October 2020
Vol. 3 No. 2
Zlatica Hoke: Editor-in-Chief
Rafael Prieto: Design
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
 
Dear WOS members and friends:
 
I hope you are all healthy and safe, and that you had an enjoyable summer, as much as the Covid pandemic would allow.
 
We have all missed the abundance of live concerts and opera performances that this area usually offers, but cultural organizations from around the world have provided ample opportunity to learn more about art and music online. If you have enjoyed the Met’s war horses, such as Carmen and numerous productions of La bohème, I hope you have also found time and patience to look at newer pieces like Nico Muhli’s Marni, Thomas Ades’s The Tempest and Shostakovich’s The Nose.
 
Those works remind us that opera is not all about bel canto and pleasant sound. Rather, it is a complex art form reflecting on our lives, thoughts, feelings and the ethics of the era in which the work was created. Modern opera may seem challenging at times, but overcoming the challenge is worth it.
 
For me, the San Francisco Opera’s broadcast of The Makropulos Case, Janaček’s 1926 work based on Karel Čapek’s play, was a real revelation. It is a perfect piece for our times and place, where we constantly strive for longer life and rejuvenation, often pushed by fashion trends and numerous ads that promise wonderful results, but whose real purpose is to fill someone’s pockets.
 
I hope you have found time to hear the September 12 radio broadcast of Héctor Armienta’s opera Bless Me Ultima, an adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya’s novel with the same title. The 1972 book is one of the most popular works of the Mexican-American literature and the 2018 opera had good reviews.
 
Our goal at the WOS is to keep you abreast with such new developments on the local and global opera scene, and expand your operatic horizons through our reimagined quarterly magazine. In this issue, we focus on diversity in opera, including the role of African-Americans in the development of the U.S. opera, from the very beginnings in the 19th century to the Jeanine Tesori’s Blue, which premiered last year. Mexican conductor José Antonio Espinal tells us about the opera in Mexico. WOS's Advisory Council member Stefan Lopatkiewicz, introduces a new and exciting project by a young opera company in Charlottesville - an opera for the deaf - which proves that diversity is not only about race. Finally, conductor-contributor Gregory Buchalter reminisces of hectic times behind opera scenes he has missed since the theaters went dark.
 
It saddens us that the Metropolitan Opera had to cancel its entire 2020-21 season amid continued spread of the virus, which has now affected such star singers as soprano Anna Netrebko and bass Ildar Abdrazakov. But we are excited that its 2021-22 season will open with an opera written by an African-American composer.
 
WOS also has been forced to cancel its season due to the pandemic, but preparations for future events have kept us busy. Executive director Michael Reilly has been especially active networking with musicians and cultural organizations to promote opera. One of his efforts led to a successful virtual discussion between our French-born conductor Julien Benichou and diplomats studying French at the Foreign Service Institute. Michael also attended a rare live classical music concert on our shores this summer and is excited to share his expressions with you.

Happy reading!
Maestro Julien Benichou
Big Deal About Opera
By Michael Reilly

Bringing the opera to people who know little about it is a challenge. All of us who produce classical music, and opera in particular, have a heavy lift combating or competing with popular culture, especially among the young people. It’s encouraging when at times we see sparks or even fireworks coming from skeptical or wavering patrons. 

My most recent experience was while attending a collaboration between the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, pioneered by Washington Opera Society Resident Conductor, Julien Benichou and the New York City Opera, narrated by NYCO General Director, Michael Capasso.  The event was billed as “Starry Night Classics”. Actually, there were no stars to be seen anywhere on that unusually brisk and windy August night on the Eastern Shore of Delaware at the outdoor Freeman Stage. The threat of rain and storms did not thwart the excitement of being at a live outdoor opera concert—said to be the very first anywhere since the age of Covid arrived some six months before. That is disputable, since we know of a few other groups and individuals who braved the pandemic headwaters by appearing in public opera events. 

