Women in summer operas, symphony concerts

by Philip Campbell

Women’s History Month has come and gone. It ought to last all year. The San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera are both trying to extend the celebration by presenting a number of concerts and productions through May and June primarily focused on women.

May 25 and 27

The San Francisco Symphony and guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero join with Lorelei Ensemble for the West Coast premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning “folk/rock/classical mixologist” Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story.” Director Anne Kauffman stages the two-part oratorio with scenic, lighting, and production designer Jeff Sugg.

A quote from a letter by Abigail Adams to husband John in 1776 reminds him “the ladies,” if overlooked, “are determined to foment a rebellion.” “Her Story” riffs on that theme.

June 1, June 2 & 3

Conductor Manfred Honeck and pianist Beatrice Rana share a traditional musical bill with the SFS premiere of Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano’s “Amazon.” Inspired by the Amazons of Greek mythology the composer says, “We all have images of those high-spirited women, as strong and tough as men, who also show their feminine emotions.”

June 8 – 11

Kaija Saariaho’s “Adriana Mater” makes its SFS premiere with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, director Peter Sellars, mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron as Adriana, plus soprano Axelle Fanyo, tenor Nicholas Phan, baritone Christopher Purves, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

A new staging of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s second opera, envisioned by famed theatrical innovator Sellars and SFS Music Director Salonen (himself a gifted composer) is an exciting prospect.

The story: a mother and son bond in a hostile and violent country facing civil war. They attempt to find a better future, torn between revenge and forgiveness.

Resonant for contemporary audiences, it offers an opportunity to experience Saariaho’s transcendent music.

Jun 29-30 & July 1

SFS Collaborative Partner soprano Julia Bullock is etched in memory from her pivotal role in the John Adams/Peter Sellars collaboration “Girls of the Golden West” at the San Francisco Opera.

A well-chosen program of songs celebrating the American story in works by George Gershwin and Margaret Bonds includes Reena Esmail’s “Black Iris,” which takes its name from the Georgia O’Keeffe painting, and examines the #MeToo movement.

June 3–July 1

San Francisco Opera’s Summer Season includes a tragically abandoned woman in Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” valiant wives in Richard Strauss’

“Die Frau Ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow”) and an iconoclastic artist in the Bay Area premiere of “El ultimo sueno de Frida y Diego” by Berkeley-born composer Gabriela Lena Frank and Pulitzer

Prize-winning librettist Nilo Cruz. For “Madame Butterfly,” SFO Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts a new co-production directed by Amon Miyamoto (the first Japanese director on Broadway for the revival of “Pacific Overtures”). Costumes are by the late Kenzo Takada, who made a brilliant career in Paris. Set designer Boris Kudlicka provides background for Miyamoto’s novel take, told from the viewpoint of the title character’s son Trouble.

Adler Fellow Moises Salazar plays the cruelly insensitive Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton in the final performance on July 1. Out and proud American tenor Michael Fabiano (an SFO favorite and international star) sings the role in all other performances. Korean soprano Karah Son makes her Company debut as the heartbreaking Cio-Cio-San.

June 4–28

For “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” acclaimed interpreter of German epics and former SFO Music Director Sir Donald Runnicles conducts his first, “The Woman Without a Shadow” with Roy Rallo directing. The new-to-San Francisco Opera production features artist David Hockney’s legendary sets.

The libretto is a murky mixture of legend, myth and questionable psychology, but the music is divine, orchestrated in Straussian everything but the kitchen sink mode, chock full of memorable motifs. The composer wrote ecstatically for women and the cast is rightfully dominated by Swedish soprano Nina Stemme as the Dyer’s Wife, Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund as the Empress and San Francisco-born Linda Watson as the Nurse.

June 13–30

With “El Ultimo Sueno de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), Mexican director Lorena Maza’s production is brought to colorful life with sets by Jorge Ballina, costumes by Eloise Kazan and lighting by

Victor Zapatero. Roberto Kalb makes his Company debut conducting the SFO co-commissioned work, the first Spanish-language opera in the Company’s 100-year history.

