From Bora Yoon's "Weights and Balances." Photo: Julia Frodahl

Many of us waited with bated breath during the recent breakdown of talks between management and the orchestra at NYC Opera. Even though the season is proceeding, the company’s plan to keep themselves afloat (if not artistically viable) seems dubious at best. No music director, draconian cuts for the players and chorus, and no base of operations. Instead NYCO will present a truncated season at several venues. After hearing how shabbily the company has treated its employees – while George Steel continues to make in excess of $300,000 – why would they expect their audience to follow them around town? It portends difficult days to come for opera – and opera goers – in the city. Take nothing away from the Metropolitan (although its recent conductor troubles are noteworthy): but a city with New York’s operatic history would seem to have room for more than one major company.

Fortunately, as Zachary Woolfe points out in a recent excellent article in the NY Times, several smaller companies are attempting to fill the void left by City Opera’s vicissitudes. Opera Omnia, Gotham Chamber Opera, DiCapo Opera, and others are making it possible to hear a plethora of works from the repertoire that are unlikely to be programmed any time soon, either at the Met or languishing NYCO: baroque gems, less known Mozart, neglected bel canto, and the like. The remaining challenge, and it’s a daunting one, is to nurture operas by living composers.

To further the efforts of those working towards that end, three longtime champions of contemporary works – HERE’s Kim Whitener and Artistic Director Kristin Marting and Beth Morrison of Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) – have recently announced a promising new venture. Prototype: Opera/Theatre/Now, a festival that they plan to be an annual event, debuts in January 2013.

Unlike NYCO, Prototype will have a single performance venue, HERE’s space in Soho, for which they will try to build an audience. And, also unlike City Opera, the festival, with steady hands at the rudder, will pursue a coherent artistic vision, presenting chamber operas in the contemporary classical/post-classical vein. Some of the names being mentioned as participants in the Prototypes‘s initial presentations should be familiar to those who’ve attended recent editions of VOX: David T. Little, Byron Au Yong, and Bora Yoon.

Dare we hope for an open call for proposals for new chamber operas? More information about Prototype as it’s available.

In the past week I’ve received emails from other composers, many of whom had doubted that my opera Erzsébet would ever be mounted. After two decades of promises, nearly two years of faltering fundraising, three directors, and a flood that pushed us out of our home, opening night seemed distant and dim. How did it happen for me? Could they finally get to mount their operas?

The opera’s genesis is long & convoluted. When I was a child in the 1950’s, my adoptive father Zoltan Bathory had mentioned an evil family ancestor. In 1983, I was given a copy of Dracula Was a Woman, Raymond McNally’s biography of Elizabeth Bathory. She was a vampiric, serial killing, blood-bathing countess with male and female lovers who died walled up in her torture chamber! The Tigress of Cséjthe! Hungary’s National Monster! What could be better for an operatic tale? In 1987 Erzsébet was scribbled onto my compositional to-do list.

Coincidentally, I’d heard that poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu was working on a biography of Erzsébet based on new research. I got in touch; Codrescu was interested in writing the libretto.

But soon my life was in turmoil, with my failed computer company and failed personal life and broken compositional dreams and a falling out with Codrescu, whose biography ended up as an attempt at a Tom Robbins-esque novel. Beyond that, Vermont was not a friendly place for new music in the 1980’s, even though my pseudo-csárdás piano sketch for the opera overture had been commissioned and performed. My new partner Stevie (now my wife), her daughter and I left for Europe in 1991. A rare opportunity brought us into then Czechoslovakia at Cachtice, home of Erzsébet’s most notorious castle.

I sketched some scenarios for the opera, considering chamber and grand-opera versions. I’d written an opera before — Plasm over ocean, with libretto by David Gunn, my cohort on Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar — but this new one would be less avant-garde and more actual storytelling and drama.