Nevertheless, live opera in any form these days is rarely done, as are group gatherings for the arts or sports. The hunger was palatable as hundreds gathered in their “pods” of circles of only 4 seats. It was unclear if people were just happy to leave their homes, or because they were as happy as I was to be at the opera again. Observing motives and levels of enthusiasm is one of my curiosities and interests when attending operatic performances. You’ll often see me eyeing the audience to see who is smiling, who is charmed, who is bored, or even who is sleeping! At times it has been overly enthusiastic wives who may have dragged their reluctant husbands or boyfriends to the opera. But other times, at one of our performances, I have witnessed notable personalities like Justice Antonin Scalia attending one of our performances in the front row completely captivated by the singing, and leaping to his feet to applaud at the end. During one of my stints as a marketer for the Washington National Opera some years ago, often women would tell me that their husbands didn’t like the opera. I made my standard retort which was: they needed to find another husband!

I was happy to spend a few hours driving to the Eastern Shore to witness live opera after being so long in the artistic wilderness. As you know, the Washington Opera Society had to postpone our fabulous productions in 2020. While the stars in the heavens might have been obscured, there was plenty of cosmic excitement on the stage that August evening. Featured singers included bass-baritone Kevin Short, mezzo-soprano Lisa Chavez, tenor Michael Butler, and soprano Kristin Sampson. All the singers, apart from Ms. Sampson regularly appear with the Washington Opera Society. 

Readers may click below for a 9 1/2-minute highlight of the WOS production of "Aida" at the Embassy of Egypt in June 2019. Get a glimpse of our stars--featuring: Rochelle Bard, Arnold Rawls, Lisa Chavez, & Kevin Short with chorus and orchestra conducted by Maestro Julien Benichou.
Our patrons could hardly forget the WOS’s production of Carmen as Lisa Chavez delivered a world-class performance at the Embassy of France in June of 2018 along with Kevin Short’s portrayal of Carmen’s star-struck boyfriend, Escamillo. At the “Starry Night Classics” Ms. Chavez delivered her usual vocal acrobatics with her reprisal of “Acerba voluttà” from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.  Later, she presented a better-known piece—"Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saëns. Kevin Short sang an aria from Gounod’s Faust and then gave the audience a stunning rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Porgy and Bess where he reprised the role of Porgy in the Met’s 2020 production.

Tenor Michael Butler, at only 21 years of age, delivered a mature and powerful presentation. Though he was the youngest and least-experienced of the troupe, the night belonged to him. Regular opera goers to the WOS remember Butler from 2019, as we presented him at the Embassy of Austria in the lead role of Franz Lehár's operetta Das Land des Lächelns.  Recently, Michael won first prize in a national online competition. The award was presented to him by iconic soprano Frederica von Stade.  

Presenting these and other young, super-talented, beautiful, often minority singers, helps us dispel the misconceptions that opera is for older, wealthy, and elite people. We want to highlight the music and the singers as being cool, charismatic, part of a growing culture among American youth, as it more often is the case in Europe or Latin America. The old story about fat ladies singing opera maybe was true a hundred years ago. Nowadays, however, our singers are svelte and definitely sexy. Not an unimportant quality when casting singers.

Another “problem” for Americans as they struggle to understand opera is the foreign language. Our concept is to present educational and entertaining narrations before the acts to give audiences a general overview of the plots. Adding a few witticisms intertwined in the narrations adds comic relief and interest, even if the opera is a tragedy. I personally find the use of projected surtitles to be a distraction to the acting and the music, though many, including such icons as Beverly Sills, advocated for supertitles saying “now American audiences can know what all the singing is about”.  

I am aware that without the surtitles, we are losing much of the lovely prose and poetry written by the librettists and may rob audiences of a greater understanding and appreciation of the music. Opera is replete with great poetry such as when Violetta, in her death throes sings “Farewell past, happy dreams of days gone by--the roses in my cheeks already are faded”, from Verdi’s La Traviata.  Not to be outdone by Violetta is Norma, from the opera of the same name, when she sings “Ah, come back to me, then when I gave you my heart!”. How could we forget Dvořák's Rusalka, the water nymph as she sings “Tell him, silvery moon, that I am embracing him…….for at least momentarily let him recall dreaming of me”. Finally, Tosca, when she sings “I have lived for art, I have lived for love”. These characters remind us that the opera is also poetry set to music.  

