Opera Non-Note: SFO Iphigénie

I’ve been trying to think of something clever and insightful to say about Sunday’s performance of Iphigénie en Tauride at the SFO opera (link), but I really can’t: enchanting (that’s two for two this weekend), but I’ve never seen it before—never seen much Gluck before in any form—and really can’t get my mind around it for anything except to be callow and shallow. And that is one of the glories of blogging; I don’t have to.

I leave it only to the lady sitting next to me who said she’d planned her travel out from Boston so she could be there. “I am a Paul Groves fan,” she explained, but it sounds a bit like stalking to me. Anyway, she assured me I was seeing something first-rate.

Oh, and a word about the set, which looked a bit like the basement at the Stevens Buswell school in the 1940s. Ms. Buce liked it. I am on the fence, but I do think that if they are going to use those vast open spaces, they can’t let the singers get so far back that we in the balcony can’t see their heads.

Fn.: Patrick Kurp chooses this day to recall the great Karl Kraus, and a selection of his acerbity on journalism (link):

• “Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.”

• “The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.”