![Patricia Racette as Dolores Claiborne [Photo © Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/SFO_Clai_01.png)
22 Sep 2013
Dolores Claiborne in San Francisco
Dolores Claiborne, the heroine of the book Dolores Claiborne (1992), is a figment of the imagination of prolific pulp horror novelist Stephen King.
Recently in Performances
ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude
English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Royal Opera House Gala Concert
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Precipice: The Grange Festival
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Performances
Just now she has been made into an operatic heroine by composer Tobias Picker with one assumes a lot of undocumented help from J.D. McClatchy, his librettist.
But before the opera the fictional Dolores Claiborne became the heroine of a movie (film does not seem the appropriate term) back in 1995 that a lot of people seem to remember even though a lot more films based on Stephen King novels made a lot more money (seventeen of them made more money to be exact).
If these two pop genres are not part of your general culture and opera is, and you happened into the War Memorial Opera House and caught Dolores Claiborne you might have been as aghast as I was.
This poor domestic servant (Dolores) had just emptied the bedpan and changed the diaper of her mean old employer when the bitter old woman was chased down the stairs by the ghost of her murdered husband. A lot happened before this, for example Dolores’ daughter Selena was raped by her father, Dolores’ husband Joe (a big number about “into the well and don’t tell”). But Selena worked hard and became a lonely Boston lawyer after Dolores got Joe drunk during the 1962 eclipse of the sun and pushed him into a well, then hit him on the head with a big rock when he tried to climb out.
Elizabeth Futral as Vera Donovan
With all this, and it is only for starters, there was not much time for psychological immersion. Empathy too was out of the question given that the sordid situations these unfortunate figments of Mr. King’s imagination got themselves into were revolting.
The governing tension of the piece is that men abuse women (there is quite a list of ways in the opera) and that God is a man and not interested in women so women must become mean bitches to take care of themselves (these are the words used in the opera). One might take a moment to compare the tensions explored in Werther or Wozzeck (or for nearly any other opera in the repertory), tensions that engender psychological exploration and emotional elaboration.
There is no point in imagining the music that might equal the situations of this libretto, except, just for the fun of it, to imagine music that might be created for a solar eclipse. There was not a hint of any such music. Tobias Picker let the words of the story tell the story in plausible, more or less conventional musical lines supported by appropriate, more or less conventional contemporary sounds emerging from the pit.
There was but one moment of reflection that stood out in the evening. Dolores’ daughter Selena was alone on stage in the starry blackness of the solar eclipse and senses that things are not quite right. It was a beautiful moment before it got musically boring, but it did call attention to the absolutely brilliantly designed set, the work of Allen Moyer. Here it was the projection of an all black abstraction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” and it was the opera’s only imaginative moment.
Susannah Biller as Selena, Wayne Tigges as Joe St. George and Patricia Racette as Dolores Claiborne
Moyer’s set was the outline of a rural police office elaborated by cinematic projections (by Greg Emetaz), some realistic, some abstractions of physical spaces, and there were stunning landscapes created across the width of the stage, among them a realistic clapboard house sitting in actual coastal marshes of Maine. With effective lighting by Christopher Akerlind the physical production achieved immense emotional atmospheres that were without response in the music. One assumes that stage director James Robinson had much to do with the realization of this superb physical production.
Mezzo soprano Dolora Zajick had the foresight to abandon the project, the role of Dolores Claiborne assumed and achieved, heroically, by diva Patricia Racette. Unfortunately there are already two sopranos in the score. The old woman Vera, vocally conceived as a high, thin aged voice was taken by Elizabeth Futral (in splendid voice). Dolores’ daughter Selena sung by Susannah Biller was the high coloratura voice of youth. Mme. Zajick would have provided welcomed alternative vocal color. Bass Wayne Tigges sang Dolores’ no-good husband Joe, and tenor Greg Fedderly was the not-too-bright country detective.
It was a high-powered cast who gave it their all. It was a waste of important talent. Conductor George Manahan held it together from the pit.
Michael Milenski
Cast and production information:
Dolores Claiborne: Patricia Racette; Selena St. George: Susannah Biller; Vera Donovan: Elizabeth Futral; Joe St. George: Wayne Tigges; Detective Thibodeau: Greg Fedderly; Mr. Pease: Joel Sorensen; Teenage Girl: Nikki Einfeld; Teenage Boy: Hadleigh Adams; Maid: Jacqueline Piccolino; Maid: Nikki Einfeld; Maid: Marina Harris; Maid: Laura Krumm; Maid: Renée Rapier; Mr. Cox: Robert Watson; Mr. Fox: Hadleigh Adams; Mr. Knox: A.J. Glueckert. Chorus and Orchestra of the San Francisco Opera. Conductor: George Manahan; Stage Director: James Robinson; Set Designer: Allen Moyer; Costume Designer: James Schuette; Lighting Designer: Christopher Akerlind; Projection Designer: Greg Emetaz. San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, September 18, 2013.