The Best of a Beast: 2011

In compiling this year's "best of" list I knew two things before I even began:  Prince would get the top spot and there would be very little opera on it. Part of the reason for the latter is because I didn't travel to L.A. or New York this year (though there was much I would have liked to see in both cities), and the other is locally it wasn't a good year. San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle had some great moments, but overall, director Francesca Zambello's production failed to leave a lasting impact after the thrill wore off of having a Ring Cycle in town. Regrettably, I missed SFO's Xerxes, which was their only other production to get solid reviews and word of mouth. Half of SFO's fall offerings were so uninspiring I didn't even bother to attend them and those I did were severely flawed. However, I really enjoyed Merola's Barber.

The void left by the lack of good opera created a list dominated by contemporary performance pieces and recitals. Two shows, The Tempest: Without a Body and Necessary Monsters, were presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). The organization is dedicated to presenting the work of living artists and they consistently deliver challenging and provocative programs. It's become an increasingly important source of culture for me this past year. I'd also like to acknowledge the success of the San Francisco Symphony's Centennial Season programs, both onstage and within the community- this is truly a special year for the organization and their hard work is paying off handsomely.

As has been the case in the previous two years, it was difficult to narrow it down to ten-  in the end I cheated.

The ranking is in order, starting with the best:

1. Prince
Prince played three wildly different shows, each with a unique set list.  More impressively, he struck a completely different tone as a performer every night- on the first he was a sexy crooner, the following evening he was the funkmeister, and finally, in the last show (my favorite) he was a blazing guitar god for over three hours. I've never been more impressed with a musician. Prince is a genius, and in his prime as a performer.

2. The Tempest: Without a Body
Eight months later this performance by Lemi Ponifasio's MAU company, it still frequents my consciousness. It was dark, disturbing and unforgettable and I don't think I could stand to see it again. Still, I would if given the chance, because I've never seen anything else that moved me in quite the same way.


3.  Orphée
Ensemble Parallèle proved again that an opera company doesn't need tremendous financial resources to put on a great production- just talent and imagination. It's been years since San Francisco Opera did something this well. Get ready for their production of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby in February.

4. Necessary Monsters
Like The Tempest: Without a Body, Carla Kihlstedt's work also left a lingering impression long afterward. An enchanting work-in-progress that will make you think about the Necessary Monsters in your own life, see it if you have the chance.

5.  The San Francisco Symphony's Mahler's 3rd
San Francisco Symphony's Centennial Season has had numerous highlights so far, but this exquisite performance was truly spectacular.

6. Yefim Bronfman
Bronfman turned in another brilliant performance this year, made all the more heroic because he didn't let on that he had seriously injured two of his fingers during it.

7. Jonas Kaufmann
He came and conquered the audience with an extremely generous performance. Never have I heard German sung with such eloquence and beauty.

8. Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Hvorostovsky's recital was an early highlight of the year. He's never sounded better and the material he chose was perfect. The encore was thrilling.

9. Goran Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra
The most fun I had at a show all year, maybe ever- and on top of that, these folks can play.

10. tie: Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, Alexander Melnikov, &  The Robert Glasper Experiment
Initially I was going to make this year's list a dozen so that I could include all three of these performances. Let's just call it a three-way tie instead because at one point each one occupied the tenth slot.

Honorable mentions are due to The Wild Bride, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Elizabeth Rowe, Jay Hunter Morris, The St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Keith Jarret Trio,  YoYo Ma & the SFS, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, which has been consistently spectacular over the past year.

LePage's Die Walkure from the Met

The first thing one can say about the Met's broadcast of Die Walkure yesterday is that it should finally silence those idiots who've been talking smack about Deborah Voigt for the last year. Voigt's performance carried the extremely long afternoon and left no doubt that not only can she sing the role, but it re-affirms her status as one of the leading sopranos of the day. Too bad such a triumph was unfolding in what turned out to be a pretty mediocre production that left me thinking perhaps the Schenk museum piece wasn't so bad after all.

The singers, individually, were in superb voice, but Walkure is a series of conversations and conflicts between two characters and what caused this production to be such a failure from my perspective is that each pairing failed to work on a dramatic level. Everyone seemed mismatched in some way and none of the scenes, except for the showdown between Fricka and Wotan (more on this in a moment), was convincing. This was only magnified by the talent onstage and seeing it all unfurl larger than life on the big screen in HD.


