SFO Announces Ian Robertson’s Retirement

Ian Robertson and the SFO Chorus at the conclusion of their 2016 recital (photograph by Matthew Washburn, courtesy of SFO)

Yesterday morning Matthew Shilvock, the Tad and Dianne Taube General Director of the San Francisco Opera (SFO), announced that Chorus Director Ian Robertson will retire and the end of this calendar year. Robertson began his tenure in 1987; and, over the course of 35 seasons, he established the SFO Chorus as one of opera’s finest vocal ensembles. There is a tendency among many opera lovers to focus attention only on the vocal soloists; but there are any number of scores in which the choral parts play a significant role in a libretto’s narrative, often reflecting the same function provided by the chorus in Ancient Greek drama. Composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi appreciated that role and knew how to deploy it to the advantage of the opera as a whole.

I had the good fortune to establish a mildly passing acquaintance with Robertson, primarily through eating at the same places at the same time. Contact often consisted of little more than friendly nods. However, in the summer of 2019 I remember crossing paths with him in the park between the two War Memorial buildings on Van Ness Avenue. After the usual exchange of nods, he could barely contain himself and burst our saying, “We’re doing Billy Budd!” With my own appreciation of the operas of Benjamin Britten, I could share his enthusiasm. When it came time to me for give an account of the SFO production itself, I put a lot of my descriptive writing into the many characters that figure in the narrative and the relationships out of which the narrative emerges. However, my “last words” shifted to Britten’s choral writing, which I described as “the foundation upon which that plethora of individual character types are developed.”

Robertson’s career will be celebrated with an all-choral concert in which he will lead the SFO Chorus. Program details have not yet been announced; but beloved choruses from the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Giacomo Puccini will be performed. These will be balanced with more contemporary selections of works by Florence Price (who often set her own texts but also drew on sources such as Vachel Lindsay), Joan Szymko (who specializes in music for the theater and choral ensembles), and the English folk singer Kate Rusby.

This program will be given two performances at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 11, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 12. The venue will be the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater in the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera on the top (fourth) floor of the Veterans Building. The street address is 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Admission will be $39 for general seating at both performances. Tickets may be purchased by calling the San Francisco Box Office at 415-864-3330.