Argentine mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack plays Frida Kahlo, the painter whose life has become legend. Mexican baritone Alfredo Daza is Diego Rivera, her famous husband. In composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz’s imagining, they reunite on El Dia de los Muertos for a final reconciliation.

Opera Parallèle

Soprano Kearstin Piper Brown is related to the San Francisco Opera by her stage debut in “It’s a Wonderful Life” by Jake Heggie and Gene Sheer in 2018. She portrayed the angel Clara in the final performance.

Now she portrays a terrified and very human wife in the West Coast premiere of Paul Moravec’s opera, “The Shining,” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) June 2, 3 & 4. Opera Parallèle, with Conductor Nicole Paiement and Director & Concept Designer Brian Staufenbiel, presents a revised version, with a libretto by Mark Campbell based on the novel by Stephen King.

Composer Tobias Picker made King’s “Dolores Claiborne” an opera at the San Francisco Opera in 2013. It was not a success, but comparisons end there. Moravec’s setting has legs and his newly created chamber music orchestration sounds intriguing.

A colleague wonders if the doorsmashing “Heeeere’s Johnny!” sequence from the Kubrick film is included. I do, too.t www.sfsymphony.org www.sfopera.com www.operaparallele.org

by Gregg Shapiro

Even though it only spans two years in the life of immigrant Pearl, Aaron Hamburger’s third novel “Hotel Cuba” (Harper Perennial, 2023) has the feel and weight of an epic. Opening in 1922, as Pearl and her kid sister Frieda set sail for a better life in America from their home in Russia, only to be waylaid in Havana, Cuba, with their futures hanging indefinitely in the balance, Hamburger paints a vivid picture of time and place. While the novel is sure to appeal to a wide audience, gay writer Hamburger has made sure to feature significant queer characters in the storyline.

Gregg Shapiro: Aaron, your new novel “Hotel Cuba” is arriving at a moment when LGBTQ historical fiction is having a resurgence along with the novels “The New Life” by Tom Crewe and “In Memoriam” by Alice Winn. Why do you think this is occurring at this time?

Aaron Hamburger: I read somewhere about “presentism,” meaning this bias we have, thinking of ourselves as so modern and enlightened in comparison to people of the past. And yet,

Personals

in the writing of this book, I was struck by the many links I found between life in the past and our present.

Just as an example, I was inspired to write this story when I came across a picture of my grandmother in full male drag from 1922. As my good friend and LGBTQ literary legend, Leslea Newman, said when I showed her the photo, “Your grandmother looks like a butch lesbian! I have such a crush on her!”

As I delved into the research, I was surprised to read about a raucous gay bar in Havana from the late 1800s. And I was struck by the fact that the conversation about immigration one hundred years ago was almost exactly the same as that of our time, just with different immigrant populations.

How much of your own family’s immigrant story is in the pages of “Hotel Cuba”?

Quite a bit of it is in there in the broadest outlines. My grandmother was desperate to escape the chaos of Russia after the Russian Revolution and join a sister in America, but new and discriminatory immigration laws closed the borders to her, and she decided to go to Cuba instead.

We have recorded interviews with

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MONDAY-SATURDAY my grandparents about their immigration stories, mostly focused on my grandfather’s story, and a small part about my grandmother, who appears as the protagonist, Pearl, in the book. She was a woman of few, but choice, words, and while she left a lot of hints about her time in Cuba, I was intensely curious to fill in the details. I wanted to know what it felt like to go from a wartorn wintry sheltered shtetl to sultry Havana with the music, the food, the language, all of it so unfamiliar to her. The novelist in me got the chance to flesh out that picture.

Were you able to travel to Cuba for research?

Yes, I went to Havana and immediately noticed the heat, the intensity of the sunlight, the atmosphere. Many people who were in my grandmother’s situation, European immigrants, came across the ocean in their best woolen clothes and struggled to adjust to the tropical weather, often getting awful heat rashes, for example.

