "Glück, das mir verblieb," known more familiarly as "Marietta's Lied," even though it is not a solo aria, towards the end of the first act. Korngold does not receive as much attention as his early twentieth-century contemporaries in either opera houses or concert halls, possibly because he tends not to be regarded as a particularly disciplined composer. As I recall, his own father, who was a music critic, reacted to one of his scores by yelling at him, "Compose, don't bathe!" The Korngold sound is nothing if not opulent, which is probably why when he emigrated to the United States in order to escape Hitler in 1935, he ended up making an enormous name for himself as a film composer. Those days have long past for just about everyone other than faithful viewers of the Turner Classic Movies channel; but "Glück, das mir verblieb" has been incorporated into the soundtrack of three films over the last twenty years: Aria (where it kept its most profound company), Slaves of New York, and, my personal favorite, The Big Lebowski. This is, alas, the only German opera of the season; but I am really curious about how the production will be realized. The story has been compared to Vertigo, because it involves the confusion of a woman who has died in the past with a woman living in the present; but it is a far cry from a typical Hitchcock suspense narrative. Runnicles will be conducting again, hopefully putting his best Wagner foot forward in Korngold's interests.
• Idomeneo (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart): This is the only Mozart opera in the season. When I was growing up, this was dismissed as long and dull; but the last time San Francisco Opera presented this (there own "home-grown" production, directed by John Copley), it was a gripping slam-bang affair. Runnicles knew exactly how to deliver Mozart's command of both tension and energy, and there is no reason to assume that the lightning will not strike in exactly the same place. Productions like this one make it clear that this is not an opera to be dismissed. If anything, it is an opera that is not performed enough!
• Boris Godunov (Modest Mussorgsky): I have not seen this opera since my days as a Metropolitan Opera subscriber, back when the late Martti Talvela sang Mussorgsky's original version, rather than subsequent revisions by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Dmitri Shostakovich. I suppose there are any number of nits one can pick with the original version, but as in the seldom-performed original version of "Night on Bare Mountain," one can just as easily view those nits as features, rather than bugs. So I am only too happy that Gockley has decided to go with an original-version production. This one is by Julia Pevzner (her first appearance in San Francisco) and comes from the Grand Théâtre de Genève, and Samuel Ramey will be singing Boris.
• The Elixir of Love (Gaetano Donizetti): I really enjoyed this the last time San Francisco Opera did it a few years ago, but this does not appear to be a revival of that production. This one is a product of many partners: Opera Colorado, Boston Lyric Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre and Fort Worth Opera. Nevertheless, since James Robinson has decided to transplant the story into the Italian-American community of Napa Valley in the early twentieth-century, San Francisco seems like the most appropriate "home." This was the opera that taught me that Donizetti could do more than wallow in bel canto tragedies, where high-strung sopranos would sing mad scenes in Italian induced by dark times in the British Isles. We shall also get to hear Ramón Vargas sing "Una furtiva lagrima," which reminds us that even a romantic comedy can allow a serious reflective moment or two.
• La Bohème (Giacomo Puccini): Last November I expressed disappointment that, after waiting for so many years for Angela Gheorghiu to come to the San Francisco Opera, she should come with La Rondine, described by one jaundiced critic as "the poor man's La traviata." This time we shall get to hear her sing Mimi, supported in the pit by Runnicles' appointed successor, Nicola Luisotti. This is an old San Francisco Opera production without any revisionist frills, and that is the way I tend to like my Bohème. My guess is that this production will attract a lot of attention as a sign of things to come, and I shall be there among the curious.
• Last Acts (Jake Heggie): This will be the second co-production with Cal Performances and will be performed at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus (just like The Little Prince this May). It is a chamber opera, and it remains to be see if even Zellerbach will be too large for it. Houston Grand Opera also shared in commissioning this work, which is based on a play by Terrence McNally, who has a serious love for and understanding of opera. This may not be my cup of tea, particularly since I came away from Dead Man Walking (Heggie's large-scale operatic effort) feeling that the music was the weakest link in the chain. However, this is clearly a different manner of beast; and I may decide that it deserves the effort of a BART ride across the Bay for an alternative view of what can be done in the name of opera.
• Tosca (Giacomo Puccini): I suppose that, where Puccini is concerned, the box office numbers tend to favor Madama Butterfly and La Bohème; but my own tastes run to Tosca and Turandot. Perhaps I just have a thing for blood-thirsty women! Whatever the reason may be, I have been very fortunate to be in a city with an opera company that has mounted excellent productions of both of these operas; and Tosca will lead off the June mini-season. There is a tendency to focus on the second and third acts, since those are the acts where all the torture and killing take place; but the result is that the end of the first act, with a choir singing a Te Deum while Scarpia delivers that great line, "Tosca, you make me forget God," is often neglected. Nevertheless, this one episode collapses everything that this opera is about into a single moment. After that, everything else just plays out with tragic inevitability; but I never seem to be able to get enough of it. Marco Armiliato will be conducting. He is a familiar face in the pit, particularly where the Italian repertoire is concerned; so this revival is likely to be as much fun as it was the last two times I saw it.
• Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin): Correctly or not, I tend to associate the Houston Grand Opera, under the direction of David Gockley, with restoring Porgy and Bess to the "legitimacy" of the opera stage. Houston mounted a serious, faithful, and, by many accounts, "authentic," production that was successful enough to be taken on tour. This is how I got to see it in New York at (of all places) Radio City Music Hall. However, this is not the production that San Francisco will see this time. Rather, it is a Washington National Opera production staged by Francesca Zambello, who will soon be a "presence" here with her "Gold Rush" staging of Rheingold for the new "San Francisco Ring;" but we shall get our first taste with her staging of The Little Prince at Zellerbach in May. Her biography is all over the map, literally as much as figuratively; and, given the beating that her recent Carmen for Covent Garden took, she must have a pretty thick skin. Consider the "core" of her resume:

