SFO Season Off to a Shaky Start

Some readers may recall that, at the end of last month, this site announced a bold plan initiated by San Francisco Opera (SFO) Music Director Eun Sun Kim. As I put it at that time: “For the foreseeable future, every season will include at least one opera by both Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, providing an opportunity to appreciate the diverse scope of these two composers.” That plan took its first step last night with the performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore to open the 2023–24 season of full-length opera productions.

This was a revival of staging by David McVicar, which was first presented by SFO in 2009. The revival was directed by Roy Rallo. The narrative was originally set in fifteenth-century Spain, but McVicar’s narrative advances the time line to the early nineteenth century when the Spanish War of Independence was waged against Napoleon. This inspired a set curtain design, which drew upon themes and imagery from The Disasters of War, the collection of 82 prints by Francisco Goya created between 1810 and 1820.

For the most part that set curtain conveyed more intensity than did the four-act libretto by Salavadore Cammarano. As a result, even when Kim’s conducting was at its most intense, the staging came across as a prolonged descent into a narrative that was little more than soap opera. Mind you, for most music lovers, the high point of the opera comes at the beginning of the second act, set in a Gypsy camp to the music of the “Anvil Chorus.” Indeed, the choral work directed by John Keene tended to draw more attention than the complexities of the narrative itself.

Angel Blue as Leonora in the final act of Il trovatore (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

That plot involves witch-burning, stolen babies, and the inevitable love triangle. The woman in that triangle is Leonora (soprano Angel Blue), lady-in-waiting to the queen. One of the men is the title character, the troubadour Manrico (tenor and Merola alumnus Arturo Chacón-Cruz); and the other is the Conte di Luna, sung by baritone George Petean in his SFO debut. As might be expected, there is a connection between these men and the aforementioned stolen babies; and the gypsy Azucena (mezzo Ekaterina Semenchuk), whose mother had been burned as a witch, is the only one that knows how those two men are actually related.

That makes for a generous amount of plot; and even the most avid Verdi fans are likely to experience the fatigue of “too much information” by the time the action has advanced into the fourth and final act of the opera. Also, there was too much manipulation (including a rotating platform) in McVicar’s staging, making it yet another contribution to that “too much information” fatigue. As a result, the shock value of the climax (when all true identities are revealed) tended to evoke little response from even the most attentive viewer other than “Who cares?” One wonders whether that opinion was shared by McVicar himself has he worked his way through the final act.