It’s June and I have been looking forward to this evening for a while. A hot day in Silicon Valley and San Francisco is always a bit cooler. The drive up the bay was easy today and the city skyline is as gorgeous as ever. Now in my 25th year here, the Berlin big city kid in me can never get enough of its view when approaching the city by the bay.
My evening starts at Mr. Tipple’s Recording Studio for a pre-Opera cocktail and some Asian fusion cuisine from “The Fat Cat.” I choose one of the several fun Mezcal cocktails to my liking, and the local Black Cod should be light enough while I am watching tonight’s act “The Tomoko Funaki Hard Bop Collective set up. “Tomoko Funaki was classically trained on flute and violin before her move to SF in 2002 where she became immersed in studying the upright bass. She has played with such luminaries as Ray Drummond, The Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, Donald “Duck” Bailey, and Denise Perrier. Their first set is just what I needed to wind down after a couple of busy weeks at work.
On my drive up from Silicon Valley I listened to the 2016/17 season review podcast. I think this will be the same production I saw in 2017. Don Giovanni – the story of Casanova in a classical setting – is considered by many Mozart’s operatic masterpiece. The discussion in “Opera After Dark” will make me look for how consenting Don Giovanni’s amorous adventures will be displayed in this production. Apparently scholars have very different interpretations here. We’ll see.
5 minute walk and off we go. Real programs are back! This shot never quite gets old.
First act was brilliant. Loved the voices and who said opera is boring? A lot is happening in the fist fifteen minutes, including a father being murdered after discovering his daughter being assaulted by not-her-fiancé!
And I stand corrected, I have not seen a Don Giovanni set in 2080 before. This is the third installment of the “Great American House” trilogy of Mozart/Da Ponte operas, following “Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi.”
These views never get old, either:
The trilogy works well and feels like a new beginning at the end, with the house that started in ruins being almost fully restored. If the program wouldn’t have mentioned a setting in 2080, I would not have recognized the time as there were no gadgets or lasers – thankfully – and the list of names of Don Giovanni’s 1,700+ amorous conquests was at one point projected onto a wall from a seemingly manually powered slide projector. With 1,003 in Spain alone, apparently, he got around 😉
Just as I always hope that Tosca somehow survives at the end, I hope that Don Giovanni may repent one day. Not today, and the musically famous scene in which he departs to hell was very well done with real fire and smoke.
A fantastic evening!
The entire Michael Cavanagh’s trilogy was above all witty and charming. In the Don Giovanni however these myriad moments of wit and charm were but the cornerstones of Mozart’s classically structured arias and finales, forms that took on new, unexpected monumentality against this destroyed vision of America’s cultural neoclassicism.
Opera Today
StageAficionado 