Shakespeare’s poetry is beloved, but there is too much to cram into an opera with an innovative and challenging score. Others wondered about the location of the universe they’d watched unfold before them, doubting what they were supposed to do there. Some of the audience rode the course and, after the finale, walked into the San Francisco night with their wits about them highly polished. Is the opera set in Egypt or Rome? Is the time contemporary or long ago? SFO sets the musical and operatic bar very high. There was excitement about it, but also sometimes confusion about important aspects. The show featured glamorous costumes, stylish sets, a full contingent of performers, and the San Francisco Chorus under the new supervision of John Keene. Onstage was a full cast of fine voices, including Amina Edris as Cleopatra, Gerald Finley as Antony, and Paul Appleby as Caesar. San Francisco’s own Eun Sun Kim conducted the score with acumen and an abundance of sound as she guided all 72 instrumentalists of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra with unity and intensity. However, overall, “Antony and Cleopatra” was a wonder, not unlike the story’s dazzling, dramatic, and defiant lovers. Aspects were lost in the wealth and welter of all that the artistic team aimed to portray. At other times, just one narrative line would have been better. While taking in Adams’ new opera, sometimes only the music, with one or several voices reciting Shakespeare’s play, was desirable. Though its ambitious attempt to capture the globe itself, all time and space, full and rich and marvelous, was at times a little too much. The production has everything-story, poetry and drama, newsreels, fascism, ancient Roman generals, ecstasy, rage, and beauty. The work was a co-commission and co-production with the Metropolitan Opera and Liceu Opera Barcelona. San Francisco Opera gave “Antony and Cleopatra” its world premiere at the War Memorial Opera House on Sept. So Adams tells us in the latest from his roster of remarkable operas. “I am fire and air my other elements I give to baser life.” So sings Cleopatra in John Adams’ “Antony and Cleopatra.” The baser life about which Cleopatra sings is everything that is not she and everything that was not Antony.
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