Wozzeck opera as film noir from San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck takes the hapless title character through moral depravity, weird science, illegitimacy, jealousy, infidelity, and murder. The music of the early Twentieth Century opera, just produced at Yerba Buena Center by Ensemble Parallèle, is modern with aggressively atonal passages, perfectly suited to the brutal happenings on stage, tempered by lushly romantic passages. On a set with shapes as biting and angular as the music, accompanied by video projections, a stellar cast of local artists gave a performance to rival any other opera company in The City.

Wozzeck is a lowly army barber in early Nineteenth Century Germany. As he is shaving his Captain, the officer chides him for having an out-of-wedlock child with a prostitute. Marie the mother dotes on the child, but not on Wozzeck. She has her eye on a new conquest, the pompous Drum Major. After he rapes her, Wozzeck's can no longer contain his jealousy. He kisses her one last time by a moonlit pond, then stabs her. Searching for the knife, he comes to a bad end.

Berg's hybrid style of avant-garde music was sensitively performed by an ensemble of musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under the energetic conducting of Nicole Paiement, Artistic Director and Founder of the Conservatory. She calls the score, "at turns terrifying, serene, transparent, and then obscured."

As the half-mad Wozzeck, bass-baritone Bojan Knezevic thrills and elicits sympathy with his richly textured voice. He is also a skilled actor, projecting his emotional plight with an internal consistency of facial gestures. His intensity is matched by SFOpera compatriot bass-baritone Philip Skinner as The Doctor who experiments on Wozzeck and finds his dead body. Both produce flawlessly rich, entirely different voices. But tenor John Duykers as the bumptious drunken Captain tended to overawe them with his comic interpretation and assertive voice. Mezzo-soprano Patricia Green as the tragic Marie sang the high notes of her soaring plaintive pleadings with a pure sustain.

Ensemble Parallèle's cinematic-style staging made elaborate use of live, large-scale video projections and clips to set scenes and to highlight the action. The show brought together grand opera and theatre. The Ensemble has a lengthy history of ambitious, greatly successful operatic productions, the last being Lou Harrison's Young Caesar. They will next participate in the Pacific Rim Festival in April with an all-Varèse concert.