No hassle Opera! The Met’s new “Live in HD” season kicks off this Saturday, October 13, at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas, with a new production of “L’Elisir d’Amore” starring Anna Netrebko
The Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” 2012-2013 season kicks off Saturday, October 13, 2012 with a new production of Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.” Opera superstar, Anna Netrebko, is Adina and Ambrogio Maestri is Dr. Dulcamara. Photo: Nick Heavican/Metropolitan Opera
When it comes to opera, it’s hard to beat the enduring popularity of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore—a whacky travelling salesman, fake love potions, rich girl, poor boy, botched communication and LOVE. The 7th season of The Met: Live in HD opens this Saturday, October 13, in Sonoma County at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas, and at select theatres across the country, with this comic gem. The series runs through the end of April 2013 with a selection of 11 other top Metropolitan Opera productions, including seven new productions, two of which are Met premieres. Each live performance is broadcast through National CineMedia’s (NCM®) to participating local theatres in real time on a Saturday with a Wednesday “encore,” a re-screening of Saturday’s captured performance. Encore performances are always shown on Wednesday afternoons and evenings by the Rialto Cinemas.
HD productions offer those of us in the extended northern Bay Area, the opportunity to sample a rich menu of almost live opera for $25, without crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and all the time and expense that entails. The immersive screen experience offers exacting close-ups of the performances—facial expressions, costumes, scenery—and informative specially produced features—generally interviews—hosted by Met opera stars such as Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Plácido Domingo, Susan Graham, Thomas Hampson, Patricia Racette, and Deborah Voigt. These backstage chats with cast, crew, and production teams give an unprecedented look at what goes into the staging of an opera at one of the world’s great houses. All transmissions have on-screen English subtitles, the same ones used in live performances at the opera house.
In fact, the popularity of the Emmy® and Peabody award-winning series has skyrocketed, reaching over 3 million people in more than 1900 theaters in 64 countries, making the Met the only arts institution with an ongoing global art series of this scale. The 2012-13 season will be broadcast in over 660 select U.S. cinemas and in 100 additional independent venues worldwide.
Johan Botha as the title character and Renée Fleming as Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello,” the second of twelve operas in the Metropolitan Opera’s popular “Live in HD” series. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
A rare occurrence, last year’s Metropolitan opera season opened with Donizetti’s tragic Anna Bolena, with Netrebko in the title role, and its new season also opens with Donizetti and Netrebko …again. This is the first time in 20 years that the Met season has featured a comedy for opening night and the first time ever that The Met: Live in HD opens with a comedy. Anna Netrebko, starring as Adina, and Matthew Polenzani, as Nemorino—both making their Met debut in these roles—received rapturous reviews the first night and the production has been praised for its insightful new staging. The opera co-stars Mariusz Kwiecien as the soldier Belcore, Adina’s swaggering fiancé, and Ambrogio Maestri as the potion-peddling traveling salesman Doctor Dulcamara. (Run time: 125 minutes including 2 intermissions) Encore: Wednesday, November 7 at 1 and 7 pm.
On October 27, Verdi’s Otello, the first opera to be televised from the Met nearly 65 years ago, comes to HD. The Shakespearean masterpiece returns with an exciting cast that includes South African tenor Johan Botha singing the title role opposite the star soprano Renée Fleming as Desdemona, with Symyon Bychkov conducting.
2012-2013 Season
Donizetti’s L’ELISIR D’AMORE
NEW PRODUCTION Saturday, October 13 at 10am and Wednesday, October 17 at 1 & 7pm
Verdi’s OTELLO
Saturday, October 27 at 10am
and Wednesday, November 7 at 1 & 7pm
Ades’ THE TEMPEST
MET PREMIERE Saturday, November 10 at 10am
and Wednesday, November 14 at 1 & 7pm
Mozart’s LA CLEMENZA DI TITO
Saturday, December 1 at 10am
and Wednesday, December 5 at 1 & 7pm
Verdi’s UN BALLO IN MASCHERA
NEW PRODUCTION Saturday, December 8 at 10am
and Wednesday, December 12 at 1 & 7pm
Verdi’s AIDA
Saturday, December 15 at 10am
and Wednesday, December 19 at 1 & 7pm
Berlioz’s LES TROYENS
Saturday, January 5 at 9am
and Wednesday, January 9 at Noon & 6pm
Donizetti’s MARIA STUARDA
MET PREMIERE Saturday, January 19 at 10am
and Wednesday, January 23 at 1 & 7pm
Verdi’s RIGOLETTO
NEW PRODUCTION Saturday, February 16 at 10am
and Wednesday, February 20 at 1 & 7pm
Wagner’s PARSIFAL
NEW PRODUCTION Saturday, March 2 at 9am
and Wednesday, March 6 at Noon & 6pm
Zandonai’s FRANCESCA DA RIMINI
Saturday, March 16 at 9am
and Wednesday, March 20 at Noon & 6pm
Handel’s GIULIO CESARE
NEW PRODUCTION Saturday, April 27 at 9am
and Wednesday, May 1 at Noon & 6pm
Details: Tickets are available at participating cinema box offices and online at www.FathomEvents.com . For a complete list of cinema locations and schedule, please visit The Met: Live in HD. Ticket prices vary by location. Tickets at the Rialto Cinemas are $25 and season subscriptions are available, allowing you to choose your seat. NO ONE cares what you wear or what you eat or drink but ladies please curb check your snoring partners, or be kind enough to elbow them to consciousness.
