Monday, June 18, 2007

Opera Note: SFO Rosenkavalier

I’m still trying to get my mind around Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, and the performance we took in at the San Francisco opera Friday night (link). It was great fun: top of the chart by SFO standards and the best, most satisfying Strauss I’ve ever seen, but that is not saying much: I’ve seen only a few Strauss operas in performanance, Rosenkavalier only once and that on DVD. Still, this was something of a breakthrough. Maybe it takes three or four performances to catch on to what Strauss is up to, and how he goes about it.

Anyway, I think I got it, and I enjoyed it—but what a strange piece of work it is! Perhaps it is the Vienna influence—but for whatever reason, it is almost as if Strauss felt he had to recap all of 18th and 19th Century music and culture in a single item: a conscious copy of Mozart, leitmotifs by Wagner, waltzes from Johann Strauss (no relation), settings from Hogarth (and maybe Daumier?), a comic lead from Verdi (or is it Molière?). Strauss even riffs on himself, although I guess all composers do that.

And was I wrong to see an intimation of Puccini’s Turandot, not to hit the stage for another 15 years?

With such a mix, it is surprising that this pudding finds a theme. Yet there is a unified musical sensibility, coupled, I suspect, with a unified poetic sensibility from Hugo von Hofmansthal, one of the few opera librettists whose name you actually remember.

San Francisco singing was gratifyingly wonderful, but there are a couple of human stories that deserve special notice. One is about Soile Isokoski, who sang The Marschallin. Isokoski is 50, and she’s had a slow climb to international eminence (link). But she’s put her hard slog to good use. A Times (London) reviewer nailed it, reviewing a CD of a Wigmore Hall performance (link):

To me, she sums up all that is best about this generation of flying Finns. She is superbly schooled, with a wonderful sense of style. Yet she never sounds overmanicured or mechanical. She can infuse a phrase with tremendous warmth, yet never overeggs the emotional pudding.

From her vita, you can see that she sings a lot of roles. But the Marschallin is almost ideal for her talents, as is Countess Almaviva in Figaro, another of Isokoski’s signatures—as would be, if she tackled musical comedy, the role of Marian-the-librarian (link): these are all the sadder-but-wiser girls who realize that life is passing them by and their string is running out. Balzac says somewhere that no woman learns the truth until she is 35, because who would tell the truth to a young and beautiful? These are the girls who have learned, or are learning, the truth.

Remarkably, she finds a strong match in Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau (that’s “Ochs” as in “Ox”) whose motto might come from The Simpsons: “It’s the SS Homer heaving into port with a cargo full’o love!” SFO’s Ochs is Kristinn Sigmundsson, the Icelandic bass (link). Sigmundsson’s performance is full of wisdom and subtle irony, reflecting his fact that this is a second career: he was a biology teacher before he stumbled sideways into world fame, and you can tell that he understands: hey, this is only a show, I could always go back to the lab.

Much more to think about and to say here, but it’s a grand show; indeed, one of the very best I’ve ever seen in SFO, definitely, in Michelin terms, worth a detour.

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