Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the final event to celebrate its Centennial Season. Over the course of three hours (with one intermission), SFO presented a program that almost literally pulled out all the stops. Fifteen vocalists participated, most of them taking a solo turn. Along with the SFO Orchestra, they were led by a “tag team” of three conductors, all with impressive credentials involving the SFO repertoire. If that were not enough, Frank Zamacona led a Video Production team for the sake of those unable to attend the Opera House; and the entire program was live-streamed.
“For the record,” I was one of those viewers. The video archive that Zamacona has compiled in working with SFO was one of the most significant assets for opera lovers during the better part of the “pandemic years” beginning in 2020 and continuing through most of 2021, which included four videos to account for Richard Wagner’s cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). Zamacona and his team could not have been in better form for last night’s performance.
This began at the very beginning, so to speak, in which the video imagery guided the attentive viewer through the rich thematic interleaving of the opening Prelude for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The composer was at the top of his game in this piece of instrumental music, building up one of the most sophisticated structures based on overlaying multiple themes. Where all the vocal selections were concerned, staging was minimal; but the video feed always seemed to find the right way to underscore what the subtitles were describing.
Caroline H. Hume Music Director Eun Sun Kim shared the podium with former Music Director Donald Runnicles, and former Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Summers. There was also a podium to the left of the stage from which Tad and Dianne Taube General Director Matthew Shilvock addressed the audience. His remarks were few but thoroughly engaging. He also shared that podium with two vocalists with strong ties to SFO, soprano Patricia Racette and mezzo Susan Graham, both of whom performed during the second half of the program. Racette sang “Losing My Mind” from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, the only work on the program that had not been performed during an SFO season. Graham sang the better-known aria “Ombra mai fu” from George Frideric Handel’s Xerxes (HWV 40), which I saw in its entirety at the Opera House in October of 2011. (This is probably the best-known love song for a tree, if not the only one.)
Don Giovanni (Christian Van Horn) applies his seductive ways to the peasant girl Zerlina (Heidi Stober) in the first act of the Don Giovanni opera (screen shot from last night’s streamed performance)
Three hours allowed for an impressive breadth of diversity in the selections. Since I enumerated them all in my preview article, I shall not repeat them here. Dramatization was kept to a minimum. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was particularly impressed with the performance of “Là ci darem la mano” (there we will entwine our hands) the “seduction duet” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 527 Don Giovanni. The chemistry between Christian Van Horn’s Don and Heidi Stober’s Zerlina practically set the stage on fire. I can think of no better example of what Buckminster Fuller used to call “making more and more with less and less;” and Kim’s conducting could not have been more attentive to every one of the composer’s gestures.
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