Even with the use of supertitles, it may be impossible to follow an opera plot. There are always intrigues, revenge, or fatal errors such as when Rigoletto accidentally kills his own daughter, or when Count Di Luna kills Manrico, not knowing he is his own brother in the Verdi blockbuster classic, Il trovatore. Many probably know the story of Romeo and Juliette where we witness a classic tragedy common in opera librettos. American composer, Robert Greenberg writes “Dido, heartbroken, decides to do what any operatic heroine would do at the same moment—sing an aria and then kill herself”, referring to Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.  

I was heartened to see many seniors at the “Starry Night” concert, which was expected, but also a fair share of younger people. I was curious if the audience were huge opera fans who had traveled two hours, like me, or mostly families holed up in their vacation rentals. The Freeman Stage is better known for its popular-music concerts which normally cater to younger summertime population. Nevertheless, many of these young people came to satisfy their curiosity about what is “The Big Deal About Opera”.  

I love to gauge the audiences in wherever my travels bring me to the opera—Europe, New York, Mexico. I expect to see audiences wildly cheering or even booing, or perhaps throwing cabbages in some “sophisticated” locales, but observed a decidedly reserved crowd at this event, hearing only a few “bravos” from the audience. Knowing when to clap, how much enthusiasm to display, or when not to clap are all part of the opera and classical music protocol and experience. I was pleased to see that many so-called “ordinary” people came. This is how we perpetuate the opera. I believe that many listening to the singing might have said to themselves that there was something great going on there, even if they were not sure what it was! This is also part of the whole learning and entertaining experience—the majesty, the mystery, and the grandeur of it all.  

Next year, the Washington Opera Society will launch our Youth Initiative, presenting live narrated concerts with orchestra to universities in Washington, DC., making sure that our organization fulfills our mission to pass on the opera art form, especially to younger audiences. We are based in the Nation’s Capital and staging productions inside embassies with full orchestras and choruses to residents in Washington, DC. We will continue to invite students at little or no cost, and to reach out to seniors with discounted tickets. 
 
For those of us who already love the opera there is no need to preach on these themes. For the newer opera patron and the young person starting to experiment we will be nearby helping them broach the chasm between popular culture and the opera. Though the plots may be impossible and the language often unknown to us, we keep coming back for more trying to satisfy our insatiable appetites.   
American Opera Follows Its Own Path
By Zlatica Hoke

Washington National Opera’s premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s opera Blue, a tragic story about an African-American family in New York, would have been timely in March 2020 when it was scheduled for introduction to the nation’s capital. It will still be timely in July 2021, the new premiere date, coinciding with the first anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man killed by the police in Minneapolis, during an arrest.

A performance cancellation or delay is usually cause for regret, but for participants in this opera, mostly black singers and actors, it was a reprieve. Star singer Kenneth Kellogg said in a recent interview that "there wasn’t a day in rehearsal that somebody didn’t break down and cry,” because for many of the protagonists, the opera’s story was too real. Kellogg portrays the opera’s leading character, a black policeman whose son is shot to death by a white policeman.

Libretto by Tazewell Thompson has three main characters: the Father, the Mother and the Son. The opening act comprises a series of discussions among family members and friends about their aspirations in the context of everyday injustice in minority neighborhoods. When a baby boy is born the family rejoices, but there are also apprehensions about his future amid growing police intimidation of young black men.

Things turn tense when the teenage Son, dressed in a hoodie and glued to his laptop becomes involved in protests against police violation. His father’s argument that he and his fellow officers risk their lives to protect communities is wasted on the angry young man, who calls his father a pathetic "black man in blue."
Photo by Karli Cadel: Kenneth Kellogg and Aaron Crouch as the Father and the Son at the Glimmerglass Festival, 2019

The family is devastated when the Son gets killed during a protest, leaving the Father struggling to reconcile the faith in his profession with the tragic loss of his son. The funeral scene offers some of the opera’s most ambitious choral pieces, accented in places with the soaring duet of grieving parents. 

