A rain soaked Saturday and I’m late for the opera.
I run for the train when the glasses I have tucked into my shirt collar begin to bounce like a contrarian to gravity. At the same time the coffee in my hand begins to slosh back and forth. The combination of centripetal force and the inferiority of post-pandemic coffee lids is a disaster predictably forthcoming. I reach up to secure the glasses mid-stride when the lid flies off with coffee going everywhere, but mostly on myself.
It’s a poor word choice. Spills. The coffee spews a geyser! A dark entity of slurrish brown viscous sludge pours onto me like that scene with Andy Dufrane when the sewer pipe explodes.
I make it onto the train in a nick of time with the door brushing my back as I jump through the doors. I board more akin to a kitchen supply than a human. Just a sad wet mop, a bible character after the flood watching New Jersey pass into the distance. This was no accident of gravity, but an act of god.
Arriving in Philadelphia and till running late I sprint off the train thru the Market Street subway station passing the homeless and drug addicts till I reach tuxedos and dresses and the flickering gas lights of the Academy of Music and enter onto the red-carpet-mirror-chandelier-lobby.
I made it! And…
My seat is A-MAZ-ING!
Front-center orchestra amazing, but I soon notice it smells bad. Permeating the air is stink like wet dog on a wool sweater on a moldy rug. To my embarrassment I quickly realize it’s me. The coffee I had spilled over myself had milk, and that milk is now beginning to go ripe.
The opera is about to start any second and I desperately look for an escape. I abhor anyone during a performance who distracts from the music including talking, whispers, candy wrappers, and even the overly perfumed. Now here I am a hypocrite skunk, a Pepe Le Pew, sitting in a $200 seat with the fancy people. Ma cherie!
I get up and embarrassingly and quickly tell an usher my story and ask if I can move off to the side where I can have a buffer between me and preferably anyone with a working nose.
This is embarrassing, but even more than that, leading up to this day I have been truly exhausted. Like teenager with mono exhausted. Understandable I think after a long stressful work week and running around to all these operas, but I’m not bouncing back. I can’t even muster the strength to read a book and barely drag myself out into the rain and onto the train for this opera. Three years on it never even occurred to me what was really happening.
Covid. After three and half years dodging it, it is Covid. By the next day I will have a fever and three Mondays later will still be coughing.
I can’t help but think that had the coffee not spilled I would have stayed in that amazing seat and I’m pretty sure someone if not everyone near me would have easily been infected before the final ovation. I was happy to take part in this act of god. For one of those opera loving souls remained healthy enough to live on for another opera.
Cough.
Cough.
Oh, yes, Simon Boccanegra!
It is clearly the centerpiece of the season.
The set stuns with sculpture and architecture. Two lions front the facade and a two story relief sculpture towers above the players for the second Act. The rigid stability of this royal court is then tendered with the feelings of the singers. It is this incredible cast who complete the incredible staging.
I breathe a sigh of relief sitting by myself as the curtain rises. I’m free of people and nothing heals and satisfies like live music, and Verdi writes the best. Rovaris, the conductor, who I’ve seen many times before, always solid, comes at it today with a glint in his eye like he just got laid. He throws glitter onto the harp, flute, and woodwinds in bright colors interspersed throughout this tragic drama. Verdi like Shakespeare knows when and where to write in a relief from the dramatic tension and Rovaris is reveling in those moments.
Verdi! The music is sumptuous mid-career. Give me an undulating arpeggio beneath a yearning vocal and… my Italian brethren, I’m putty. I melt into my sickness and soggy socks into an operatic dream.
Christian Van Horn brings commanding gravity. I have such fond recollection of him playing Mefistofole at the Met. It’s interesting, like Rovaris, I’ve seen him many times before and for both I never had any criticism towards them, but today both struck me as maturing into something more than they were – commanding in their confidence.
Mefistofole coincidentally is the only opera written by Arrigo Boito who would go on to write the librettos for both Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff. Before those two masterpieces he helped rewrite today’s opera Simon Boccanegra and famously adding the Council Chamber scene where we get to see opera do what only opera can do; have four people singing contrary things at the same time and rather than be untranslatable noise like in the real world, become fabulous haromony.
Kelsey Quinn and Ana Maria Martinez are also wonderful. They unfold nuanced passageways like Debussian waves. Their vocals linger over textures and massage them into crevices as they explore their characters complex personalities. They softly hold these fragile performances like it really means something, and to me it does.
Still wet, still exhausted, the coffee wiped off my glasses; this is the best I’m going to feel for the next two weeks. They say the Pandemic is now just merely endemic, but that doesn’t make me feel any less feverish.
Opera Philadelphia really tried to prove something in scale and quality with Simon Boccanegra, that Philadelphia is still a great music city post-pandemic. With magnificent aplomb they succeed!
So What is Simon Boccanegra all about? Sometimes I like to go into an opera knowing absolutely nothing, it can be a thrill to go along that ride. I don’t recommend that for Simon. Before going I would read through the synopsis and then read it again. It’s just complicated enough that you can miss the music trying to follow along. Personal tragedies framed around court intrigue, Synopsis.
Quinn Kelsey
Notes on the Production:
Composer……………………………………………… Giuseppe Verdi
Conductor……………………………………………… Corrado Rovaris
Simon Boccanegra………………………………….. Quinn Kelsey
Maria Boccanegra/Amelia Grimaldi…………. Ana Maria Martinez
Jacobo Fiesco …………………………………………. Christian Van Horn
Paulo Albiani……………………………………..…… Benjamin Taylor
Gabriele Adorno……………………………………… Richard Trey Smagur
11/24
Opera Philly