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    Reimagining ‘Madame Butterfly,’ With Asian Creators at the Helm

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    As opera houses rework Puccini’s classic, criticized for stereotypes about women and Japanese culture, artists of Asian descent are playing a central role.The auditorium lights dimmed, and the cast and crew of Cincinnati Opera’s new production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” anxiously took their places.For months, the team, made up largely of Asian and Asian American artists, had worked to reimagine the classic opera, upending its stereotypes about women and Japanese culture. They had updated the look of the opera with costumes and sets partly inspired by anime, scrubbed the libretto of historical inaccuracies and recast much of the work as a video-game fantasy. They gathered at the Cincinnati Music Hall one evening last week to fine-tune their creation before its opening last Saturday.“It feels a little like a grand experiment,” said the production’s director, Matthew Ozawa, whose father is Japanese and mother is white. “It’s very emotional.”“Madame Butterfly,” which premiered in 1904 (and is set around that time), tells the story of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha in Nagasaki who is abandoned by an American Navy lieutenant after he gets her pregnant. The opera has long been criticized for its portrait of Asian women as exotic and submissive, and the use of exaggerated makeup and stereotypical costumes in some productions has drawn fire.Now, after years of pressure by artists and activists and a growing awareness of anti-Asian hate, many companies are reworking the opera and giving artists of Asian descent a central role in reshaping its message and story. In a milestone, directors with Asian roots are leading four major productions this year in the United States.San Francisco Opera recently staged a version, directed by Amon Miyamoto, that explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Boston Lyric Opera is setting part of its coming production in a Chinatown nightclub in San Francisco in the 1940s, and part in an incarceration camp.New Orleans Opera rewrote the traditional ending in a recent production to give the title character a sense of agency. Instead of committing suicide, she throws aside a dagger handed to her, picks up her son and storms offstage.Adam Smith dons a virtual reality headset as the overture begins in the Cincinnati production. “We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Cincinnati, the opera begins in the apartment of a lonely white man in his 20s who worships Japanese video games. The overture begins when he puts on a virtual-reality headset to enter a fantasy about Japan, assuming the character of the American lieutenant, B.F. Pinkerton.“We decided we’re going to honor the fact that this is a white man’s fantasy — a fantasy of a culture and a fantasy of a woman,” Ozawa said.At times, the fantasy breaks down and the characters freeze, such as when Pinkerton says something offensive or the chorus makes stereotypical gestures. “We see these moments that hearken to what the tradition usually would look like and then we erase it,” Ozawa said.A scene from San Francisco Opera’s recent “Butterfly,” directed by Amon Miyamoto, which explored the suffering and discrimination experienced by a biracial character. Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera.The re-examination of “Madame Butterfly” comes as cultural institutions face pressure to feature more prominently musicians, dancers, choreographers and composers of color amid a broader discussion about racial discrimination.The reconsideration extends beyond the United States: The Royal Opera House recently updated its “Madame Butterfly” production, getting rid of white makeup and other elements, like wigs and samurai-style coiffures.While the changes have alienated some traditionalists, the artists behind the new productions say they want to preserve the spirit of Puccini’s work while making it accessible to a broader audience.Phil Chan, who is directing the production in Boston and has helped lead the push to confront stereotypes in opera and ballet, said he hoped to make familiar stories more authentic and relevant. The creative team in Boston includes Nina Yoshida Nelsen, a founder of the Asian Opera Alliance, which was formed in 2021 to help bring more racial diversity to the field.“Some people might be afraid that we’re somehow messing with a masterpiece,” said Chan, whose father is Chinese and mother is white. “But we see it as an opportunity to make the work bigger and resonate with more people.”As they reimagine “Butterfly,” artists of Asian descent are working to help each other, exchanging ideas and offering encouragement.Aria Umezawa, who directed the New Orleans production, was distressed after coming across photos of white chorus members in exaggerated makeup and costumes in an old Canadian production of “Madame Butterfly.” She sought out Ozawa.“It’s just been always really helpful to talk to my colleagues,” Umezawa said, “to hear their concerns, to understand the nuance and the shades of gray that exist between different elements of our community. It’s just nice not to be alone.”A scene from the New Orleans production of “Madame Butterfly.” Instead of killing herself at the end, the title character picks up her son and takes him offstage.Jeff StroutWhile the experience of remaking “Madame Butterfly” has been liberating for many artists, the reaction from the public has been mixed.In New Orleans, many people applauded Umezawa’s production, saying it was refreshing to see a strong woman at the center of the opera. But some were critical of the ending.“Not having her die stole the pathos of the story,” an operagoer wrote in response to a survey by the company. “I don’t need an empowered Butterfly. What lesson do I learn from Butterfly riding off into the sunset?”Umezawa said she felt constrained at times by Puccini’s vision. “Ultimately, no matter what I do,” she said, “it’s still Puccini’s music, and it’s still his best guess with Japanese culture.”Next year, when she directs a production of “Butterfly” in Philadelphia, she said she hoped to experiment some more, perhaps by incorporating taiko drums into the orchestra.The focus on “Madame Butterfly” has helped shine light on the dearth of Asian artists in opera. While Asian singers make up a large share of conservatory vocal programs, they remain significantly underrepresented in principal roles at major opera companies, and among stage directors and in other leadership posts.The production in Cincinnati, which closes on Saturday, almost didn’t happen. In 2020, Ozawa backed out of a plan to direct a traditional version of “Madame Butterfly” at the opera house, worried that it would not be true to his artistic mission.But Evans Mirageas, the company’s artistic director, persisted, agreeing to support Ozawa’s vision for a reimagined work. The idea gained the backing of several co-producers, including Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera and Utah Opera, which will stage the Cincinnati production in the coming years.Mirageas said it had become increasingly difficult to ignore the problems of “Madame Butterfly” because of the surge in violence and harassment targeting Asians in recent years. “It’s a production that’s found its moment in time,” he said.At Ozawa’s request, Cincinnati Opera hired three women of Japanese descent — Maiko Matsushima, Yuki Nakase Link and Kimie Nishikawa — to oversee costumes, lighting and scenery.The almost entirely Asian cast and crew brought a sense of camaraderie to the production.“We can easily understand each other because we know each other’s stories and cultures,” said Karah Son, a South Korean soprano who sings the title role. She recalled being able to quickly master a geisha dance because she knew what Ozawa wanted.The production’s conductor, Keitaro Harada, used a Japanese phrase to capture the dynamic: “aun no kokyu,” describing a sense of harmony.“We just understand each other in a very natural way,” said Harada, who was born in Japan. “We know what we’re all thinking.”Ozawa directing a rehearsal in Cincinnati. “It feels a little like a grand experiment,” he said of the reimagined production. “It’s very emotional.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesOzawa said he felt an obligation to “Madame Butterfly” because he is of Japanese descent, even if working on it could be uncomfortable. Earlier in his career, he recalled that white colleagues would sometimes squint their eyes, bow to him or greet him by saying “konichiwa” while working on the production.He said he was nervous that he would let down the Japanese community if his production was not a success. But on opening night, his fears subsided when cheers erupted after the final curtain fell at Cincinnati Music Hall.“We have an immense duty to this piece, to Butterfly and to the Asian community,” he said. “There might be some discomfort in our story, but change can only come if there’s discomfort.” More

