A new wrinkle to the old "whistling the sets" after the opera:  singing of
the location.

Just stumbled onto the most spectacular environment one can imagine.  Went
to see a double-bill of Gustav Holst's 1908 "Savitri" and the significantly
less exotic Menotti "The Medium," but came away dazzled by the view from
the Oakland Mormon Temple, a five-spired, enormous complex, which somehow
I missed seeing all these years (it went up in 1964 and I came in 1977).

Da View!  Da View!  Oakland, Berkeley, the Bay, San Francisco and, most
likely, the Farallones, on a good day.  Stunning.

You look straight down at the spot where pre-San Francisco Yerba Buena
stood, the goal of Mormons on board the sailing ship Brooklyn, traveling
24,000 miles in six months to get here, in 1846 - a year before Brigham
Young arrived in Salt Lake City.

The 230 people on board who survived the trip from New York to the Pacific,
around South America, doubled the population of the town that was soon to
become San Francisco.

Oh, the opera? Yes, it's presented by an organization also new to me,
the three-year-old California Music Festival, a smallish, but fine effort
to involve young people - mostly high-school age - in music performances.
The audience of about 100 would have been terribly lost in the huge
auditorium (I'd guess 1,000 seats), but there is a handy partition wall
closing off a part of the front section, improving the sound and saving
face.

Among many concerts in various locations around the Bay, artistic
director James Greening-Valenzuela manages to get quite a lot of opera
into the program, especially opera scenes, but also including tonight's
staged presentation of complete, if short, works.  He directed "Savitri,"
Olivia Stapp was in charge of "The Medium," with her usual professional,
straightforward direction.  The conductor was Monroe Kanouse.  Fine
performances came from Amy Yarbrough, in the title role of the Holst,
and Sena Bender as Monica in the Menotti.

"Savitri" is an interesting mini-opera, less than half an hour in length,
with three singers and a 12-piece orchestra.  There is also a small chorus
off-stage, providing a haunting addition to the orchestration.  The story
is about 3,000 years old, about an Indian princess who takes on Death and
reclaims her husband from the other side.  A great admirer of Wagner,
Holst has a Death Announcement scene of his own here, a setting from "Die
Walkure" right in the middle of a reverse-Orpheus story.  The orchestral
music is fine - much closer to his chamber music and "Choral Fantasia"
than to "The Planets" sound - but the vocal portion is rather dry and
recitative-oriented.

Ah, the view! Don't miss it.

Janos Gereben/SF
[log in to unmask]