Sonoma County:
Rialto Cinemas Lakeside
551 Summerfield Road
Santa Rosa, CA 95405
Questions: opera@rialtocinemas.com
Napa County:
Cinemark Napa 8
825 Pearl Street
Napa, CA 94559
Marin County:
The Lark Theater
549 Magnolia Avenue
Larkspur, CA 94939
Cinemark Century Northgate 15
7000 Northgate Drive
San Rafael, CA 94903
Cinemark Cinearts Sequoia 2
25 Throckmorton Avenue
Mill Valley, CA 94941
Stealthy Soprano Nicole Cabell climbs a sink and balances on a wall in her debut at SF Opera’s “Capulets and Montagues,” through October 19, 2012
Singing on top of a sink means ditching your Christian Lacroix platforms and using those toes to grip. Nicole Cabell is the stealthy Giulietta in Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece, “The Capulets and the Montagues,” which opens SF Opera’s fall season. Photo by Cory Weaver.
SF Opera’s fall season opener is Bellini’s 1830 bel canto masterpiece, The Capulets and the Montagues (I Capuleti e i Montecchi)—the doomed love story of Romeo and Juliet, but not Shakespeare’s version. And in this production, it is Giulietta, the stunning Nicole Cabell, who does all of the work literally. The poised soprano, in her SF Opera debut, first climbs atop a sink mounted high on a wall and delivers a lush aria and later teeters on a narrow wall and delivers another…all in the name of love. The object of her affection is opera’s white hot mezzo, Joyce DiDonato, her Romeo. As this 1830 opera begins, Romeo and Juliet have already met and fallen in love and there isn’t a single uplifting moment for the two young lovers. Romeo, a Monatgue, is a real rebel and he has killed Giulietta’s brother and is on the verge of war with the Capulets, while his Giulietta (a Capulet) is engaged to her cousin Tebaldo, who is based on the character Tybalt. Tormented Giulietta, holed up in the Verona palace, refuses Romeo’s numerous longing pleas to run away with him, offering the excuse that she cannot desert her father. It’s only in death that the lovers are joined. In fact this isn’t much of a love story at all—it’s more a sad commentary on being caught up in the fervor of war and the vulnerability of first love. Bellini’s beautiful music, composed when he was just 29, and played with affecting beauty by the SF Opera Orchestra, expresses deep tenderness and pathos in the two lovers’ passionate solos and contains bloodthirsty choral parts, meant to drive home the unstoppable momentum of the war machine itself.
SF Opera opens its fall season with Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece, “The Capulets and the Montagues” (“I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), the story of Romeo and Juliet sans Shakespeare. Joyce DiDonato (left) is Romeo and Nicole Cabell is Giulietta. Photo by Cory Weaver.
This Bavarian State Opera and San Francisco Opera co-production, directed by Vincent Boussard, had its world premiere at the Nationaltheatre in Munich in March 2011. It features a sparse but confounding set design by Vincent Lemaire. Minimalistic palace walls are illuminated with lovely Lascaux-like primitive drawings of running horses, the beauty of which is illuminated by Guido Levi’s skillful lighting but confounded by two dozen saddles awkwardly hanging down like pendant lamps over the Capulets. These saddles, meant to remind us that battle is eminent, are much like the huge descending mirrors in Alessandro Cameo’s minimalistic set design for SF Opera’s 2011 Don Giovanni—they get very old very fast. The set also has an elegant shiny black floor which occasionally squeaked. And then there’s the sink mounted high on one of the walls, a fixture that plays a heightened role as a platform for one of Cabell’s arias and seemed to work beautifully with minimalistic aspects of the set design. Most confounding, to the point of annoying, was the interruption of the music and flow twice, both Act I and Act II, for changes in scenery.
