SFO to Stream Historical Content for Centennial

Yesterday afternoon San Francisco Opera (SFO) announced a series entitled Streaming the First Century. This involved creating an online hub to provide free access to selected historic recordings, rare artist interviews, archival photographs, program articles, oral history excerpts, and newly captured conversations among past and present SFO creative luminaries. Content will be uploaded to the hub on a monthly basis as a series of “Sessions,” the first of which took place yesterday.

The title of that Session is Slavic Sensibilities. It offers an in-depth exploration of the works of Czech and Russian composers through landmark SFO performances. The historic recordings include two complete performances. The Czech offering is a 1980 broadcast of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, which was the first SFO production of a Czech opera in the original language. The Russian opera is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, whose production led to the general denunciation of Shostakovich’s music by the Communist Party in 1936. The site also includes four excerpted recordings:

1. The 1945 SFO premiere of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, sung in Italian with bass Ezio Pinza in the title role.
2. The United States premiere performance of Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair in 1966.
3. The first SFO performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spaces in the original Russian in 1975.
4. The 1984 SFO premiere of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina.

Finally, the Down the Rabbit Hole Web page will provide a rich offering of background content, including archival interviews, newly captured conversations, and historical essays.

Release dates for the remaining Sessions in the current year are as follows:

• October 10: Session 2: Parlez-vous français? French opera
• November 7: Session 3: Italian Roots Italian opera
• December 5: Session 4: Ho Jo To Ho! works by German and Austrian composers

Hyperlinks will be added to the online hub on the above dates.