Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera presented the first of six performances of Kaija Saariaho’s sixth and final opera, Innocence, structured in five acts performed without any interruptions. This was also the first time the opera was performed in the United States, having received its world premiere during the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July of 2021. Over the course of her career, Saariaho’s compositions explored a diversity of rich sonorities from both acoustic and electronic sources. These made for engaging listening experiences, so her move into the narrative foundations of opera made for a radical shift in attention. The good news is that the shift also introduced her to new colleagues and partnerships that prospered as she explored the domain of opera as inventively as she had developed her instrumental chops.
Chloe Lamford’s set for Innocence (photograph by Jean-Louis Fernandez, courtesy of SFO)
When I wrote my preview article for this opera about a month ago, I included the above photograph. Little did I realize how much it would disclose about the nature of the opera itself. The lower-left corner shows a room that provides the reception space for a party following a wedding ceremony. To the right is the kitchen providing the food for that ceremony. The upper level is occupied primarily by the classroom of an international high school, where a shooting had taken place ten years earlier. The remaining segment is taken from the home of the groom’s family.
However, it is no mere segment. This entire set was situated on a rotating platform, which is in motion for pretty much the entirety of the 105-minute performance. This allows for spaces, such as that upper-right segment, to reveal more of themselves, while also introducing other spaces that advance the overall narrative. That narrative involves the interleaving of the past circumstances of the groom’s family with the present day context of the relationship between groom and bride. Indeed, it is the complexity of that interleaving that guides the narrative line, which involves a plot of so many surprises that further details would spoil the experience of viewing the opera.
Rather, it would be more appropriate simply to account for the basic foundations. Of greatest interest is the polylingual libretto of texts in English, Czech, Romanian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Greek, as well as Finnish, developed by dramaturg Aleksi Barrière. Above the stage, an all-English version of this libretto was projected. However, on both the right and left of the stage, there were projections of the words actually being sung, providing a reflection on the characters singing them.
In the orchestra pit Clément Mao-Takacs led a seriously large instrumental ensemble. Unless I am mistaken, this consisted entirely of acoustic instruments. However, I was particularly impressed by the abundance of percussion instruments occupying both the right-hand and left-hand extremes of the pit. In spite of that abundance, however, Mao-Takacs always knew how to strike just the right balance between all those instrumental resources and the vocalists on stage.
Almost all of the vocalists were making their respective SFO debuts. The only exceptions were mezzo Ruxandra Donose as the waitress at the wedding reception, baritone Rod Gilfry as the groom’s father, and bass Kristinn Sigmundsson as the Priest. From a narrative point of view, the key figure was the bride (soprano Lilian Farahani), who gradually learns of the past of the man she has just married (tenor Miles Mykkanen). The other significant figure was soprano Lucy Shelton as one of the teachers at the school at the time of the shooting. The relationships among these characters were developed through staging by Simon Stone (another SFO debut), directed in this production by Louise Bakker (also an SFO debut); and the skill behind that development is reason enough for me to hold off on any further details (which might lead to spoilers)!
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