Two women next to me at a recent performance of John Adams’ newest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” chatted about how much they hated it. Still, one said her husband loved it.
No, that husband wasn’t me. But, for a time during the roughly three-hour world premiere by the Berkeley-based composer at San Francisco Opera, I was immersed in a “love-it” reaction and thought it was a good beginning of the company’s 100th season.
As the days and hours passed since then, however, I am questioning Adams’ overuse of vast propulsive rhythms — with debts owed to Stravinsky and Prokofiev and sometimes seemingly never-ending and also anchored in 20th-century minimalism — and his underuse of orchestration rooted late 19th-century European romanticism and even snippets of American pop music — that is, the broader palette for which he is known and justly acclaimed. Consider his best-known work, the 1987 opera “Nixon in China” or his 1985 symphonic piece “Harmonielehre.”
South Korean-born conductor Eun Sun Kim adroitly led the orchestra through the mostly dissonant and relentlessly galvanic contour of Adams’ score. No easy task, for sure.
Directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, who, with dramaturg Lucia Scheckner, blended ancient imagery with 1930s glamour, the Shakespeare play upon which most of Adams’ libretto is based, with passages also culled from Plutarch, Virgil and other classics, revolves around the theme of world empire.
Underscoring its relevance to our own times, it has contemporary echoes in the ambitions of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who dreams of being a modern-day Peter the Great restoring his homeland to latter-day glory by invading Ukraine and also casting a cold, covetous eye on other former Soviet-controlled countries.
In some quarters, the 1607 play is considered one of the playwright’s richest and most moving works. Known to many as a required text in high school English classes or to fans of films that recount the story, it tells the familiar tale of Roman general Mark Antony, who is desperately in love with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and former mistress of Julius Caesar. The rivalry between Caesar’s successor, Octavius, and Antony, and the latter’s tactical misjudgments at the Battle of Actium doom the general and the queen — he fatally wounds himself and she famously arranges to have an asp delivered to her in a basket of figs.
After two acts, the curtain came down on Tony Award-winning set designer Mimi Lien’s construct, largely comprised of black, telescoping scrims. While the sets did not have to be equal to, say, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1966 production of Samuel Barber’s opera of the same name, which, by some accounts, was an overwhelming grand spectacle, one royal throne in this new staging had all the appeal of an upholstered chair found at a garage sale. The production team could have done better here and there with a couple of upgraded minor details.
And the average operagoer could well argue that the production boasted one too many distracting pre-World War II-era montages of Italian fascist rallies that presaged the rise of Mussolini — even though they helped to reinforce the notion of where unbridled political and military ambitions ultimately lead if enough people buy into the vision of a charismatic and narcissistic but misguided and temperamental leader.
Know of any?
As for the singing, it was adequate and led by the pair in the title roles, Egyptian soprano Amina Edris, whose dramatic vocals soared consistently when Adams’ score called on her to reach the uppermost balcony in the War Memorial Opera House; and Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley, notable for his vocal gravitas and his role as J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 2005 world premiere of Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” also at San Francisco Opera.
They were at their best when, by turns, emotionally acerbic and loving, such as Cleopatra needling him as “the scarce-bearded Caesar” in Act 1, scene 1; such as Antony caustically summing her up as “the false soul of Egypt” in Act 2, scene 1; and such as Cleopatra, holding Antony in her arms as he dies and sings, “Noblest of men, will’t thou die? Has thou no care for me?” And as she dies, snake-bit, imagines Antony’s call, saying, “I see him rouse himself to praise my noble act. I hear him mock the luck of Caesar.”
American tenor Paul Appleby came across as the determined Octavius; American bass-baritone Alfred Walker impressed as a full-throated Enobarbus, Antony’s lieutenant; and American mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Deshong added vocal thrust and weight to her role as Octavia, Caesar’s sister and the wife of Antony.
No doubt in the coming years Adams will continue his fondness for expanding on minimalism and incorporating any number of expressive elements, including lively cultural references, high and low, that define our collective culture in the 21st century.
In New Yorker writer Alex Ross’ 2007 book “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” the author quoted Adams as saying, “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other.”
And Ross, in the book’s epilogue, also wrote, “One possible destination for 21st-century music is a final ‘great fusion’: intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language.”
But Adams’ “Antony and Cleopatra,” while an earnest effort at composing a fast-paced “sung drama” and very different from his previous works, likely will not be an exemplar of that fusion.
“Antony and Cleopatra” continues at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 27, 2 p.m. Oct. 2 and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; for tickets, visit sfopera.com or telephone (415) 864-3330.
— Richard Bammer is a Reporter staff writer.
