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San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday, January
12, 2005 Obscure German Opera Blooms in Plucky,
Inspired Performance Monday night's concert
in Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco provided one
of the most heartening spectacles the musical scene can offer: a small,
doughty organization taking on an ambitious project and doing it superbly. The evening's hero was
the City Concert Opera Orchestra, a group that under founding music director
Thomas Busse specializes in unstaged performances of obscure operatic scores.
And the vehicle was "Die Weisse Rose" ("The White Rose"),
a 1986 work by the 61-year-old German composer Udo Zimmermann that has become
something of repertory staple in Europe without making much of a dent in this
country. Taken together, the
combination of repertoire and performance made for an inspiring package. Inspiring, but grim.
"The White Rose" takes its name from an anti-Nazi movement founded
in the early 1940s by Hans and Sophie Scholl, two young German Catholics who
were tried and executed in 1943. This version of the
opera, scored for two singers and 15 instrumentalists, is a wholesale
revision of an earlier incarnation that was a more traditionally linear
narrative. In the revised
version, with texts drawn by San Francisco Opera dramaturge Wolfgang
Willaschek from the letters and journals of the Scholls and theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, narrative is jettisoned in favor of a refractive series
of images -- observations of prison life, dreams and family reminiscences,
meditations on political morality. The result is more of
a dramatic song cycle (think Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire") than
an opera in the conventional sense. Nothing could be more
chilling than the final song, with its exhortations to political bravery from
ordinary citizens ("Don't say it is for your country! Don't play deaf
and dumb when Death is at home in your midst!"). The musical settings
are spare and haunting, in the allusive fashion of the Hungarian musical
aphorist György Kurtág. Zimmermann's stylistic palette is broad, from the
most abrasive dissonance to tender lyricism, but each selection is fleeting,
and even the fiercest passages make their impact felt with stark efficiency.
The whole thing runs only 75 minutes. Busse's command of the
score was unerring, and the instrumental ensemble played magnificently in a
score where Zimmermann's lean, bone-dry textures make every participant a
soloist. A recurrent duet for violinist Maki Ishii and harpist Karen
Gottlieb, and an extended solo passage by flutist Emma Moon, were only the
most memorable standouts. As Hans Scholl, Dale
Tracy displayed a warm, precise tenor that captured both the heroism and the
human vulnerability of the role. Soprano Carole Schaffer, though taxed here
and there by Zimmermann's cruelly high vocal writing, brought vigor and
urgency to the role of Sophie. Both singers provided an impressive model of
how to tackle unfamiliar and daunting fare. Kanbar Hall, which
seats between 420 and 480 depending on its configuration, has been home to a
variety of music, dance and spoken-word presentations since opening last
year. It's an invitingly intimate space, if a bit institutional in its
bareness; the acoustics are crisp and reliable.
© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle
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