In modern, everyday dress director Ozawa’s prisoners were men, women and children who could have been you and me, though some were in yellow (low risk) prison jumpsuits, leaving it uncertain as to why we were imprisoned.
If stage director Matthew Ozawa seems a bit vague as to what this was all about, Beethoven certainly was not. Maestra Eun Sun Kim urged the final, Rossinian strepitosissimo moments of Beethoven’s complex finale to shattering, fortissimo levels, the seventy-two voices of the San Francisco Opera Chorus joining Florestan and Leonore, the jailer Rocco and the minister Don Fernando, and the first act refugees, Marzelline and Jaquino - the arch-villain Don Pizarro having been unceremoniously hustled off the stage - in full voice celebration of an impassioned ode to conjugal loyalty. It was a huge, and quite magnificent effect. The structure, now fully transparent, its neon lights fully aligned in infinite parallels, achieved, finally, its moment of liberation. The massive structure gracefully revolved to a new position for each of the opera’s scenes, the prevailing black background becoming a blinding white for the opera’s triumphant finale. Nichols, was a two sided open metal super structure dressed with TV screens and lines of industrial neon lights. Mme.Van den Heever’s Fidelio shone in spite of the blue denim coveralls and cap she wore, somehow meant to be a uniform of the security or more likely, custodial staff at some sort of heavily bureaucratic (lots of file boxes and very busy personnel) contemporary detainment center somewhere. Tenor Russell Thomas as the delirious, starving prisoner Florestan radiated musical elegance in his beautifully voiced vision of his savior, Leonore, and held the stage with consummate dignity through to the eventual, sublime moment when his chains are removed. Her impassioned first act aria “Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern” (“Come, hope, let the last star”) earned a remarkably huge ovation. As Florestan’s wife Leonore she commanded the stage realizing the opera’s goal of saving this political prisoner from an ugly death. Her voice clear and strong, her presence magnetic, majestic. Soprano Elza van den Heever shone as the Fidelio of your dreams. All in all it was a triumphant return of actual world class opera to San Francisco. To boot, long overdue new chairs in the opera house, more comfortable with more legroom for the masked and vaccinated spectators.
A superb cast, a fine production, inspired conducting, classy orchestra and a classy chorus, a wired audience - it was Fidelio last night at the War Memorial Opera House.
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