Jeffery holds an MA in Jazz History and Research from Rutgers University and spent ten years as an archivist for the Metropolitan Opera, where he helped develop the MetOpera Database. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes about opera and jazz for publications including Opera News and Musical America.
Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas deserves credit for this excellent semi-staged version of Britten's Peter Grimes performed with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall.
The final production of the San Francisco Opera’s fall season was a new staging of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, advertised everywhere as The Barber of Seville.
What happens when the director develops in directions the company neither wanted or expected? For San Francisco Opera’s new Der Fliegende Holländer, this discovery led to decisive action: director Petrika Ionesco was sacked just before the opening.
It may have taken Verdi’s bicentennial to bring Falstaff back to the San Francisco Opera, but at last the knight has returned to the company’s stage for the first time in over a decade...
All was set for the Berkeley Symphony to launch its new season, the fifth under the direction of Joana Carneiro, when a moment of panic, no doubt, rattled the front office. Due to a medical condition that temporarily prevented air travel, Carneiro would be unable to reach Berkeley in time to lead on 3 October.
The 91st season of the San Francisco Opera opened with a revival of Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele in Robert Carsen’s well-traveled production. The staging extends Shakespeare’s metaphor: if the whole world’s a stage, then heaven, quite naturally, must be an opera house.
The bits of conversation I overheard during intermission and in the aisles after the world première of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene at San Francisco Opera were assorted variations of “so, what did you think?” World premières are, indeed, auspicious occasions that privilege first-nighters to experience the work before anyone else has molded or influenced their thoughts about it.
When I first saw Jean Cocteau’s 1946 cinematic masterpiece La Belle et la Bête on DVD several years ago, its visual storytelling made such a strong impression that a few of its images became unforgettably burned into my memory: disembodied hands grasping candles, statues that blinked, and the Beast himself, a giant kitty-cat who was more pathetic and sad than terrifying.
Bass-baritone Eric Owens is no stranger to Bay Area voice aficionados. After making his local debut as Lodovico in Otello with San Francisco Opera in 2002, Owens memorably created the diet-regiment-reciting General Leslie Groves there in the world première of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in 2005. Most recently he did yeoman's work with a smaller role in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi in October.
Maestro Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela completed a four-day residency at Cal Performances with two concerts that rocked, rolled, and astounded audiences in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.
Continuing the experiment from the opening of the season, San Francisco Opera’s current run of Tosca has several performances occurring on consecutive days or in close proximity, necessitating two different casts. The Thursday opening made headlines when the leading lady was felled by illness and a new talent, Melody Moore, made her mark in storybook fashion.
Wagner’s Lohengrin was the last work the master completed before settling into a mid-career six-year slump. During this compositional hiatus, he wrote the poems for his Ring operas and ruminated in print on various topics, musical and otherwise, but work on the music dramas essentially ceased.
Though reports of the work’s importance and dramatic power have attended it since its 2010 premiere in Dallas, I doubt many in the audience of the War Memorial Opera House on Wednesday night were prepared for the impact of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.
In the last few decades, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi has flirted with standard repertory status, but it has not sufficiently won the hearts of opera-goers to warrant more than the occasional production. Though blessed with some of the composer’s finest melodies, the opera has problems for modern audiences.