  An American who grew up in Europe, she speaks French, Italian, German, and Russian. She attended Moscow University in 1976 and graduated cum laude from Colgate University in 1978. She began her career as an Assistant Director to the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. From 1984-1991 she was the Artistic Director of the Skylight Music Theater. She has been guest professor at Harvard and Berkeley Universities.

  Ponnelle also had a thick skin, given his tendency to choose controversy over fidelity. I know him best in San Francisco for his decision to put the rape of Gilda in Rigoletto on the stage: It was concealed behind the curtains of a four-poster bed; but those curtains endured a lot of energetic kicking. This was also the production in which all the men in the first act festivities indulged in a chorus-line kick. Zambello will thus come to us as a "high risk" property; but the thing to remember is that, when those properties deliver, they do so in significantly enlightening ways. So, since this production of Porgy and Bess was favorably received in Los Angeles, it may well "deliver" when it gets here.

• La Traviata (Giuseppe Verdi): This is likely to be the major "power cast" item for the season: Anna Netrebko, Charles Castronovo, and Dwayne Croft, all familiar to San Francisco opera fans. Runnicles will once again deploy his Verdi skills in the pit, meaning that the wild card of the production will be stage director Marta Domingo, who has decided to set the opera in the Jazz Age. This is a production of the Los Angeles Opera, now under the general direction of her husband Plácido. I have absolutely no idea what to expect. When Franco Zeffirelli decided to interpret this opera as a film (Teresa Stratas, Plácido Domingo, and Cornell MacNeil, with James Levine conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), he got everything right in terms of both a dramatic conception and the translation of that conception to cinema. On the other hand the last time I actually saw a Traviata at the Met, it got everything wrong, the worst part being a Nicolai Gedda too far past his prime who could only look silly. As a result I have come to believe that there is no middle ground for Traviata; so Domingo's production is likely to be another "high risk" property.

So there is the whole ball of wax. There is a lot of risk there; but in opera there is never any "sure thing." If risk is inevitable, then Gockley is certainly taking some interesting ones. If they are also good ones, then they will be good for his revenue-building strategy. For what it is worth, he will have my feeble voice rooting for him. My only serious question is: What happened to Walküre? Weren't we suppose to get the new Ring operas at a rate of one per season?