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San Francisco Chronicle
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Baritone Brian Mulligan on coming out with San Francisco Opera in style and song
For two decades, baritone Brian Mulligan has performed on many of the world's great stages, but his heart belongs to San Francisco. Now, in a full-circle moment, the internationally acclaimed singer returns to make history as one of the featured soloists in San Francisco Opera's first-ever Pride Concert, set for Friday, June 27, at the War Memorial Opera House. 'San Francisco Opera is unquestionably the most important opera company in my life,' Mulligan, 46, told the Chronicle by phone from his native town of Endicott in upstate New York. 'They have taken chances on me and given me opportunities that no place else in the world has done. I consider it my home opera company.' While the baritone snagged his first professional role at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 2003 when still a student at the Juilliard School, he's truly come into his own in San Francisco. Since making his debut at the War Memorial in 2008's ' La Bohème,' he's appeared there nearly two dozen times, singing everything from the title characters in ' Sweeney Todd ' and ' Nixon in China ' to a series of Wagner roles (mostly recently Telramund in 2023's ' Lohengrin '). He is set to return in October to sing the role of Amfortas in a new production of Wagner's 'Parsifal.' 'I've had so many firsts in San Francisco,' he recalled fondly, listing his first major Verdi role as Count Anckarström in 2014's 'Un Ballo in Maschera' among them. 'It's incredible to go back and see people, faces who know me and have helped me over the years to deliver performance after performance.' For the Pride Concert, Mulligan is slated to be joined by a few other San Francisco Opera favorites, mezzo-sopranos Jamie Barton and Nikola Printz, for a program featuring tunes by Harold Arlen and Jerry Herman, among others, as well as operatic fare by Tchaikovsky and Camille Saint-Saëns. Music Director Eun Sun Kim will share conducting duties with Robert Mollicone, while drag queen Sapphira Cristál serves as emcee. Mulligan spoke to the Chronicle about Pride and his passion for the Opera ahead of the upcoming concert. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Q: On the cusp of the city's 55th Pride Celebration, the San Francisco Opera is presenting its very first Pride Concert. What does that milestone mean to you? There was a long time (when) I felt my sexuality was a liability as an opera singer. Because almost all of the roles I play are straight people, being gay isn't exactly a good calling card. (But) over the years, I've proven myself as an actor. That's what being an opera singer is all about — portraying somebody else. Q: You've said that one of the reasons you leaned into opera growing up was because you were gay. Could you please elaborate on that? A: I started taking voice lessons when I was 17, and at that age, I didn't know or understand my sexuality. I knew that I was different, and (by) taking a step toward opera, which was also different, I was establishing my otherness — because most people don't know or understand anything about opera. Q: Fast-forward a few decades to this upcoming Pride Concert. Among the tunes you're preparing to sing are 'You Take My Breath Away,' Freddie Mercury's 1976 hit with Queen, as well as the aria 'I love you, dear' from Tchaikovsky's 'The Queen of Spades.' Did you make the selections? A: I had a hand in choosing the songs, but they were largely suggested by (the company). They explained that they were trying to highlight gay composers, iconic gay moments in opera and theater. (As) with any kind of recital program, it's about the order that you sing the pieces in. I'm starting with the Tchaikovsky; that will be most technically challenging because it's opera. After that, we'll move to the standard stuff. Q: Your 2022 solo CD, 'Alburnum,' features works by Mason Bates, Missy Mazzoli and Gregory Spears. You've also sung in contemporary operas, including John Adams' 'Nixon in China.' What is your attraction to new music? A: I often say to people, 'The greatest music may not have been composed yet.' There's a lot of phenomenal music that's been composed, but I have to believe that there's music that we don't know about yet. I really believe that one of the biggest draws for me in performing contemporary music is (that) often, it's written in English. I communicate best in English because it can (sometimes) be a struggle in other languages. No matter how good I get at German, French or Italian, I'm most powerful as a communicator in English. Q: As is the case with most successful opera singers today, your travel schedule is something akin to a rock star's. In the last few weeks, you were in Leipzig, Germany, before which you made your debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Where do you go to rejuvenate, and how do you keep it together on the road? A: Because I'm working more than 85% of the year, a few years ago I moved back to upstate New York, where my entire immediate and extended family lives — and I actually get to see them. So I come home to the absolute country. It's quiet. This morning, I opened the windows and I could hear all of the birds. It's incredible. I love living here. I have a small Norwich Terrier, Beauregard, who just