With the story so close to real life events, many people will wonder why go see it in the theater. Certainly, it is easier to escape today’s harsh realities with the music of Mozart or Rossini, but opera is ultimately about real people and their emotions in conflict or tragedy, as well as in joyful times. An average opera goer will go to see Carmen or La bohème, attracted by name recognition more than a sense of discovery. But a more avid fan is curious to examine a new work or at least a re-invented production of an old one. The advent of live opera simulcasts in movie theaters and online has made the discovery of opera, both the time-tested classics and daring new productions, accessible to everyone. The most recent Met production of Glass’s Akhnaten must have dazzled even a complete novice.

Unlike Akhnaten, Blue is an intimate drama intent on inspiring contemplation of current events rather than dazzling. It premiered in 2019 at The Glimmerglass Festival and received the 2020 award for best opera from The Music Critics Association of North America.

Blue is unmistakably American in its story and music, like many home-grown operas before it. U.S. composers have developed a unique operatic style, with recognizably American sound and unmistakably American themes. The effort to branch away from the European opera was there from the very beginning. As early as 1855, New York saw the premiere of George Frederick Bristow's opera Rip Van Winkle, based on Washington Irving’s short story. The composer championed American music and themes throughout his life and was critical of his contemporaries who did not.

Since then, other American literary masterpieces such as Little Women, The Great Gatsby and A View from the Bridge have been adapted for the musical theater. But few have been as successful as the works based on true events. One of the first ones was The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore, which premiered in 1956 at the Central City Opera in Colorado, where the real historical figures that inspired the opera, had lived.

When John Adams presented his opera Nixon in China in 1987 in Houston, some of the main characters were still alive. Initially considered a gimmick, the so-called docu-drama gained worldwide recognition and started a new trend that eventually caught on in Europe. In 2011, London’s Royal Opera House premiered Anna Nicole, an opera about the tragic life and death of American celebrity model Anna Nicole. Critics were not sure how to look at this provocative work, but all the six performances were sold out. Anna Nicole was portrayed by star soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek who then went on to New York to sing Sieglinde in Wagner’s Ring.

But the most performed American opera of all time is Porgy and Bess, which premiered in 1935 and has remained a symbol of American culture worldwide. There is hardly a place anywhere on earth where the Summertime tune is not recognized even by people who do not know the opera. The music drama about African-American experience was crafted by three white men, the fact not lost on many black composers whose work has been ignored or neglected. Critics have described Porgy and Bess as a symbol of systemic racism in the American artistic world.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that one of the earliest American opera composers, producers and teachers was a black man. Harry Lawrence Freeman wrote more than 20 operas and founded several music schools and organizations, including the Negro Opera Company. At the age of 22 he produced his first opera Epthelia in Denver. His second opera, The Martyr, was performed in several U.S. cities, while the others could not garner sufficient support in the U.S. music circles of his time. Still, during his lifetime Freeman was known as “the black Wagner.”

Scot Joplin’s 1911 Treemonisha is the only opera by a U.S. black composer that is still performed from time to time, albeit in smaller theaters, and there is a commercial recording of it.

Despite being ignored, African-American composers have created ambitious music pieces, some of which have survived. Scholars as well as music companies are now working to bring some of them to light and reverse years of neglect.
Among them is Freeman’s Voodoo that was performed in semi-staged production in 2015 in New York.

Shirley Graham du Bois’ epic work Tom-Tom was performed at Harvard two years ago, for the first time since its 1932 premiere at Cleveland Stadium.

The Metropolitan Opera has just announced that it will open its 2021-22 season with its premiere of Terence Blanchard’s work Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on Charles Blow’s 2014 memoir, which was first performed in St. Luis last year. This will be the first ever production by a black composer and black librettist (Kasi Lemmons) staged by the Metropolitan Opera in its 137-year history.

American opera companies have long fought to diversify their audiences, which are predominantly white people. One way to attract new audiences is to produce a new opera. But with most operas written by white composers on white themes, it is hard to attract people of different backgrounds.

“Rarely do you go to the opera and see black people onstage really letting you know how they feel with a story written by a black librettist,” said Kellogg. The music for Blue is composed by a white woman, but the libretto is written by a black theater director.

