Stober’s frazzled, well-intentioned Zdenka, with her implike energy, was often more engaging. But Dehn’s even-tempered portrayal fell short of yielding the transformation we expect from her character, who finally accepts the man she has claimed to love, by the opera’s close she started off too polished and self-assured to make further development seem meaningful. The soprano Ellie Dehn, making her San Francisco Opera debut, performed the title role with strength and grace, revealing particular tenderness during her Act I duet with Zdenka (Heidi Stober). While the stage might have invited experimentation, the cast responded with restraint. They are apt scaffoldings for characters whose identities-particularly that of Arabella’s sister, the cross-dressing Zdenko/Zdenka, whom her parents cannot afford to raise as a girl-are still rough drafts. Production designer Tobias Hoheisel’s unadorned, monochromatic sets evoked sketches, with one wall appearing to have been rendered in chalk. The San Francisco Opera’s smooth new production, directed by Tim Albery, reveals the opera as a work of surprising introspection, a study in hard-won empathy and evolving identity. Considered an uneven successor to Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella is in a sense a grab bag of Shakespearean plot twists, including a cross-dressing sister and a nonsensical bed trick, that owes its coherence to the rousing score. Richard Strauss’ comic opera Arabella (1933) shuttles its title character through a hasty Bildungsroman: over the course of a single day, a girl dreaming of storybook love ends up a happily betrothed woman by virtue of having survived the opera’s cavernous plot holes. The San Francisco Opera’s introspective Arabella debates its own constraints.
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