San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House is one of the most beautiful in the country, because of its simplicity and deceptive size: It has the grandeur of a traditional opera house, where a work like Lohengrin can get a proper display, yet it can also be intimately scale for, say, a Baroque opera such as Vivaldi's Orlando Furioso. Both Lohengrin and Orlando Furioso happen to have been two of the operas staged during San Francisco's 1989 season. The house easily accommodates both, as it does Richard Strauss' mammoth Die Frau ohne Schatten and Puccini's Madama Butterfly, which has the delicacy of a chamber piece.
San Francisco has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the country's finest venues for opera. And it's also patronized by a highly sophisticate - and often national and international - audience. Here you will find no clapping after every single aria, no matter how brilliantly or poorly sung, which is an incessant irritation endemic to the Met. Going to the opera in San Francisco is a pleasure.
The company is among a growing number to use surtitles (which the Met's music director James Levine firmly and arrogantly eschews), and a performance of Frau certainly shows how valuable the process is. Since not every one speaks or understands German and Italian fluently, the verbal maze of Strauss' fairy tale puts up a road block to the enjoyment of it.
Mélange of Mysticism
The Strauss-Hugo von Holfmannsthal story is a mélange of mysticism and arcane symbolism in which an Empress without a shadow (understood as the ability to bear children) descends into the mortal world to find a shadow. She and her Nurse, and ambivalent creature whose motivations for driving the Empress onward in her pursuit of fertility still remain unclear, try to convince the wife of a lowly dyer to trade in her potential motherhood for the Empress' finery.
In Die Frau ohne Schatten, divinity discovers mortality and is moved by it. Still, this opera is the damnedest thing, including, among other things, a Chorus of Unborn Children that sings its woe from the future. Three's a happy ending, however with the Empress finding her shadow and the dyer Barak and his wife happily reunited in their love.
San Francisco's Frau was - there's no other way to put it - a hot night. The company's casting is perhaps its strongest feature; and singers, finding themselves well-suited to the productions and appreciated by audiences, keep returning. Anja Silja, dressed in a special new amphibious-looking costume, was a sensational Nurse, reminiscent of snaky Satan hading Eve an apple. Her performance, in fact, added another level of metaphor to the tale.
Vocally, Silja has been over the top for some time now (a wobble you could march a platoon through, for example). Barak's wife of the evening, Gwyneth Jones, has too in the recent past not been completely dependable; but the evening I heard her, her big, rich voice seemed almost to be in the bloom of youth. Her portrayal of the wife was impassioned and quite moving. As the Empress, Mary Jane Johnson had an equally buxom voice, with an interesting steely edge to it. William Johns' Emperor disappointed: colorless, and a faltering top.
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