San Francisco’s alternative opera company has just now revived its 2021 production of Everest, a 2015 Dallas Opera commission about climbers on Mount Everest, here reimagined as a graphic novel (comic book format) cast onto a planetarium dome.
Unlike San Francisco’s other opera company Opera Parallèle is about production. Moving from performing space to performing space it delights its audiences with staging concepts and solutions that challenge, amuse and amaze our minds and spirits. Even so Everest at the California Academy of Sciences Planetarium was a bit of a stretch.
Though we may have imagined photographic images of the daunting atmospheres of this monstrous magnificent mountain in such an immersive, planetarium enclosure we were confronted with crudely drawn abstractions of the mountain, and comic book renderings of the human forms of the opera’s actors. There were no live performers, it was an entirely recorded experience.
Rob Hall (lead photo on left, Doug Hansen on right) was a New Zealand mountaineer who together with his wife Jan Arnold led Everest expeditions. Jan, pregnant, stayed behind for this 1996 expedition, Rob led two amateur climbers on this ill-fated ascent. Doug Hansen, a mailman, achieved the summit, then perished with Rob. Beck Weathers, a Texas pathologist, stranded on Everest’s “balcony” (1300 feet below the summit) staggered back to the base camp.
The opera is a memorial for these three men, and all of the twelve climbers who died during the 1996 Everest climbing season, plus maybe the twenty-three fatalities of the 2015 season, and probably the sixteen fatalities of the 2014 season, their faded images often floating onto the dome — anyway there were many names projected onto the dome in the final moments of the 68 minute opera.
Everest as a graphic novel for the local planetarium was conceived and directed by Brian Staufenbiel, Opera Parallèle’s creative director. Most likely it was a Covid-shutdown-era project when we were closeted in our respective creative spaces, a project that could be realized without bringing together the expansive resources of an opera production into the infectious confines of a theater. Plus it was hardly an unreasonable step, or maybe it was a mighty leap, to envision these well-storied, ill-fated climbers as super heroes achieving their impossible feats in the solitary confines of a comic book.
And where else than to imagine these feats taking place in the cosmic expanses of a planetarium.
Conductor Nicole Paiement, Opera Parallèle’s founder, had conducted the sizable orchestral resources (triple winds, full strings, much percussion) at the opera’s Dallas premiere. For the planetarium recording these forces were rendered in digital approximation by the opera’s British composer Joby Talbot working in London together with sound engineer Magnus Green, molded from afar by Mme. Paiement. The voices were individually recorded in Oakland, then it was all mixed together by sound designer Miles Lassi at Oakland’s Skyline Studios.
The Opera Parallèle Everest production itself was a feat that dwarfed the story it told.
The Everest libretto was created by Gene Scheer, well known for his collaborations with Jake Hegge and for a thwarted commission at San Francisco Opera for Cold Mountain (with composer Jennifer Higdon). The commission was subsequently assumed by Santa Fe Opera (et al), its premiere occurred the same year as Everest, relevant because in Cold Mountain Scheer was confronted with creating lines in the Appalachian accent. In Everest the Texas pathologist was sung in a definitive, jarring Southern accent.
Rather than portray Everest’s climbers in cosmic, heroic terms, Scheer created characters who were quite attached to their very basic human needs and feelings — an insecure postman, a depressive pathologist, a stoically sentimental leader. There was little heroism in Everest.
Opera Parallèle assembled an impressive cast for the recording of the opera, notably tenor Nathan Granner as the expedition leader Rob Hall and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as his wife Jan Arnold. The Texas pathologist Beck Williams was sung by Tennessee born bass Kevin Burdette, the postal worker Doug Hansen was sung by baritone Hadleigh Adams, Kevin Burdette’s daughter Meg was sung by soprano Charlotte Fanvu.
The animation was created by David Murakami, with illustrations by Mark Simmons. The sound design for the planetarium was effected by Miles Lassi.
Michael Milenski
Academy of Science, San Francisco, California. November 10, 2024. All photos copyright Scott Wall, courtesy of Opera Parallèle.