On returning to Vermont, my boxes of Erzsébet research—books, articles, novels, stories, photosgraphs, videos, postcards, trinkets—became the impetus to create an online home for the opera project. That led to a connection with a Czech sculptor living in America, Pavel Kraus. We had similar artistic sensibility and soon worked together on Sex and Death: Offerings in Burlington, Vermont, and later at Prague’s Mánes Museum, newly restored after the dreary Communist years. Pavel would be the opera’s visual designer, and was the earliest team member who stayed with the project.

In 1999, Lisa Jablow, singer, conductor, and aficionado of new music, became interested in the Báthory story and wanted to sing the lead. She suggested a monodrama written specifically for her, and that became the manageable version of the opera—small enough to afford, intimate enough to create a powerful atmosphere.

The Báthory website became a hub for stories and speculation about Erzsébet, now an online cult figure, and was linked everywhere Elizabeth’s story was mentioned. Traffic was high and email poured in. In 2001 the Travel Channel found the site, sending me to Slovakia for a cable special called “World’s Bloodiest Dungeons.” A musical turning point came in 2004 when the Discovery Channel sent a team to Vermont in 2004 to record interviews. With their encouragement, I wrote what would become the opera’s final scene for their series “Deadly Women.” Lisa Jablow sang it with a small ensemble of my musician friends. Discovery also sent Stevie and me back to Cachtice, where the town council agreed to allow the opera to be produced at the castle itself.

Where to mount the premiere, though? I could have worked on getting it done in a place with genuine commitment to new music—Amsterdam or Ghent, places that have rolled out the welcome mat for me before—but this project was conceived here and I was determined to present it first at home. By now media requests were coming in—from Weekly World News, the Globe, Requiem, Bloodcult, Horror Punks, Slovak SME television—even though there was actually no opera yet, just one scene and one piano dance. Still, it was looking good. Allowing Erzsébet to do double duty, I formalized the entire project into my PhD dissertation in 2006. Cradle of Filth got in touch about a joint performance. Czech director Juraj Jakubisko released his massive film Bathory, reconsidering the entire Erzsébet story as a conspiracy against the Hungarian Countess. The vampire craze now made Báthory a hot topic; in Montréal, a composer with no knowledge of Erzsébet was commissioned to create an opera about her. Suddenly I had to get down to work or lose the project.

Easier said, etc. Though Erzsébet was covered in some of the new music media, there was no traction whatsoever with the opera community in the U.S. And unfortunately for the opera’s progress, I ran right into my own insane projects: In 2007, We Are All Mozart, 100 compositions in 52 weeks, all on commission, and a month-long residency at binaural media in Portugal; and in the first months of 2008, writing the book Country Stores of Vermont. Media continued to do Báthory stories, however, and I appeared on the wildly popular “Martina Cole’s Ladykillers” in the U.K.

Erzsébet finally became a focus—though, Codrescu being gone, without a librettist. What to do? Write it myself. I was already a published author with several books and hundreds of articles in print. On the other hand, I was overwhelmed with information about her, making it a challenge to get the twisting story—and especially the complex psychology—of Erzsébet into operatic form for a single character. I shrank the original grand-opera plot, leaving the key elements, treating her as a human character instead of a Gothic vampire.

The poetic libretto was finished in early 2009, and it was time for fundraising. With a list of 1,700 correspondents from the Báthory website—from goth teenagers through professional opera singers—I sent out a “now-it’s-time” appeal. The appeal was thoroughly ignored. Though I’d been online since the pre-Web dark ages of 1981, it was not until that moment that I realized how deeply “internet” and “free” were now married. Everyone was waiting for the opera, sure—but few of these folks were willing to help fund its production.

I was stunned and depressed. I needed an easy and enticing way to gather funds. I had to be a marketer now! I designed t-shirts and published the libretto in a slick-looking little book. And in 2010 I turned to the then-new Kickstarter. It was fairly diverse at the beginning, before it became cool and professional in its appeals. Sadly, by the time it hit the 90-day deadline on June 15, I had failed, reaching only two-thirds of my goal. I was back to an unfunded opera.

