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Berkeley Opera at Caffé Venezia

Berkeley Opera singers continue the New Year's Eve tradition at Berkeley's Caffé Venezia on University Avenue. Enjoy a special dinner in an evocative Italian setting to the music of your favorite opera arias.

Call Caffé Venezia at 510-849-4681 for reservations.

For other Opera Nights throughout the year see caffevenezia.com.

Berkeley Public Library Events

SPECIAL FREE EVENTS AT THE BERKELEY PUBLIC LIBRARY

• Noon Concert: Highlights from Don Giovanni in the Art and Music Room, 5th floor. Thursday, February 11, 2010, 12:15 - 1:00 p.m.
  
  
• Noon Concert: Highlights from The Tender Land in the Art and Music Room, 5th floor. Thursday, April 1, 12:15 - 1:00 p.m.

Reviews from our 2009 Season

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, aka E.T.A. Hoffmann, is certainly one of the most fascinating characters to emerge from a century overflowing with fascinating characters. He has been rendered — if possible — a little more so by the Berkeley Opera.

Born in East Prussia in 1776, Hoffmann became one of the 19th-century's most popular, if slightly macabre, writers. He was, at the same time, a lawyer, composer, music critic, painter, caricaturist and an enduring, although dissolute and unfaithful, husband.

The plucky 30-year-old Berkeley Opera is currently in the midst of four performances of Jacques Offenbach's not-quite-completed 1881 opera, "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" (The Tales of Hoffmann), which is loosely based on the infamous Hoffmann's life.

The Berkeley production benefits mightily from a wittily illuminating update of the Offenbach-Barbier French-language original, written by Berkeley resident David Scott Marley. Marley's version, defined in the program not as a translation, but as an "English adaption," allows ample creative leeway, as well as a reordering of the opera's various elements. While both plot iterations feature Hoffmann as the primary character in an amalgam of three of his own fantastical stories, Marley has endowed his, in a way that other English translations do not, with a pleasing supply of graceful rhyme that melds beautifully and lyrically into Offenbach's music.

Berkeley's Hoffmann, portrayed as a sort of anti-hero writer suffering from "writer's cramp," is sung by tall, dark-haired tenor Adam Flowers. The opening scene sets him and a jolly company of opera patrons doubling as an exceptionally skilled opera chorus, in a basement cafe enjoying drinks during an intermission in the opera going on in the hall above. The glittering star of the opera happens to be Stella, Hoffmann's current mistress, sung by the versatile soprano Angela Cadelago.

Tailing Hoffmann is his benevolently nagging "Muse," disguised as his sidekick, Nicklaus, a sort of guardian angel type who tries to encourage him to write. Mezzo-soprano Nora Lennox Martin, with laudable acting ability, voice and diction, created an exceptionally adept Nicklaus.

The ensuing plot entails Hoffmann's entertaining the assembled group by recounting the tales of his "other" mistresses — the mechanical doll Olympia, the tragically doomed singer Antonia and the heartlessly deceptive Venetian courtesan Giulietta — all impressively sung by the same Angela Cadelago.

Splendid baritone Paul Murray suavely inhabited all four of the evil figures creating havoc and challenging Hoffmann in each of his love affairs. Other roles were admirably sung by Wayne D. Wong, Sara Couden, Patricia Prewitt, George Arana, Brian M. Rosen and Alexander Frank.

Ernest Frederic Knell conducted the fine small orchestra; Phil Lowery created the clever staging; Emilica Sun Beahm did the Victorian "steam punk" costumes and Alex Sardelich provided the Victorian gothic sets.

HARD TIMES, whether economic, social, or political, can often serve as stimulus to human creativity — "necessity is the mother of invention" and that sort of thing. Berkeley Opera’s current production, Douglas Moore’s "The Ballad of Baby Doe," set to a libretto by John Latouche, offers a vivid case in point.

Composer Moore, known for his tonally melodic and engagingly rhythmic writing in what has been labeled "typical American folk style," based his opera on a true story that took place in rip-roaring mid-19th century Colorado during the heyday of silver mining. It’s a rags-to-riches-to-ruin tale of Vermont-born Horace Tabor, who, in midlife, divorces his cold-fish wife Augusta after falling deeply in love with a warm, beautiful, but decades-younger woman, a divorcee named Elizabeth "Baby" Doe.

Berkeley Opera’s big problem, according to its artistic director Jonathan Khuner, is the depressed economy. "Our reality-mandated 40 percent cut in the budget has required that the opera take place on a spare stage with just one table and five chairs," he says. It also forced Khuner to assume the duties of stage director in addition to conducting the show.

But, no need to worry. What Berkeley Opera may lack in money, it more than made up for with a heaping helping of ingenuity.

The most impressive, jaw-dropping examples of ingenuity were the breath-taking scenic projections created by Jeremy Knight, abetted by Alexander Kort’s lighting wizardry. I marveled at the Knight-Kort set-up: one huge rectangular screen forming the wall at the left side of the stage; four smaller rectangles aligned to suggest a receding perspective of windows veering off on the back of the stage. A large oval-shaped screen was set up on the right front of the stage to alternately accommodate a series of interiors, such as a saloon wall with a "naughty" Victorian painting of Leda and the Swan hanging above the projected rack of bar bottles; a prim parlor wall hung with stripped wallpaper and family portraits; a festively decorated room in Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel; or a forest of languid-looking willow trees lit by moonlight.

Who really needs a stage full of lumbering sets and heavy, sometimes awkwardly painted backdrops, when you can have such things as a realistic illusion of boom-town Denver backed by its magnificent ring of sky-high mountains via the ingenious use of artfully lighted scenic projections? High tech to the rescue!

But beyond the opera’s romantic love story aspect, the tale deals with the boom to bust former times when the idealistic, thoroughly democratic-minded Midwestern candidate William Jennings Bryan ran unsuccessfully for the presidency against William McKinley, who had the backing of powerful East Coast banks and financial institutions.

McKinley’s win, a tragedy for the silver rich Tabors, enabled the country’s transfer from a dual silver and gold standard for the American dollar to gold alone. Overnight, the Tabors lost their fortune as well as the friends and status it had attracted.

The role of Horace Tabor, was sung with appropriate gusto by rakishly handsome baritone, Torlef Borsting, who moved convincingly from rowdy full-voice banter at the saloon with his pals to sotto voce crooning to Baby Doe. His love song to her, "Warm as the Autumn Night" was especially beautiful.

Petite, but voluptuous soprano Jillian Khuner, a consummate singing actress, created an endearing Baby Doe. Her ultra high notes, sung pitch-pure at pianissimo levels during her "Willow Song," seemed capable of melting an iceberg or quenching a fire. While her high range soared, her midrange initially suffered from excessive vibrato.

Tall, reed-slim mezzo-soprano Lisa Houston, in her severely cut black gowns, was a convincing Augusta, as her character teetered on the edge of forgiveness, before finally, angrily, falling into an abyss of bitter vengeance.

In addition to a small, skilled chorus and orchestra, there were also two outstanding quartets of singers: Alexander Taite, Kenny Louis, Michael Beetham and Wayne Wong performing with exceptional dramatic and musical polish as Tabor’s long-time cronies, and a finely blended group of ladies — Elizabeth Wells, Angela Hayes, Elizabeth Gentner, and Cary Ann Rosko — who seemed to be having great fun acting out the righteous indignation of Augusta’s prim lady friends.

Reviews from the 2008 Season

Elixir of Love

Bluebeard's Castle and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges

Tosca

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