Yesterday afternoon the second performance of the Merola Opera Program's Schwabacher Summer Concert was given as part of the 2010 Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. While it is clearly advantageous to experience "the next generation of opera talent" (as they are described in the program book) in a conducive setting, placing such them in circumstances that are far from ideal (particularly for opera) provides serious opera lovers to see whether or not their talent is made of sterner stuff. Outdoor performances are always challenging, and an outdoor performance on a typical day of Mark Twain summer in San Francisco raises the bar to a level that some would call worthy of combat pay. (I still have fond memories of Susan Graham on such a day singing "Summertime" with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra in Dolores Park in a down jacket and huddled against a driving wind.) Thus, while the Merola appearance in Herbst Theatre could not have been a better vehicle for presenting both musical and dramatic talents, yesterday presented the current "Merolini" as a team of real troupers.
Fortunately, the program of offerings had a strong bias towards comedy, which often places more demands on working with the cards you have been dealt; and the Merola performers shone in these scenes. The most modest was the love duet from Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride, sung in Czech with only a brief explanation of the setting by Sheri Greenawald prior to the performance. I was reminded that one of the questions put to Patricia Racette (a "graduate" of the Merola Program) at the end of her Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI) master class came from a student who wanted to know how to learn Czech. (As I recall, the answer was, "Find someone who already knows it.") Writing as one who does not know Czech, I confess that I was still struck by a clarity of diction that Rebecca Davis and Kevin Ray brought to their performance, because it clearly enhanced the dramatic message of their love scene.
Indeed, diction was very much the order of the day; and the fact that all voices had to be enhanced by microphone in the Yerba Buena setting made the need for clarity all the more urgent. (Microphones can't tell the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong.) Four of the performers worked their comic magic in two decidedly different settings; and diction was the "secret sauce" in both cases. The settings were the music lesson scene from Gioacchino Rossini's Barber of Seville and a pair of scenes from the second act of Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor. The performers were tenor Eleazar Rodriguez (Almaviva in Barber and Fenton in Merry Wives), baritone Dan Kempson (Figaro in Barber and Fluth, Shakespeare's Ford, in Merry Wives), bass-baritone Ryan Kuster (Bartolo in Barber and Caius in Merry Wives, with a hysterical French affectation), and Kevin Thompson (Basilio in Barber and Falstaff in Merry Wives, played with perhaps a bit too much good health for that dissipated knight). The gold star for diction, however, definitely goes to Kuster for deftly managing a text that bounces between German and French without skipping a beat.
Of the more tragic offerings the most effective was the letter scene that begins the third act of Jules Massenet's Werther. (This was a particularly valuable selection, since it provided an excellent preview of the opera which will be presented in its entirety in the coming San Francisco Opera season.) Greenawald needed a bit of time to set up this scene, but it required a fair amount of explanation. The focus is on Charlotte, stuck in a loveless marriage with only the memories of her brief romance with Werther, whose letters she has saved. During an extended orchestral introduction (perfectly timed by conductor Mark Morash), mezzo Renée Rapier as Charlotte had to cross the entire stage slowly with her eyes fixed on the box in which she had saved Werther's letters. Her focus was so intense that one easily forgot about the whipping chill wind in the air, not to mention the scraps of paper blowing off stage after she untied the ribbon around those letters. Her subsequent confession scene with her younger sister Sophie, sung by soprano Janai Brugger-Orman, was equally effective and certainly compelling enough to leave us hungry for a performance of the entire opera.
The weakest offering consisted of two consecutive scenes from the second act of George Frideric Handel's Rodelinda in the course of which four of the opera's six characters each sing an aria. This may have been an efficient way to showcase four singers in four different voice ranges, but Davis, Ray, and Kuster all appeared in subsequent scenes whose dramatic settings were much more accessible. This left Robin Flynn to sing the alto castrato role of Unulfo. The plot across these two scenes concerns a baby who may or may not be slain as a victim of the machinations of political power playing. Most of the action that involved holding the baby was, at best, awkward; but when Unulfo received the baby, it seemed as if Flynn forgot that she was singing a male role and got far too maternal in her gestures. However, these scenes provided the only problematic events in the entire afternoon; and the program was probably best served by having them performed at the very beginning.
Comments