Performances in several cities have been cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Lyric Opera of Chicago has rescheduled performances for January of 2021 and Minnesota Opera for February 2021, but new cancelations are possible. Washington’s premiere has been rescheduled for May 2021 and Toledo opera in Ohio announced plans to produce Blue in February 2022.
Mexican Opera Gets Long Overdue Attention
By José Antonio Espinal

Regardless of my background, I am a strong promoter of classical music from the Americas, both North America and South America. U.S. composers Eric Whitacre and Aaron Copland, Mexican Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chavez and Argentinian Alberto Ginastera and Astor Piazzolla are some of my most favorite. I seek to include American works whenever possible in the concerts I conduct.

While I was studying for my Master’s in Orchestral and Choral Conducting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, I proposed a concert in homage to the two Mexican composers, Chávez and Revueltas, as one of my 1999 graduation recitals. Luckily, my mentor, legendary Robert Page, had been a close friend of Chávez and he supported the idea.

During the summer of 2000, I was invited to conduct an orchestra in Veracruz, Mexico, and I used the opportunity to introduce a work by a CMU professor, American composer Nancy Galbraith, titled Tormenta del Sur. She was so excited that her work would premiere abroad that she happily gave me the rights to perform it in Mexico, without any royalty fees!

In Los Angeles, while working with Esa-Pekka Salonen at his own invitation, I saw Maestro Salonen conducting works by Revueltas. I also saw him conducting Revueltas’s music in Finland! Salonen even released a whole album with music by Revueltas. But perhaps most importantly, as a board member of Hispanics for L.A. Opera, a subsidiary of the Los Angeles Opera, I had the pleasure of being part of the process of commissioning and promoting of an opera by a Mexican composer: Daniel Catán’s Il Postino. Incidentally, Catán’s wife was my classmate at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music in the late 1990s.

Il Postino, which premiered exactly 10 years ago and featured Plácido Domingo still in his prime, was a landmark event - it has drawn the world’s attention to the Mexican opera and inspired initiatives to make it better known.

Since then, a friend of mine, Mexican performing arts historian Enid Negrete, who has lived in Barcelona for the last few years, launched a big educational project. She has gathered expert music historians, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and voice teachers to create the first course on Mexican opera.

The course, which began this past summer, has been divided in three modules. Module I “Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Lyric Scene” comprised 18 hours lectures and 20 hours of practice, mornings and evenings. It was originally planned to be at the facility of the Escuela Superior de Música Fausto de Andrés y Aguirre at the Institute García de Cisneros AC, a private university. The expected enrollment was 30 to 35 students. But due to the pandemic, the course was given online, with the lecturers from Mexico and Barcelona, and the unexpected 80 people enrolled. Among honor students were internationally recognized operatic stars, such as soprano Maria Katzarava, tenors Javier Camarena and Diego Torres and Enrique Guzmán.

The video of some of the final performances, titled Diplomado de Ópera Mexicana 2020 is now available on Youtube. You can hear some of the rare jewels such as the a capella choral piece Xicochi Conetzintle by 16th-17th century Portuguese-Mexican composer Gaspar Fernández, and Te Ergo, a composition by late 18th-century composer Manuel Delgado. I conducted the final choral work: Laudate Dominum by 18th-century composer Frey Francisco Martín de Cruzelaegui.

With recordings from the United States, Mexico, Australia and Europe, the music production was assembled at the MC Productions Inc. Buena Park, CA, USA by Music Productor Mauricio Centeno. The video was finalized in Argentina. It was an amazing international effort. I consider this project unique and the most important one in decades.

We have not had anything like this before. Mexican conservatories and universities have courses on Mexican classical music, but no courses devoted to Mexican opera.  

Module 2, devoted to the Mexican opera of the 19th century, will be offered during the last week of November and the first week of December. I will participate as a lecturer and accompanist-coach.