The stylish costumes by Christian Lacroix, known for his use of vibant shades and textures, infused a palpabale visual energy into the angst-ridden vibe of the opera. While it isn’t widely known outside the fashion world, Lacroix’s fashion house went into bankuptcy in 2009 and he subsequently lost the rights to design under his own name, so these gorgeous gowns, which look exceptional on the lythe bodied Cabell and supernunneries, are part of an bygone era of decadent couture that carries the name Chrstian Lacroix. (Now Lacroix, designing under the name “Monsieur C. Lacroix”, collaborates with the hihg-end Spanish chain, Desigual, known for using a kaleidoscope of colours.) The humorous Act II opening of the opera includes a scene that many men may find baffling but most women instinctively relate to—supernumeraries in confection-colored elegant Lacroix gowns slowly and somewhat noisily parade up steep metal bleachers in outrageously high Lacroix stilettos. Just as the young lovers are hostage to doomed love, women are bewitched by stylish but impossibly cruel shoes.
What works magically is the singing and Cabell and DiDonato are very heart and soul of it. Each is in top form, but the meshing of their voices, its exquisite tenderness, is what defines this production. Cabell’s SF Opera debut will be long remembered. Her singing grew more sublime as the evening progressed, exemplifying what makes the bel canto repertory work: beautiful sound creatively embellished, driving home the emotion. Her Act I aria, “Oh quante volte,” in which she longs for Romeo to return to her, was deeply melancholic. And her acting—soulful, demented—delivered pathos in doses befitting a torn young woman.
From the minute she walked on stage, Joyce DiDonato, a former Merola participant, owned this trousers role. She delivered an impassioned, idealistic, and highly impulsive young Romeo with an intoxicating sensuality and her expressive mezzo voice seemed capable of winning over every heart but hesitant Giulietta’s.
Here, Joyce DiDonato sings Romeo’s Act 1 aria from The Capulets and the Montagues (Paris, 2008). Romeo has entered the palace in the guise of a Montague envoy and offers the guarantee of peace through the marriage of Romeo to Guilietta. He will leave distraught, knowing that he is an unwitting, inexorable part of the machinery of war that cannot be stopped.:
A strong supporting cast backed up the two soloists. Albanian tenor Samir Pirgu seemed to struggle to find his sweet spot in his SF Opera debut as Tebaldo, Guilietta’s fiancé, but his singing improved as the evening progressed. Chinese baritone and second-year Adler Fellow, Ao Li, made the most of his small role as Lorenzo, the doctor (not friar) of the Capuleti. American bass-baritone, Eric Owens was Capellio, leader of Capuleti and Guilietta’s father who, in an intense stand-off with Romeo, brashly refuses the young man’s offer to marry his daughter, setting the whole tragedy in motion.
In Vincent Lemaire’s sets for Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” at SF Opera through October 19, 2012, dozens of saddles hang over the Capulets who are waiting at the palace to avenge the death of their leader Capellio’s son, who was killed by Romeo. Photo by Cory Weaver.
Riccardo Frizza, who made his SF Opera debut conducting Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia last season, again led the SF Opera orchestra in an exciting performance that was greatly enhanced by the enchanting solos of Kevin Rivard (French horn), and José González Granero(clarinet).
Details: War Memorial Opera House is located at 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. Remaining Performances: Oct.11 (7:30 p.m.), Oct. 14 (2 p.m.), October 16 (8 p.m.), October 19 (8 p.m.) Tickets: : $22 to $340 at the Box Office, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco, by phone at (415) 864-3330, or online at www.sfopera.com. Standing Room tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. on the day of each performance; $10 each, cash only.
Driving to San Francisco and Parking: Be sure to allow ample time when driving into San Francisco on the weekend and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge—there is frequently a 15 to 30 minute back-up on Highway 101 South from Sausalito onwards due to congestion around the toll-plaza. Arrive early at your parking garage of choice because those also fill up on weekends. Recommended garages near the opera house are the Performing Arts Garage and Civic Center Garage (both have flat $15 pay cash as you enter policy on performance nights)
ARThound 