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      Elayne Jones, Pioneering Percussionist, Is Dead at 94

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      She challenged racial barriers when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972. But she became embroiled in a legal battle when she was denied tenure two years later.Elayne Jones, a timpanist who was said to be the first Black principal player in a major American orchestra when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, and who mounted a legal battle over racial and sexual discrimination when she was denied tenure two years later, died on Saturday at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 94.Her daughter Cheryl Stanley said the cause was dementia.The charismatic, Juilliard-trained Ms. Jones was not only a rare woman among the orchestral percussionists of her time; she also helped lead a generation of Black musicians in confronting the pervasive — and enduring — racism of the classical music industry. Her appointment in San Francisco, under that ensemble’s modish music director, Seiji Ozawa, “projected a forward-looking vision of classical music,” the scholar Grace Wang has written.Admired for her lyricism and finesse, Ms. Jones was an instant hit in San Francisco. “Her playing is so outlandish in quality, one gets the titters just thinking of it,” the critic Heuwell Tircuit wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle of her debut. Arthur Bloomfield of The San Francisco Examiner wrote that her work in a seemingly straightforward passage of “Norma,” at the San Francisco Opera, was “so rounded and suave I just about fell out of my seat.”Once described in a headline as “the groovy tympanist,” Ms. Jones had seen the San Francisco auditions as a last chance to win a permanent post, a success that had been denied her during the two decades she spent toiling to challenge the color line as a freelancer in New York City.“I had to prove that music could be played by anyone who loves it,” she said in 1973. “It’s been a terrible burden because I always felt I had to do better, that I wouldn’t be allowed the lapses other musicians have. It’s true even now.”Orchestral musicians typically serve probationary periods before being granted tenure. Approval seemed a formality in Ms. Jones’s case, but a seven-man committee of the San Francisco players voted against her — and a bassoonist, Ryohei Nakagawa — in May 1974, despite Mr. Ozawa’s advice to the contrary; two rated her competence at 1 out of 100.As audience members launched pickets and petitions, many white critics portrayed the incident primarily as a challenge to Mr. Ozawa’s authority; though the conductor denied any link, he soon quit. Ms. Jones saw things differently.“I’ve had good vibes everywhere. Now I wonder what the hell is wrong and what do I do that’s so wrong?” she said that June, announcing her intention to sue the orchestra and the musicians’ union. “Was it because I was a woman or a Black? Or both?”Ms. Jones played on for a season while her lawsuit made its way through the courts. But when a judge ordered a second, supervised vote in August 1975, a new committee of players turned her down again, citing concerns about her intonation. Although she performed, tenured, in the pit of the San Francisco Opera until 1998, her effective firing at the symphony stayed with her.“It has been quite difficult,” she said in a television interview in 1977, “not only playing but trying to live through all this, and living with myself too, which is kind of hard because you begin to question, well, am I really a good performer, am I worthy person?”But, she went on, “I listen to other people, and I have more confidence in myself.”Ms. Jones looked on as the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the conductor Seiji Ozawa acknowledged the audience’s applause after a performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1973.Bruce Beron, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony ArchivesElayne Viola Jones was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Harlem, the only child of immigrants from Barbados. Her father, Cecil, was a porter and then a subway conductor; her mother, Ometa, dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, but had to enter domestic service. They had a piano in their apartment, and Elayne used it to play along with the big-band jazz she heard on the radio. She was 6 when her mother introduced her to classical music.“At first, I thought it was strange to have music that people didn’t dance to, because we all loved dancing to swing music,” Ms. Jones wrote in her autobiography, “Little Lady With a Big Drum” (2019). “However, I didn’t reject this different kind of music and practiced it every day, growing to enjoy its irregularities.”She qualified for the High School of Music & Arts (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts), and she hoped to add the violin to her studies on the piano; she was given drumsticks instead. “We all know that Negroes have rhythm,” she recalled a teacher saying.Ms. Jones was sufficiently talented to win a scholarship to the Juilliard School in 1945, under the sponsorship of Duke Ellington. Her tutor was Saul Goodman, the storied timpanist of the New York Philharmonic, and after she graduated, in 1949, he persuaded New York City Opera to hire her as its timpanist.But the City Opera season was limited, and she had to scrounge for jobs for much of the year; on tour with the company, she was forced to sleep in separate hotels from the other musicians, stopped at stage doors as white colleagues walked through, and told to perform hidden from view.Politically a leftist, Ms. Jones became an insistent activist. When the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times in 1956 that “if there are capable Negro musicians” they would deserve major-ensemble jobs, she visited him to demonstrate that such musicians did, in fact, exist. She worked on an Urban League report about racism in the music world; within weeks of its publication in 1958, she found herself filling in at the New York Philharmonic. Although the Philharmonic’s records of substitute players are sparse, archival documents name her as the first Black musician to perform as part of the orchestra.Ms. Jones left City Opera in 1960 at the request of her husband, the doctor and civil rights activist George Kaufman, who asked that she spend more evenings with him and their three children. But Leopold Stokowski, long a fan, quickly tapped her for his American Symphony Orchestra, for which she performed until 1972. She was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the integrated Symphony of the New World in 1965, and she joined other Black musicians to urge that the initial rounds of auditions be held blind, with the musicians behind a screen, to reduce bias. The San Francisco Symphony was an early adopter of that approach.“I wouldn’t have gotten the job if the screen wasn’t in play,” she later told Dr. Wang. “I’m the recipient of a thing that I worked on.”Ms. Jones’s marriage to Dr. Kaufman ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to her daughter Ms. Stanley, she is survived by her son, Stephen Kaufman, a violinist and performance artist also known as Thoth; another daughter, Harriet Kaufman Douglas; and three grandchildren.As a single mother, Ms. Jones often had to take her children to rehearsals, she told The Times in 1965. She hoped, she said, that she offered them an example.“All youngsters need an image to project to, Negro youngsters even more than white,” she said. “When they can see Negroes playing in the orchestra, they may feel that they can get there someday, too.” More

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      From the Underworld to Our World: An Opera About Frida and Diego