Module 3, the last one in the series, will cover 20th and 21st century operas. It will be given during the first quarter of 2021. Participants who successfully complete the three modules will receive a certificate. I believe the course and the certification will mark the beginning of a new era of musicologists, researchers and performers engaged in the Mexican opera. Today’s world-renowned composers like Daniel Catán, Gabriela Ortiz, Federico Ibarra and many others are only the latest in a long line of Mexican composers of classical music. I am enthralled about the undertaking that will have a great impact on the study, promotion, and performance of the Mexican opera.

For my own part, I have co-founded the non-profit organization Opera in Movimiento Co., devoted to promoting operatic achievements in North and South America.

Currently, I am a DMA candidate in orchestral conducting at the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music at the Catholic University of Mexico, focusing on the orchestral and operatic works of the great European composers, including Beethoven, Brahms, Puccini, Bizet and Tchaikovsky. But the effort to help American composers take their rightful place among the classical Greats of the world remains an important part of my work. 
Opera Without Sound – and More!
By Stefan M. Lopatkiewicz, J. D.

Opera for the deaf? It seemed incongruous, yet there it was!

While recently reviewing my alumni association’s University of Virginia magazine -- dutifully perusing the travails of how to teach students in the Covid era, as well as the achievements and (increasingly) passings of my fellow graduates – my attention was drawn to an advertisement for a workshop titled Breaking the Sound Barrier, intended to combine the talents of deaf actors and hearing opera singers in a reimagining of scenes from Francis Poulenc’s 1957 Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Piqued by this tantalizing tidbit, as an opera lover and alumnus, I had to learn more and soon discovered that the production was just one in a string of creative offerings by Victory Hall Opera (VHO), an innovative, young company in Charlottesville. Now in its fifth season of operation, the non-profit seeks to offer “a new model for what an opera company can be.”

Founded by singers who were sustaining professional careers in the United States and Europe, but who were disillusioned by staid, traditional performances presented to dwindling audiences, VHO presents itself as a troupe, rather than an institution.

Under their model, singers assume a central role in the management and creative direction of the company.

While not a repertory company in the traditional sense, VHO does prioritize role assignments to its affiliated singers. Stagings are conceived collaboratively by the artists, who have an opportunity to identify roles they would like to take on and who challenge themselves to create “chamber opera” presentations that “look and feel like no others.”

Productions rely on chamber-size reductions of full orchestral scores -- some of which must be created by the company for the first time -- and target ensembles of four to seven musicians. The organization advertises that it insists that all performances meet a triple artistic test of being “disarming, exquisite and sincere.”

VHO’s Board of Directors is headed by founder Miriam Gordon-Stewart, an Australian-born soprano who serves as both president and artistic director, and is herself a frequent performer. Gordon-Stewart is a veteran of such prominent houses as Hamburg State Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Opera Australia and National Opera Korea. Juilliard graduate Brenda Patterson, a mezzo-soprano, serves as Secretary to the Board and Director of Music. A member of the voice faculty at the University of Virginia, Patterson has sung with the Met, Florida Grand Opera, Glimmerglass, La Scala, Opera Colorado and Hamburg State Opera.

Non-singing members of the board include poet Rita Dove and film writer and producer Paul Wagner. VHO’s name is inspired by the Victory Halls that the organization’s website claims were built as community theaters all over the world following World War I. The organization’s leadership seeks to recapture the spirit of touring companies that, in an earlier era, tried to bring the best of opera to regions beyond the orb of large urban centers.

Although Charlottesville is imbued with the larger-than-life creative footprint of the university, VHO operates as a private organization independent of that academic center, while drawing when it can on its resources. Its seat in Albemarle County is serendipitously attributed instead to being the home of one of VHO’s founders, as well as to its perceived atmosphere of both tradition and creativity.

Like the Washington Opera Society, VHO seeks to bring to its audience opera using smaller budgets and smaller scale while maintaining the highest standards of professionalism. It prioritizes devoting its limited resources to compensate singers at sustainable levels. Thus, it eschews putting energy into founding a permanent physical home and instead takes advantage of local untraditional settings for its performances, including one production in Thomas Jefferson’s historical home, Monticello, and others at a town restaurant, or at the university’s library.

