Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with Francesca Zambello’s staging of Georges Bizet’s Carmen for the San Francisco Opera (SFO). Having been there for opening night, which was also the launch of the three-opera Summer Season, I returned to experience the alternative point of view afforded by my subscription tickets. As almost always seems to be the case, a change of perspective, enhanced by a few week’s of experience on the part of the performers, almost always makes for a fresh experience; but in this case the freshness came from an unexpected source.
That source turned out to be the cast listing in the program book. According to the footnotes, five of the members of the cast were Adler Fellows, four of whom were making SFO debut performances. Mind you, these were all what tend to be called “bit parts;” but, given the extent of my discontent with the interpretations of the “lead” characters (Carmen, Don José, Escamillo, and, to a lesser extent, Micaëla), I found myself marveling at how, under Zambello’s staging concepts, it was the angels, rather than the devils, that resided in the details.
Micaëla (Anita Hartig) encounters Moralès (SeokJong Baek) at the beginning of Carmen (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)
Consider the simple fact that the very first voice we heard came from an Adler, baritone SeokJong Baek in the role of Moralès. The libretto has Morales introduce us to the mundanity of the street scene that will unfold before us, along with the similar mundanity of military routine, including a changing of the guard, which is about to unfold. He is Micaëla’s first encounter with the military presence in Seville, and it is not a particularly pleasant one. Indeed, the fact that she survives it at all signals her capacity for persistence that will sustain her through the entire opera.
The other four Adlers all took the roles of gypsies first encountered in the second act. Indeed they constituted four-fifths of the vocal quintet that displays Bizet’s polyphonic skills at their finest. The fifth voice, of course, was that of Carmen (mezzo J’Nai Bridges). However, the essence of the quintet involves the “cunning plan” hatched by Le Dancaïre (tenor Christopher Oglesby) and Le Remendado (tenor Zhengyi Bai) requiring assistance from Frasquita (soprano Natalie Image), Mercédès (mezzo Ashley Dixon), and Carmen herself. (Dixon was the only Adler not making an SFO debut appearance, having made her debut as Angel First Class in Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life during the Fall Season.)
Both Oglesby and Bai approached this intricately composed score with a solid command of both musical detail and underlying character. Furthermore, all the qualities of the latter sustained them through the remainder of the second act and the entirety of the third. Image and Dixon, on the other hand, took another stunning polyphonic turn during the third act during the episode in which Frasquita, Mercédès and Carmen all discover their fates in a deck of fortune-telling cards. Taken as a whole, then, these five Adlers played key roles in disclosing meaningful details about both military and gypsy life.
Through those details I found my reaction fo Zambello’s interpretation changing. Perhaps her point, that the “angels” were in the details, was the motivating force behind the opera. Perhaps she was saying, “You all know this story; but how much to you really know about the day-to-day context in which it unfolded?” After all, it is the context that influences how we react to the content; and Zambello’s attention to the secondary enabled a keener perception of the primary. Mind you, my general discontent with the execution of those primary roles (the one solid exception being soprano Anita Hartig’s account of Micaëla) has not changed; but the overall experience of the production allowed my mind to follow paths not previously considered.
Fortunately, down in the orchestra pit conductor James Gaffigan was as much of a powerhouse as he had been on opening night. I particularly appreciated how he repositioned percussionist Patricia Niemi to the center of the pit, standing beside the harp, to allow her tambourine work to cover convincingly what the gypsies were doing during the beginning of the second act. (She returned to the percussion section to cover Carmen’s castanets, filling in all the embellishments to the basic beat provided by Bridges.) On a broader scale Bizet’s scoring never reduces the orchestra to “secondary status;” and Gaffigan was consistently on top of all of the many instrumental details, making sure that each one meshed properly with the wealth of elaborate vocal (including choral) writing up on stage.
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