Sheng’s Opera Returns … and Disappoints

Last night the War Memorial Opera House hosted the first performance of the second staged production in the Summer Season of the San Francisco Opera (SFO). The program presented a revival of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, which had been given its world premiere by SFO on September 10, 2016. I was rather impressed with my first encounter with this opera and the way in which Sheng and David Henry Hwang produced a libretto that managed to distill one of the longest novels in world literature down to a performance that lasted for less than three hours.

Sadly those impressions did not carry over into the return of that production. It seemed as if all the novelty in both narrative and music, which had made such a deep impression on first encounter, could not sustain or revive after an absence of a little less than six years. On first encounter every visual experience was an original one, allowing mind to dwell on all the stimulation while following the English surtitles at the same time. Six years later I definitely had to refresh myself on the overall plot, but memories were strong enough to link the present back to the past. By all rights, the combination of the visual experience of the staging by Stan Lai and the unique qualities of Sheng’s score should have made for a welcome return. Instead, the result turned out to be little more than a disappointing rehash of a complex narrative that now seemed merely tedious.

Konu Kim as Bao Yu and Meigui Zhang as Dai Yu (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

From a musical point of view, there was little cause for complaint. Conductor Darrell Ang, making his SFO debut, provided a disciplined account of Sheng’s score. Similarly, all of the vocalists delivered a solid command of their respective parts. Given how much of that score is devoted to the two leading characters of Dai Yu (soprano Meigui Zhang) and Bao Yu (tenor Konu Kim) also making their respective SFO debuts, there was more than enough compelling performance work to satisfy the most attentive listener. However, perhaps because the experience was no longer a novel one, the overall flow of both vocal and instrumental performances was more torpid than anticipated.

As a result of the time I spent working for Fuji Xerox, I learned an amusing Japanese precept about there being only two kinds of fool in the world. The first fool is the man (apologies for the gender bias in this anecdote) that has never climbed Mount Fuji. The second fool is the man that climbs Mount Fuji twice. Sheng clearly knew how to seize and sustain attention when one first encounters his score. Revisiting that score may not have been a fool’s errand, but that draw on attention never seemed to return during the second encounter.