Opera, popera

A Green Day musical? Seems about as logical as, say, an opera about Anna Nicole Smith.

Oh, wait...

Selling It

So, this past Friday night, a big group of MN Orchers made our way to the Walker for the annual celebration of salesmanship and corporate artistry that is the British Television Advertisting Awards. (For those readers not from the Twin Cities: I know. Sitting and watching 90 minutes of TV ads sounds ridiculous, and not like something a major American museum should be promoting. But you'll just have to trust us. It's awesome.) I've been going to the BTAA show for several years now, and I have to say, 2009 was one of the best reels I've seen. Very few clunkers, several amazingly poignant ads, plenty of laughs...

...and then, about midway through the show, there was this, which had everyone in the theater baffled right up to the very end...



If there is a better way to market grand opera in 2009, I don't know what it would be. And if you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing orchestras need to be doing more of. Opera companies have gotten very good in recent years at reinventing their image, making their performances seem like not-to-be-missed events, and generally making themselves seem like the cool corner of the classical music world. And that, by extension, makes orchestras the decidedly uncool corner. They're exciting, we're sleepy, they're hip and fresh, we're stuffy and tuxedoed, they're simulcasting their biggest shows live to your local movie theater, we're stuck in a mid-20th century universe pretending that the internet doesn't exist.

You might point out that it's easier for an opera company to market itself on a visual medium like YouTube than it would be for an orchestra, but I'm not buying it. The stories behind symphonic music, even non-programmatic stuff like a Shostakovich symphony, are easily as riveting as your average opera libretto. It's just a matter of finding the part of the narrative that's going to grab people, and then retelling it in a creative way and getting it out there where people can see it. It's really not rocket science, and orchestras need to get a whole lot better at embracing that sort of idea, even if it means changing some longstanding elements of our business model...

In the crosshairs

I'm finishing up Michael Pollan's wonderful The Omnivore's Dilemma, which, I have to confess, I started back when the Orchestra was on tour in late February (I have a bad habit of reading up to a dozen books simultaneously, which often results in taking many, many months to finish a single one.) It's a thought-provoking read (who knew how corn permeates so much of what we consume?) describing four meals from four different sources - factory farming, industrialized organic agriculture, self-sustaining polycultural organic farming and hunting/gathering.

A phrase in the hunting/gathering chapter caught my eye; "the hunter's ecstatic purple". Describing his participation in a pig hunt in northern California, Pollan goes on to explain:

It was as if I'd dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter...So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present.

Reading this was an "aha" moment for me, as I realized that's exactly how I feel while conducting opera.



No, I'm not comparing pig-shooting to Cavaradossi in the crosshairs of the firing squad (I just love that poster). It's more about the feeling of absolute focus on the necessities of the present, which is so all-encompassing that, as Pollan says, one forgets both the passage of time and any physical discomfort.

Opera conducting is an entirely different beast from the orchestral variety. Ostensibly, the biggest difference is the addition of singers, costuming and scenery, but practically this translates into an approach to performance that is completely divergent.

First of all, much more so than in a purely symphonic realm, one has to be acutely aware of the necessity to create a coherent narrative from a musical standpoint; it's a matter of constant attention to dramatic pacing. Which would be hard enough on its own, but the major complication of opera is that you have a bunch of singers running around on stage, and while you may have rehearsed something to perfection in the rehearsal hall, all bets are off when you hit the stage.

Conducting singers is often like herding cats (said with all love and respect for my singing friends and colleagues - but it remains fact that singers rarely have to work under the constraints of communal agreement and consistency that orchestral players do). Combine the artistic license being taken vocally on stage with a prop door that doesn't seem to want to open with a smoke machine that threatens to asphyxiate your first violin section, and you have all the makings of a disaster.

But, oddly (and that very same scenario happened to me several weeks back during the Orchestra's run of Hansel and Gretel), just as those little calamities are piling up, I feel calmer and more focused. After a particularly harrowing act in which a soprano threatened to skip over several lines of music, our principal horn Mike Gast found me backstage and asked, "Geez, doesn't that make you crazy? How do you not panic?"

Call me crazy, but I love that feeling of chaos. When it happens, I utterly understand Pollan's "ecstatic purple"; time slows down, and all those constant bubbles of subconscious thought ("'Did I feed the dogs? Will my house in Richmond ever sell? Should I call my dentist tomorrow?") completely dissipate. My attention is given fully to the task at hand (lassoing the errant soprano, holding a cue until the door can be opened, fanning the violins with a spare hand) and on nothing else. Which for me is incredibly mind-clearing, and thus intensely pleasurable. It's ironic that at those moments when a conductor should feel as if they're caught in the crosshairs, I feel the most relaxed and free - anyone have any comparable experiences in other fields?