turned 7, but he's still a puppy in many ways. He has a European passport, and he's been traveling with me everywhere — except Asia or the U.K. — since he was a baby, so he's completely used to it. I've found now that my life is centered around him, and wherever I go, I make sure it's near a place that's beautiful where we can walk. … He's improved my life, and since I need to (rest my voice) when I'm not performing, it's all silence with him. A: It's funny because I was thinking maybe I should wear some kind of glittery, sparkly, crazy Pride thing. But as time went on and I thought about it, Pride is actually more about being yourself and just owning who you are, and who I am is a simple tux kind of guy. I'm wearing a black tux with pink accessories — a pink tux shirt for part of the show and a pink pocket square.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Summer opera festivals have gone Wagner mad
Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn't be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades. And now look. We've got Parsifal at Glyndebourne (its third Wagner staging), a chamber-sized Tristan coming up at Grimeborn and a full Ring cycle starting next year at Grange Park Opera – which, having built its own back-garden theatre, has followed the Martin Graham playbook still further by importing Longborough's music director Anthony Negus. Meanwhile in Notting Hill, Opera Holland Park has taken a first step into the Bayreuth club with The Flying Dutchman, Wagner's shortest opera, and the least Wagnerian that actually sounds Wagnerian, if that makes any sense. It certainly makes sense for OHP, which is still operating on a Covid-era stage that places the orchestra in the middle of the performance space. That's not invariably a bad thing: the orchestra is the sea on which this drama sails, and with Peter Selwyn conducting, the City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's (moderately reduced) score with suitably salty vigour. The apron stage thrust the singers towards the audience, the roof of OHP's tent was configured to suggest sails, and out among the shrubs and the five-a-side pitches, the peacocks gave their best impression of seagulls. There was plenty to admire in Julia Burbach's production, too, plus a few things that weren't so great. Senta (Eleanor Dennis, bright and austere) was on stage almost throughout and her rusty skeleton of a house is tilted like a shipwreck. When Daland (a bluff Robert Winslade Anderson) brings the Dutchman (Paul Carey Jones) home to meet her, gravity propels her towards him – a neat visual metaphor. Neal Cooper as Erik, and Angharad Lyddon, as Mary, found more (both musically and dramatically) than you'd have thought possible in these thankless roles, while the masked ghost crew stalked the action in silence. The Holland Park set-up gives the big choral scenes a real physicality. The negatives? OHP performs the opera in its three-act form, which is unusual these days but valid enough. A pity, though, to lose the orchestral postlude that Wagner added in a later revision, and there was some curious textual jiggery-pokery at the end of Act One, introducing a female chorus into an act where Wagner's sonic palette is built around the darkness of male voices. Possibly it's authentic – Wagner tinkered with The Flying Dutchman a lot, and it'd take a musicologist to unpick all the variants – but it rang false, even if the score as presented was a better fit for Burbach's vision, which was more concerned with obsession and social isolation than transcendence. The City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's score with suitably salty vigour Again, that's a valid approach, but it meant that the ending of the opera was confusing. Senta simply wandered off stage. And it was a bumper night for 21st-century-opera-director mannerisms (chilly, distant lovers; domestic violence; silent doppelgangers populating the overture) though if you're a regular operagoer, you price that in. Overall, though, the energy and atmosphere won through, crowned by Carey Jones's weatherbeaten Dutchman: rough in all the right places and positively sulphurous in the depths. Carey Jones was a formidable Wotan at Longborough. Clearly, a rising tide lifts all boats – even ghost ships. It's not every year, moreover, that the UK sees two different but comparably fine productions of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Close on the heels of Opera North's touring production, Grange Park Opera has opened its season with what turns out to be a revival of David Pountney's 1997 staging for Welsh National Opera; complete with costumes in the colours of renaissance frescos and shifting, sea-dappled abstract sets by the great Ralph Koltai. Insert your own bitter aside about how a national company has been defunded by the Arts Council (Welsh and English: both are culpable) to the point that only private festivals can now afford to revive classic productions that were once public property. What matters here is that Grange Park has done it proud, with excellent singing in every role. Otar Jorjikia, as a purposeful Gabriele, made a particularly strong pairing with Elin Pritchard's Amelia: a performance in which pathos burned as bright as passion. Gianluca Marciano conducted vividly, and Simon Keenlyside was a noble Boccanegra – by turns expansive, belligerent and vulnerable in one of Verdi's most Shakespearean title roles.
Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Sincere, serious and beautiful: Glyndebourne's Parsifal reviewed
'Here time becomes space,' says Gurnemanz in Act One of Parsifal, and true enough, the end of the new Glyndebourne Parsifal is in its beginning. We don't know that, at first: the sickbed image that's glimpsed during the prelude doesn't resolve itself until the opera's closing scenes. In between, characters appear on stage in multiple forms, at different ages – past and future selves attendant on the present, whatever 'present' means in Monsalvat. Wagner, after all, makes it clear enough that time in the Grail Domain moves in mysterious ways, and his whole musical strategy reinforces that truth. So I can't get too upset about those multiple personas, even though the presence of miming doppelgangers in an opera production is typically one of the most damaging of gimmicks. In this case, though, and in this opera – well, to quote Gurnemanz again: you see, it is not so. The director Jetske Mijnssen manages the interaction between the figures on stage in thoughtful and expressive ways, finding a language for what she evidently sees as the true subject of the drama: the awakening of compassion between a group of damaged, all-too-human characters. The deliberate pace of Wagner's score allows the visual puzzles to disclose their meaning over time. Whatever else this is, it's a sincere and serious attempt to make sense of a work that asks far more questions than it answers. Visually, it's handsome – in Ben Baur's designs the Grail dwells amid the dark wood and sombre drapes of a 19th-century mansion. By Act Three, decay (or if you prefer, liberation) has set in; Kundry (Kristina Stanek) has shed her Victorian frock and an altarpiece of Christ has been turned to the wall.
Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The glorious elitism of Glyndebourne
There is nowhere in May more beautiful than England with the hawthorn out, the clear light and a thousand shades of green. And there is nowhere more beautiful in England than Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house between the Downs and the coast. Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner's final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master's late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: 'Oh play that thing!' Music-lovers have been coming to this blessed plot of land outside Lewes since 1934 when John Christie invited three refugees from Germany to establish a shrine to Mozart.
Epoch Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Great Music May Surpass Our Understanding
Many things we thought we knew have been found to be false. Things like 'the world is flat,' or 'the sun revolves around the world,' make us a bit more cautious when arriving at a conclusion or passing judgment. Regarding aesthetic matters, one sees that works of art are great mysteries whose qualities and laws are far beyond our knowing. Whether they are good or bad is a more confounding issue still. Beethoven's great mystery, the Ninth Symphony, has been perceived in many ways, as many, in fact, as there have been listeners. It seems sublime to some, monstrous to others. The music historian and novelist Romain Rolland said it was 'an unsurpassed triumph of the human spirit.' Yet, Ludwig Spohr, the German composer and Beethoven's contemporary, called it grotesque, tasteless and trivial. Beethoven in 1804, the year he began work on the Fifth Symphony; detail of a portrait by W.J. Mähler. Public Domain Robert Schumann thought that Richard Wagner 'to put it concisely, is not a good musician,' and that his music was 'often quite amateurish, meaningless and repugnant.' The childlike composer Anton Bruckner, however, upon meeting Wagner, fell on his knees and kissed his hand. The elder composer had to rein in Bruckner during a performance of 'Parsifal,' asking that he not clap so loudly. Bruckner in his turn was called 'a fool and a half' by the rich and powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, but Jean Sibelius, a deeper mind and more generous heart, called him 'the greatest living composer.' A photograph of Johannes Brahms in 1866 by Lucien Mazenod. Public Domain Johannes Brahms was adored by Clara Schumann, who wrote that he was: ' one of those who comes as if straight from God,' while Benjamin Britten had other ideas: 'I play through all Brahms every so often to see if he's as bad as I thought—and usually find him worse.' Tchaikovsky wrote in a letter to a friend that he would like to say 'Mr. Brahms! I think you are a talentless, pretentious, and completely uninspired person.' But the Russian composer himself suffered the assorted slings and arrows of people supposedly 'in the know": His great B flat minor concerto was not well received at its premiere. Nikolai Soloviev, composer, critic and professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, remarked 'Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.' Related Stories 3/13/2025 4/11/2025 The mighty Tsar Alexander III also had negative views. In his diary, Tchaikovsky wrote 'The Tsar was haughty to me 'Very nice,'!!!!! [sic] he said to me after the rehearsal [of 'Sleeping Beauty']. God bless him.' Igor Stravinsky, however, revered the composer to his last days, and dedicated 'Le Baiser de la fée' to his memory.' Let Each Judge These witnesses for the prosecution and for the defense lead to only one possible verdict: All criticism is precarious, personalized, and subject to change. There is and can be no explanation of why one piece of music pleases one man and displeases another; it is, and will remain, a mystery. A phrase from a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier says, 'We older children grope our way, from dark behind to dark before.' But in our groping, we now and then come upon something more or less solid, something that we might use as a touchstone for what lies beyond pleasing or not pleasing: What is good or bad, truthful or counterfeit. The homestead of John Greenleaf Whittier; this poet create a hospitable home in which to write and think. We have time itself, for example, the judge that decides what will be remembered, and what forgotten; we have what Virginia Woolf described as 'the feeling of being added to.' Most solid of all might be philosopher Immanuel Kant's idea in 'Critique of Judgment,' that 'if the fine arts are not imbued with moral ideals that are common to the whole of mankind, then they can serve only as frivolous entertainments to which people resort to deaden their discontent with themselves.' Let each of us question and judge. Einstein tells us we should never lose a 'holy curiosity.' What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to