Oh… and in the midst of this fundraising there was still no actual opera. The score had to be written. I composed it while my home’s leaking roof was being replaced in hot and humid weather. The heat and the pounding above my head and detritus raining down on me drove the music forward in a kind of relentlessness, and also seemed to push it toward a conservatism of structure and tonality.

Writing the music meant I wasn’t paying attention to the production. The opera nearly derailed again when my first director forgot to reserve the three venues for Halloween weekend in 2011. Now there was no place to perform the opera! A second director got ill and withdrew; the original lighting designer also got very sick. There was no costumer, no crew. A second Kickstarter appeal—now facing competition from young artists with much hipper projects—was failing even more miserably than the first one. I scrapped it a few weeks in. It was also becoming impossible to find a cimbalom, the Hungarian hammerdulcimer that formed a pivotal part of the orchestration. Players were either committed or unwilling to perform for a Vermont pittance. It was almost as if the Blood Countess was trying to kill off her opera.

The Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble was behind it, though. Originally I’d planned to hire them outright, but director Steven Klimowski’s enthusiasm brought the opera into their regular season. Together with 2011 becoming the Year of the Vermont Composer, at least the attitude—though not yet the funding—was looking up. We had new venues. We had found costumer Meg Hammond, who was working on what would become a phenomenal layered outfit. I contacted every pledger on the old Kickstarter list, created a Facebook and Twitter campaign, offered the t-shirts, libretti, scores and various books as rewards, and worked at generating interest and enthusiasm. With the help of folks like new Erzsébet biographer Kim Craft who contributed copies of Infamous Lady, it began to work; I’d recovered the old Kickstarter amount by the early months of 2011.

Why not just write a grant? I’d wanted this to be a listener-funded opera, not one more grant-hog production. There’s still enough of that old capitalist in me to believe that people will pay for what they value—even if it’s a niche product like a nonpop opera about a dead countess. I was both right and wrong. Indeed almost the entire $25,000 production was paid for by contributions, a bequest from our own Consortium of Vermont Composers, and ticket and merchandise sales. But what humbled me during the fundraising is how composer colleagues supported it. Of the 143 sponsors, 59 were composers are 42 other artists. A remarkable and humbling experience.

Incoming money meant commitment to the project. But the poster wasn’t done. The photographer, a Bard student, had to return to school before the costume was finished, and I was left to do it. The program book was developing but shifting as personnel changed. Vermont media became interested in the project. Radio ads were sketched out. But there was no director yet.

There was still time, right? So I thought. Alas, trouble wasn’t over for Erzsébet. On August 29, less than two months before opening night, Vermont was hit by its greatest natural disaster, a huge flood from tropical storm Irene. We moved the ponies to higher ground, grabbed two cats, two laptops, eight backup drives, two books (including the original John Cage Notations), a framed photo, the big box of film negatives, and a kit of clothes … and abandoned our home for the next 17 days. The home stood, but its infrastructure was ruined, the woodshop and darkroom lost, and the gardens scrubbed away. FEMA came up with $92 in recovery money for us. It was a depressing time.

So the opera was surely doomed, right? No! Like a dog on a bone, I kept at it while shoveling muck and picking through ruined tools. With me working via laptop from my mother-in-law’s apartment, soon we had a professional director, Ann Harvey. She brought with her lighting designer Mark O’Maley (acclaimed in Philadelphia performances and installations), as well as her sense of organization and certainty—despite her own family farm having been damaged by the flood. Production meetings followed; the opera was going to be a reality. Conductor Anne Decker had the score down, and Lisa Jablow had it memorized. Bolder Sounds came up with a brilliant cimbalom sample set for our Kurzweil/Dell/Aria setup, and a keyboardist was brought in. Rehearsals were underway. Posters were going up. The program book was being printed. Tickets were printed and sales began online. Ads were recorded for broadcast. News articles and radio interviews popped up. Dress rehearsal!