Taking it from the top, James Levine led the orchestra through a musically thrilling first act- superbly paced, the details in the score coming through with a slicing precision I've seldom heard anywhere else that made the listener pay attention. Sadly, that precision disappeared during the second act ("Du hehrstes Wunder, herrliche Maid!" came and went with no impact at all) and only sporadically returned during the third, mostly in the conclusion. The orchestra wasn't bad by any means, but the heights achieved during the first act weren't heard again.


Kaufmann and Westbroek, both offering fantastic phrasing, tone and diction, looked like a great pairing of the Walse twins on paper but the reality was quite different. Kaufmann seemed tentative with Westbroek, as if he wasn't quite sure how far he should go with her, and his performance lacked a necessary passion and desire, though his voice is simply amazing. This hesitancy on his part made his Siegmund have less stature onstage than Westbroek's Sieglinde, rendering their entire pairing something of a dramatic mismatch. As Hunding, Hans-Peter Konig's entrance, delivering a devastating side-ways glance perfectly cued to the music (albeit lifted straight from Hunding's entrance in the Copenhagen Ring- the first of many "borrowed" ideas in this production), was the kind of subtle touch wholly missing from Kaufmann's performance.


In Act II Voigt and Terfel started off with a playfulness similar to what Francesca Zambello is doing with her "American" Ring about to unfold in its entirety in San Francisco later this month. This would be the first of two moments during the afternoon which made me think director Robert Lepage has been seeing every Ring Cycle he can, searching for ideas because dramatically he has none of his own (more on this later). Voigt's first "Heiaha" immediately served notice to the doubters that she was going to be on. While hers wasn't a display of endless range, she was in complete control and remained so throughout the performance. On top of that, despite the ridiculous costumes she and everyone else had to endure, she looked and acted the part.


The highlight of the second act, indeed of the entire show sadly enough, was Stephanie Blythe's Fricka. Making a fantastic entrance on a throne with prominent goat-horns as armrests (this reference to cuckoldry would be only thoughtful piece of set-design we would see all day), Blythe's eighteen minutes onstage were devastating in more ways than one. Completely emasculating Terfel's Wotan, Blythe turned this Die Walkure on its head in a way I'm not sure was intentional because it never recovered afterward. Her imperious, take-no-prisoners Fricka not only slices off Wotan's balls during their scene together, but Terfel seemed so beat-down by her that his character couldn't seem to shake his newly imposed impotence for the remainder of the opera.

And that's a problem because while we all know Wotan is weak in many ways, there has to be moments during the rest of Walkure where we see that weakness cast aside and he reclaims the anger and gravitas which make him such a compelling figure. Sadly after this scene, Terfel's Wotan has this air of "my mom just cut off my balls" about him that never goes away and makes him seem pathetic and powerless, which LePage's stage direction does nothing to ameliorate, example one being when Wotan steps in to break Siegmund's sword and the net impact was "really- is that all there is to that?" Ho-hum, check off another plot point. Some of this is also exacerbated by Terfel coming across as appearing much younger than Blythe and Voigt- another downside of casting in the current era where every nuance and detail is illustrated in HD. Compared to them, he seems to possess no maturity. On the upside, he sang beautifully, though after the marvel of the singing in Act 1, there was a noticeable difference in the diction of the native Germans versus the non evident in Act 2.


Act 2 also featured the second of LePage's pilfering of ideas from others- the eyeball, which 20 years from now might seem like a neat homage to the brilliance of Achim Freyer's LA Ring of last year, but in this context seems one-step shy of plagiarism. Furthermore, this reminder of the LA Ring brought into full relief what's missing in LePage's- a concept or vision. There simply isn't one at all. Where in the LA Ring everything onstage made the audience think about the connections and relevance to the characters and story, there isn't anything going here at all- it's just the Machine doing its tricks and the singers moving around it. Sure there are some glorious visuals- the hunting of Siegmund through the trees, and the forming of the Ash tree- both in Act 1, and the final visual of Brunnhilde on the rock was visually gorgeous and arresting, but beyond that? Nothing.


Even the "Ride of the Valkyries" felt flat and unexciting, even though this was the closest thing we'll likely ever see of them making their entrances riding their steeds through the air. This, of all moments, should have been the one where the Machine silenced its critics with the amazing theatricality LePage brought to La Damnation de Faust, which caused me to get all excited about him doing this Ring in the first place. But like everything else except the scene with Fricka, it remained unconvincing and devoid of drama.