Happy Thanksgiving!

A little feel-good story for you this gray (at least here in the upper Midwest) Thanksgiving Day; Placido Domingo signed autographs post-performance last night until nearly 2 am. A wonderful thought, on two levels: 1) that an artist of his stature would be so gracious with his time, and 2) that there would be so many fans (purportedly over 500) seeking autographs!

I'm not a witch, I'm your wife

(Yes, cinephiles, that is indeed a "Princess Bride" reference)

While Sam and the Orchestra have been occupied with the Composer Institute this week, I've been preoccupied with Humperdinck...well, actually, this Humperdinck.

I'm always surprised how well-known Hansel and Gretel is - not because of the piece itself, which is beautiful - but because of the exposure many seem to have had as children (it is, after all, a "fairytale opera"). It's a funny matter of personal experience, I suppose - for many, H&G is their first contact with opera; for me, it was Samson et Dalila, but I guess that makes sense for a 7-year-old obsessed with Placido Domingo (I don't think Humperdinck is really his bag). In the interim decades, I've heard H&G quite a few times but never studied it (except for the omnipresent Prelude and Dream Pantomime, both of which I've done over a half-dozen times).

So, as I hadn't been around for any of the previous iterations of this production with the Orchestra, my first real involvement with the complete work came this past summer, when I initially delved into the score.

One of the most fascinating discoveries I've made in the score is how unsympathetic a character the Mother is (yes, yes, I've pondered musical stuff too - don't get me started about use of percussion in the Witch's Ride and how triplets in the tambourine intimate magical/evil). But, wow, this woman is painted as such an unsympathetic character; her first entrance is marked with hysterics; she knocks over the jug of milk herself and takes it out on Hansel and Gretel; then in a typically manic-depressive switch she has suicidal thoughts while falling asleep at the kitchen table after she chases the kids out of the house; she has no idea how dangerous the woods are or that there's a hungry ogress or that witches ride broomsticks (why does Father know all these things??); and in the happy reunion at the end she merely has a single line ("Children, dear") while Father has quite a few lines - and the kids, quite tellingly, call him first ("Father, Mother!" - although maybe I'm simply reading too much into that?).

Our "Mother", Lola Watson, and I shared a few laughs at our first rehearsal about how mentally unbalanced the character seems, and the possibility (as some have interpreted) that the Mother is the Witch. While that seems a little far-fetched in context of the opera, I wonder what a feminist fairytale scholar's take on that notion would be? A tantalizing alternative to ponder as I peruse the score this morning for the umpteenth time.

In any case, I'm delighted to be taking a break from operaland to attend the Future Classics concert tonight - the next 6 days holds nearly 23 hours of staging/orchestra/sitzprobe/full-run rehearsals for H&G!

Double Standard

One of my favorite young composers, Nico Muhly, was writing last week about the marked differences between working with instrumentalists and singers (specifically, opera singers,) and his take made me think about the seemingly widening gulf between the concert hall and the opera house.

Muhly's post was mainly about rhythmic accuracy, or the lack of it, which he experiences very directly as a composer working both with orchestral-type musicians, who prize rhythm above nearly everything else, and rely on accurate counting to hold the ensemble together, and opera companies, where singers (who control the ensemble in the end) focus more on the overall shape of musical phrases than on the specific rhythms that have been written for them.

But orchestras and opera companies have been growing apart in less musically specific ways, too. I wrote a bit about this a couple of weeks back, after the Met's new production of Tosca was roundly panned by critics and audience alike. What I was thinking (but didn't write) at the time was that I really am in awe of the ability of major opera companies to turn literally everything that happens to them, good and bad, into a buzz-generating event that somehow makes opera yet more popular at the end of the day. Those downright lousy reviews of Tosca might have led a few people to stay away from the production, but I'd be willing to bet good money that the larger impact was to once again place the Met squarely in the center of New York's cultural life as the Most Important Classical Music Institution In The Greatest City In All The World.

To extend this idea, let's think about those wildly popular high-definition simulcasts the Met's been doing at movie theaters around the world for the last couple of years. From a PR perspective, this has been a dramatic and hugely successful extension of the company's brand - the movie theater shows, which are priced at more than double the rate for a normal movie ticket - sell out almost everywhere, and in some cities, you have to get your tickets days in advance of the Saturday afternoon showings.

