Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Opera (SFO) announced that performances in the War Memorial Opera House will resume, after eighteen months, on August 21. This will (finally) mark the first full season with Eun Sim Kim as the new Music Director. Performances will include the completion of the SFO “trilogy” treatment of the three operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart based on libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, conceived and directed by Michael Cavanagh. Così fan tutte (K. 588) will conclude the fall portion of the season; and Don Giovanni (K. 527) will launch next year’s summer portion. This season will also provide the first chance for audience members to enjoy the completed final phase of the seat replacement project.
That said, SFO decided that this new season will be “transitional,” temporarily offering a reduction in the number of operas and performances to ensure a safe return to “business as usual.” Instead of five partially overlapping programs, there will be only three productions in the fall, which will be scheduled in succession. The current plan is that summer will mark the return of repertory (interleaved) presentation. The first full repertory season will take place in 2022–23, the season that will mark SFO’s centennial. Here is the basic summary of the schedule for the coming season:
August 21–September 5, 2021: Appropriately enough, the season will begin with Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, included in SFO’s first season in 1923 and selected to open the Opera House in 1932. The traditional staging will be directed by Shawna Lucey, and Kim will conduct. The lead vocalists will be soprano Ailyn Pérez making her role debut as Floria Tosca, tenor Michael Fabiano as Tosca’s lover Mario Cavaradossi, and bass-baritone Alfred Walker making his role debut as the authoritarian Baron Scarpia.
September 10, 2021: Live and In Concert: The Homecoming will be a single performance simulcast live from the Opera House to the videoboard at Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. For those in the Civic Center, there will be a pre-performance reception in the Green Room of the Veterans Building, a post-performance toast in the main lobby of the Opera House, and a post-performance celebratory dinner, also in the Green Room. The vocalists will be soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen and mezzo Jamie Barton, and Kim will be the conductor.
October 14–30, 2021: The second full opera will be a new production of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 72 Fidelio. Staging will be by Matthew Ozawa, and Kim will again conduct. The title role of Leonore (disguised as a man under the alias “Fidelio”) will be sung by soprano Elza van den Heever. Tenor Russell Thomas will portray her husband, Florestan, a political prisoner being held in the jail where “Fidelio” works as an assistant to the jailer Rocco (bass James Creswell). The prison is governed by Don Pizarro, the “nemesis character” of this opera, sung by baritone Greer Grimsley.
November 21–December 3, 2021: As mentioned above, the fall season will conclude with Mozart’s Così fan tutte. This is definitely the most complex libretto of the three da Ponte operas, if not of all of the operas that Mozart composed. Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto will sing the role of Don Alfonso, an aging cynic determined to convince his young friends Ferrando (tenor Ben Bliss, making his SFO debut) and Guglielmo (baritone John Brancy) that fidelity is a sometime thing. The young men are betrothed to a pair of sisters, Fiordiligi (soprano Nicole Cabell) and Dorabella (mezzo Irene Roberts); and Alfonso snares all of them in a tangled web of “girlfriend-swapping.” He is assisted in his plot by the sisters’ maid Despina, sung by soprano Nicole Heaston. The conductor will be Henrik Nánási, who had previously conducted the first opera in the trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492) in October of 2019.
December 10: The SFO Adler Fellows will present their annual The Future is Now program of arias and opera scenes with Kim conducting the SFO Orchestra.
June 4–July 2, 2022: The trilogy will then conclude with Don Giovanni. Bertrand de Billy will make his SFO debut as conductor. The title role will be sung by baritone Etienne Dupuis, also making his SFO debut. Bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni will sing the role of Giovanni’s servant Leporello. Over the course of the opera, Giovanni’s attempts at seduction will be thwarted by three different women: Donna Anna (soprano Adela Zaharia, also making her SFO debut), Donna Elvira (soprano Carmen Giannattasio), and the peasant girl Zerlina (soprano Christina Gansch). As was the case in Così, da Ponte’s libretto allows for ambiguity, rather than a straightforward conclusion to the narrative.
June 14–July 3, 2022: The final opera of the season will be a revival of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, composed for SFO and first performed in September of 2016. The opera is based on one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China. Author Cao Xueqin wrote 80 chapters and died before completing the novel. Sheng prepared his own libretto in partnership with David Henry Hwang. Stan Lai’s original staging will be performed; and the conductor will be Darrell Ang, making his SFO debut. The opera will be sung in English, but supertitles will be projected in both English and Chinese.
June 30: The final single-performance offering will be an evening of Verdi conducted by Kim. The vocalists will be soprano Nicole Car, tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz, and bass Soloman Howard. The SFO Chorus will also be featured. The program has not yet been finalized; but selections from Lucia Miller, Don Carlo, Aida, and Il Trovatore will be included.
Web pages have been created for both subscriptions and single ticket purchases. (The latter is a collection of hyperlinks, one for each event of the season.) Safety protocols have been developed in partnership with a team of physicians from the University of California, San Francisco, led by epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford. SFO has created a Safety First Web page, which will provide all necessary information about those protocols. At the present time tickets are not available for in-person purchase. All tickets must be purchased prior the the day of the performance, either by telephone or by the above hyperlinks.
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