From around the world: San Francisco.(Concerts and Recitals ... a production of Der Fliegende Hollander utilizes the resources of Davies Hall, on-stage and off)(Opera Review)

The rubric--"Innocence Undone: Wagner, Weill and the Weimar Years"--may have been as contentious as its predecessors. Yet the San Francisco Symphony's June festival in Davies Symphony Hall again emerged what it has been for the previous seven years--the fulfillment of music director Michael Tilson Thomas's repertory wish list, music that merits exposure outside the restrictions and demands of the symphony's subscription season.

These concentrated annual celebrations have produced their unequal share of revelations, and June's semistaged version of Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander, heard at the second performance (June 13), was no exception. Wagner has been conspicuous by his absence from Tilson Thomas's playlist, but the turbulent Romantic landscape of this 1843 opera (given with all the composer's revisions and a single intermission) elicited from the conductor, his alert orchestra and a gold-standard cast a response of sufficient intensity to make all the conventional appurtenances of the opera house seem, at least temporarily, irrelevant. Tilson Thomas's surging leadership obliterated notions of Hollander as a precursor to the late Wagner masterworks; no lingering over redemption motifs here, as the conductor hit his turbulent stride in the overture and kept going, without respite, for two hours.

Stage director Peter McClintock and designers David Finn and Daniel Hubp hoisted jib sails and lampposts around the Davies Hall stage, gauged entrances and exits cannily and utilized the auditorium's terraces and plinths for maximum theatrical effect. The Dutchman's spectral entrance above the audience's heads lacked nothing in shock value. Vance George's magnificently prepared San Francisco ...