Indeed, Breaking the Sound Barrier itself was performed at the University’s Old Cabell Hall as part of the UVA’s Disability Studies Symposium. To support the organization’s mobile concept, the company employs modular set design called Ready.Set, a transportable and reconfigurable model, developed through a 2019 design competition that it sponsored.

Gordon-Stewart emphasizes that each performance the company brings to its public must satisfy a hallmark of originality. For example, Now Try This employs a master-class format that provides the company’s principals an opportunity to showcase their vocal prowess while engaging the audience in an on-stage interactive improvisation. VHO’s debut production was so well received that it was replicated in two subsequent seasons and Gordon-Stewart predicts it is likely to be used again. In Monticello Overheard, the cast used Thomas Jefferson’s home as the stage for its presentation of an original soundscape drawn from music found in the former president’s private collection.

In keeping with the challenge of all non-profit arts organizations in the United States, VHO funds its programs – more than 20 since its founding -- through the hard-scrabble pursuit of ticket sales, donations and grants. Its cutting-edge approach to chamber opera has attracted the positive attention of important foundation sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and several UVA departmental grants. Again, embracing the reality of a private arts organization in current America, the company’s creative leaders multi-task as their own grants writers.

Unlike virtually all other live arts organizations, VHO has managed to limit the impact of the current pandemic on its 2020-21 season. Indeed, Gordon-Stewart reported that the Covid shutdown of large, established opera companies has actually presented an opportunity for her much smaller enterprise, relatively free of fixed overhead, to react nimbly.

Breaking the Sound Barrier was staged in February, prior to the full brunt of the virus being absorbed. Gordon-Stewart was happy to report that the reception of the mixed hearing and hearing-impaired audience to the workshop was “ecstatic.” Instead of the hearing singers and deaf actors merely doubling for the same role, as has been done in previous musical productions employing hearing-impaired performers, in VHO’s production the actors portrayed deaf nuns while the singers assumed roles of spiritual companions bringing historical context to the isolation that deafness can impose.

Gordon-Stewart said the troupe grew to appreciate the deaf actors -- all of whom had previously performed in non-operatic musical productions -- as musicians in their own right, and gained an understanding that music can actually transcend sound. Following the February workshop, VHO was forced to reschedule only one production for 2021. In keeping with its unorthodox approach to its craft, the organization’s management has risen to the Covid challenge by reimagining a planned production of La Traviata as a film, rather than a live performance.

The film, to be marketed under the title Unsung, will employ Puccini’s music in an original twist focusing on how artists are responding to the current shutdown brought on by the pandemic. VHO hopes to release it by year’s end and is considering licensing it to other opera companies to help tell the story of how the industry is grappling with the pandemic’s impact.

For later this fall, the company has commissioned an original musical work under the provocative rubric Fat Pig. The chamber opera is actually written for a large female singer. It is believed to be the first known time that the subject of prejudice against a man enamored with a plus-sized woman will be explored in the opera medium. In keeping with its philosophy of testing an original production through a workshop format, VHO will stage a public reading of the libretto in November, with a view to producing a full performance in 2021.

For any opera lover choosing to visit the environs of Charlottesville, VHO will certainly provide a dynamic new attraction.
Musings from The Metropolitan Opera
By Gregory Buchalter
My relationship with the Washington Opera Society and its leader Michael Reilly goes back a long way. It started much before Michael founded the Washington Opera Society. When he first invited me to conduct in Washington D.C. about 20 years ago, I accepted without any hesitation. Washington has been one of my favorite places since my teenage years when I used to take a bus from Ney York City to D.C. to visit my grandmother.

My first professional appearance in the nation’s capital in 2001 was a grand event, set in the historic and glamorous Warner Theater, starring tenor Francisco Casanova, who sadly passed away a year ago, and soprano Sondra Radvanovksy, accompanied by a full orchestra. The operatic concert earned a rave review from The Washington Post. Since then, I conducted countless acclaimed productions in Washington, including Cavalleria Rusticana with the famous Met soprano Alessandra Marc, debuting in the role of Santuzza. During many of those performances some of Washington’s top VIPs – justices, politicians and dignitaries were sitting right behind me.

