Posted:09/17/2009 12:00:00 AM PDT
Early this month, San Francisco Opera’s new music director, an expansive 47-year-old from Tuscany named Nicola Luisotti, was leading his orchestra and a world-class cast of singers through a rehearsal for “Il Trovatore,” Giuseppe Verdi’s saga of love and vengeance.
The feeling in the room was electric: It was Italian opera to the max, with Luisotti, seated in a high director’s chair, marshaling his players, note by note, phrase by phrase, telegraphing signals to them with his baton, head, eyes — his whole body, which seemed hot-wired into the music.
A bespectacled violinist, looking as if he were having an out-of-body experience, slowly rose out of his seat and played, for just a moment, while standing. Stephanie Blythe, one of the world’s great mezzo-sopranos, released a massive climactic note to one of her arias, and held it and then held it some more. The room was pretty near vibrating, and, finally, when Blythe had finished, Luisotti broke into an appreciative grin, shouting “bravo!” and “grazie mille!” — “a thousand thanks!”
There’s a lot of excitement at San Francisco Opera these days, and Luisotti — whose “Trovatore” opened at War Memorial Opera House Sept. 11 to raves as well as more circ*mspect, let’s-wait-and-see reviews — is the reason.
Only the third music director in the company’s 87-year history, he speaks, in heavily accented English, like a voluble mystic: “Music is an expression of love! It is
the voice of God, transformed!”
And he arrives with a mission: to heighten the company’s presentation of Italian opera — of Verdi and Puccini and Donizetti, the bread-and-butter repertoire for any company — and to fill seats during stressful economic times, when the company has been cutting back on the number and variety of its productions. David Gockley, the company’s general director and the man who hired Luisotti, has called him “a lightning rod.” He seems confident that Luisotti, who spent decades rising through regional Italian opera companies, learning the music from the ground up, is the right man for the moment, someone to bring authenticity to performances while shoring up the bottom line. We shall see.
Is Luisotti feeling the pressure? If he is, he doesn’t show it.
After the rehearsal, he schmoozes with the singers and members of the orchestra, sits down for some shoptalk with representatives of the brass section, then heads up to his office in War Memorial.
Some maestros make a point of acting maestro-like, regal and standoffish. Luisotti opens a small refrigerator and tosses his interviewer a cold bottle of water. He talks about his wife of 25 years, Rita Simonini, and their new home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights: “It’s a dream to be here, really,” he says, draining his own water bottle after the long rehearsal. “I’m not kidding,” he says, relaxing into a chair. “And I’m from Tuscany, which is not too bad, yes? But to be in San Francisco — “
He drops the thought and starts writing down the names of Tuscan villages: Viareggio, where he was born; Bargecchia, where he grew up (it’s the village whose church bells inspired the first act of Puccini’s “Tosca”); and Corsanico, just a few miles down the road, where Rita grew up and where they were married — and where Puccini inaugurated a church organ that’s now in all the guidebooks. Luisotti’s great-uncle, by the way, was one of Puccini’s hunting partners.
It’s only in the last few years that Luisotti has begun to establish an international reputation as a conductor; his hiring by Gockley was not without risk. Luisotti knows this and is flattered. He is also confident: “In the next few years, when we play the music of Verdi in San Francisco, no one will conduct but Nicola Luisotti — and my assistant,” Giuseppi Finzi, a native of Bari.
Luisotti gets up and moves to the piano that takes up close to half of his work space. He plays a sentimental tune: “This song — my mother would sing it to me when I was 6 years old,” he says. “My mother sang in church, and my father — he played the clarinet in a small band in the village. But they were never fond of opera. This I discovered myself, when I was 20, 21 years old. And before that, when I was 10, I began to learn the organ, studying with a priest. And I can say that I have always been a true musician — not a great one. I don’t even want to think about that. But a true one, a natural one. I could play the organ without knowing one note of music. You can’t discover music; the music discovers you.”
In Italy, he attended seminary until age 14 and later went to conservatory, while playing in piano bars and always working odd jobs — blacksmithing, mending shoes, selling chickens. In the 1980s, he began singing in the choruses of regional opera companies, eventually taking on the role of chorus master and various backstage functions. His rise through the ranks was steady and true, an Old World route to success.
In fact, Luisotti’s first major conducting job didn’t happen until 2000, when he led Verdi’s “Stiffelio” in Trieste. In 2001, in Stuttgart, he conducted a “Trovatore” that blew away the critics, setting his busy, international career in motion. In 2005, Pamela Rosenberg, who preceded Gockley as general director at San Francisco Opera, hired him to conduct Donizetti’s “La Forza del Destino” at War Memorial.
That’s when Gockley, then general director of Houston Grand Opera, flew up to give a listen: “I arrived jet-lagged and found myself sitting in the staff box waiting to take a nice siesta,” he remembers. “But when I heard that overture, I said, ‘What in the world is happening here?’ I found myself energized, on edge, fascinated.”
He became a Luisotti groupie. And after taking over as San Francisco’s general manager in 2006, Gockley knew the time would come when he would bring in his own director to replace Donald Runnicles, music director since 1992. And when the time did come, in 2007, Gockley announced Luisotti’s appointment, beginning in this, the 2009-10 season.
Luisotti and his wife plan to spend five months each year in San Francisco. (They are also renovating an old house back in Tuscany.) This season, he will conduct four productions, three of them Italian (Verdi’s “Otello” and Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West” in addition to Verdi’s “Il Trovatore”) and one German — Strauss’s steamy “Salome.”
In coming seasons, there will be more Italian repertory, of course, but also Mozart and Wagner, he says. And he has other plans: He would like Gockley, known as a maverick commissioner of new operas by American composers, to commission a new one from a living Italian composer. This leads to a conversation about San Francisco’s rich Italian, cultural history (though he has never heard of Joe DiMaggio, it turns out), stretching back to an 1859 production of what else? — “Il Trovatore.”
Still at the piano, he begins to play some of the opera’s familiar melodies. He is engrossed, seems viscerally connected to them.
He looks up and says, with a wink, “But what is this music? It is a mystery.”
He plays the main theme from Beethoven’s Fifth.
“What is it?”
Laughing, he plays the theme from John Williams’ score to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
“What is it?” asks this voluble mystic — and full-time performer.
“You can study music; you can achieve. But no one will ever know the music. You may know the history of the music but not the mystery of the music.”
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069.
San Francisco Opera
Verdi”s “Il Trovatore”: Conducted by Nicola Luisotti; through Oct. 6; next performance 8 p.m. Tuesday
Strauss”s “Salome”:
Conducted by Nicola Luisotti; opens Oct. 18; continues through Nov. 1
Where: War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
Tickets: $15-$310; 415-864-3330, www.sfopera.com (standing room tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. on the day of each performance; $10, cash only)
