Dan and I went to San Francisco Opera’s production of Elixir on Wednesday night. It was such great fun to see and hear it right after finishing with Opera San José’s production. I certainly know the music intimately. I was sorry we missed Ramón Vargas. (Hmmm. He bagged the final show … ill?) Not that his replacement, Alex Shrader, wasn’t good. You can hear him in this first clip, which is in English since it was the version for families:
But I really did want to hear Mr. Vargas sing Una furtiva lagrima. Ah well, he sings a bit of it in this next clip:
I do wonder if the ice cream they are eating in this next clip is really ice cream. I’d heard that singers should avoid dairy products before singing. Hmmm. Is that true? (I know at least one singer who reads this. Mike?)
I was curious about tempi, since I thought we were draggy in a few spots. There were a few places that were slightly faster (precisely where I had wished some to be, actually … maybe I know something about tempi after all?!) but mostly it was much the same, and a few tempi were slower. I thought the SFO’s singers were good but, to be honest, I liked ours equally well. So there ya go. 🙂
We did discover that the buffet downstairs is far too expensive. Live and learn.