But from a fiscal perspective, it's been written that the Met is actually losing untold millions on these simulcasts, and doesn't really have a plan for making them financially sustainable in the future. Now, imagine that this were a symphony orchestra doing this - beaming their concerts all over creation and charging $25 a head for people packed into a theater in Las Vegas or Paris to watch us play. Then imagine that the New York Times found out that said orchestra was going to run a multi-million dollar deficit this season because of the cost of production. Can you imagine what the reaction would be?

I can. The orchestra would be roundly blasted by everyone from critics to consultants to its own board members for behaving as if money grows on trees, the simulcasts would most certainly be canceled immediately, a feeble plea for funding to save them would go out to the usual corporations and foundations, and in all likelihood, would fall on deaf ears because there's a massive recession going on, donchaknow. And I can't really say that this wouldn't be a defensible reaction from all involved.

But because we're talking about the opera world, none of this seems to happen. Opera (at least grand opera presented by large companies) seems to get a near-total pass from the folks who are constantly harping on orchestras for being clueless, elitist organizations who pay their musicians and conductors too much and can't seem to make a budget sheet balance. Maybe it's that our vision of opera is so bound up with images of opulence and wretched excess that it somehow seems okay for opera companies to shoot for the stars even when it's dangerous from a bottom-line perspective.

I could go on for quite a while about the orchestra vs. opera double standard. (Just for instance, why is that when an opera company deigns to commission a new opera to squeeze in between their 187th and 188th production of Rossini, it's talked about breathlessly in the press for months, but orchestras which commission multiple new works every season are still regularly lambasted by composers and critics for a perceived lack of commitment to new music? Why was it okay for the musicians of a certain high-profile opera orchestra to flatly refuse this summer to redo their contract to save the organization some money in the worst fiscal crisis America's seen in 70 years, but orchestras around the country which did reopen their contracts and take substantial pay and benefit cuts are still portrayed as greedy and short-sighted for deigning to draw a salary at all?) And I'll admit that a lot of this comes down to basic jealousy on my part - I often think that it must be nice to work in a corner of the classical music world that isn't constantly being told how useless and stuffy and culturally irrelevant it is.

But my larger frustration is that I just don't see a way out of the current paradigm. Orchestras are treading water furiously right now just to stay afloat, and no one sees that changing for the better anytime soon. And if the public perception is that opera companies are supposed to spend gobs of money and orchestras are supposed to be frugal, well, spending a lot of money on some splashy new project probably isn't going to change anyone's mind.

Bottle Music

Several things can be deduced from this clip: 1) Some people have a lot of time on their hands; 2) The "Toreador Song" from Bizet's Carmen is firmly entrenched in popular culture; and 3) David Letterman sounds to be tone deaf.

Schadenfreude

I know it's wrong to take pleasure from the pain of others (especially when "others" are an opera company which employs several of one's friends,) but something about the mini-firestorm that's been enveloping the Metropolitan Opera this week has been highly entertaining to me.

At the center of the controversy is a brand spanking new production of Tosca that America's premiere opera company has chosen to open its season. Opera audiences do not, on the whole, tend to be big fans of change, so it's always risky to replace a well-worn production with something new and innovative. (Opera audiences also tend to be far more willing to make their displeasure known immediately than the audiences we see at Orchestra Hall. I attended a perfectly decent production of Eugene Onegin at the Vienna State Opera last winter at which the director and set designer were roundly booed during the curtain call.)

Still, music critics today are a gentle lot, on the whole, and it's relatively rare that you read a truly blistering review. So I can only imagine that the Met's new Tosca must have indeed laid quite an egg last week to inspire this absolute demolition by the estimable Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

"It takes a certain effort to suck the life out of Tosca... [Director Luc Bondy] delivered an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption. Karita Mattila was miscast in the title role. No one else sang with particular distinction. By the end of opening night, [Met Opera General Manager Peter] Gelb had on his hands a full-blown fiasco, with boos resounding from the orchestra seats, the upper galleries, and even the plaza outside, where people had watched on a screen for free... While there is nobility in an ambitious failure, there is no glory in ineptitude."

Dude. That is a serious takedown. But Ross sees a bright side in the rare Met misfire, too...

"Opera being a delightfully paradoxical medium, this whole debacle left me in an upbeat mood. The Met is refusing to repeat itself and is seeking, by trial and error, a new theatrical identity... The audience was, at least, paying attention. If I’m not mistaken, someone shouted “Vergogna!”—“Shame!”—when the production team shuffled onstage to face the firing squad. I doubt that mass revulsion is part of Gelb’s marketing plan, but a scandal has its uses: the Met made the evening news."

