Verdi concert shows conductor’s strength
Music Director Kim shines in S.F. Opera program dedicated to genius of art form
They say opera is all about the singing. (It isn’t true, but they say it anyway.) In that case, how should we understand an operatic program in which the conductor is the star and the vocalists are more or less the accompanists?
The San Francisco Opera put on such a show on Thursday, June 30, at the War Memorial Opera House. The once-only performance — which joined productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Dream of the Red Chamber” to make up the company’s slightly foreshortened summer season — was billed as “Eun Sun Kim Conducts Verdi,” thus putting the spotlight where it belonged.
Like Esa-Pekka Salonen across the street at San Francisco Symphony, Kim took up her position as music director just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic to stomp all over any initial plans. As a result, the exuberant getting-to-know-you honeymoon period has had to proceed in fits and starts.
So Thursday’s program (which was also live-streamed on the company’s website) provided a welcome opportunity to hear Kim in action in this key corner of the operatic repertoire. And even in a comparatively small sampling — the two-hour program featured excerpts from
In music from “Luisa Miller,” “Il Trovatore” and “Don Carlo,” Eun Sun Kim created a brisk, robust template that still left room for tenderness and expressive flexibility.
three Verdi operas — the news was entirely heartening.
In music from “Luisa Miller,” “Il Trovatore” and “Don Carlo,” Kim created a brisk, robust template that still left room for tenderness and expressive flexibility. Melodic phrases found room to breathe without pulling the performance away from its rhythmic guide rails.
In his spoken remarks between the selections, General Director Matthew Shilvock made much of the stylistic arc of Verdi’s career, proceeding from the early, rather conventional strains of “Luisa Miller” through the increasingly inventive and responsive emotional lexicon of “Don Carlo.” But in truth, Kim found an apt dramatic and musical path through all these works with equal finesse.
Local audiences will benefit from
this in seasons to come since Kim plans to present one Verdi opera each season for the foreseeable future — as well as an annual offering by Wagner, the other great figure of 19th century opera. Thursday’s program, in other words, amounted to a promissory note for more expansive pleasures still to come.
The current proceedings were curtailed, unfortunately, by tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz’s last-minute withdrawal after an inner ear infection prevented him from flying. That left soprano Nicole Car and her husband, baritone Etienne Dupuis — two stars of the company’s “Don Giovanni” — to carry most of the vocal assignments.
They did that most alluringly during the second half, in a pair of arias from “Don Carlo.” In Rodrigo’s farewell aria, “O Carlo, ascolta,” Dupuis combined remarkable breath control with a rich expressive radiance. Car’s crystalline tone and sustained phrases made Elizabeth’s “Tu che le vanità” a glorious showpiece.
The Opera Chorus, singing splendidly under its new director, John Keene, brought vigor and force to the “Anvil Chorus” from “Trovatore,” and smaller vocal contributions were well handled by bass Soloman Howard and soprano Mikayla Sager.
Yet perhaps the most oddly memorable segment of the evening was purely orchestral. “Don Carlo” boasts a long, rather pointless ballet sequence, almost always omitted, for which Verdi composed a string of magnificent music. We never get to hear this music, and here were Kim and the Opera Orchestra giving it a wonderful degree of tonal muscle and stylistic variety. It was a reminder of just how deep Verdi’s genius ran, and how much more there is here to discover.