Opera is big.  Small towns are not.

To say that small-town opera should not be judged by the same standards
as leading houses is a simple matter of fact, not of condescension.

It is then all the more exciting to see two remarkable "small-town"
operas one day in the pastoral East (of San Francisco) Bay.

In the afternoon, it was the Berkeley Opera's "Carmen" - a unique, exciting
production.  The evening brought Festival Opera's "Madama Butterfly" in
Walnut Creek, a fine performance, with a rare bonus:  a pair of young, good
singers in the leading roles.

Chinese soprano Guiping Deng and Mexican tenor Leonardo Villeda both made
auspicious local debuts.  Festival Opera artistic director Olivia Stapp
once again managed to find and present singers that make the trip to
Hofmann Theater worthwhile.

Deng - born and trained in China - is beginning to make a name for herself,
primarily in this role, as Cio-Cio-San.  She has a lovely yet powerful (if
not particularly interesting) voice, which she uses well.  Her Italian
is difficult to figure out (in sharp contrast with Villeda's exemplary
diction), but she has a good stage presence - again, nothing especially
memorable.  Still, she sang through the tough role with very few glitches
in intonation, and - heroically - she managed to soar above Michael
Morgan's determined efforts in the pit to cover up all voices.

Morgan's conducting was bewildering.  In the quiet passages, he brought
out a gorgeous sound from his part-time, under-rehearsed orchestra (at
times reminiscent of the recent San Francisco treat of Charles Mackerras
and Donald Runnicles taking turns to conduct the finest orchestral
"Butterflies" in my memory), but for the rest of the evening, he filled the
small hall with a mighty racket, an impossibly noisy treatment of what was
obviously meant as orchestral accompaniment, not an ongoing finale at the
Last Night of the Proms.

Villeda too broke through the muzzle, but his single, important shortcoming
- lack of effortless, secure high notes - was exacerbated by the
Morgan-imposed need to shout.

Otherwise, Villeda is an extraordinarily promising singer.  There is
something in the timbre, in the elegant, straightforward voice production
in the middle register that's truly appealing.  He is one of the few
Pinkertons I know exactly in-between lyric and heldentenor.  If he develops
the right approach to, and security in, high notes, this tenor is going
places far away from small towns.

With a Pavarotti-pear shape, but not nearly as tall, Villeda has a
simple, amiable stage presence, a bemused, benign expression - perfect for
Pinkerton, and ready-made for Nemorino.  or Siegfried.  (I mean acting, but
Wagner is not out of the question in 10 years, if all goes well.)

Notable in the cast:  Buffy Baggot's Suzuki and Philip Skinner's Sharpless.
Stapp directed a smooth, conventional production on Giulio Cesare Perrone's
functional sets.  (I always enjoy the opportunity to mention the designer
with that wonderful name.)

The quality of performance in Walnut Creek was far above over that of the
Berkeley Opera today and yet, against a "good Butterfly," I emphatically
recommend seeing the "unique Carmen" in the Julia Morgan Theater.  You have
until July 22.

The Saturday that ended with a fine "Madama Butterfly" in Walnut Creek -
as reported above in this marathon review - began auspiciously in Berkeley,
with David Scott Marley's restoration and new translation of "Carmen."

Even if it is a fair-to-middling (and occasionally worse) production, true
opera fans should all head to the Julia Morgan Theater.  There, you may
experience the opera as you never have.  It is the clearest, most cohesive,
theatrically-musically-psychologically-editorially most valid presentation
of an old, consistently abused warhorse.

("Editorially"? Marley fixed such silly and now-accepted glitches as
Micaela traveling from Navarre to Seville in a single morning, a 300-mile
feat in 1875 - perhaps on an early version of the Concorde.)

If Marley worked in London or Berlin (or even in New York), his
dramaturgical talent would place him in the category of Peter Sellars
or Robert Wilson - but without the lately frequent idiosyncratic,
self-important excesses of the former.  Marley, even at his most wildly
imaginative - Rossini's "L'Italiana" made into the fabulous "The Riot Grrrl
on Mars" - always serves the composer.  In Berkeley, his "Beatrice and
Benedick," "Bat Out of Hell," "Daughter of the Cabinet," and "Tales of
Hoffmann" all illuminated the "originals."

But now, with "Carmen," he did something that goes well beyond clever and
entertaining.  He cleaned up the Gypsy girl's censored and misinterpreted
act.  Marley used Merimee's novella, Henri Meilhac's libretto, and the
Halevy-Guiraud grand-opera version, but he went back to Bizet's Opera
Comique original - and, from a distance of so many years, liberated the
work from the yokes of the political correctness of those days.

Marley's completely new English libretto tells a story in which Carmen is
the powerful woman Bizet tried to sneak by the hypocritical-conservative
audiences in 1875 - and failed, creating the need for the sanitized
grand-opera version.  Do not think that this is a new-PC, Berkeley,
Liberation "Carmen" - not at all.  Other than the contemporary (2001)
language, nothing is updated or reinterpreted in Marley's version:  he
excavated and completed what was there already.

The English text also happens to be, amazingly, musically superb, the
substitution for the French handled excellently well.  Consider Escamillo's
aria (sung with great clarity by Joe Kinyon) - "Picture this:  / The great
arena full.  / What is it draws the crowds? / Why do they feel a pull? /
What force has brought them? / What spell has caught them? / Just the
grandest battle [that's hard - "battle"!] of them all:  / Man versus bull!"

Uniquely among "Carmen" productions, in Berkeley, you find out where Don
Jose is from, what drove him from home, why his mother's forgiveness is
needed, what Micaela is all about, what Carmen means to him, and so on.
This is not in footnotes or a program essay - it's all in the text, sung
and spoken in clear English, introducing an all-new (and yet faithfully
authentic) "Carmen" to even the most knowledgeable opera fan.

(In a sheer coincidence, Bay Area audiences will have a chance to see Peter
Brook's interpretation of what he considered the "real Carmen," when "Le
Tragedie de Carmen" is presented in Walnut Creek, Aug.11-19.  And there is
always a late-night showing somewhere of "Carmen Jones," for good measure.)

The Berkeley performance's strength is in the communication of the drama,
the text.  It's fine musical theater, with uniformly good diction and
that's a tough task for the mixed professional-amateur cast.  Not a
line was flubbed in this 3 "-hour, very talky piece, and the afternoon
performance I saw today came hours after the conclusion of the Friday
opening night.  How under these conditions - and fighting a cold -
did Marie Bafus managed to sing the title role well is a kind of
artistic/heroic mystery.  Ever since I heard her in a school production
in San Francisco not long ago, I've been expecting good things from her,
and I understand she is doing well at the Portland Opera.

The baritonish Don Jose, Michael Licciardello, produces some Vickers-like
sounds, but not frequently or consistently enough.  Romina De Gasbarro's
Micaela is intriguing:  she has stage presence to burn and a strong voice
- but she is not (yet, one hopes) an opera singer.  She could do very well
in musicals, and fits in well with this production of "Carmen."

Jonathan Khuner's musical direction works well, although his (very)
part-time orchestra has its few ups and many downs.  Passages of fine
ensemble playing are followed by the string sections going their separate
ways.  The brass, especially David Taylor's trumpet, had a very good day.

Janos Gereben/SF
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