San Diego Symphony to kick off season with a phantasmagoric Ravel opera

To kick off its eleventh season under president and CEO Martha Gilmer and seventh under music director Rafael Payare, the San Diego Symphony has pulled out all the stops.

Rather than program a mammoth symphony, it’s shrewdly chosen Maurice Ravel’s phantasmagoric opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (“The Child and the Spells”), which is 100 years old this year. Doing so not only lets the Symphony show its stuff with Ravel’s iridescent score; it opens the door for a vocal and multimedia spectacle led by a bona fide star, mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard, in the lead role of the tantrum-throwing child whose victims teach him a memorable lesson.

Leonard’s engagement is an inspired choice even beyond her celebrated voice and undeniable star power. In 2016, she won a Grammy for this very part, which capitalizes on her versatility as a dancer and actor. But Leonard came down with COVID in August, jeopardizing the arrangement. Leonard canceled a performance due to a previous bout with COVID in 2021. Four years later, singers’ still face professional risks from illness.

“Sadly, the way COVID affected the world is not something that we singers would be able to change if it were to happen again,” Leonard said via email. “Sickness directly affects our ability to earn an income. If we don’t sing, we do not get paid. Performing is already a high-stress, high-risk endeavor, so … we become a bit neurotic about our health.”

Neurotic is not among the adjectives used to describe Leonard’s storybook career. Descended on her mother’s side from an Argentine chess grandmaster, she was raised in New York City, studied at Joffrey Ballet School as a child, and earned a bachelor’s and master’s at Juilliard. Within months of graduating, she debuted at the Met at the unusually young age of twenty-five. The New York Times gushed: “It is hard to make a splash in a pants role in a long opera on a night when Anna Netrebko is singing, but Ms. Leonard did.”

In the eighteen years since, Leonard has performed at the world’s top opera venues — La Scala, Wiener Staatsoper, Covent Garden — made her Hollywood debut (in 2023’s Maestro), and earned three Grammys, a feat only a handful of mezzo sopranos (Marilyn Horne, Cecilia Bartoli, Joyce DiDonato, Michelle DeYoung) can claim.

For mezzos, “pants roles” — like her Met debut and the naughty six-year-old boy she’ll play this weekend — come with the territory. Leonard has donned trousers for at least eight such roles, including the most iconic, Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Of that role, Leonard has said, “He has become a character I can interpret in lots of different ways and who I’m happy to perform differently every time.”

Ravel’s wicked kindergartner will be no exception: “Production tends to have an effect on the way you perform a role,” Leonard explained. “Sometimes the costumes change perception; sometimes a director has such a different vision that you are forced to think of your character differently.”

Leonard’s default stance as a performer facing familiar roles is dynamism. “Performing is a living, breathing, and ever-changing art form,” she said. “The safest place to be is in the knowledge that it will always be different night to night — just like we are different day to day in our lives.”

The psychological heart of L’enfant et les sortilèges is the fraught relationship of Ravel’s “Child” to the Mother he rebels against. As the single mother of a now fifteen-year-old, Leonard surely draws on personal insight. “There is nothing better for an actor and performer than life experience,” she said. “I think most mothers would tell you they know what a tantrum looks like! Haha. The good, the bad, the ugly, the painful — all of it informs your work. Then it’s your job to communicate authentically and honestly.”

The Symphony’s opening-night bill — which includes two rarely performed Debussy gems, The Joyful Isle (“L’isle Joyeuse,” orchestrated by Molinari) and The Box of Toys (“La boîte à joujoux,” orchestrated by Caplet) — will feature the Ravel in a semi-staged production, conceived and directed by respected composer/writer/director Gerard McBurney.

Leonard rejects the idea that the now more common semi-staged performances are somehow less challenging than a fully staged operatic version. “I don’t usually think semi-staged is easier, as I like to be truly enveloped in the physical world of the opera,” she said. “Usually, it’s easier to sing a concert version of a role once you’ve done it fully in the theater. You’re bringing a more embodied understanding of the role. But that’s the beauty of theater: to create worlds no matter what we have at our disposal.”

Best known in the United States for his role in executing Gilmer’s brainchild, the Chicago Symphony’s celebrated “Beyond the Score” series, McBurney is also an admired orchestrator and musicologist. No less than Dimitri Shostakovich’s widow chose him to orchestrate her husband’s unfinished 1932 opera Orango, and McBurney’s completion of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina will be performed by the Metropolitan Opera in 2027.

Via a video call from Edinburgh, McBurney explained his approach to Ravel’s L’enfant. “When I’m working with [San Diego Symphony] and Martha and Rafael, I think, ‘Oh, gee, I have a role. I can do something that’s never been done,’” he said. “I wanted to find a way to project this piece so that the San Diego audience would go, ‘Oh, my, that’s gorgeous’. I wanted to come up with something which would sell the piece emotionally to that particular audience. I mostly wanted it to be fun.”

To that end, McBurney recruited New York-based theatrical lighting designer Paul Miller to illuminate Ravel’s surreal setting — household objects, animals, and nature interacting with an unruly boy — and projection designer Mike Tutaj to complement images by artist (and former political cartoonist) Joe Fournier. “I’ve done lots of shows with Mike Tutaj,” McBurney enthused. “I knew I needed a particular kind of charm for the fundamental imagery.

“What if we get Joe Fournier, who has a track record of doing beautiful images for children’? He’s a painter; he does beautiful artworks. I’m sure Joe could come up with some beautiful images, and if we throw them on the back wall and around the space, it’ll be cute as anything, and people will understand the story.”

McBurney is acutely aware that for some seeing an opera requires coaxing. “If you bump into somebody in the street and say, ‘Come and listen to my opera’, they go, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to’. But if you tell the right story, they will say, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a try’, and it can be beautiful,” he said.

Part of that “sell” are the eight singers the Symphony recruited to drive Leonard’s six-year-old hellion to his surprising epiphany — including soprano Liv Redpath in the roles of the Fire, the Princess, and the Nightingale; baritone Elliot Madore as the Grandfather Clock and the Black Cat; and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Amman as Mama, the Chinese Tea Cip, and the Shepherd.

For her pivotal part, Leonard welcomes hurdles even in this familiar role: “Not to say there aren’t any challenges in this role — there are always things that we look to sing better, phrase better, act better,” she explained. “But this is one of those roles where I truly get to enjoy the singers around me, and I get a front-row seat. There’s nothing better than that!”

Paul Bodine has been writing about music — from classical to pop/rock — for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Classical Music Daily, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, David Benoit, Laura Claycomb, Jon Nakamatsu, Paul Chihara, the Ahn Trio, Lucas Debargue, and John Thiessen.