SAN DIEGO — Eleven years after a near-implosion, the 60-year-old San Diego Opera is alive and well. Its opening performance March 21 of Richard Strauss’ Salome, part of a three-opera season, showed a company fully capable of recruiting exceptional operatic talent and mounting an intriguingly conceived and well-executed interpretation to a virtually sold-out hall.
That might have looked unlikely back in March 2014, when the opera’s board of directors abruptly announced the company’s termination after already having released details of its 50th season. After 28 years of consecutive balanced budgets and programs featuring the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, and Kiri Te Kanawa, Ian Campbell, the company’s general and artistic director for 31 years, explained the company’s volte-face: “Demand for opera in this city isn’t high enough.”
Several board and staff members mutinied against this preemptive termination of an Opera America top 10 troupe. Launching a “Save San Diego Opera” petition, social media, and fundraising campaign, they quickly raised $2.15 million from donors and the public. When the board met again in April 2014, it voted overwhelmingly to soldier on, firing Campbell, then San Diego’s best-remunerated arts executive, and his then-wife, Ann Spira Campbell (also a well-paid SDO executive).
In the decade since, the San Diego Opera — now partly sponsored by the City of San Diego — has substantially reduced its budget (to about $10 million), hired current general director David Bennett (formerly of Gotham Chamber Opera), and infused the programming — conservative during Campbell’s era — with spicier fare: operas by Jake Heggie (Moby Dick), Laura Kaminsky (As One), Zach Redler (The Falling and the Rising), and Astor Piazzolla.
It all seems to be working. This year San Diego Opera has expanded its total number performances per production to three (versus two last year). And before the March 21 curtain-raising, Bennett announced the support of ‘many, many new season subscribers’ and ‘many new-to-file” (first-time-ever) SDO attendees.’
Last staged by SDO in 2012, Salome nicely aligns with the San Diego Opera’s new look: It’s a distinguished repertoire regular at most major opera companies yet still edgy and challenging enough to burnish a company’s reputation for unstodgy programming.
Musically, Salome shocks (or once shocked) via Strauss’ tour-de-force score: dissonance and chromaticism pushing tonality’s envelope, extreme and challenging vocal writing, unrelenting pacing. Dramatically, as a story/plot, its shocks are all Oscar Wilde (whose 1893 play was translated into German for Strauss’ 1905 opera): not only Salome’s bloody kiss of John the Baptist’s freshly severed head but the opera-long collision of sacred and profane, which still retains its power to nauseate. (Though Strauss could never be described as a man of faith, ironically or not Wilde became a Catholic on his deathbed.)
Director Jose Maria Condemi’s conception fell somewhere between a strictly literal or traditional interpretation (e.g., biblical/orientalist staging) and the kind of abstract or nontraditional Regietheater productions that have become the norm since the 1990s (e.g., contemporary or surreal/expressionistic sets). Condemi recently described his Salome as “at its core, … the story of a 16-year-old whose development has been both stunted and accelerated — a consequence of profound psychological trauma inflicted by deeply flawed parenting.”
Marcy Stonikas‘ Salome realized Condemi’s conception by portraying not so much a man-eating seductress as a merciless teen with the ferocious will and moral depravity to do the unspeakable. A dramatic soprano with stamina and power, Stonikas managed to bring a dark humor to the role without ever diminishing the horror of Salome’s actions. Her nicely gauged petulance when Jochanaan rejects her slavering praise of his flesh, hair, and mouth elicited chuckles in the hall. Even as Salome’s language and actions become more demonic, Stonikas preserved the sense that Salome was not so far removed from the dolls and mirrors Condemi provided as her props.
Condemi struck a nice balance between Salome as incredible camp and disturbing tragedy. Herod, Herodias, and Salome are all played floridly — unmoored decadents wholly interested in themselves. In Condemi’s vision, the only characters possessing integrity are Jochanaan and Herod’s retinue: Narraboth; his “friend,” the page; the Nazarenes; and the soldiers/slaves. Condemi nicely underscores this contrast in his handling of the Narraboth/page friendship. And the director deftly sets up the opera’s notorious closing scene by casting a woman (Karin Wilcox) as the page, having her visibly grieve center stage over Narraboth’s body after he (distraught over Salome’s unglued drooling over Jochanaan) kills himself, and by having Herod’s retinue pay Narraboth respect by covering him with a shroud.
As Salome begins her gruesome closing monologue, Jochanaan’s bloody head in her hands, Condemi has Wilcox’s page enter stage right and wordlessly observe as Salome perversely sings, “The glorious secret of love is mightier than is the secret of death.” The page’s silent witness eloquently reminds us what real love looks like and gives the opera the only moral center it has left after Jochanaan’s exit.
Condemi’s nonliteral direction meant liberties were taken with the score’s black-and-white. One seemed unaccountable: At measure 310, Salome addresses the page (“You were the friend of this dead man [Narraboth], no?”), but Wilcox’s page isn’t on stage. Another felt fully justified. Just before curtain fall, the score instructs, “The soldiers rush forward and crush Salome under their shields” — fulfilling Jochanaan’s earlier prophecy that the “warrior chiefs shall gather round … and with their many pointed shields they shall crush her.” Instead, Condemi has a single soldier stride on stage and strangle Salome with something like the veil that Condemi has had Salome brandish, wave, and discard throughout the opera. As liberties go, it was a nice touch.
Together with Stonikas, baritone Kyle Albertson (Jochanaan) and tenor Dennis Peterson (Herod) brought all the vocal and acting chops needed to put this performance across. Both Wilde and Strauss set up Jochanaan to seem a priggish, misogynistic, self-important preacher. For his part, Wilde undercuts Jochanaan’s righteousness by hinting that Salome’s allure is not lost on him (“Why does she stare at me with those two eyes golden under their shimmering eyelids?”).
And while Strauss gives Jochanaan an appropriately regal solemn brass theme, he privately described Jochannan as “an imbecile… I would have preferred above all that he would appear a bit grotesque.” But Albertson wisely played Jochanaan straight: as the holy man that even Herod suspects he is. Albertson’s strength (besides his sturdy baritone) was in convincingly projecting Jochanaan’s integrity but also revealing his humanity. When Salome pleads, “Will you not let me kiss your mouth?” Albertson’s “Niemals!” (never) felt angry, personal — no cardboard biblical prophet.
Easily the most charismatic presence on the stage, Peterson as Herod sang with a bright, firm, commanding tenor. His considerable acting skills did the rest, humorously conveying not only his character’s mincing, fainting weakness and wine-loosened lust but also his nagging moral sense. He believes Jochanaan is God’s chosen and only he and Jochanaan hear the wings of death’s angel. No hero, he at least knows he must finally act when Salome’s depravity becomes unendurable: “Kill this woman!”
Nina Warren brought a delicious venom to Herodias’ soullessness, and Benjamin Werley fully inhabited Narraboth’s besotted devotion to Salome. At the curtain call, the audience saved special applause for principal conductor Yves Abel and his 100 or so San Diego Symphony players for navigating Strauss’ demanding score with vigor and color.
Eleven years after its near-death experience, San Diego Opera looks and sounds as viable as ever.
