Editorials

If anyone wonders if there’s a role for classical music in the hard-edged 21st century, they should acquaint themselves with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, which had its season’s opening on Friday night at the Paramount in Oakland. We go to a good number of musical events, some of them really big hits with their audiences, but it’s only at the Paramount with Maestro Michael Morgan wielding the baton that bravura performances are rewarded with shouts of “right on” from the balcony. Sometimes (horrors) they come even after a particularly thrilling movement, in defiance or ignorance of the classical convention which counsels waiting until the whole piece is finished to cheer. It’s not just polite clapping, or even the vigorous foot-stomping on the wooden floor of Berkeley’s First Congregational Church which is used to applaud the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. When the enormous Paramount audiences like something, it’s expressed by full-throated roars, often ornamented with the kind of piercing whistles normally heard at rock concerts or baseball games.  

Since this paper usually reserves its review space for repeating events which our readers have future opportunities to attend, we didn’t have an assigned reviewer at Friday’s concert. We did see one of our regular reviewers there, and she loved it, but she won’t be writing a review for us. Instead, we’d like to direct our readers to Joshua Kosman’s review in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle. (This is partly to maintain our reputation for being “fair and balanced,” since a reader commentary in these pages last week pungently denounced the Chron’s editorial judgment for its defense of Diane Feinstein’s vote for Michael Mukasey.)  

I’m no reviewer myself, just a devoted audience member, and in this case even if I were it wouldn’t be cricket for me to praise the evening’s star soloist, Hope Briggs, since she’s a long-time friend. Instead, let me just quote a bit from the impartial Mr. Kosman, in case you’ve cancelled your Chron subscription in response to last week’s diatribe: 

“Her singing was proud, defiant and full of pizzazz, both tonally and dramatically... Friday’s performance was the work of a singer unafraid to make a large, energetic statement, and able to back that up with commanding technique and smooth, eloquent phrasing. All that, and she holds the stage like a true diva...Her finest showing came midway through the set, with a rendition of “Tacea la notte placida” from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” that was both voluptuous and pure-voiced. The opening phrases were shaped with eloquent directness, and with Morgan’s aid, Briggs then brought the aria to ever-greater heights of intensity and emotional fluency....” 

Take that, David Gockley. In case you’re not an opera fan, it’s possible you missed San Francisco Opera manager Gockley’s gaffe last summer, when he dumped Briggs from a production of Don Giovanni in questionable circumstances after the final dress rehearsal. Kosman wisely steered away from that controversy in his review, but since I’m not a reviewer myself I’m free to comment on it. (I am qualified to review Hope’s red dress, which was smashing.) 

The always-vocal crowd at the Paramount loved Briggs just as much as Kosman did. It was the usual mix of elegantly dressed matrons and patrons, many of them African-American, and schleppy Berkeleyesque types, both the seedy graying academics and the blue-jeaned young. A fair number, male and female, even sported the obligatory display of tattooed biceps. But whoever they were, and however unlikely it seemed to find them all in the same hall, they love the OEBS and they adored Briggs—they roared their approval after every aria. 

I didn’t see Gockley there, though I did recognize some regulars from Tuesday nights in the balcony at the opera house. One hopes he sent a flunky to listen and watch. He might learn something. 

His arrival at the San Francisco Opera was accompanied by a lot of fanfare about his track record in Texas as a popularizer. He’s tried to live up to it by staging televised performances with video screens in the balcony, and he’s even beamed a few shows to novel venues like the San Francisco ballpark which should be called Willie Mays Field if sportswriters had any guts.  

Is any of this working? Is opera attendance up? Judging by the smallish crowd in the balcony the night we saw The Magic Flute, which isn’t hard to like and was charmingly staged, I doubt it, but I don’t know for sure. 

What’s certainly not helping are the raucous, vulgar and cloyly patronizing SF Opera commercials, starring Mr. Gockley in person, which blast the ears in between musical selections on genteel KDFC. The message appears to be that opera is for everyone, but the effect is simply to make me, and I suspect most listeners, switch stations as fast as possible to classic jazz on KCFM. It may come as a surprise to someone who’s lived in Texas for a while, but there’s a sizable number of music lovers who don’t listen to Grand Old Opry but might be persuaded to enjoy grand opera with the right incentives. Including, for example, the presence of a glamorous and well-loved home-girl diva like Hope Briggs. 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one more real reviewer, Jack Neal, who heard Hope’s recent performance as a last minute replacement for the scheduled star of Nevada Opera’s Aida: 

“Briggs sings magnificently and brings magnetism, majesty and considerable magic to Verdi’s Ethiopian princess doomed by her across-the-border love for Radames, commander of Egyptian forces....There’s not a moment when Briggs’s singing does not thrill. Her Act III aria, “O cieli azzurri” is regal in tone, passionate in demeanor, and a sensation of vocal agility. There’s no reason why Briggs should not become a major star on the international opera scene.” 

Are you listening, Mr. Gockley? Here in the Bay Area, audiences would like to hear Hope Briggs again, and soon. She might even persuade some of her Oakland fans to BART across the bay for a change.