SFO Video Stream Gounod’s Shakespeare Opera

 Pene Pati as Roméo and Nadine Sierra as Juliette in Jean-Louis Grinda’s staging of the balcony scene (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

This weekend marks the first of the three opera streams in the Opera is ON service presented by San Francisco Opera (SFO). The opera is Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette; and the video was directed by Frank Zamacona, based on performances that took place at the War Memorial Opera House in September of 2019. The production was staged by Jean-Louis Grinda, making his SFO debut and working with French-Canadian conductor Yves Abel. Gounod used a French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, which, for the most part, honored William Shakespeare’s narrative, occasionally translating some of the better-known quotes from the script into French.

What is probably most important is that the title roles were taken by vocalists that were well-suited to capturing the youthfulness of the characters they were embodying. Both of them were Adler alumni: tenor Pene Pati as Roméo and soprano Nadine Sierra as Juliette. From a technical point of view, Gounod allocated most of his fireworks to Juliette, the best known of these being her first-act aria “Je veux vivre” (I wish to live). Sierra nailed every measure of this aria, capturing all of Juliette’s high-register energy and abundant embellishments. However, she also embodied the many changes in character that unfold as the narrative progresses; and Gounod gave her character abundant opportunities to vocalize over those changes.

Roméo’s character, on the other hand, is more straightforward. While he does not initially know Juliet’s ancestry, once he finds out he is immediately aware of where his fate is leading him. As a result, Pati’s singing consistently revealed undercurrents of the consequences of Roméo’s actions.

This was definitely a production in which video close-ups disclosed more about character than one often encounters in opera stagings. While all of the secondary characters also benefitted from Grinda’s insights, Zamacona’s camera work always kept the focus on how the title characters were responding to the cards that the Fates had dealt to them. He also took a somewhat experimental approach to crowd scenes, including a few shots from above that best served the mass sword fight that culminates in Tybalt’s death. For all those virtues, however, there are still periods that tend to go on longer than the narrative requires them to do, perhaps suggesting Gounod’s awareness that his audiences would rather revel in watching his vocalists (particularly Juliette) than follow the more straightforward path of Shakespeare’s narrative!