Eyes Front for Opera

By David Gregson

San Diego Opera’s familiar promotional slogan is “We make music worth seeing.” There’s more to this claim than meets the eye. Whether it’s a performance by a jazz combo, a string quartet, a solo guitarist or a symphony orchestra, all vital music-making is essential to see and hear in an environment where living musicians can interact with a living audience. Operas, of course, have that something extra: sets, costumes, lighting and all the features of the living stage, including—fingers are eternally crossed!—performers who can act and who look their roles.

Whatever else happens when Puccini’s Turandot opens this month in the Civic Theatre, patrons will be getting an eyeful. The retina-searing purple-blue-red-and-green sets and costumes are by David Hockney, the fashionable British painter and photographer whose productions of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Mozart’s The Magic Flute are by now virtual classics. His Turandot production was presented here in 1997 (with soprano Jane Eaglen making her local debut as the story’s frigid Chinese princess), and the show has been up and down the California coast. Audiences invariably love it, no matter who’s singing. However, as with so much of Hockney’s work for the stage, the lighting director must be on his or her toes at the controls to get the blinding Technicolor visuals just right.

Turandot isn’t the only flashy spectacle on the SDO roster this season. Hockney has formidable competition in the eye-popping department during the unveiling next month of fashion designer Zandra Rhodes’ production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. Rhodes dreamed up the SDO’s fanciful The Magic Flute in 2001, when management festooned opening-nighters in complimentary phosphorescent pink boas and boutonnières, effectively making the audience part of the show.

Unlike Rhodes, a Commander of the British Empire, San Diego–based scenic designer Jane LaMotte boasts humbler credentials, including productions at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Lamb’s Players Theatre, the Globe and SeaWorld, but her preliminary sketches and paintings for Leos Janá´c`ek’s Katya Kabanova (April) look impressive. It’s truly remarkable for San Diego to mount two totally new productions in a single season. Adding considerably to the Katya excitement will be the appearance of fabulous American soprano Patricia Racette as Janá´c`ek’s doomed heroine. Those who saw her in this part in Santa Fe last August were blown away—this writer included.

Although Hockney’s Turandot is making its second appearance here, SDO’s general director, Ian Campbell, is attempting to uphold his record for finding fresh talent. New to town are Ukrainian-Canadian soprano Anna Shafajinskaia as Turandot, Argentinean tenor Dario Volonté as Calàf and Russian basso Maxim Mikhailov as Timur. America Chinese soprano Ai-Lan Zhu repeats her 1997 role as Liù. Edoardo Müller will conduct, with stage direction by Lotfi Mansouri.

Metropolitan Opera designer Zack Brown’s Don Carlo is coming up in March, so with the exception of John Conklin’s overexposed sets for La Traviata in May, that’s plenty of opera that will be (with a few prayers to the lyric muses) eminently worth “seeing."

(Civic Theatre, Third Ave. & B St., downtown, 619-570-1100.)

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