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      “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return.” Frida Kahlo confided these remarks to her diary in 1954, just a few days before making her final exit.In a new opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), the composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz imagine Kahlo overcoming her reluctance to return from beyond. She is summoned back on the Day of the Dead with a mission: to escort her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld. What lures her is the prospect of being given a chance to paint once more.“Sueño,” the debut opera by Frank, 50, has had a long road to the stage. In 2007, she was invited by the Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen to write a work. He suggested the Mexican painter‌ Kahlo as an ideal topic. It resonated with her immediately.“On a personal level, the fact that Frida is a multiracial woman of color with a disability is something I can really relate to,” Frank said in a recent video interview, referring to her heritage — Peruvian-Chinese on her mother’s side, Lithuanian-Jewish on her father’s — as well as her history of hearing loss and Graves’ disease. “She lived this rich, full life that any able bodied, non-disadvantaged person would love to be able to live. And she did so through some very dangerous times in world history.”The commission from Arizona Opera fell through. But in the meantime, Frank established herself as a significant American composer, winning the Latin Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 2009.Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” from 1949, which depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by Kahlo and by an earth goddess.The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWhen the “Sueño” project was revived, San Diego Opera’s general director, David Bennett, took the lead. In 2015, he convinced San Francisco Opera to come onboard as a co-producer, securing the support needed to bring “Sueño” to the stage. Now, after further pandemic delays, the work will premiere at San Diego Opera on Oct. 29, with San Francisco’s production coming in June.The material is well-trodden — Kahlo’s life and work have inspired films, books, dance and Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s musical theater-tinged opera “Frida” (1991) — but Frank and Cruz determined from the outset to take a novel approach to it. Instead of dramatizing Kahlo’s physical and emotional torments and her notoriously tempestuous relationship with Rivera realistically, they embed these biographical details in the mythic context of a Day of the Dead ritual. Motifs from their paintings are integral to the story — as is the act of painting itself.“I thought: Let’s do something different,” said Cruz, 62, recalling the first time he and Frank met to discuss the project. Frank had gravitated toward Cruz, a Cuban American playwright and poet, after reading his “Anna in the Tropics,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003. “It looked like a libretto,” she said, “with monologues that could obviously be arias and lots of witty banter with a great sense of rhythm that composers can get into.”Thus began a collaboration that has shaped the development of the careers of these two artists. Over the course of the opera’s prolonged incubation, the pair have worked on about a dozen projects, from a brief choral piece about the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca to “Conquest Requiem,” an oratorio inspired by the complex, contradictory legacy of the Nahua woman Malinche and her role in Cortés’s war against the Aztecs.And the long postponement of “Sueño” had its upside. “The opera is different for having this long relationship,” Frank said.Sketches by the costume designer Eloise Kazan; above, Frida. Eloise KazanAnd, here, Catrina. Eloise KazanA rendering of a “Sueño” set, by the scenic designer Jorge Ballina.Jorge BallinaWhen they started to work on it, Frank played samples of her music for Cruz, including “Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos” (2006), a “folk requiem” ballet originally scored for band and dancers, and “La Llorona,” a viola concerto about death and the afterlife. Cruz found these pieces so evocative that he decided to use the Mexican folk tradition of the Day of the Dead to anchor the opera.“What I love about that idea is that we go into a mythic landscape that is bigger than life,” he said. “I think those are the brushstrokes that an opera needs.”‌The Spanish-language libretto ‌he wrote uses the Day of the Dead to enact a reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth central to the history of opera itself. Frida crosses the threshold from the underworld to the living for the single day allotted and guides the ailing Diego back with her as he accepts his mortality.The opera is replete with references to the pre-Columbian Mexican culture and folklore that so profoundly inspired Kahlo and Rivera. The realm where the departed souls reside is depicted as Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Access back to the world of the living for the Day of the Dead ritual is controlled by Catrina, a trickster figure.Catrina also serves as the mouthpiece for the wit that leavens Cruz’s poetic, magic realism-inflected text. “Nothing illustrates the Mexican sense of humor and irony toward death more than the sugar-candy skulls that are made for the festivities of the Day of the Dead,” Cruz said, “as if death were sweet to eat and it can disintegrate in our mouths.”The most surprising of the opera’s quartet of characters is a young actor named Leonardo — a countertenor role — who impersonates Greta Garbo for a fan, whom Leonardo crosses over from Mictlan to visit every year.Leonardo embodies the world of art, which coexists with the worlds of the living and of the dead. The entire opera is structured around the passage among these three worlds, which are separate yet also connected. Frank said she set out to create “evocative soundscapes so that the audience is very clear when we enter a different phase of Frida and Diego’s story.”Frank established a musical vocabulary to conjure these worlds by assigning distinct gestures and instrumental colors to each: lush harmonies to evoke “the grandeur of the underworld beneath the moonlight, a big, night sound”; hints of folkloric music and lighter dance rhythms for the world of the living; and intimate, chamber music-like textures for the world of art.Diego Rivera’s “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, in Mexico City.Fernando Llano/Associated PressFor authenticity, said Bennett from San Diego Opera, it was important to round out the creative team with Mexican artists and to hire native Spanish-speaking singers for the two leads. The mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz and the baritone Alfredo Daza will create the roles of Frida and Diego.The Mexican-born conductor, Roberto Kalb, who recently led the premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera “Awakenings,” admires the diversity of colors in Frank’s score, with the marimba threaded throughout as a unifying timbre. “She’s a master orchestrator and writes for the chorus as well as anyone,” he said. “It’s her first opera, but it doesn’t sound like it.”Frank’s references to Mexican music tend to be subtle and, for Kalb, “are always done elegantly, with great respect. As a Mexican, I appreciate that, because so many pieces just slap it on.”Kalb described the overarching tone of Frank’s music as “ancient spectralism” — referring to a focus on the phenomenon of sound itself, which she blends with an early-music flavor.“A timeless kind of sound is important,” Frank said. “That’s how Frida and Diego saw what they did. Yes, they were creating new art. But they were obsessed with old Mexican art and tradition.”Specific examples of their art influenced Cruz’s ideas for the dramatic structure. In “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” from 1949, Kahlo depicts Rivera as a child, embraced by herself and by an earth goddess. Cruz said that from this image he derived the opera’s core concept of Kahlo helping Rivera cross over at the end of his life, three years after her death: “It is a self-portrait that celebrates the union of the Riveras, perhaps in the afterlife, or in a more idealistic and artistic world.”Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park” (1946-47), which mingles his life story with a political history of Mexico, springs to life at the beginning of second act as the artist is shown painting it. Frida emerges from its composition to re-enter the world of the living.The director, Lorena Maza, who is from Mexico City, said that she and her design team took their cues from the two painters’ shared love of Indigenous and folk art, as well as their activism. But equally fundamental to the opera’s mise-en-scène are their differences in outlook: the intimacy of the self-portraits that figure so prominently in Kahlo’s work — “each one a battle against pain and disintegration” — and the social realism of Rivera’s epic murals.“Mainly what we bring to the table is the Mexican view of the story,” Maza said. “What Anglo-Saxon culture knows about the Día de los Muertos, or about Frida and Diego, is a bit different from how we live it. We want to avoid the folkloric, cliché version of this celebration and of these two artists. For us, these are very close, personal characters who have been with us since we were children and who both created a Mexican visual identity for us.”The opera’s aim, suggested by the final lines of the chorus of departed souls, is to invite us to enter into the world of Frida and Diego, to erase the borderlines between the real and the imagined:“Life is briefbut the light will followthe strokes of your paintbrush.From your paintings emerge,an anthem of sun,the glory of your gaze.” More