Good point, and one that further underscores the different cultural positions occupied by orchestras and opera companies in America today. Can you imagine the New York Philharmonic being booed at Lincoln Center? And even if you can, can you imagine any media entity beyond the arts press caring about it?

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have decided that opera companies are populist and orchestras are elitist. (Which is odd, since the trappings of each experience would suggest exactly the opposite to me.) That's a problem for those of us in orchestras, of course, but I'll admit - there are times when it's nice to be ignored. I'm guessing the Met would take some of that treatment right now...

Fish Out of Water

We're in the final days of our summer season, with two concerts left to go, and that means that we're deep into rehearsals for the most stressful show we play all year. It's the full-length semi-staged opera that brings Sommerfest to a close every year, and it's a brutally difficult thing to pull off for a variety of reasons.

The first problem with the opera is that we simply don't have nearly enough time to prepare it. During our regular season, we rehearse a concert for three days or so, then perform it three or four times before starting the next week's repertoire. During Sommerfest, we also perform three or four concerts a week, but every one of them has different repertoire. So if you've ever wondered why professional orchestras tend to play a lot of familiar old warhorses in summer, the lack of rehearsal time is a big part of it.

And that brings us to the second difficulty of the Sommerfest opera. To put it bluntly, we are not an opera orchestra. For the most part, our familiarity with operas and how to play them is very, very low, at least compared with the musicians who play them full-time. Opera really is a very different game than symphonic work - at the risk of overgeneralizing, orchestral music is Germanic, while opera is Italian. Symphony orchestras base nearly everything we do on rigid precision and rhythmic clarity, while opera swims in a much more freeform pool where rhythm is merely a suggestion, tempos shift violently back and forth at the whim of the singers and the conductor, and many of the important elements that give the work its shape aren't noted in any way in the musicians' parts.

And speaking of parts, we come now to the major reason that we'll all be sweating it out until the last note of Aida sounds on Saturday night. As anyone who's ever played in an opera pit can tell you, the printed orchestra parts for even the most famous operas tend to be horrifically, atrociously, criminally difficult to read. I've never really understood why this is, but it's a fact. What's in our part is often different from what's in the conductor's score in very important respects - dynamics might be missing, notes can be incorrect, and the publisher's main aim was obviously not to give us readable parts, but to save as much ink as possible. (For instance, our Aida parts don't have the key signature at the beginning of each line. The sharps and flats only appear when the key changes, so there are several occasions when no key signature appears in my part for several pages. That's a disaster waiting to happen when your part is 57 pages long and you haven't played the piece before.)

There are also lots of little things wrong with the parts - notes that aren't spaced properly, lyrical cues in two languages (one of which is German, for absolutely no reason at all) jammed into small spaces between staves, and then, there's my favorite bit of insanity. The markings in our parts for "piano" and "forte" dynamics are not the usual stylized and markings we're all used to seeing. The "p" is a standard lowercase letter, but the "f" is a block-printed capital letter in miniature, and if you're more than six inches from the page on your stand and playing through a fast section, the f looks exactly like the p!!! This has led to some unscheduled drive-by solos in our rehearsals, which would be hilarious if it weren't quite so terrifying.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when this is what nearly all orchestra parts looked like. But over the last several decades, some very dedicated and detail-obsessed orchestra librarians have helped publishers standardize parts, remove errors, and establish a basic "look" for symphonic scores. There's still plenty of variation from publisher to publisher and country to country (the French, in particular, are ridiculously attached to using a symbol for a quarter rest that looks like a backwards eighth rest, which the rest of the music world just hates,) but generally speaking, most of the repertoire symphony orchestras play comes with parts that are pretty easy to decipher at high speed.

I don't know why the people who publish opera scores don't hire the dedicated librarians to do for them what they did for symphonies, but they haven't. And that's pretty much fine with a lot of established opera companies, because they've owned their sets of parts for decades, and the errors have long since been corrected, and the whole orchestra could probably play Aida from memory anyway, just like I'm pretty certain I could get through Beethoven's 5th without a part. But when a bunch of musicians unaccustomed to playing opera encounters a set of parts that hasn't been opened in 20 years, well... let's just say there's a lot of frantic scribbling in the margins going on.

We'll get through it, of course. We always do (mainly because the singers who will be the main attraction are spectacular performers who actually do opera for a living,) and with any luck, no one will mistake a ppp for an fff on Saturday night. But I'll say this - it's a smart move to schedule the orchestra's annual vacation immediately after this particular performance. I need a nap.

More opera avante garde

If you thought a Klingon opera was weird, try this on for size: an opera sung underwater.