At the time of my professional debut in the nation’s capital, I had already been an assistant conductor at New York’s Metropolitan Opera for 12 years. That cooperation continued in one way or another for 30 years and my ties with the Met have never been severed. Having started as assistant chorus master, I went on to wear many other hats. I was a prompter, a cover conductor and even a new “maestro di banda” – a position created especially for me. In that role I would conduct and oversee all the offstage music of the operas.

Whatever I did, there was hardly ever a dull moment at the Met. Where else can you see a supernumerary fall into the orchestra pit, stopping the performance, singers miss their entrance cues and then scramble to catch up with what’s going on with the opera on the stage, and sets getting on fire, real fire?

During my Met years I had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest operatic stars. Perhaps my fondest memory is of Luciano Pavarotti, whom I met during his final performances at the Met in Tosca. Working with him was a unique and special experience. In Tosca, he needed help with his offstage singing in Act 2, while he was being “tortured.” I would conduct him backstage but he was always filling his mouth with water and gargling to keep from getting dry. It was a bit of a challenge to dodge the stream of water shooting from his mouth while trying not to lose a beat of the music!

But there were other memorable moments. Once, when I was conducting the stage band at the top of Act 2 of Elisir d’Amore high up on a tier of the set, a part of the set swayed directly toward us, and it could have been a serious catastrophe if it had hit us. At the last moment it aligned properly averting a disaster. We never stopped playing.

Another time, I was prompting a rehearsal of La bohème, and during the sword fight between Colline and Schaunard in Act 4 when Musetta comes in and interrupts them, Schunard threw the heavy metal sword, which headed straight into the prompter’s box. If I had been in the box, the action could have cost me my nose. But, luckily for me, that night the conductor had to leave early and had asked me to conduct the rest of the rehearsal, so I was not there. 

During my many years with the company, I witnessed animals (yes, there are regularly horses, donkeys and other animals as part of the stage action) do things we won’t mention onstage in front of the audience. In our famous Zeffirelli production of La bohème, Musetta and Alindoro had to run onstage for their entrance instead of riding in a horse-drawn carriage because the horse was particularly stubborn that day and did not want to appear onstage.

Technical difficulties happened too. On one occasion, the gods could not march to Walhalla at the end of Das Rheingold due to a technical glitch.

Every theater experiences its share of crazy happenings. I was once conducting Tosca at Opera Las Vegas when, during the Te Deum, the power went out. Apparently, a car had crashed into an electrical grid in the neighborhood knocking out the power. We finished the first act in the dark and then emergency work lights kicked in for the second act. A similar power outage happened from a storm while I was conducting L’Italiana in Algeri in Fairbanks. We had to call an intermission immediately while power was being restored and the lucky audience was treated to an impromptu question-and-answer session from two of opera’s greatest stars, Vivica Genoux and Barry Banks. 

But while mishaps are inevitable, it is actually quite amazing how few things do go wrong, considering the hundreds of people involved onstage during a performance, and the dangers posed by the massive sets and props we deal with all the time. 

One thing is sure: none of the accidents has ever devastated the operatic world, and the world of arts in general, as the Covid-19 pandemic. For the Met to be shut down for almost an entire year would have previously been unthinkable; likewise, the performing arts everywhere, and particularly opera, have come to a grinding halt. How can one properly social distance with an audience of close to 4,000, a chorus of over 80 and a large orchestra in the pit as in the case of the Met? We have all been clever in making the best of this terrible situation inventing creative ways to keep the art of music alive online, getting lots of practice and music learning time and we hope to come back so strongly that one day this will be behind us and forgotten. 

I am currently artistic director and conductor of Opera Fairbanks and am also engaged to conduct at the New England Conservatory and Pacific Northwest Opera, as well as at the international music festival Varna Summer in Bulgaria, where I am a principal conductor. But many of the music performances, including my projects, have been cancelled since March. I am excited about my upcoming engagement with the Florida Grand Opera, where I am scheduled to conduct Faust in March of 2021. I also look forward to my renewed cooperation with Michael and the Washington Opera Society in the near future.

Opera is one of the most exciting and most comprehensive of all the art forms. It has been my life and I certainly hope all opera organizations will be up and running again very soon!
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