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      Review: In ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ John Adams Goes Conventional

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      This composer’s latest stage work, at San Francisco Opera, is his most straightforward, but also his least inspired.SAN FRANCISCO — John Adams’s operas have never been ordinary.His first two, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” broke ground by treating events from recent history with enigmatic new poetry. The stage works that followed over the next 30 years included a reflection on the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, an adaptation of an Indian folk tale, and, since 2000, four pieces with patchwork librettos drawn from a broad assortment of sources: ancient and modern, poetic and prose.Adams infused the eclecticism — and the sometimes anti-dramatic artificiality — of these texts with music of fast-shifting colors and energy, of tenderness and unexpected, haunting effects. If the works varied in impact, none were like any other composer’s.But with “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premiered on Saturday at the start of San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, Adams, 75, has finally become conventional.He has done the same thing as many composers before him for his first opera created without the collaboration of the director and writer Peter Sellars, who for better and worse pressed him toward that quiltlike method of libretto-writing. Adams has chosen a great, eminently sturdy play from the past — in this case, Shakespeare’s tragedy of love and war — and trimmed it to a more manageable size, adding just a scattering of interpolations from other sources.The result is the clearest, most dramatically straightforward opera of his career — and the dullest. “Antony and Cleopatra” has the least idiosyncrasy of his nine stage works so far, and the least inspiration.With almost three hours of music, it slumps to a subdued finish. It could be described in a line from the play that was cut for the opera: “She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.”That sense of not quite coming to life, of not fully inhabiting the play through music, begins at the start. With the two lovers and their attendants crowded into Cleopatra’s bedroom, we are unceremoniously shoved into frenetic activity both onstage and in the orchestra — as if to prove that the work is, as Adams writes wishfully in a program essay, his “most actively dramatic.”But with the pace so breathless from the opening bars, and with the focus seemingly on getting as much text out of the singers’s mouths as possible, we are never able to really sit with the two main characters and feel the depth of their bond.Paul Appleby, center left, as Caesar, shaking hands with Finley. From left: Hadleigh Adams (Agrippa), Elizabeth DeShong (Octavia) and Philip Skinner (Lepidus) look on.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAnd without the strength of their relationship being convincingly depicted, the precipitous ups and downs of that relationship lose their stakes, despite the baritone Gerald Finley’s weathered authority and the soprano Amina Edris’s focused vigor. (Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, withdrew because of her pregnancy.)Largely eschewing arias, duets and other ensembles — its source is a play with notably few soul-baring soliloquies — “Antony and Cleopatra” skates along the emotional surface as it tries to keep up with the fast-moving story, lacking the expansive dives into thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’s best work.So we never really feel we know these characters, though we see a lot of them: Despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, has upset the fragile balance of power in the Mediterranean world, with Caesar — his younger partner in ruling Rome — using it as a pretext to make war against him. Shakespeare’s genius was to make the lovers’ pairing, a union of two seen-it-all cynics, bracingly yet realistically volatile, with jealousy, betrayal and reconciliation from both sides.It is an unwieldy piece to wrangle into musical shape. An “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Burdened by an extravagant Franco Zeffirelli staging, it was a notorious fiasco, but a revision — recorded, if infrequently performed — revealed a lushly perfumed, viably dramatic score.In that revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams’s. Perhaps the main trouble with this new opera is simply the amount of text still in it — especially given the problems inherent in setting Shakespeare’s verse, which is so virtuosic that it’s barely legible when sung. If you catch it in the supertitles, a line like “Gentle Octavia, let your best love draw to that which seeks best to preserve it” is a challenge to grasp at a glance.Adams has long rightly been regarded as a master of intriguing orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. Wisps of cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer with a tinny yet silky sound, would have more interest if that instrument hadn’t become something of his go-to evocation of the ancient Mediterranean: It is also a central feature of the passion oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012) and the violin concerto “Scheherazade.2” (2015). Interludes bridge many of the scene changes, but even if these are generally bustling, they tend to feel like vamping, oddly characterless.There are some effective touches, particularly in more shadowy passages that the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, revels in without losing the pulse. Octavia — Caesar’s sister, who has been married to Antony in a last-ditch effort to cool the hostilities — replies to Antony after their wedding in vocal lines surrounded by an instrumental halo of hovering prayer, mysterious and alluring. The opening of the second act aptly depicts the stunned aftermath of Antony’s military disaster, with the mellow music for Cleopatra’s entrance having a dreamlike, distant suggestion of a foxtrot.Appleby’s Caesar rallies the crowd in a hectoring empire-building monologue.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaBut the tenor Paul Appleby’s bright stamina can’t keep his big speech late in the work — an empire-building monologue whose text is taken from John Dryden’s translation of “The Aeneid” — from being hectoring. And while Alfred Walker and Hadleigh Adams are both firm as aides to the Roman rulers, the bass-baritone Philip Skinner, as Lepidus, is alone in the cast in his ability to sing both richly and with perfectly intelligible diction.The inoffensive staging, by Elkhanah Pulitzer (who also consulted with Adams on the libretto alongside Lucia Scheckner), sets the opera not in ancient times but in the 1930s or so, with Art Deco elements and slinky gowns (by Constance Hoffman) winking at the glamorous Hollywood adaptations of the Cleopatra story.Mimi Lien’s spare set, starkly lit by David Finn, hides and reveals playing spaces as it opens and closes like an aperture, with some large structures looming in the back that recall the pyramids. Bill Morrison has contributed lyrically grainy black-and-white film projections of scenes including a sail on the Nile and a crowd ready to be whipped into frenzy by a dictator.This loose association of Caesar with later authoritarian leaders is pretty much the opera’s only contemporary resonance. After decades of pointedly political work with Sellars, in which those resonances could sometimes feel suffocating, Adams seems more than happy to make an opera that’s not “about” anything other than its plot.The outcome of that experiment is thin. But hopefully this is a transitional work for Adams, away from those patchwork pieces with Sellars and toward other styles of libretto, adapted or original, more compelling than this.“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said in a recent interview. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”Unfortunately, compared with those earlier works — among them true glories of opera history — “Antony and Cleopatra” is a dreary disappointment.Antony and CleopatraThrough Oct. 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco; sfopera.com. More

