"u" the opera

Klingon opera

Not Wagner, but let's be honest here. The Nordic sagas that we love are cut from the same cloth as all the warrior mythology. And Star Trek has certainly taken its place as a major interpreter of that heroic mythology. So it's sort of a second-cousin-once-removed from Wagner's Ring.

Sure, it's odd, but if I were anywhere near the Netherlands next week, I'd definitely attend, if only for the value of being able to say, "Why yes, I've seen a Klingon opera!". (And while I'm not a Trekkie, these characters are just as alive to Star Trek fans as Wotan, Brünnhilde and Siegfried are to us Wagnerians.).

The next performance of the opera ‘u’ will be:

9, 10, 11 and 12 September 2010
Theater Zeebelt

De Constant Rebecqueplein 20A

The Hague
For reservations email kassa@zeebelt.nl or call +31 (0) 70 3656546

And if you want to know more, there's lots of u and Klingon lore here, including a couple of videos in the Klingon language.

http://www.u-theopera.org/

Thanks to OperaBobb for sending this tidbit in his newsletter.

Review: Lotfi Mansouri's new tell-all book

Whilst perusing Amazon, debating whether to buy Lotfi's new book in print format or wait until it's available for Kindle, I saw Janos Gereben's review of it and asked him if I could put it on Wagner Bytes. He graciously responded with an expanded version, plus his review of the current Berkeley Opera offering, Legend of the Ring. Thanks, Janos!

The World According to Mansouri

By Janos Gereben

Reading "Lotfi Mansouri, an Operatic Journey" is a guilty pleasure.

The former San Francisco Opera general director's straight-from-the-shoulder - if inevitably self-serving - autobiography is published by University Press of New England; it is available from

http://www.amazon.com/Lotfi-Mansouri-Operatic-Journey/dp/1555537065

This 330-page delight of backstage stories from a 60-year-long international career is perhaps disquieting for the genteel reader, made to witness a tell-all orgy, ranging from the discourteously candid to the nakedly retaliatory... some with numerous grains of revelatory truth, others purely of personal resentment.

Hundreds of the past half century's best-known singers, conductors, and administrators are praised-and-demolished or just the latter. It is amazing stuff, even if one feels uneasy to be so positive about it. Yikes! I am beginning to sound like the book.

Examples of Mansouri dishing it out, picked at random:

- Santa Fe Opera founder/director John Crosby had an "unmatched tenure [of 43 years]," was "an incredible fund-raiser," but "his people skills were nowhere near his managing talents... the price he paid for his fear of human contact was the coldness of his conducting."

- Otto Klemperer: "unaware of his health problems [a stroke and a botched brain operation], I just thought he was an abusive boor... His fascination with the opposite sex took precedence over everything else." Klemperer, responding to someone with a Swiss accent: "Would you repeat that in German?"

- Zürich Opera administrator Emil Jucker "had all the integrity of the average viper."

- Kurt Herbert Adler "ran San Francisco Opera like a personal fiefdom, oozing disdain for anyone he considered inferior in judgment or experience, and his list was a long one... tightfisted... could be arrogant, aggressive, rude, and insulting - and this was just on an average day."

Written with Donald Arthur, the book is impressively diverse in its appeal: all about opera, it's a perfectly captivating book for readers oblivious to musical theater - a fascinating read about the struggles of a young man from a dysfunctional family in Iran, his subsequent adventures around the world, and skyrocketing international career.

Apparently stillborn in Tehran, on a sweltering day in 1929, and given up for dead, the baby miraculously revived on a block of ice was named Lotfollah - "kindness of God."

Mansouri's recurring adventures over the years in Iran and in Hollywood are both suspenseful and rib-tickling. In kindergarten, he played the Grand Vizier in a cast with Fatemeh, the future Shah's sister.

Unfortunately, the crown prince himself attended our little performance... and I got so nervous that I wet my pants and started crying onstage. From that moment, I developed a lifelong sympathy for singers' nerves.

In Hollywood, Mansouri played Caruso in the made-for-TV movie "The Day I Met Caruso," and many years later, he was involved with the Pavarotti disaster, "Yes, Giorgio," which, he says, cost $19 million to make and grossed $1 million. He went on to direct the opera scenes in "Moonstruck," with Cher and Nicolas Cage.

