Arts & Events

On entering Zellerbach Hall on Sunday afternoon, November 7, the first sign that things would not go well was the abysmal lack of a substantial program for this performance of Handel’s opera Alcina by the prestigious ensemble The English Consort.Concert nstead, we were offered only a single page listing singers, and notifying us that the performance would last approximately three hours and forty-five minutes with two intermissions. Okay, I know that Handel’s operas tend to be long, even overlong, especially given all the repeats inherent in Handel’s use of the da capo formula. But Alcina is a particularly convoluted opera involving a sorceress who presides over a fantasy island. Why in the world Cal Performances didn’t provide audiences with a plot synopsis is beyond belief. 

Before the opera began, Jeremy Geffen, Cal Performances Artistic and Executive Director, walked on stage to say that many of his most memorable moments in his long career came from hearing The Englsih Consort Concert performing Handel operas in concert version such as the one we’d be hearing today. However, once the music began, it quickly became obvious that this performance would be memorable largely in a negative sense. As the excellent performers began singing, supertitles appeared but were so darkly illuminated that they were not only illegible but largely invisible. When the first break in the music occurred, someone in the audience thankfully yelled “Fix the Supertitles!” 

Alas, the supertitles were not fixed. Thus, the audience was left completely in the dark, quite literally, about what was happening on stage and which characters were singing. Look, I’m probably more experienced than most members of the audience where Alcina is concerned, having heard the excellent San Francisco Opera 2002 production of Alcina starring soprano Catherine Nagelstadt. Burt even i found myself completely lost as this performance by The English Consort Concert went on and on without any legible supertitles to guide us through the convoluted action of this opera. 

Responsibility for the abysmal lack of support, administrative and technical, by Cal Performances for Harry Bicket’s excellent ensemble group The English Consort, Concert ultimately falls on Jeremy Geffen. First, his failure to offer audiences a program with a plot synopsis of this opera was unforgivable, especially when this opera would last three hours and forty-five minutes! 

Second, his failure to ensure a technical crew could offer legible supertitles compounded his initial failure. All I can say, Mr Geffen, is that this may be the first time I’ve walked out of a performance after forty minutes, especially when the performance by the musicians was uniformly excellent. But I certainly was unwilling to sit through three hours and forty-five minutes without any information from Cal Performances about what was transpiring on stage. Get your act together! 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

ALERT: 

Céline Ricci, a Bay Area musical treasure, brings her Ars Minerva troupe to San Francisco’s ODC Theatre on November 19-21 for three performances of another long neglected Venetian opera. This year’s offering is Messalina by Carlo Pallavicino, who was active in both Venice and Dresden. 

This is an opera where hero and heroine both appear in drag, so we can expect that Céline Ricci’s staging of this opera will have plenty of resonances with contemporary audiences. Don’t miss it! 

 

**************************************************************************************************************** 

ERRATA

By some quirk of the mind I’ve always thought of the ensemble called The English Concert as The English Consort. Of course, I know better. However, when I came to write a review of the unfortunate November 7 concert of Handel’s Alcina, which was marred by the lack of administrative and technical support from Cal Performances, I mistakenly referred to the group as The English Consort. My apologies. Speaking of apologies, Jeremy Geffen, Artistic and Executive Director of Cal Performances, has sent an apology to all who attended the November 7 performance. He apologises for the malfunctioning supertitles and assures that it will not happen again. However he sidesteps his failure to provide the audience with a plot synopsis and instead claims that this opera was too long to offer a complete libretto. No one expected a complete CClibretto, but we certainly would have appreciated a plot synopsis of this convoluted opera. Had he provided a plot synopsis, the malfunctioning of the supertitles would at least have been mitigated somewhat by our ability to follow what transpired on stage by means of the plot synopsis. For the recent Jonas Kaufmann-Helmut Deutsch recital, which was wonderful, Cal Performances printed out a multi-page set of program notes that included the German lyrics and an English translation for every song included in the recital. Why couldn’t they have at least given us a plot synopsis of Handel’s Alcina instead of a bare bones single page?