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      John Adams, an American Master at 75

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      BERKELEY, Calif. — “I have to apologize,” the composer John Adams said as he approached his car. “The front seat was torn up by a bear.”Patches of the passenger seat were slashed open, revealing the stuffing inside. Bears aren’t a hazard in the hilly neighborhoods of “the People’s Republic of Berkeley,” as Adams wryly referred to his town, but they are in the Sierra Nevada, where he sometimes retreats to work at his cabin.One night, while Adams was in the mountains with his dog, Amos, beer exploded in the car’s trunk because of the altitude, and a bear wreaked havoc trying to get a taste. “It’s probably a problem that Stravinsky didn’t have,” he said.Adams and Stravinsky might not have that in common, but they share much else: a recognizable yet constantly evolving musical language; a body of work across a wide breadth of genres and forms; and, above all, something close to supremacy in the classical music of their time. And, at 75 — the same age as Stravinsky when he took a stylistic turn for his late masterpiece “Agon” — Adams is making a swerve with his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premieres at San Francisco Opera on Sept. 10 ahead of future productions, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”That corner of Adams’s output, which began in 1987 with “Nixon in China,” has never been mere art for art’s sake. “Nixon” — an essential American opera of the last 50 years, along with Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” and Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” — made myth of recent history. Even more immediate was “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), an account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, which had happened just six years earlier. “Doctor Atomic,” from 2005, reached farther back to meditate on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project; and in 2017, “Girls of the Golden West” revisited a 19th-century California with eerily coincidental connections to the Trump era.“Doctor Atomic” had its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2008. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“Nixon in China,” Adams’s first opera, at the Met in 2011.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAdams has brought contemporary politics “into the cultural sphere,” said Finley, the bass-baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer, and opened discussion “about the role of opera and music in society, and who we are as people.”As the classical music world celebrates Adams’s 75th year — not least with a new 40-disc box set of collected works from the Nonesuch label — and San Francisco Opera (itself marking a milestone of 100 seasons) prepares for the premiere of “Antony and Cleopatra,” he was understandably anxious during a recent hike in Tilden Regional Park.He followed a ridge trail that, to the left, revealed a vista of the foggy San Francisco Bay, with the peak of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County emerging from the clouds, and, to the right, sun-streaked hills and valleys leading to the distant Sierras. In between pointing out a bunny or sharing a story about Amos and coyotes, he — a composer who cares about public reception and reviews — said that while the new opera was at least obliquely relevant, in the way that Shakespeare tends to be, he worried people would be expecting something like “Nixon.”“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”COULD ADAMS BE ANYTHING other than a deeply American composer? “Not with my name,” he said with a chuckle. But that name — John Coolidge Adams — “so blue-bloodedly Yankee in its import,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” “was in fact a conjunction of a Swedish paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather I never knew.”Born in Massachusetts and raised around New England, with a singer for a mother and clarinetist for a father, he grew up around big band music and the Great American Songbook alongside symphonic classics. On the family turntable he listened to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and an album called “Bozo the Clown Conducts Favorite Circus Marches,” conducting along with a knitting needle.Adams with music for “Antony and Cleopatra” at his longtime home in Berkeley, Calif.Marissa Leshnov for The New York TimesBy adolescence he aspired to composing, while playing clarinet and formally learning to conduct. During one formative summer, he saw the film adaptation of “West Side Story.” “It was the moment,” he wrote in his memoir, “when I felt most aroused to the potential of becoming an artist who might forge a language, Whitman-like, out of the compost of American life.”That did not come easily during his years at Harvard University, where he studied with teachers including Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions, in the spirit of the mid-20th century high modernism that was fashionable around composers of the Darmstadt School. On the side, Adams continued with the clarinet, subbing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Aaron Copland, Adams wrote, once heard him play and remarked, “Yeah, the kid knows his stuff.”After college, Adams moved to the Bay Area — his first views of the untamed California coast later found their way into “The Dharma at Big Sur” (2003) — and took a teaching job while programming concerts packed with works by avant-gardists like John Cage, Robert Ashley and Ingram Marshall. He also toiled away at electronic music, blending it with acoustic sounds in “American Standard,” from 1973; the middle movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity,” stretches a hymn melody to glacial beauty alongside, on Edo de Waart’s recording with the San Francisco Symphony, a looping sermon.“Phrygian Gates,” a Minimalist yet sprawling piano solo from 1977, is Adams’s first mature work. More accomplishments quickly followed, like “Shaker Loops” and the chronically underrated “Common Tones in Simple Time” — which, he wrote in his memoir, summed up the goals of Minimalism in its title alone, and served as a farewell to the “chaste, scaled-down aesthetics of that particular style.”He wasn’t long for the Minimalism of Glass and Steve Reich, two composers a decade older than him. “I felt that in obeying that kind of rigor, there wasn’t a lot of potential for not only emotional surprise and emotional expression, but also formal flexibility,” Adams said. “I wanted to make a music that had potential for surprise, because that’s always what we’re looking for in any kind of artistic experience.”You can hear, in Adams’s strain of Minimalism, a harmonic language that grabs listeners by the heart, and a gift for layering lyricism with the style’s trademark pulses, as in “Harmonium” (1981). Robert Hurwitz, the longtime president of Nonesuch — who brought Adams to the label and created the new box set — said that while Glass and Reich “looked at music a different way,” Adams was continuing the path of music in the 20th century.“I think whether or not he was influenced at different points by Steve and Phil,” Hurwitz added, “he passed through those in the way that Picasso passed through Cubism or Stravinsky passed through Neo-Classicism. He is of the moment, and yet his music is always his own.”Adams was most brazenly idiosyncratic, and surprising, in his 1982 work “Grand Pianola Music,” which begins in comfortable, Minimalist territory before giving way to a cascading excess and a sweeping melody both familiar and unplaceable. The piece left early listeners perplexed — or angry at what they perceived as a thumbed nose at the hyperseriousness of modernism. It wasn’t a joke, though: It was a glimpse of a more honest voice in the making, one that would bloom with the symphonic “Harmonielehre” and “Nixon.”Adams also diverged from other Minimalists in his medium: At the time, they largely operated outside institutions, writing for their own ensembles and performing in lofts and galleries. But Adams’s music was popular among orchestras and institutions, and he brought Minimalism to the concert hall in the process.