Opera San Jose presents new digital ‘Decembers’
When the pandemic shut down live performance earlier this year, Opera San Jose general director Khori Dastoor could have put the company on indefinite hiatus. Instead, she got busy.
In recent months, she unveiled the company’s new Fred Heiman Digital Media Studio, showcasing resident artists in streamed performances. Now she’s about to present the company’s first fully staged virtual opera, a new production of Jake Heggie’s “Three Decembers.”
Starring acclaimed mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, the production, which also features resident company artists Maya Kherani and Efraín Solis, opens Dec. 3 for on- demand screening.
Dastoor, who became Opera San Jose’s general director last year, says the COVID-19 pandemic was both an imminent threat to the company and an imperative for creativity.
Due to current restrictions, going forward was a herculean effort.
“This was a survival project,” Dastoor explained in a recent interview. “The choice was to grapple with the limitations we were facing — or just try to wait it out.”
“But opera’s always difficult,” she added, “so I said, ‘ We can do it.’
Heggie’s opera was her first choice, says Dastoor, who has great respect for the San Francisco-based composer; in college, she did her dissertation on his music, and Opera San Jose’s production of Heggie’s “Moby-Dick” was a triumph for the company last year.
She also knew she wanted Graham in the opera’s central role, and was thrilled when the singer said yes.
Graham, a longtime champion for Heggie’s music, sang the role of Sister Helen Prejean in the composer’s breakout hit, “Dead Man Walking,” which premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2000. Heggie has gone on to write other works specifically for the singer since then.
But Graham had never sung the part of Madeline, a famous actress at the center of Heggie’s chamber opera. Frederica von Stade starred in the role when “Three Decembers” premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 2008, and reprised her performance when the opera made its Bay Area debut later that year in a co-production by San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances. Houston Grand Opera commissioned the piece in association with San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances.
In a call from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Graham said she was thrilled — and a little terrified — to be offered the role. Von Stade was a great Madeline, she said, in what she describes as a challenging role.
“Jake’s music is deceptively difficult,” she said. “You look at it and think ‘Oh, it’s in English and it sounds so pretty and tuneful, it’s going to be easy.’ But it’s challenging.”
With a libretto by Gene Scheer, “Three Decembers” spans three decades in a troubled family. Based on “Some Christmas Letters,” an unpublished work by the late playwright Terrence McNally, it centers on Madeline Mitchell, an aging showbiz diva at odds with her two headstrong children: an unhappily married alcoholic daughter and gay son awash in grief for his dying partner. Family secrets and old hurts fuel the drama in these fierce and fragile relationships.
Under director Tara Branham, the artists worked under extreme conditions. Masks, face shields and distancing are not the norm for opera performance, and Graham said the experience was “surreal and a little bit scary.” But she and her fellow artists quarantined as a pod, and she says they transcended the restrictions. “It ended up being very positive,” she said. “After we got over the weirdness, it sort of became joy.”
With its heightened emotions and intense conflicts, she also thinks the 90-minute opera is an ideal piece for today.
“Jake and Gene are so good at telling human stories,” she said. “This opera brings up such deep feelings of frustration and anger, which we all have right now. Having that outlet for those feelings ended up being very cathartic.”
For Dastoor, making the production possible was a challenge unlike any she’s experienced to date. Singers are particularly at risk in the pandemic, and the company went the extra mile to comply with new regulations, modifying the HVAC system, installing air scrubbers and closed- circuit TV, and making other necessary adjustments. COVID-19 restrictions prohibited the score’s original requirement for an 11-piece instrumental group; this production features a two-piano arrangement conducted by Christopher James Ray.
It’s been a hard year, notes Dastoor; 2020 began on a high note, with a thrilling production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in February. But her 2020-21 season opener, a production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” that was scheduled to open in September, was canceled due to the pandemic.
Today, though, Dastoor is feeling proud of “Three Decembers” — and what it means for the company’s future.