At the Opera

As I mentioned earlier, our spring break adventures included an opera performance. I didn't start out planning for that experience, but it turned out quite well.

Prior to this, my opera experience was limited to two field trips to the San Francisco Opera House during elementary school. I know we saw Carmen, and I'm pretty sure the second was A Midsummer Night's Dream. I can recognize and name a couple of famous arias, but that's about it. It just wasn't part of my world.

One of the pieces Son played with his youth symphony orchestra this spring was O Mio Babbino Caro by Puccini, from the opera Gianni Schicchi. [In fact, he had a bass solo in this piece, and didn't even tell us before the performance! His rationale: "If you knew I was doing a solo, you would have made me practice and practice forever." I'll post a link to the MP3 file as soon as the concert CD arrives in the mail.] I recognized this aria as part of the soundtrack from A Room with a View, but didn't know anything more about it.

As I searched various events calendars for things to do while in Seattle, the name Gianni Schicchi popped up. The Seattle Opera has a "young artists" program, kind of a post-doc experience for singers between their formal training and their first full professional position. These performances aren't at the Seattle Center, but in Bellevue, the same neighborhood we were staying in. It was combined on the program with The Enchanted Child by Ravel, and tickets were quite reasonably priced. Since this was an opportunity to see Son's piece in its context, I decided to take the plunge.



The kids' initial response to this plan was less than enthusiastic, but they acquiesced with very little protest, and all of us ended up thoroughly enjoying the performance. Both productions had very contemporary staging: in The Enchanted Child, the Child was a bratty ponytailed girl in a school blazer and plaid skirt with headphones plugged into her ears as she ignored her mother's entreaties. One of the characters moved through the scene on a Razor scooter wearing leather, chains, and a flaming red mohawk.

Gianni Schicchi opened with the patriarch dying in his elaborate bed complete with canopy, draperies, and frescoed ceiling. Across the stage, his relatives gathered on red velvet sofas to await his demise... while they watched a soccer match on a flat-screen TV and shouted and cursed at the players and refs. There were several over-the-top characters, but the best was Gianni himself who had all the persona of Tony Soprano (not that the kids really got it, but the laughter from the adult audience was contagious). Both were quite funny and the kids really came away with a better understanding that artists can take their work very seriously to produce a comic result. And the setting was informal enough that the cast came out and mingled with the audience in the lobby afterward. I'll be keeping an eye out for these productions whenever we find that we'll be spending some time in the Seattle area.