You don't have to be an antique to remember that late, great ad campaign: "What becomes a legend most…" with accompanying shots of mink-swathed dames cooing into Richard Avedon's monochromatic camera. Those Blackglama coats just flew out of furriers' shops.
In comparison, SFO didn't feel all that legendary when it opened 61 seasons ago, with mostly bench seating for 480 patrons facing a handsome, down-to-business redwood stage. During that 1957 season, Puccini, Stravinsky, Mozart and Richard Strauss caroled their way through chilly high-desert nights, all courtesy of the unflinching founding patriarch, John Crosby.
Crosby left behind a still-sustained credo for the company: to offer a balanced but innovative repertory, to discover and cultivate young artists and to maintain the SFO's legendary reputation as the nation's premier summer opera festival.
Which brings us up to 2017 with—gasp—neither Mozart nor Puccini nor Richard Strauss on the agenda. Another Strauss, Johann Jr., opens the season on June 30 with that high-calorie Viennese confection, Die Fledermaus. Drag out your dancing pumps, gents, and your fanciest dominos, ladies, for a fling at the Waltz King's flirtatious party.
The usual operetta appurtenances apply: disguise, mistaken identities, romantic trickery, Champagne. In most performances this summer, super-diva Susan Graham drawls away as the gender-challenged Prince Orlofsky, while a suspicious wife Rosalinde (Devon Guthrie) exacts revenge upon her philandering mate, Eisenstein (Kurt Streit), with everyone winding up in the juzgado supervised by a muy borracho jailer (scenery-chewer Kevin Burdette). Rory Macdonald conducts.
The laughing stops when Donizetti's madness-fraught melodrama, Lucia di Lammermoor, opens on July 1. Despite ghosts and ghastliness, Lucia features some of the most gorgeous vocalizing in all Romantic opera, a love duet to end all love duets, that sextet, and opera's craziest mad scene ever.
Donizetti's star-crossed lovers are Lucia (Brenda Rae), whose love for Edgardo (Mario Chang) is thwarted by bad-boy brother Enrico (Zachary Nelson), with a nasty demand that she marry the wrong tenor, Arturo. Whoops. During the wedding night from hell, Lucia loses her wits, carves up Arturo à la Polanski, makes a gore-spattered entrance and sings and sings and sings. Corrado Rovaris is in the pit.
"The law? Never heard of it! Anything I want, that's the law!" That has a familiar ring these days, though spoken by the ignorant autocrat, King Dodon, in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel, entering the repertoire on July 15. Relatively unfamiliar to American audiences, it's a gorgeous farrago of foolishness with a deliberately shambolic plot.
The bumbling king goes to war, pointlessly, with a kingdom whose alluring queen mocks and seduces him. Their would-be wedding turns into mean-spirited farce and the opera ends, ironically, with the bleak message that all we've seen is mere illusion. Well then, why bother? Because of Rimsky's glorious, colorful score, its exotic and self-mocking orientalisms and the savage satire clothed in voluptuous fairy-tale trappings. As doddering Dodon, Eric Owens debuts here, Wotan no more. Venera Gimadievna is the Queen of Shemakha and Emmanuel Villaume conducts.
We've been waiting a couple of years for this season's world premiere, Mason Bates' The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Opening July 22, the opera follows a recent SFO practice of staging premieres with modern-day protagonists, ie, Bright Sheng's Madame Mao in 2003 and Huang Ruo's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen in 2014.
In studying the meteoric Jobs, who revolutionized human communication, Bates says he's written an opera "about a man who learns to be human again." The composer invents a "sound world" for each character, with Jobs linked to acoustic guitar while his spiritual guide, Koban, is associated with Asian percussive instruments against a large electro-acoustic orchestra led by Michael Christie. Edward Parks sings Jobs, Sasha Cooke is his wife Laurene and Wei Wu is Koban.
In brief, the final opera to join SFO's repertory on July 29 will be Handel's spectacular and spectacularly plotted Alcina, a reinvented version of the Circe story. Putting it mildly, she is not a nice lady. But Handel's score is perhaps his finest, filled with terrific Baroque vocal opportunities for his large cast. Elza van den Heever is the beauteous witch with Harry Bicket in the pit.
