S.F. Symphony’s deft opera turn
Sets, costumes, staging — if you want to be strict about it, these things are all essential parts of the operatic experience. But sometimes all you really need for transcendence is a small cadre of firstrate singers along with an orchestra and conductor at the top of their games.
That’s what the San Francisco Symphony offered Thursday, Nov. 14, with a powerful, extravagantly gripping account of the first act of Wagner’s “Die Walküre.” Three superb singers took on the vocal duties, members of the orchestra dived splendidly into music that is not quite their bread and butter, and guest conductor Simone Young shaped the proceedings with a potent combination of urgency and tenderness.
After all that, only an ingrate would ask for an actual sword.
Short of the sort of fulllength semistaged operatic blowouts that Michael Tilson Thomas has made a staple of his time in San Francisco, Act 1 of “Walküre” is an ideal vehicle for an orchestral crossover into the operatic world.
It’s formally compact yet expressively multifold, with a wealth of emotional situations played out in probing detail. It’s got a plot that is part of the vast cosmology of the composer’s fouropera “Ring” cycle, yet stands perfectly well on its own (boy meets girl, they discover they’re longseparated twin siblings, they hook up anyway).
And perhaps most pertinently for this occasion, Wagner always makes the orchestra an equal character in the drama, not just an accompaniment to the vocal display that predominates in the Italian tradition. Thursday’s audience in Davies Symphony Hall heard the Symphony in full splendor, just as it would have in a program of Beethoven or Mahler.
So a lot of the fervor and clarity of the evening came from the intricate interplay among the instrumentalists — including cellist Peter Wyrick, who rendered the act’s famous solos with the requisite glow of longing, and the members of the expanded brass section, who brought an elegantly buffed gleam to the score’s more explosive passages.
But none of it would have been possible without the firstrate vocal casting, beginning with tenor Stuart Skelton, whose performance as Siegmund was a tour de force of stamina, energy and grace.
Skelton, a onetime Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera, gave Symphony audiences a memorable interpretation of the title role in Britten’s “Peter Grimes” five years ago, but this performance outshone even that landmark.
In singing that was by turns intimate and heroic — and sometimes, somehow, both at once — Skelton created a portrait of a man in flight from the travails of the world, yet eager to fight for the rewards of love when they come across his path. The vaulting, piercing phrases of the assignment registered without any sense of strain — always shapely, always beautifully in tune — and he delivered the role’s more gently expressive passages with all the directness of a lieder singer.
Soprano Emily Magee was a sympathetic and tonally lustrous Sieglinde, letting us hear the character’s gradual emotional thaw into the blossoming of the final “Winterstürme” love duet. And as the ominously glowering Hunding, bass Ain Anger gave one of the most robust and musically alert renditions of the role I’ve heard — resonant, fullthroated, even sexy, but never without a strong vein of menace.
Young, who began the evening by leading 23 of the orchestra’s string players in a fluid, ripely evolving account of Strauss’ “Metamorphosen,” presided over the performance with a wondrous combination of passion and precision. For the climactic moments, she proved herself unafraid to crank up the volume while keeping everyone impeccably balanced, while the sparser sections of dialogue that suffuse the act were charted with all the conversational ebb and flow of a spoken play.
For anyone who knows and loves “Walküre,” the only disappointment was not being able to hear the rest of the opera — the two main characters are so happy as the curtain falls, and there’s a dark dramatic irony in contemplating what is still to come for them. But even one act delivered at such a high level is a cause for celebration.