The introduction to Florestan’s Act II aria pulsed with a mix of anger and despair. The prisoner’s chorus in Act I began with a threadlike hush in the orchestra and gradually built to an exultant joy, only to recede into a poignant silence. The orchestra, except for a few fleeting occasions that didn’t quite sync as they should, sounded rich and glowed with resonance.
The production also dispenses with the usual insertion of the Leonore Overture No.3 between scenes in Act II, which put more emphasis on the story.įrom moment to moment, Kim found just the right dynamics, shadings and pace in the pit. My failing, perhaps, but credit this performance for bringing it forward. I must admit this is the first time in the many occasions I have experienced this opera that I made the connection between the shaky expressions of love in the light-hearted domestic scenes in Act I and the grander, grittier passions of Leonore and Florestan at the end. At the end, a press gaggle greets Don Fernando, the government minister who saves the day, and Florestan is freed thanks to the bravery of his wife.īeethoven’s music brings all this together with a strong strain of revolutionary spirit, once it gets into the rescue drama. Pizarro, the political functionary who has imprisoned Florestan for calling out his misdeeds, swans about in a business suit but carries a knife and pistol. Russell Thomas, who portrays the hidden-away prisoner, Florestan, is black, which added another layer of meaning, alluding to the oft-cited preponderance of black people incarcerated today in America. Jaquino, her limp suitor, seems to have earned the disdain of the other office workers. When we first meet Marzelline, the jailer’s daughter, she is shown not folding laundry but rather helping her father by handling office chores. San Francisco Opera’s Fidelio © Cory Weaver During the overture, this image ever-so-gradually turned to face us, only to morph before our eyes into Fidelio, dressed as a modern-day guard, complete with baseball hat and bulletproof vest.
The production, meant to open the company’s season last year but shelved by the pandemic, greeted a live audience at the War Memorial Opera House with a projected image on the front scrim of Leonore facing away from us. Director Matthew Ozawa’s set makes these ideas relevant with a stage-filling, rotating cube that evokes the jail-like cages of immigrant detainees, and costumes that portray characters in the way they might fit into today’s culture. Those who speak the truth to oppressive power still risk everything, and the idea that love can conquer such ugliness is the stuff of great opera. Political incarceration remains with us to this day.
#San francisco opera fidelio review full
San Francisco Opera’s long-awaited production of Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, rests on the universal aspects of the story’s fight against oppression, a cast that inhabits every role with distinction and glorious conducting from Eun Sun Kim in her first full season as the company’s music director. (HS) James Creswell (Rocco), Elza van den Heever (Leonore) and Greer Grimsley (Don Pizarro) © Cory Weaver ethanheard.United States Beethoven, Fidelio: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of San Francisco Opera / Eun Sun Kim (conductor). He received his BA and MFA from Yale, and he now teaches at Yale School of Drama and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Musical theater includes Little Shop of Horrors and A Little Night Music (Berkshire Theatre Group), Sunday in the Park with George (Yale), and Into the Woods (Princeton). Other opera includes Truth & Reconciliation (Opera America), Desire|Divinity (Judson), Empty the House (Curtis), Sisyphus (Experiments in Opera), L’Orfeo (Yale), and Poppea (Princeton). These productions have been called "urgent and powerful" ( The New York Times), "relevant and heartbreaking" ( The New Yorker), and "incisive and inspired" ( Opera News). With Heartbeat, he has directed Breathing Free: a visual album and Lady M: an online fantasia of Verdi’s Macbeth (created during quarantine), La Susanna (Kennedy Center and BAM), Fidelio, Butterfly, Dido & Aeneas, Kafka-Fragments, six drag extravaganzas, and a performance on the High Line. Ethan Heard is Co-Founder & Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera, "a categorically imaginative company, which has made its name with vital reshapings of repertory operas" ( The New Yorker).
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