“The thing that he did is, I think, the hardest thing to do,” said the composer Nico Muhly. “Which is to take the influences of — let’s pretend that it’s a kind of American Minimal tradition — and the time space that you find in Wagner, and figure out how to make those things live next to each other, to work together.”As Adams’s more personal style developed, it carried traces of the Western classical tradition — with the colorist acuity of Debussy and the American vernacular of Ives and jazz — in a way that could be mistakenly labeled postmodern but isn’t. The composer Dylan Mattingly said that Adams brings an element of the familiar into his work with sincerity because “John just loves that music, and so he’s interested in writing music that uses the instrument of the orchestra, while still being totally revolutionary and totally exploratory.”Whiffs of popular idioms in, say, “The Chairman Dances” (1985) were a clear break from the Darmstadt School brand of modernism that had dominated Adams’s youth — the music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen — but had begun to be overtaken by Minimalism and a broader return to tonality. And it coincided with what Adams called “one of my Saul on the road to Damascus moments,” when he started reading Dickens novels in his 30s.“The first thing that struck me was that there was a person making great art,” Adams recalled. “I mean, sometimes terrible, sappy sentimentalism, but you turn the page as fast as you can. And, like Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, he was writing important work with social connections or social influence. They had enormous audiences. I thought about our time; we composers have sort of surrendered that to pop music.”A pop star Adams isn’t, but he is one of the few composers who approaches that status, second only, perhaps, to Glass. And from that perch he has, in the vein of his literary heroes, written music of conscience and consequence. Alongside exercises in form and timbre, like the Violin Concerto (1994) and, more recently, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” (2019), have been “On the Transmigration of Souls,” Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and collaborations with the director Peter Sellars that explored contemporary social issues through classic lenses: “El Niño” (2000), a Christmas oratorio with the mastery of Handel’s “Messiah,” or the “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” a retelling of the Passion from 2012.Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock in “Girls of the Golden West” at San Francisco Opera in 2017.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAlong the way, Adams has also provided an invaluable service to the next generations of composers. He doesn’t teach, but he curates concerts, championing younger artists, some of whom he has helped as a mentor, like Mattingly and his peer Gabriella Smith, who said, “I hardly know any composers who have not been influenced by his music.”Adams is known to look at scores and give frank, productive feedback, but also lessons applicable beyond the work at hand. Smith described their time together as “more like hanging out,” but also a confirmation that her two biggest interests — music and nature — could coexist, as they do in Adams’s life. He got her thinking, she said, “about what it would be like to have my own, unique compositional voice.”Mattingly said that Adams once responded to a piece of his by pulling out a Mahler score and talking about the physicality of it. Mattingly eventually realized the conversation was about how music could be embodied. Adams was pushing him to think about “music as the amorphous, invisible thing that it actually is,” Mattingly said, “instead of as specific durations and straight lines. I remember thinking about it nonstop for months, and then creating something that was way more compelling afterward.”“THE MOST TEDIOUS THING an artist can do,” Adams said, “is brand himself or herself.” If there’s a genre in which this most applies to him, it’s opera. Although all his stage works are on some level political, they occupy distinct sound worlds. In “Nixon,” created with the librettist Alice Goodman and Sellars, the mode was, Adams wrote in his memoir, “Technicolor orchestration.” But when the team reunited for “Klinghoffer” — their triumph, though, as a magnet for controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that is virtually impossible to produce in the United States — the text called for “something that was intensely poignant and lyrical, but also violent,” Adams said.Adams and Sellars assembled the libretto for “Atomic” from found texts. Critics called the result of their method undramatic, but the work has been increasingly accepted in recent years, in part because of a 2018 recording that, with the soprano Julia Bullock as Kitty Oppenheimer, brought the dramaturgy more into focus. Such a turnaround has yet to come for “Girls of the Golden West,” whose libretto had few fans, despite a lean, focused score that will have its moment in the sun when the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents it in concert in January.John Adams with his dog, Amos, in Tilden Regional Park, where they take daily walks.Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times“Antony and Cleopatra” is a departure in more ways than one. Its libretto is almost entirely chipped from the Shakespeare original, in collaboration with Lucia Scheckner and Elkhanah Pulitzer, who is directing the premiere in San Francisco. And as such, it is a work of written-through drama, rarely pausing for reflection and moving propulsively toward its tragic climax.The title roles were written with Finley and Bullock in mind (along with Paul Appleby, another Adams veteran, as Caesar); Bullock, though, is pregnant and withdrew from the San Francisco run, so Cleopatra will be sung by Amina Edris. During recent rehearsals, the orchestra and cast were settling into the score, whose breakneck pace is set from the start by “archetypal” rhythms, Adams said, that may remind listeners of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Wagner’s Nibelheim music from “Das Rheingold.” The vocal writing, meanwhile, largely follows the pace of speech like Debussy in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” or Janacek in his operas.“He really went from the words,” said Eun Sun Kim, the opera company’s music director, who is conducting the run. “It’s really about storytelling, but he also challenges us to be precise and at the same time musical.”As in Adams’s partnership with Sellars, the production’s concept seems conceived alongside the development of both the libretto and score. Pulitzer said that their entry point was “manifestations of Cleopatra, mostly through the lens of Hollywood, whether it’s Liz Taylor winking at the camera or the de Mille ‘Cleopatra’ integrating glamour and ancient Egypt.” That led them to the idea of movie palaces and news reels, which were then woven into the show.The approach is one way to bring the opera’s themes to the fore — principally, its depiction of one nation’s fall and the rise of another. “We all worry that America is in decline with Donald Trump and this horrible polarization,” Adams said. “I thought the dichotomy between Rome, which is ascendant, and Egypt, which is in decline, is very much a contemporary topic.”During the hike in Tilden, Adams followed a lot of reflections on the new opera with a “we’ll see.” Unsure of what audiences will think of it, he also doesn’t know what a success now would mean for the future. “I keep a mental picture of Meyerbeer,” he said, referring to the once ubiquitous and now rarely heard 19th-century composer, “just to remind myself: Here today, gone tomorrow.”He brought up about a performance that he conducted recently, of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the Juilliard Orchestra. At one point, near the end, he got “this absolute chill running up my back.”“A chill is not the right word, because it was warm,” he continued. “It was just the feeling having a genuine, deep experience with a great creation. I know that it’s impossible not to sound trite, but that’s something that makes life and culture worth it. So, if somebody has an experience like that at some point from a piece of mine, then that’s all I really care about.” More

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      If Remote Work Empties Downtowns, Can Theaters Fill Their Seats?

