Last week the San Francisco Opera Archive unveiled its new, permanent photography exhibition "Looking Through the Lens: The Glory of San Francisco Opera, Past and Present." Located in the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera in the Veterans Building, the exhibit features 135 photos drawn from the San Francisco Opera Archive collections, curated and assembled by San Francisco Opera Director of Communications and Public Affairs Jon Finck.
The exhibit spans two long corridors on the building's fourth floor. The David Gockley Gallery offers 58 black-and-white prints, visual documents of San Francisco Opera's early years under General Directors Gaetano Merola and Kurt Herbert Adler. The Hume Family Gallery brings us up to the present in 77 color scenes from the War Memorial Opera House stage, and other images of the Company's orchestra, chorus, dancers and supernumeraries.
Some highlights from the black-and-white collection (though you are sure to find your own): Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad and tenor Lauritz Melchior on stage in a 1935 performance of "Die Walkuere," American baritone Lawrence Tibbet as Baron Scarpia in "Tosca" American soprano Leontyne Price in her Company debut as Madame Lidoine in "Dialogues of the Carmelites," and soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her U.S. debut as the Marschallin in "Der Rosenkavalier."
Stand-outs in the color prints include Placido Domingo in "Cyrano de Bergerac," Renee Fleming in "Rusalka," Nina Stemme in "Siegfried," Nadja Michael in "Salome," Company premieres of Glass' "Satyagraha" and Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt," and world premieres of Adams' "Doctor Atomic" and Wallace's "The Bonesetter's Daughter."
It's great to see arts photographers who regularly capture the beauty and drama of the opera recognized here, including Cory Weaver, Robert Cahen, Ken Friedman, Terence McCarthy, Larry Merkle, Ron Scherl, and Marty Sohl.
Best of all, "Looking Through the Lens" is free and open to the public, Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-6 p.m. The online performance archive database is at archive.sfopera.com.
Chamber Work
The world premiere of composer Bright Sheng and co-librettist David Henry Hwang's "Dream of the Red Chamber," opening Sept. 10, is shaping up to be a highlight of the SFO season. The opera, a co-production with the Hong Kong Arts Festival that will be performed there in March 2017, is based on a classic of Chinese literature, author Cao Xueqin's 18th-century novel of the same name.
At a bilingual press conference in the Opera House last week, new SFO General Director Matthew Shilvock proclaimed that San Francisco is the "right city to be doing this" world premiere in. Members of the creative team spoke about finding the emotional core of the 120-chapter Chinese novel, a vast epic, citing the contemporary opera "Moby-Dick" as a similar case of radical abridgement. Director Stan Lai said that "Red Chamber" lies "at the backbone of Chinese literature," taking up themes of destiny, karma, and cause and effect.
For the first time, supertitles will appear in both English (horizontally) and Chinese (vertically), as the Bay Area's Chinese-American community has demonstrated great interest in the opera. Opening night is sold out, and the run is nearly so, which is extraordinary for a new opera that has never been heard before by prospective audiences. Watch these pages for our coverage and review. (Through Sept. 29; sfopera.com.)
Slack-Jawed
This week, arts writer Tavo Amador reviews author Jean Stein's history of Los Angeles, "West of Eden: An American Place." He shared an anecdote from the book with us. It comes from the reminiscences of the famed author, raconteur, and provocateur Gore Vidal. The context is the rampant lesbianism among actresses in Los Angeles in the late 1930s and 40s. Vidal says he was at a party at which Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, both conventionally dressed, arrived together. Not long afterwards, Marlene Dietrich arrived, wearing slacks. Garbo murmured, "Ah, there is Miss Dietrich, giving the whole game away."