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Also, when I was in Havana, I had a wonderful guide who told me stories about her grandmother strolling down Havana’s main street and looking at the fashions in the high-end department store windows, which made me imagine my fashion-loving main character Pearl, based on my grandmother, taking that same walk.

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Antisemitism is at the heart of the novel. It’s the driving force behind Pearl and her sister Frieda’s departure from their homeland in Turya, and it’s something they continue to encounter in other

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415•861•5787 places. Can you please say a few words about writing about antisemitism at a time when it’s on the rise?

It is sad that we can’t quite seem to shake our addiction to all sorts of hatreds, and antisemitism is one of the most persistent and pernicious of those hatreds. More than anything, Pearl, as well as my grandmother, simply wanted to live her life in peace. However, then, as now, political figures have found that stoking fear of Jews, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and on and on is a convenient way to accrue power. Even more tragic is that they find a willing audience for their hate. That’s one thing we can do, resist vigorously any leader who might try to appeal to us through the language of division.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is also woven throughout. In chapter eight, one character says “Republicans hate the immigrants.” Is this a way of saying that not much has changed since the early 1920s?

It’s actually that character’s opinion of the politics of that time, as eerily familiar as that might sound to some contemporary readers. The Republicans in the 1920s were advocating for a tough stance on immigration. By the way, the immigration laws of the early 1920s laid the foundations for much of the debate we’re having now. Back then, many Americans worried that the people fleeing Communism (many of them Jewish) were actually Communist infiltrators coming to bring chaos and revolution to our

<< Ni¿¿er Lovers

From page 16

Thompson’s approach to the topic at hand is a daring one, a cousin of Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play.” Some audiences may balk at the boldness, unable to see that, in this case, humor allows a more rigorous examination of this subject matter than yet another puddle of tears or yelp of oversimplified outrage. So be it.

As “The Ni¿¿er Lovers” evolves on its way to future productions, which it absolutely merits, the show would benefit from some structural tinkering. A series of interstitial monologues from a crowd-pleasing Tanika Baptiste as a ringmaster-esque emcee provide moments of relief from the historical excoriation, but feel oddly disconnected from the main comic narrative and somewhat duplicate the earlier function of the time-travelling character.

Likewise, while Thompson’s original songs (Though a first time playwright, he’s well known as a musician) offer spot-on parodies of performers like Al Green, James Brown and the

Stylistics and are expertly sung by the cast, they don’t feel of a piece with the old-timey burlesque style of the characters who sing them; they might themselves be more effective as interstitial performances.

That said, I’d be thrilled to see this show again, even unrevised. Refusing to trade in sentimentality and betting shores. Compare that to the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS. I also read in the National Archives letters from everyday citizens demanding that the government do more to keep out immigrants in order to “protect the blood pool.” Disgusting.

In chapter 11, Pearl pays a visit to a bar in Havana called the Gold Dollar where she encounters “inverts and hussies.” There she encounters butch dyke Señora Martin and Martin’s associate, the “Queen of England.” Later, in New York, she works for Safaya, who introduces Pearl to her lesbian social circle. Being a gay writer, why was it important to you to include queer characters in what is primarily a straight story?

I would say it’s important not only for gay writers to do this but for any writer who wants to write accurately about human beings. I see Pearl as bisexual, though she would not have had the language to label her feelings or identity in that way.

Because of that, I wanted Pearl to meet people who would have been more open about their same-sex attractions, which would show her a different way of life from what she might have known back home. It’s part of the theme of the book, this idea that coming to Cuba was an accidental stop on her journey to America, a “hotel,” as many Jewish immigrants called it. But that experience turned out to shape the rest of her life in ways she couldn’t have expected.t www.aaronhamburger.com the farm on smarts, “The Ni¿¿er Lovers” offers tough love in the form of sharp art.t

‘The Ni¿¿er Lovers’ through Sunday, May 28. $30-$70. Magic Theatre at Fort Mason. 2 Marina Boulevard, Bldg. D. (415) 441-8822. www.magictheatre.org