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      Since the pandemic, San Francisco has embraced work-from-home policies. Now venues and concert halls are wondering if weeknight audiences are a thing of the past.SAN FRANCISCO — As live performance finally returns after the pandemic shutdown, cultural institutions are confronting a long list of unknowns.Will audiences feel safe returning to crowded theaters? Have people grown so accustomed to watching screens in their living rooms that they will not get back into the habit of attending live events? And how will the advent of work-from-home policies, which have emptied blocks of downtowns and business districts, affect weekday attendance at theaters and concert halls?Nowhere is that last question more urgent than here in San Francisco, where tech companies have led the way in embracing work-from-home policies and flexible schedules more than in almost any other city in the nation. Going to a weeknight show is no longer a matter of leaving the office and swinging by the War Memorial Opera House or the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “It’s something that could be a threat. We’re all trying to wait and see whether there’s a surge of interest in live activity again or is there a continuation of just being at home, not coming into the city from the suburbs.”Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown. Close to 70 percent of the audiences at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony — two nationally recognized symbols of this city’s vibrant network of performing arts institutions — live outside the city, according to data collected by the two organizations.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, which presented a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaSome economists see the trend of remote work persisting. “It’s likely we are going to have more people working from home than other places,” said Ted Egan, the chief economist for the city and county of San Francisco. “The tech industry seems to be the most generous for work-from-home policy, and employees are expecting that.”Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently. At Salesforce, which has 9,000 employees, employees will only have to come to work one to three days a week; many will be allowed to work at home full time. Dropbox, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also has adopted a permanent work-from-home policy. Facebook and Google, both of which have a significant presence in San Francisco, have implemented work-from-home policies.Egan said that the trend might pose more of a problem for the city’s bars and restaurants than for its performing arts institutions. “My suspicion is that performing arts are going to be less sensitive to working from home than other sectors,” he said. “It’s not the kind of purchase you do after work on a whim, like going for happy hour.”Attendance has been spotty as this city’s art scene climbs back. Just 50 percent of the seats were filled the other night for a performance of “The Displaced,” a “gentrification horror play” by Isaac Gómez, at the Crowded Fire Theater. “We had sold-out houses on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and much lower participation on Wednesday and Thursday night,” said Mina Morita, the artistic director. “It’s hard to tell if this is the new normal.”There were some patches of empty seats across the Davies Symphony Hall the other night, as the San Francisco Symphony presented the United States premiere of a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner, even though it was the third week of the long-delayed (and long-anticipated) first season for Esa-Pekka Salonen, its new music director. The concerto, with an energetic performance by Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, was greeted by repeated standing ovations and glowing reviews.Attendance in October was down 11 percent compared to before the pandemic, but the symphony said advance sales were strong, suggesting normal audiences might return in spring.Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images“The audience is back,” Salonen said in an interview before he took the stage. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large, the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”The San Francisco Opera also began its new season with a splashy new hire: a new music director, Eun Sun Kim, who in August became the first woman to hold the position at one of the nation’s largest opera companies. She conducted a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall that incorporated chain-link fences and flickering video screens to update the story of the liberation of a political prisoner.Even so, the opera, which can seat 2,928 with Covid restrictions, sold an average of 1,912 tickets per show for “Fidelio,” its second production of this new season. That’s better than its second production in 2019, Britten’s “Billy Budd,” a searing work that does not always attract big crowds. But it drew fewer people than the opera’s second production in 2018, “Roberto Devereux,” which sold an average of 2,116 tickets a performance.“The urgency to be bold, to be innovative, to be compelling to get audiences to come back or give us a try for the first time has never been stronger,” Shilvock said. “There will be a hunger for things that have an energy, that have a vitality, that give a reason to come into the city.”Even before the pandemic, cultural organizations were dealing with challenges that threatened to discourage patrons, including a stressed public transportation system, traffic, parking constraints and the highly visible epidemic of homelessness. And many institutions were struggling to make inroads in attracting audiences and patrons from the tech industry, which now accounts for 19 percent of the private work force.Now, facing an uncertain future as they try to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, arts organizations are embracing a variety of tactics to fill seats..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hope Mohr, the co-director of Hope Mohr Dance, said that her organization was spending $1,400 per night to livestream performances, so audiences could choose between coming into San Francisco or watching from their living rooms.“A hybrid experience — I have to do that from now on,” she said. “My company usually performs in San Francisco, and I have audience coming from all over the bay.”These calculations are taking place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety. It is not clear how much these early attendance figures represent a realignment, or are evidence of audiences temporarily trying to balance their hunger for live performances against concerns about the spread of the Delta variant — even in a city where 75 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Lower attendance figures have been reported by performing halls across the country.“The audience is back,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”Christopher M. Howard Opening nights have found performers relieved to be playing to real crowds again and audiences delighted to be back. “The convenience of at-home entertainment has made it not as desirable for some folks, ” said Ralph Remington, the director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “But that being said, even though the density of the numbers isn’t as great as it was prepandemic, the audiences that are coming are really enthusiastic.”Advance sales for “The Nutcracker” at the San Francisco Ballet, with one-third of the tickets going for just $19 a seat to help bring in new patrons (the average ticket price is $136), have been moving briskly.Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the ballet’s interim executive director, said she hoped that working from home had made people eager to break out of their increasing isolation. “I would do anything to get out,” she said. “I hope that’s a good sign for our season.”At the height of the pandemic, about 85 percent of San Francisco-based employees worked from home; that number is about 50 percent now, said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.“I think it’s possible that people are not going to commute from Walnut Creek at night to go to downtown San Francisco for the opera to the same extent,” he said. “But I don’t expect those office buildings will sit empty. There will be other people moving into them.”The Magic Theater, a 145-seat-theater in Fort Mason, just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, has been experimenting with different kinds of programming, such as a poetry reading, and pay-what-you-can seats to lure patrons who live — and now work — far from the theater.“This is going to be an interesting year for everyone,” said Sean San José, its artistic director. “Are people going to come back? The zeitgeist is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. This ain’t a pause. We have got to rethink it.” More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      Rossini at the Drive-In, as San Francisco Opera Returns

