The Bay Area Boards

Out here visiting my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons in the usual Bay Area balmy air with just the slightest bit of cool edge.  We enjoyed a lot of outdoor time, heading to Half Moon Bay for the tree tunnel and then a hike that included visiting the tidepools at maximum low tide to see lots of sealife like stars and anemones and crabs. Another trip was to Rancho San Antonio, with its great trails through fields and forest. A few more parks in Cupertino and Sunnyvale provided more wonderful hours to savor.

As far as indoors is concerned, we made it back to the War Memorial to catch the San Francisco Opera's new production of La Traviata. A chestnut, to be sure, but with three fine principals, a highly impressive one. Pretty Yende, who's been receiving many great notices in the leading houses, was a fine Violetta, and tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought youth and authority to Alfredo, while the veteran Simone Piazzola, whom I'd not seen before (not that I'd caught the others either) handled the tricky role of Giorgio Germont very capably.

I've always felt that Traviata proceeded from the magnificent musical experience of Act I, delightful musically from start to its finish with the last high notes of Sempre libera. Act II is always more complicated, and it became more so because the house needed several minutes to change from the first to the second scene--from Violetta's country place to Flora's decadent party. There's a lot of good music, too, but the flow is entirely different from the first act and a lot longer. Act III, to me, is gen,erally disappointing, and I've never seen any opera company make it work at the level of the first two acts.

Excitement also arrived in the form of a false alarm that emptied the house about a half hour before the curtain was to go up. Handled fairly badly, eventually the proceedings got going only a few minutes behind. A critic once speculated that opera orchestras, in his case, the Met's, know Traviata so well that they could probably perform the score backwards. That does not take away from the delight of the opera--the music and the singing. 

More to follow.