San Francisco Opera opened its 104th season Tuesday with an engrossing and warmly sung performance of Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” after a delay due to a musicians strike that was settled after almost a week of negotiations.
No orchestra, no opera, to state the obvious. The situation was brought home on Sept. 12, the original opening night, as patrons who hadn’t heard the news arrived at the War Memorial Opera House to see musicians, with their instruments in backpacks, carrying signs.
However, it signals well for the future that Tuesday’s first performance was a model of committed, orchestral playing, led by Eun Sun Kim with her usual passion and fine detail, and sung so robustly.
The opera’s plot might seem more far-fetched than most if it weren’t based on a real figure in 14th-century Genoa who was elected Doge after a career in seafaring piracy. The Doge had two ambitions: to bring peace to warring Italy and to find a long-lost daughter.
Boccanegra’s objectives are made difficult by his rival Fiesco and enemy Paolo; and his joy when he is reunited with his daughter Amelia is dimmed, too. Amelia loves Gabriele, yet another antagonist whose royal family has a dark history with the Doge.
Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat handled the title role with ease, his dark and burnished baritone a handsome fit for the beleaguered Doge. In the great council scene, his ardent phrasing carried the day in striking, bold colors as the opera chorus, in its own starring role, responded boisterously in a plea for peace.
Verdi endowed the reconciliation scene between Boccanegra and Amelia with the opera’s most beautiful music, and Eleonora Buratto’s strong, gleaming soprano was at every moment a perfect pairing for Boccanegra.
Buratto, in her company debut, presented so powerfully in each ensemble, it seemed she might at a future time step into the role of Doge. Her duets with Gabriele, sung in a ravishing, dramatic tenor by Joshua Guerrero, were dreamlike.
Baritone Christian van Horn was an imposing Fiesco and baritones Aleksey Bogdanov and Gabriel Natal-Báez were suitably oily conspirators.
Claus Guth’s minimalist staging in this revival (originally presented by Hamburg State Opera) directed here by Katherine Carter is the most un-Italian possible approach to “Boccanegra.” The concept of having the singers dressed in contemporary business attire continually walking forward and backward onstage past each other without making eye contact serves only to diminish the emotions and dumb down the choral response, particularly in the father-daughter reconciliation and fiery council scenes. Also, Christian Schmidt’s design, an empty room with a large, live framed panel (and what appeared to be a giant meteorite) does very little to drive the narrative.
That said, there are two more highly engaging musical performances of “Simon Boccanegra” to be seen at the War Memorial Opera House.
San Francisco Opera’s “Simon Boccanegra” is onstage at 7:30 p.m. Sept 25 and 2 p.m. Sept. 27 at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are $30 to $447 at sfopera.com.