Mansouri, who ran opera houses in Geneva and Toronto before, became general director of San Francisco Opera in 1988, just a year before the Loma Prieta earthquake which damaged the War Memorial. "[Administration] dysfunction, strike, recession - and then an earthquake!," he laments.

For the next decade of those trying times, Mansouri held the company together, helped to oversee the $90 million on-time, on-budget, successful reconstruction of the building in the middle of an economic downturn.

And yet, instead of losing audience during almost two years of the company being homeless, Mansouri actually brought in many new and young opera fans with productions such as the "Broadway Boheme" in the Orpheum, and great casts in the Civic Auditorium, transformed for the occasion.

Mansouri engaged Valery Gergiev and the Kirov to San Francisco for their U.S. debut, also signing Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Schneider, Markus Stenz, Christian Thielemann, Antonio Pappano, Andrew Davis, and Yuri Temirkanov.

During his term, Mansouri commissioned new operas by John Adams, Conrad Susa, Stewart Wallace (whose Harvey Milk, he says, "the cast saved from its second-rate music. I've never even listened to the recording"), André Previn, and Jake Heggie, enhancing San Francisco's reputation for having a leading opera company. On the other hand, Mansouri manages this aside about the Harvey Milk creators:

We met composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie in New York. I found them pretentious, pseudo-intellectual East Coasters and self-satisfied. There was an aura of mirthless superficiality about them.

Then, in 2001, Mansouri was succeeded by Pamela Rosenberg, "who [in Europe] was used to realizing her visions... and then send the bill to the government." During the six-month overlap between them, Mansouri says, "she never talked to me about business. Not once."

By this time, in the transition period to the new general director, Mansouri was "barely on speaking terms with Donald Runnicles," he had named music director of the company a decade before.

At his most Dante-esque, Mansouri reserves the ninth circle of Hell for those two, listing Rosenberg's misdeeds (an appointment resulting from "a search process gone tragically wrong") and, even more, attacking Runnicles in great detail, calling him "the one problem entirely of my own making."

Besides Runnicles' siding with Rosenberg, Mansouri also holds the conductor's behavior ("weirdly insecure") and even work on the podium against him:

When he was on, his performances were very, very good. But when he was off, he was way off. Sometimes he didn't seem familiar with a score, as if he were sight-reading it, even in performance. He also had a habit of letting the orchestra overpower the voices. He cared about some operas, but not about others, which was odd, considering he always had his choice of whatever three operas he wanted each season.

But, beyond personalities and feuds and dishing it out, there is a wealth of material, both fascinating and debatable, in "Lotfi Mansouri, an Operatic Journey."

Janos has covered the SF Bay Area arts scene for many years, as arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and music editor of the San Jose Mercury News. He now covers music, theater, and art for the SF Examiner, and for the past decade has been Music News columnist for San Francisco Classical Voice:

http://www.sfcv.org/

Review: Berkeley Opera's Ringlet

Berkeley (Now West Edge) Opera Conquers Big Miniature Ring

By Janos Gereben

Once upon a time, six long years ago, there was a little opera company in Berkeley tackling a huge project, called the Legend of the Ring, making waves far and wide.

And now, on Saturday, here was a little company again, taking up the same challenge: David Seaman's condensation of Richard Wagner's four-opera, 15-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle into a four-hour evening, including a single intermission.

Photos by Ching Chang

Alberich (Bojan Knezevic) and the Rhine Maidens

The first part combines Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the second consists of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.

A point of perspective: Legend's entire running time is shorter than Ring intermissions alone in the Wagner temple of Bayreuth, where the first of the 2010 cycles just concluded on Sunday - a total of six hours.

Legend dispenses with a 100-plus piece orchestra, about the same number of soloists and chorus, and huge sets, settling instead for a cast of eight (eight!) in multiple roles, no chorus, an orchestra of 16, and projected sets. A challenge indeed.

In 2004, it was the Berkeley Opera in the Julia Morgan Theater, packing 'em in and scoring critical success. This time, it's the freshly renamed Berkeley West Edge Opera in its new venue, the El Cerrito Performing Arts Theater, once again filling a hall (twice the size of the Julia Morgan), and scoring even bigger. And not.

The new cast includes astonishing, world-class voices, but the orchestra performance on Saturday had enough intonation problems and badly blown notes to temper enthusiasm.

