SFO: Beyond the McVicar Staging

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with the first San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of the season, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore. Those that read about my first encounter know that it left much to be desired, due, for the most part, to the staging by David McVicar, which amounted to an unsatisfying account of the narrative behind Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto. This time I shifted my attention to the leading vocalists, making the afternoon far more satisfying.

At the top of the list was, as might be expected, the title role of Manrico, sung by tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz. He is no stranger to SFO, nor, for that matter, to the Italian repertoire. Nevertheless, it has been a while since my last encounter, which took place June of 2017, when he sang the role of Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. By the time this opera has advanced to the tragedy of the final act, the portrayal of Rodolfo risks going over the top with tear-your-hair-out grief. Chacón-Cruz found the “sweet spot” of intensity without overt excess. Similarly, his approach to Manrico reflected a substrate of nobility that the character himself never recognizes, thus keeping the entire narrative from descending into trivial melodrama.

Manrico (Arturo Chacón-Cruz) and Azucena (Ekaterina Semenchuk) in Il trovatore (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

Manrico’s character is best understood by Azucena, sung by mezzo Ekaterina Semenchuk. This is the character that gets a farcical poke from the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. More importantly, it complements the role of Manrico by also teetering on the brink of melodrama. Semenchuk knew how to establish her role as the tragic infrastructure of the narrative. Through the entire opera she inhabits a cloud of darkness, which Semenchuk knew exactly how to portray without succumbing to excess.

One might say that the narrative as a whole is structured around two triangles, rather than a single conflicted one. Two of the sides of both triangles are taken by Azucena, who knows the truth of Manrico’s identity, and Manrico himself, who never learns it. In the first of the triangles, the “third side” is the Count di Luna, sung by baritone George Petean, making his SFO debut. The triangle is frustrated by ignorance, since the Count never learns of his connections to the other two sides. The same is true of the second triangle, in which Manrico and the Count are rivals for Leonora’s love. (Soprano Angel Blue is making her role debut in this production.) Again, the underlying truth is hidden from all three of these characters; but, in the second triangle, one comes away sympathizing with the loss that Leonora must endure.

As I wrote in my previous article, Production by David McVicar was too wrapped up in playing with stage machinery (including a rotating platform that began to get tedious even before the intermission) to pay much attention to the “social network” behind Cammarano’s narrative. Fortunately, while working with Revival Director Roy Rallo, the “sides” of those two triangles emerged with more than adequate clarity. Thus, while McVicar distracted with “too much information” with his devices, the vocalists working with Rallo brought chilling reality to the characters trapped in those two triangles.