San Francisco celebrated the opening of its 87th opera season with last night’s gala performance of this rousing middle-period Verdi favorite. A largely black-tie audience filled the War Memorial Opera House with festive elegance on this sad anniversary of our nation’s greatest tragedy. Among the more uniform evening clothes one noticed long trains of taffeta, antique lorgnettes, gauche costume tiaras, at least one pair of Groucho glasses (an homage to the Il Trovatore performance featured in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera), supercilious expressions worthy of the East Coast, and, this being San Francisco, a statuesque and utterly unaffected drag queen in full gown.

The historic evening marked the passing of company’s baton to a new music director, the talented Italian conductor Nicola Luisotti. Despite an inauspiciously sluggish playing of the national anthem, San Francisco’s new maestro led an incisive and passionate performance. Although Luisotti moved the orchestra unevenly at times, the imbalance reflected the opera’s violently changing moods and its characters tremendous emotional vicissitudes.

As the “last” bel canto opera, Trovatore falls awkwardly between the embellished artistry of the early nineteenth century and the gritty realism that began to appear in its middle decades. The musician facing such a challenge must pay homage to both styles. Luisotti’s inconsistencies addressed it effectively, though that may not have been his intention.

Despite the ambiguity in genre and the burdens of the global financial crisis, San Francisco fielded top talent in casting this production. In her San Francisco Opera debut Sandra Radvanovsky conquered Leonora’s demanding music with limpid artistry. Sonorous tones and insightful drama articulated the role with great intelligence. Her Act IV aria “D’amour sull’ali rosee” showcased effortless ascents into the upper register. Tenor Marco Berti appears to have escaped some of the roughness that characterized earlier performances I have heard him give elsewhere. He delivered Manrico’s part with real feeling. Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky added luster in di Luna’s part, singing with a sensitivity unusual for both the singer and the role. “Il balen del suo sorriso,” the love struck but prideful cavatina di Luna sings before his failed attempt to abduct Leonora, unrolled almost bashfully.

In other moments Hvorostovsky worked hard – perhaps a bit too hard — to overcome the dramatic staleness of which he is sometimes accused. The much talked about mezzo Stephanie Blythe brought her great musicianship and intelligent emotional tones to the role of Azucena. “Stride la vampa” resounded with burnished verve, as did her dynamic Act III scene. A supporting cast drawn largely from the San Francisco Opera’s Adler program for young singers filled out the performance. It was unfortunate that such fine singing fell into such a drab production.

David McVicar’s interpretation – a joint production with the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago — is dominated by a giant gray wall that rotates to create the various spaces called for in the opera’s four acts. In most cases the wall drew too much attention away from the action and loomed at unnecessary heights above dwarfed principals and choristers. Its gray expanse reminded one of the great character actor Sig Rumann’s indignant exclamation at an out-of-place backdrop that appears after his character loses control of the performance in A Night at the Opera: “A battleship in Il Trovatore!” Nevertheless, we had one. Updating the action to the early nineteenth century added little more than a utilitarian grimness that suppressed the opera’s colorful musicality. Only in the famous Act II anvil chorus did the setting come somewhat to life.

Summer in Paris can offer some musical surprises. Just this week the Opera’s two main theaters, the venerable old Palais Garnier and the functionally modern Bastille, are offering two rarities in new productions: Jomelli’s Domofoonte and Szymanowski’s King Roger. The Opera Comique has Carmen. The Theatre des Champs Elysees is offering a Ravel piano concert, an intriguing dance retrospective celebrating the centenary of the Ballets Russes (which performed in the theater in its earliest days), and last night’s concert performance of Kurt Weill’s satirical treatment of 1920s capitalism and urban decadence.

The production is the brainchild of the peripatetic Viennese actor, singer, musician, and impresario H. K. Gruber, a type who would probably have been more recognizable in the frenzied fin-de-siecle or late old regime days of Mozart’s collaborator Emmanuel Schikaneder than in today’s staid domain of arts administration. We were fortunate in that, for Gruber assembled a fine cast and the great orchestral talent of the Klangforum Wien (Noise Forum Vienna), the performers of which included all the standard Weill instrumentalists and a few oddities, such as the Hawaiian guitar.

Gruber himself led the orchestral effort and sang Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the beggar king whose daughter Polly is pursued by and speedily marries the great thief of London, Mack the Knife. Not possessed of a spectacular voice, Gruber nevertheless got the role across without undue embarrassment. The ensemble of principals he built up, however, offered some of the best Weill we could hope for today. Ian Bostridge, a professionally trained historian with a published monograph on early modern witchcraft, has his detractors, but from the very beginning, the famous “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” his lyric tenor proved excellently well suited to the lilting melodies of Mack the Knife’s music. The intimacy of the theater probably helped what can be a weak voice, but there was no lack of musicianship. Dorothea Roschmann, an accomplished Mozartean, gave a fine performance in the role of Polly Peachum.