There were two priceless moments during the broadcast- the first came during the first intermission when Joyce DiDonato was interviewing the Met's stage manager about the 45 minute delay in the start due to some mechanical malfunction with the machine- as she ended the interview, she said to him "Thanks for getting it up today!" to which the guy looked completely flummoxed and any response he may have had was drowned out by the uproarious laughter from the audience in the theater. The other was the sight of Jonas Kaufmann drooling a six-inch long bit of goo off his lower lip which will probably be edited out of the DVD release so it doesn't become a YouTube sensation following him through the cyber world for the rest of his life.


I'm pleased for Voigt's triumph in this, but dismayed that this Walkure not only made me lose interest in what's to come in the following installments, but surprisingly, it made me see Zambello's production in a kinder light- I don't like most of what she's doing with her concept- but at least she has one.

Jonas Kaufmann in recital

In general, I'm not fond of the recital format when it comes to hearing opera singers perform. However, I did go to hear Jonas Kaufmann in Berkeley Sunday because one can hardly read anything opera-related these days and not find people gushing about him like he's the Justin Beiber of the opera world. He didn't disappoint. In fact, I can say I've never heard German sung so beautifully by a male voice as I did on Sunday night's excellent and generous program.

Yes ladies, this man is an opera singer.

The first half of the recital featured lieder by Shumann- selections from Kerner Liedern, followed by Dichterliebe, to texts Heinrich Heine, both composed in 1840. Kaufmann sounded fantastic, though there were a couple of very brief moments when his voice sounded strained, the first coming in Stille Tränen. After the audience applauded after the opening Wanderlied, Kaufmann and his excellent accompanist Helmut Deutsch eliminated the pauses between songs to the extent they could, imparting a comme il faut air to the proceedings to great result, the two went through the brief pieces at a thrilling pace. I'd like to think it generous design on the part of Kaufmann to sing these particular works, as Deutsch's expressive piano work was an equal key to their success.

The lyricism of Heine's texts worked well for the non-German speaking contingent in the house (including yours truly). At numerous points during this segment an expressiveness or declaratory tone shone in Kaufmann's voice and when I would refer back to the translation it perfectly matched, for example, in Wenn ich in deine Augen seh' , one could clearly understand the emotion of "Yet when you say 'I love you!' I must cry so bitterly" without even knowing what words were being sung.

Adopting more of a baritone during Im Rhein, im schönen Stromme, I wondered if Kaufmann would ever take on Wotan. Vocally it may not be a good fit, but it made me long to hear him in the role anyway. This particular piece ended with impressive forcefulness coming from Deutsch and it would prove the first of many times during the recital where his contributions became equal to Kaufmann's- other notable examples being Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen,  Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen and especially during the final piece in the Schumann set, Die alten, bösen Lieder.

The second half was all Strauss, equally successful and expressive, full of wonderful touches such as Kaufmann gently looking upward while singing the last line of Die Frauen sind oft fromm und still, which translates into "I think that women, now and then, can still see heaven open wide" and opening up impressively high, clear notes at the close of Sehnsucht (Longing) when he sang "ich liebe dich (I love you)." To mention all of these would take quite awhile- suffice to say there were more moments like this than one could have hoped for and the effect on the audience was as expected- they ate it up.

As he did in Friday night's recital in LA, he graciously performed five encores, even though it looked like half the house had left by the last one. The encores on Sunday night were:

1. Breit uber mein haupt (Strauss)
2. Nichts (Strauss)
3. Wie Sollten wir gehein sie halten (Strauss)
4. Dein ist mein ganzes Herz (Lehar)
5. Montnacht (Schumann)

The concert was a co-presentation between Cal Performances and San Francisco Opera. SFO's General Director David Gockley, seated across the aisle from me, left after the second encore. Hopefully that can be read as a sign that he knows he'll be hearing more of Kaufmann soon, and not as indifference to the performer. I do think it likely Kaufmann will be onstage at SFO and LA Opera soon, since these two performances are the only two he's doing in the U.S.. Why make that very long trip for just a weekend in California? Regardless, the audience was certainly grateful he did- as was I.

After hearing him, I now have to get a copy of the Lohengrin DVD featuring Kaufmann in the role. If someone reading this who knows me personally has one (Patrick? Mary Ann?) please let me borrow it. I am also now looking forward more than ever to the Met's upcoming Die Walkure, since it will feature Kaufmann taking on Siegmund for the first time- a role his for which voice (and presence) seems like the most perfect of fits.