Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first of two performances by the SFO Chorus, led by Director Ian Robertson. Robertson is retiring from his position after the second of those performances this afternoon. In honor of his 35 years of service with SFO, the program was entitled, appropriately enough, Celebrating Ian Robertson.
Following two selections of sacred music by leading composers of the Baroque period, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Johann Sebastian Bach, the program traversed an extensive survey of selections from operas composed by George Frideric Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Jacques Offenbach, Jennifer Higdon, Scott Joplin, and Leonard Bernstein. The second half of the program also presented a generous offering of secular music, much of which was sung a cappella. These included the world premiere performance of “Invitation to Love,” a setting of a text by Paul Laurence Dunbar composed by Cava Menzies on a commission by SFO in Robertson’s honor.
Other living composers on the program were Joan Szymko, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Kate Rusby. Their twentieth-century predecessors were Florence Price, Joseph Canteloube, and Maurice Ravel. All instrumental accompaniment was provided by Associate Chorus Master Fabrizio Corona at the piano.
Ian Robertson conducing an earlier performance by the San Francisco Opera Chorus in the Atrium Theatre with projected text (photograph by Matthew Washburn, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)
Robertson preceded each offering with a brief verbal introduction, often establishing the significance of the selection. Rather than burden members of the audience with text sheets that could barely be read in darkness, all texts were projected on the Atrium wall behind the performers, always in English, regardless of the text being sung. Those familiar with the space know that it has no acoustics of its own. As a result, the performance owed as much to the Constellation® acoustic system provided by Meyer Sound. The controller of this technology appears to have had some difficulty early in the performance, but those problems were resolved quickly enough that most of the audience was probably unaware of any problems.
My guess is that almost all of the operatic selections were familiar to the audience, most of whom were probably SFO subscribers. The most notable exceptions would have been Joplin’s Treemonisha and HIgdon’s Cold Mountain. (Those encountering Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène for the first time would probably still have found some of the music familiar.) On the other hand those subscribers would also have been familiar with the instrumental accompaniment from the “source” operas; and there were several occasions when the piano could not provide the rhetorical support encountered in the original scores. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine the Atrium space being conducive to a large instrumental ensemble; and most of us were more than content to focus attention on the vocalists.
Personally, I must confess that I was more impressed with the diversity of the selections that were not operatic. While I am have long been satisfied with my Decca Complete Edition collection of Ravel’s music, I must confess that my recording of the three a cappella choral songs he composed between 1914 and 1915 had slipped my mind. Each of these pieces was brief; and the second afforded an excellent opportunity to appreciate the solo voices of soprano Angela Moser, contralto Silvie Jensen, tenor Alan Cochran, and baritone Mitchell Jones. For that matter all of the a cappella offerings were thoroughly engaging “adventures of discovery,” with the premiere of Menzies’ “Invitation to Love” leading the way.
Robertson’s command of repertoire clearly extends far beyond the usual operatic bill of fare, and my mind is still processing the stimulating diversity of the program he prepared for his farewell concert.
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