Veteran mezzo-soprano Hanna Schwarz sang engagingly as her mother Cecilia. Angelika Kirchschlager’s burnished mezzo delivered the role of Jenny, Mackie’s prostitute friend who ultimately betrays him, with outstanding aplomb. Her Song of Solomon was the best I have ever heard. Christoph Banzer narrated the whole story effectively (in spoken German with French subtitles). The performance entirely merited the four encores of numbers from the score, though one missed a reprise of Bostridge’s opening Moritat.

Celebrity needs to be watched. Although it is the center of attention, it is so only because attention that puts it there. The gawkers therefore have nobody to blame but themselves when one of their creatures collapses under the pressure of their expectations. Plato calls it a Diomedean Necessity, how a person who sets out to lead the mob ends up going in exactly the direction the followers lead him to. It is this field of forces that is the ultimate subject matter of Janacek’s Makropoulos Case, though this is so only by accident.

The primary fact about Elina Makropoulos (Emilia Marty), his heroine of many names, is not that she has the irresistible pizzazz of an “It Girl” like Marilyn Monroe or a belle dame sans merci like Bette Davis, but that she is 337 years old. If you lived that long, you, too, would become entirely jaded for whatever feelings of love may once have conceived for individual members of the series of husbands you inevitably outlived. It is touching that Elina remembers that she really did love Count Ferdinand Prus back in 1827 when she was already over two hundred; but by now she cannot feel anything for the vicissitudes of the people around her, who will barely survive their pain anyway.

Wonderfully, we learn near the end that her great hope is to recover the formula for the elixir of youth that she was given as a child by her father back in 1587 when she was sixteen, since finally she is beginning to show signs of age. Her jaded life has left her useful only as a celebrity, a creature only able to fulfill the fantasies of others. If one deduces from this that she is powerful, as all the characters do in this opera, then one he has forgotten himself, and forgotten that it is he who gives her what power she has over him, a power that devolves from the meaninglessness of her own life.

At the Bastille last night began a reprise of the mise en scène of this opera — based on a play by Karel Capek and composed by Leos Janacek in 1926 — that had its premiere here in Spring of 2007, by Krzysztof Warlikowski. The star was of course Elina, sung by Angela Denoke with stunning energy and rapid shifts of feeling, disarming crassness, and, finally, tragic grandeur. In the last moments Elina acquires the formula to the magic potion of youth her father had concocted centuries before for Emperor Rudolf II and then decides not to use it, declaring that life is meaningless.

Janacek is a champion of the basic human substance, the inner strengths and conscience that a person shows in greatest relief only in the most extreme conditions, to the accompaniment of an almost autistic repetition of short lines and hammering away in triumphant octaves on the timpani. Warlikowski starts us off with a movie during the prelude that is entirely outside the hypothesis and story. It is a series of silent newsreel clips of Marilyn Monroe, starting — and ending — with her corpse being hauled out of her Bel Air home. When Elina. appears on stage, she is dressed in a bright yellow version of the white dress Marilyn wore when the air jets blew her skirt up, and it happens to the opera’s heroine, too. For Warlikowski, she is an It Girl who happens to be 337 rather than a person stuck with a macabre life centuries long that has retained the human form without the luxury of living a life that is human.

At the end, she tries to persuade her young admirer Krista to take the slip of paper with the formula; and Krista, who has by now donned her own white Marilyn Monroe dress and even had a little air blow up it, tries to reach Elina’s hand. She is reaching, but Elina is a little out of reach. Before she reaches far enough the scene blacks out and the opera is over. In the original stage directions of Janacek’s opera, the young girl takes the formula and sets a match to it; the whole scene takes on a red hue and Elina with her dying breath calls out the Our Father in her native language, Greek. Elina has provided an object lesson for the normal mortals and they have learned it, but for Warlikowski it is more important that the vortex of celebrity and desire whirl on. When at the end Elina begins to declaim the feelings of contrition and illumination by which she ends up rejecting the potion, Warlikowski has her lines projected onto the back wall of the stage and roll up, as if they were credits at the end of a movie. Again he is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The movie is not over but only just beginning.

The ads in the program may have taken some inspiration from the performance. The first one, after the usual perfume ads, shows a bottle of champagne called INCONNU, under which is printed on the bottle’s very label the phrase “sauf pour ceux qui savent”. The ad at the end of the program says “Il y a des gens qui voient des choses que d’autres ne voient pas” — an ad for the Opéra Nationale de Paris.

Review by Ken Quandt