Seattle Opera Gala

Having recently endured a five hour ballet gala in Vienna, I approached the recent Seattle Opera Gala with no lack of trepidation. The Vienna ballet gala, held at the end of the season, did not just include favourites of the audience but also the favourites of the individual artists. In particular, the piece danced by the boss of the outfit, who had recently been the star of the Paris ballet, was the hit of the evening.

The Seattle gala was not to celebrate anything like the end of a season. This gala celebrated the activities of an extraordinary man who had headed the Seattle Opera since 1982. Like most small opera companies, they are crazy about Wagner.

But I LIKE crazy so I am sympathetic to the aims of this brave person who stages the Ring and somehow gets away with it!! But I suppose that Seattle is definitely a Nordic outpost so it’s OK to celebrate the fact.

The evening was a sort of “love in” for the departing General Director Speight Jenkins. The artists had all given their services free for the evening. This was remarkable as Seattle is in the extreme North West of the USA and they must have made sacrifices of some of their gigs along the line to get here.

The only problem about the evening was just getting there. The traffic around the McCaw Hall car park is impossible. It takes about 45 minutes waiting on the roads around the place before you get in. Thankfully the performance started immediately we reached our places on the very first row of the theatre.

And it started with – you’ve guessed it – something from our favourite Wagner opera ’Valküre’ – Act 2 Scene 1.

I was expecting a wizened venerable personage to lead the Speight adulation from the stage, Thank goodness we had a real live opera singer Joyce Castle inebriated with love for Speight in the first half and with what seemed like some other stuff in the later second half. She was funny, fresh and Texan!!! What more can you ask for? She popped out on to the stage from time to time reminding us of the achievements of a Director who had managed to lure her and her colleagues all the way out to the rain washed northwest.

The came one of my favourite singers of the evening, Stephanie Blythe – a big woman with an enormous voice who gives us everything she’s got. Wow!!! She had fun singing part of Offenbach’s ‘La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein’ with the male chorus. It looked to me as though she could have the whole lot for breakfast! Here she is singing at the Met’.

And so it continued. It was a great evening!!