Watching Eun Sun Kim at Work with SFO

SFO Music Direct Eun Sun Kim (photograph by Marc Olivier Le Blanc, courtesy of SFO)

Those that have been following this site for some time probably know by now that my wife and I have had subscription tickets to the San Francisco Opera (SFO), which we secured long before I took up the writing I am now doing. I treasure our seats because the view of the orchestra pit is as good as that of the stage; and I have found that it is often beneficial to keep track of both of those sites, rather than just watching the narrative unfold on that stage. Thus, for all the benefits that came with the seats we had for the beginning of the 2021–22 season, I was not in a position to observe the new Music Director Eun Sun Kim launching the season with her interpretation of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

Mind you, there are no end of details in Shawna Lucey’s staging of this opera to keep attention firmly fixed on the stage over the course of all three of the opera’s acts, each of which amounts to its own dramatic journey. However, this is one of those operas whose text is almost entirely in prose, meaning that the traditional techniques for dealing with arias (not to mention duets or larger groups) are seldom encountered. As a result, every utterance has its own characteristic phrase structure, meaning that every phrase of the music has its own distinctive semantic baggage to carry.

As a result the conductor must deal with a level of “micro-management” that goes beyond the usual stand-there-and-sing aria deliveries. Mind you, SFO’s first encounter with Kim took place in June of 2019, when she made her SFO debut conducting Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 114 Rusalka, which is also dominated by prose rhetoric. This is another opera in which the music advances the progress of the narrative by adding new dimensions to the text and the staging. Kim clearly knew what those additional dimensions were and knew how to call them out for the benefit of the attentive listener. Similarly, she called out expressive techniques in Puccini’s score which are often overlooked by those just interested in following the narrative from one episode to the next.

It is also worth noting that, every now and then, one can catch Puccini reflecting back on his few ventures into chamber music. In the third act, which begins with Mario Cavaradossi (tenor Michael Fabiano) reflecting on his last hours of life, the score calls for four separate cello parts, which were taken by single instruments under Kim’s direction. This was almost a vocal quartet unto itself, with a melodic line in the “upper voice” that was an absolutely luscious account by Principal Cello Thalia Moore. Kim knew exactly how to convey the poignant intimacy of this moment; and, even if the episode is only about a minute in duration, last night’s account was firmly etched into memory.

Tosca is one of those operas in which the instrumental music carries as much of the “narrative weight” as is demanded of the vocalists; and Kim’s command of the full scope of the score registered in memory as securely as Fabiano’s account of Cavaradossi, soprano Ailyn Pérez in the title role, and bass-baritone Alfred Walker as Baron Scarpia.