Salonen and Sellars Bring Opera to Davies

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented the first of its three performances of Adriana Mater, the second opera composed by Kaija Saariaho, who died one week ago today at the age of 70. The opera is structured in two acts, which together present seven tableaux, three in the first act and four in the second. In the flow of the narrative, eighteen years elapse between the two acts.

Saariaho’s first opera, L’Amour de loin (love from afar) was first performed by the Metropolitan Opera in December of 2016, and that production was subsequently streamed and saved for broadcast on Public Television. The French libretto by Amin Maalouf was relatively minimal in content, but the overall flow of the telecast was engaging from beginning to end. He also provided the libretto, again in French, for Adriana Mater.

 

The four characters in Adriana Mater: Yonas (Nicholas Phan), Adriana (Fleur Barron), Refka (Axelle Fanyo), and Tsargo (Christopher Purves) (photograph by Brittany Hosea-Small, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

There is a bitter irony to the opera’s title. The plot, which “takes place in a country at war” (quoted in an essay by Saariaho in the program book), revolves entirely around a woman named Adriana (sung last night by mezzo Fleur Barron). The irony comes from the fact she is raped by the soldier Tsargo (baritone Christopher Purves) in the first act, while the second act involves her coming to terms with the result of that rape, her son Yonas (tenor Nicholas Phan). There is only one other character in the narrative, Adriana’s sister Refka (soprano Axelle Fanyo).

Staging was directed by Peter Sellars, and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted. Both of them had presented the world premiere in Paris in April of 2006. Last night was the first SFS performance. Sellars gave the pre-concert talk, which amounted to an account of the overall plot. It is probably fair to say that he brought more acting chops to that account than were evident during the performance itself, which basically involved a lot of coming and going by the four characters between two platforms that had been erected on the Davies stage.

That imbalance of priorities is typical of a Sellars production. He tends to provoke solely for the sake of provoking, and his overloaded staging for Adriana Mater tended to overwhelm the many subtleties of person-to-person engagement that emerge during the progression of Maalouf’s plot structure. I am not quite sure why his work has been embraced by so many opera companies (including the San Francisco Opera). My guess is that he feels that surface-structure provocations will be given better reception than more cerebral approaches to narrative. Personally, I felt that last night he had pulled almost all of his rabbits out of the hat by the end of the first act and never seemed to come to terms with the dark depths of narrative that need to be negotiated during the second act.