Pride Weekend Begins with a Night at the Opera

Sapphira Crystál (emcee for this season’s Pride Concert, photograph by Joe Mac Creative)

Last night the 55th annual Pride Celebration got under way with the seasonal Pride Concert in the War Memorial Opera House. The program was hosted by Sapphira Crystál, who, appropriately enough, was a classically trained opera singer with a six-octave vocal range. She introduced performances by three vocalists, all of whom had performed in San Francisco Opera (SFO) productions: mezzos Jamie Barton and Nikola Printz and baritone Brian Mulligan. Eun Sun Kim and Robert Mollicone shared conducting duties with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, which filled the entire stage, giving SFO opera-goers a chance to see them outside their usual orchestra pit. On audience side the walls were awash with elaborate video projections conceived and directed by Tal Rosner.

Those projections set the tone for the evening by providing eye candy for the evening’s overture, the one composed by Leonard Bernstein for his musical Candide. This was followed by selections from operas associated with the venue. Camille Saint-Saëns received the most attention with two excerpts from Samson et Dalila. Barton sang the seduction aria “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” (my heart opens to the sound of your voice), followed by the “Bacchanale,” familiar to anyone of my generation that used to watch Saturday morning cartoon shows. Sitting in the Center Box, composer Jake Heggie got to enjoy Printz’ solid interpretation of “Vesuvio, il mio unico amico” from his opera Great Scott. Mulligan’s operatic solo was taken from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera Pique Dame (queen of spades), an aria sung by Yeletsky in the first scene of the second act. Barton was also the only vocalist to offer art song, Reynaldo Hahn’s “À Chloris.”

The remainder of the program provided a diverse assortment of jazz, pop, and musicals. That included giving the vocalists a break with a spirited account by the Orchestra of Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” All three of the vocalists were perfectly comfortable with departing from the operatic repertoire, and each of them had their own ways of settling into pop rhetorics. The result was a program that delivered something for everyone; and each listener in the audience could relish the qualities of at least one (if not more) of the selections. The overall flow of all that diversity was more than skillfully managed by Crystál’s introductions.

Pride Weekend 2025 definitely got off to a good start.