Seaman's reduction of the orchestra is radical. In the string sections alone, Wagner's 32 violins disappear, Legend has none; instead of 12 violas, there are three (Michi Aceret is the first violist and thus the concertmaster in El Cerrito), two cellos do the work of 12, and two basses substitute for the original eight.

Strings on Saturday did great work, but there were not enough of them to cover up problems in the brass to the same extent that the original gargantuan Wagner orchestra can.

Perhaps there were not enough rehearsals or it was just a "bad night," so upcoming performances - on Aug. 4, 6, and 8 - may still have the best of both worlds, on the stage and in the pit.

Wotan (Richard Paul Fink) and the giants (Bojan Knezevic and Dean Peterson)

The cast is gloriously starry for a small company. Wotan is sung by Richard Paul Fink, a regular in some of the world's big opera houses. His Saturday performance combined a great voice with musical intelligence, and praiseworthy restraint to avoid oversinging in a relatively small theater. The Seaman reduction takes most of the depth away from the character, but Fink still gives a solid portrayal.

Fink also appears as Gunter, another remarkable vocal performance, but here he is handicapped by the director's whim of presenting the character as a shuffling, prissy caricature.

Jay Hunter Morris, as Siegmund, Siegfried, and Froh, gives sterling performances, his bright, clear heldentenor not only holding up well, but actually peaking as time went on.

Marie Plette sings five roles brilliantly, including a wonderful Sieglinde and Gutrune.

Among a number of roles they sing, Bojan Knezovic scores best as Alberich, and Dean Peterson as Hagen. The two are also paired well as the giants Fasolt and Fafner.

Berkeley Opera regular Stephen Rumph, a dynamic singing actor, impressed as Loge (especially) and Mime in a personal-best performance.

Christine Springer's main role is Brünnhilde, Valentina Osinski sings both Flosshilde and Fricka.

Heading both the 2004 Berkeley Opera and the 2010 Edge Opera productions: music director Jonathan Khuner and artistic director Mark Streshinsky.

Khuner, who has had an important role in many "real" Ring productions in San Francisco and New York, exhibits an impressive mastery of the score, which is a smooth aggregation of Wagner's operas, making the omission of lengthy portions and of "big numbers" (bye-bye "Ride of the Valkyries"!) almost imperceptible.

Jay Hunter Morris as Siegmund and Marie Plette as Sieglinde

Streshinsky, whose career has skyrocketed since his early days with Berkeley Opera, had a fascinating stage production back then, and he has improved on it this time.

Gods, dragons, giants, dwarves, heroes and villains perform their cosmic drama in a small box center stage, between two large screens. The "set" consists of two chairs and a desk-like platform - that's it. And it works!

The improvement since the last production: instead of Loge using a trash can to clean up the stage during the finale, this one has the proper world-ending fireworks.

Insisting on a previous misstep, however, Streshinsky still has the Forest Bird use a cell phone to report (silently, but in a grotesquely animated fashion) Siegfried's slaying of the dragon, and then sing her lines into the phone. Mercifully short of EuroTrash, it is just plain silly.

Jeremy Knight's projections are terrific - more modest, abstract, and at a fraction of the cost, just as effective as those in the San Francisco Opera's current production. Lucas Krech's lighting design needs fine-tuning: stripes and blotches of colors on faces and bodies are confusing.

Again, three more chances to see and hear this economy-but-vocally-opulent edition of the Ring.

Siegfried (Morris) about to die at the hand of Hagen (Peterson)

Thanks in abundance to Janos Gereben for sending this excellent review!

For a far more negative review, see Josh Kosman's:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/02/DDVG1ENBN3.DTL

(Frankly, I don't think Josh "gets" this sort of production. He reviewed the WSNC's 1994 Rheingold poorly, without seeming to realize that our objectives were to give a number of young musicians an opportunity to perform in a Wagner opera and add it to their résumés. As I recall, after the costs and receipts were tallied, our grant fund had spent around $3000 on the production - and had given around 70 musicians and stagehands (and most of the orchestra members were students) an experience they wouldn't have otherwise had. C'mon, Josh! When the tickets only cost 20-30 bucks, you should hardly expect the production to be the spectacle of a full-blown SFO one. You come to hear promising talent and see innovation done on-the-cheap, something the SFO could learn from, IMHO.)

Trish "still bitter after all these years" Benedict

(ok, not really bitter, but obviously seriously annoyed)