SR Symphony presents ‘Titans of Opera’

Soprano Christina Major will share the stage with tenor Christopher Bengochea, performing arias from  “Nabucco,” “Il Trovatore,” “Aida” and “La Traviata.” (Soprano Major shown here with baritone Jason Detwiler).

Opera lovers, take note. Richard Wagner’s monumental opera, “The Ring” cycle, is coming to Rohnert Park.

When the Santa Rosa Symphony takes the stage for its third subscription concert set this weekend at the Green Music Center, the program will kick off with excerpts from Wagner’s “The Ring of Nibelungen,” a series of four epic operas usually performed over the course of 16hours, or one night and three days.

The convoluted plot — full of murder and incest, gods and semi-gods, humans and gnomes — reads like Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones” rolled into one.

“For me, ‘The Ring’ represents the kernel of what Wagner is capable of doing, the theatrics and the imagination … to invent those races of gods,” said Music Director Bruno Ferrandis. “So I created a mini-Ring, with extracts from ‘Das Reingold,’ ‘Die Walkure,’ ‘Siegfried,’ and ‘Gotterdammerung.’”

During the second half, the symphony will join with soprano Christina Major and tenor Christopher Bengochea to perform a dozen arias and choruses from Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous operas: “Nabucco,” “Il Trovatore,” “Aida” and “La Traviata.”

Ferrandis planned the program as a study in contrasts between the two titans of opera, who were both born in 1813, nearly 200 years ago.

“It’s a clash between the two giants,” Ferrandis said. “Look at the amount of money that opera companies, musicians and especially singers have made due to these two giants.”

The Santa Rosa Symphony could not hire Wagnerian singers for the first half of the program because most of them are based in Europe.

“It is very hard to find Wagner singers without paying a huge price,” Ferrandis said. “So I chose to do scenes.”

Wagner’s orchestration itself is so complex that the symphony musicians will be working extra hard to perfect their parts.
“The technical demands on the strings are gigantic,” Ferrandis said. “The violins have runs after runs after runs, and it’s non-stop.”

Instead of leading back to a home key, however, Wagner’s scales typically lead the listener away from tonality.

“You have scales up and down and up and down and up and down, and they don’t resolve,” he said. ““Wagner made everyone else depart from chromaticism, eventually leading Mahler and Schoenberg to atonality.”