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      SAN FRANCISCO — It feels almost too good to be true after a pandemic closure of Wagnerian scale: an audience watching a cast of singers enter the War Memorial Opera House here to rehearse and perform Rossini’s classic comedy “The Barber of Seville.”And, indeed, we’re not quite there yet. After 16 months, San Francisco Opera did return last week to live performance with “The Barber of Seville,” but not indoors at the War Memorial, its usual home. Rather, it is presenting the work through May 15 some 20 miles north, in a Marin County park. The cast for this abridged version is pared down to six main characters, who appear as singers coming back to work at the opera house to embody their Rossinian counterparts.Much of the plot has been reconfigured as a day of rehearsals, culminating in a performance of the final scenes “on” the War Memorial stage. By then, contemporary street clothes have been replaced with 18th-century-style costumes — the illusion of art restored, at long last.“We wanted to ignite and celebrate the return of this living, breathing art form with a sense of joy and hope and healing,” Matthew Ozawa, who adapted the opera and directed the production, said in an interview. “Audiences really need laughter and catharsis.”About 400 cars form the capacity crowd for this open-air “Barber” at the Marin Center in San Rafael, Calif. The orchestra’s sound is mixed with that of the singers and transmitted live as an FM signal to each car’s radio. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesSan Francisco Opera needs it, too. With its centennial season fast approaching, in 2022-23, the company is trying to write the most dramatic crisis-and-comeback chapter of its history at breakneck speed.The damage has been brutal. Arts organizations around the world have been devastated by pandemic shutdowns, but San Francisco has been closed significantly longer than most. Because of the structure of its season, which splits its calendar into fall and spring-summer segments, its last in-person performance was in December 2019.This enforced silence has come at great cost: Eight productions had to be canceled, wiping out some $7.5 million in ticket revenue. The company, which struggled with deficits even before the pandemic, has had to make around $20 million in cuts to its budget of roughly $70 million. In September, its orchestra agreed to a new contract containing what the musicians have called “devastating” reductions in compensation.Top, Catherine Cook, familiar to San Francisco audiences as the housekeeper Berta, warms up before the performance.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesMatthew Shilvock, the company’s general director, said of the production, “I see this as a signpost to something new in our future.”Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times“We felt that it was so important to get back to live performance when we could,” said Matthew Shilvock, the company’s general director. “There has been such a hunger, a need for that in the community.”Like opera companies in Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, upstate New York and elsewhere, San Francisco’s return has a retro precursor: the drive-in. “The Barber of Seville” is being presented on an open-air stage erected at the Marin Center in San Rafael. Audience members, in their cars, can opt for premium “seats” with a head-on view of the stage, or for a neighboring area where the opera is simulcast on a large movie screen — for a total capacity of about 400 cars.A cellist gets ready in the tent that serves as the production’s orchestra pit.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe drive-in presentation meant jettisoning the company’s house production and conceptualizing and designing a brand-new staging in a just few months.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesRoderick Cox, in his San Francisco Opera debut, conducts the singers by video feed — while wearing a mask.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe logistics necessary to bring this off have been complex — not only to adapt to an unaccustomed space, but on account of Covid protocols, which in the Bay Area have been among the strictest in the country. The company has adhered to a rigorous regimen of testing and masking; wind players have used specially designed masks, and in rehearsals the singers wore masks developed by Dr. Sanziana Roman, an opera singer turned endocrine surgeon. Even during performances, the cast members must remain at least eight and a half feet away from each other — 15 feet if singing directly at someone else.Shilvock realized in December that it might be possible to bring live opera back around the time of the company’s originally planned April production of “Barber,” but only if he could “remove as many uncertainties as possible.” The idea of a drive-in presentation began to take shape. But that meant jettisoning the company’s house production and conceptualizing and designing a brand-new staging in a just few months.“I’ve had to rethink some of my tempi and how to keep that excitement,” Cox said. “To know when to press on the gas a little bit more.”Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesA village of tents behind the stage houses the infrastructure and staff needed to run the show. One tent acts as an orchestra pit, where the conductor Roderick Cox, making his company debut, leads a reduced ensemble of 18 players. Along with adapting to using video screens to communicate with the singers — while wearing a mask — Cox noted an added layer of challenge in the absence of audible responses from the audience.“I’ve had to rethink some of my tempi and how to keep that excitement,” he said. “To know when to press on the gas a little bit more.”The orchestra’s sound is mixed with that of the singers and transmitted live as an FM signal to each car’s radio. “Rather than sound coming through big speaker clusters, across a massive parking lot,” Shilvock said, “it comes straight from the stage and from the orchestra tent into your vehicle.”Alek Shrader, who sings the opera’s dashing tenor hero, said he felt “a combination of nostalgia and excitement for what’s to come.”Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesDaniela Mack, Shrader’s lover in “Barber” and his wife in real life, spoke of the cathartic effect of finally being able “to perform for actual people.”Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesA sense of drive-in populism — keeping in mind the comfort and attention spans of automobile-bound listeners — resulted in the decision to present a streamlined, intermission-less, English-language “Barber,” about 100 minutes long. All of the recitative is cut, along with the choruses.The familiar War Memorial Opera House is conjured through projections of the theater’s exterior and replicas of its dressing rooms as part of Alexander V. Nichols’s two-level set. Ozawa’s staging takes as a poignant underlying theme the transition back to live performance: The singers, with sometimes witty self-consciousness, must negotiate a labyrinth of distancing precautions, but with a hopeful sense of soon being able to return to much-missed theaters.The mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, who stars as Rosina, spoke in an interview of the cathartic effect of finally being able “to perform for actual people, to have that connection with an audience.” The tenor Alek Shrader, her lover in the opera and her husband in real life, said he felt “a combination of nostalgia and excitement for what’s to come.”For all of the production’s novelty, there was something reassuring about the familial ease with which the cast interacted. Mack and Shrader are reprising roles they have performed previously here in San Francisco opposite Lucas Meachem’s charismatic Figaro. And Catherine Cook’s sympathetic housekeeper Berta has been a fixture of “Barber” at the company since the 1990s. All four, as well as Philip Skinner (Dr. Bartolo) and Kenneth Kellogg (Don Basilio), emerged from San Francisco’s Adler Fellowship young artists program.Much of the plot has been reconfigured as a day of rehearsals, culminating in a performance of the final scenes “on” the War Memorial Opera House stage, conjured through projections.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesShilvock said the production costs for “Barber” were comparable to what the company would have spent for the 2021 summer season it had planned prepandemic — but building the temporary venue and Covid restrictions added between $2 and $3 million in extra costs.Still, Shilvock said it has been worth it — and on opening night on April 23, the curtain calls were greeted with an exuberant chorus of honks. Shilvock said that around a third of “Barber” ticket buyers were new to the company.“I’m not seeing this in any way just as a band-aid to get us through to the point where we go back to normal,” he said. “Rather, I see this as a signpost to something new in our future. It’s creating this energy for opera for people who would never have otherwise given us a thought.” More