Opera, perhaps because of it's theatrical elements, has often been more cutting-edge than orchestral music, a trend that has become more notable as of late (I'm thinking in particular of the Lincoln Center Festival's production of Zimmerman's "Die Soldaten" at the Park Avenue Armory). Chamber musicians and soloists, as well, have been thinking outside the box in terms of alternatative performance venues (The Knights, Matt Haimovitz). I've always been a proponent of creative concert formats and exploring new performance spaces (I'm at the end of the article).

As always, orchestras are latest in the uptake. I know, I know, the usual argument is that it's cost-prohibitive, acoustically unideal, etc. etc., but to all of that, I say, take a gander at the "Die Soldaten" review (link above) again. Opera is far more costly to produce, with built-in sound issues (singers/orchestra), but if the interest is there and the effort is made, the possibilities of an extraordinary, unique and memorable artistic experience abound.

So why the lag in the symphonic sphere? Is it an overreliance on tradition? Reticence to think really creatively? Fear?

Opera plots 4 u

A fantastic use of technology over at The Omniscient Mussel; a contest to create the ultimate opera plot synopsis in 140 characters or less, submitted via Twitter (or blog comment, if you must). The celebrity judge? Superstar soprano Danielle de Niese. The prizes? You gotta see it to believe it. It's made the press everywhere. (Winners from the first contest here.)

Such buzz! I wonder if this is duplicable in the symphonic field?

Brevia

The good, the bad and the resigning.

Yes, everybody is feeling the pinch. Which tests our collective mettle, as well as our guiding philosophies; is it a time where the only solution is to streamline, batten down the hatches and hope to ride it out or a time to embrace the notion that "Taking bold artistic chances always opens new avenues"? Or perhaps those seemingly opposed notions are different sides of the same coin.

At least there's always some good news out there. The eternal optimist that I am, I'll always choose to believe that, in the end, we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Torn from the tabloids (or Scientific American)

A recent slew of opera announcements has caught my attention, not least for the fact that each of these projected productions is based on contemporary, topical and perhaps controversial subject matter.

First up, the seemingly silly, an opera based on the brief but sensational life of Playmate/golddigger/Trimspa spokeswoman Anna Nicole Smith by Richard Thomas and Mark-Anthony Turnage. At first glance, it’s a superficially sensationalist, ripped-from-the-headlines topic by the same guy (Thomas) who was librettist/composer of “Jerry Springer – The Opera”. On closer inspection, it appears that this tawdry and tragic life isn’t so far removed from countless other opera heroines, from Dalila to Carmen, who manipulated men for adoration/power/financial gain. This could be an interesting production, particularly with Turnage, a highly-respected jazz-influenced English composer who has two very successfully operas under his belt, at the helm.

Next up, another tragic story, this time fictional; an opera based on Annie Proulx’s novel “Brokeback Mountain” (yes, the very novel that yielded Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film) commissioned by the New York City Opera. My surprise at this production came not so much from the subject/libretto (although I find the idea of a cowboy opera absolutely charming), but from the composer, Charles Wuorinen. While Wuorinen is certainly no stranger to the novel-turned opera (his adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, premiered at the City Opera in October 2004), he’s a seriously serialist composer whose works are notable for their unrepentant twelve-tone modernism that make little concession for populist tastes. It could be that because this story has been such a part of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist (not least for it’s honest treatment of a homosexual relationship) I have a hard time imagining it under a very different artistic/aesthetic guise. By the same token Wuorinen was highly lauded for his last effort for the City Opera (the aforementioned “Haroun”); “Brokeback” will be a reimagining that I look forward to with great curiosity.

Finally, another movie-connected opera based on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” commissioned by Milan’s famed La Scala and to be composed by Giorgio Battistelli. Climate change has been at times a controversial topic (there are still some very vocal global warming skeptics who claim that current climate changes are due to cyclical global temperature shifts and not because of human-caused increases in greenhouse gas emissions, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary) and certainly a rather loose and unrestricted basis for an opera (will there be an “Ozone Aria”?). "It will be about the tragedy of our present situation," Battistelli said. "It is a great challenge, of course, to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet." To say the least. But from a production standpoint, there is the exciting possibility of using projections, SFX and other multimedia as part of the performance experience.

Opera tends to be more cutting edge than anything you would encounter in a concert hall; the theatrical aspect certainly supports innovation. In an increasingly visual/multimedia society, it has the upper hand in terms of visibility and popularity (one only needs attend an HD Met Broadcast to see that opera certainly reaches a wide demographic). What does this bode for the future of concert music?