What could go wrong now? Snow. The forecast for Saturday’s show in Plainfield, Vermont, was for five to ten inches of white, with more downcountry where many guests were coming from. Some couldn’t make it, while others were stranded for two days in Vermont with the southbound Amtrak canceled. Friday’s location at the Hyde Park Opera House was so obscure that some people were unable to find it. And then came Sunday, the near-sellout performance in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. The opera was finally over after a 24-year odyssey, and—thrilled, relieved and exhausted—I finally crossed the oldest item off my to-do list.

The reviews are in, personal and in print. We’re a one-reviewer state, and Jim Lowe wrote, “a powerful one-woman opera … traditional, effective and beautiful score … a poetic work of art.”

There are lots of next steps. A debt of $1,700 remains, which might require dipping into the VCME’s grant funds—wrecking my capitalist plans. We’re meeting to work out the next performances, especially the Slovakia trek. There are still four cameras of video to edit into a DVD from three performances and a dress rehearsal. A graphic novel of the opera is in the works from Bob Hobbs. And there’s a whole virtual-opera-as-computer-game in development.

So how about those composers wanting to mount their own operas? Go for it. Build a reliable team way earlier than I did, and keep on them. Look over their shoulders. Find interested people to fund it—the major money came to me from folks who knew me and had interests I didn’t know about. Create a budget, then double it. Better yet, get a commission that includes performance funding. Create merchandise. Tote up all the details and create a timeline. Write for specific musicians, not a generic ensemble (for me there were only five rehearsals). Make sure your score and parts are near perfect and consult with your players; percussionist Brian Johnson performed brilliantly but had to choreograph his drums, and clarinettist Steven Klimowski had to work especially hard when moving from B-flat bass clarinet to E-flat clarinet.

More than anything, stay at it like the dog on the bone. It’s your opera and your responsibility—and you’ll be thrilled when those first notes sound before an expectant audience.

Opera Shorts
Presented by Remarkable Theater Brigade
Weill Recital Hall, NYC
Fri, Nov 4, 2011

Seeing the Remarkable Theater Brigade’s production Opera Shorts, it is clear that on a small stage like the one at Weill Recital Hall, it is very much a theatrical production that cannot escape that trapping, but the pieces that resulted from the 9 composers (Two of the shorts were composed by musical director Christian McLeer) were mostly comical in nature, thus making it a cheerful night for patrons and a kick in the pants for the opera world.

McLeer’s Sonata was first on the program, and it immediately revealed itself (as did a few other works on this evening) as an operatic version of Forbidden Broadway, stripped of an actual plot and/or libretto and left with cookie-cutter operatic roles making use of the 4th wall and talking stabs at operatic cliches like the wronged lady, the jealous lover, and topping it off, the Shakespearean suicide. Most appealing about this piece was the sweet performance of soprano Danya Katok in her characterization of a typical operatic heroine.

It may have been a mistake to have Sonata and the Patrick Soluri short Tragedy of Count Alfredo Von Nibelungen in the same program as it was yet another sendup of operatic cliches–This one focusing on particular composers like Wagner, Puccini, Verdi and Mozart. While this piece had just as much gall, it made for a slightly abundant programming.

Tom Cipullo’s The Husbands was an unprecedented serious short that reminded me very strongly of Sondheim’s most cerebral works. Very effective performances by Danya Katok and baritone Chris Pedro Trakas as the narrators of a story (based on William Carpenter’s Rain) depicting widows being reunited with their long-lost husbands only to lose them again. The story characters (non-singing) were performed beautifully by Lauren Alfano, Laura Federici, Genaro Mendez and Dewey Moss. The white shroud draped over the widows by the 2 narrators seemed to symbolize peace with death.

Another favorite was Anne Dinsmore Phillips’ Table #9, which got some of the biggest laughs of the night due to its Seinfeld-ian nature of being virtually about nothing, just the two ladies having brunch. Kristin Patterson’s powerful alto voice made the irony of the piece play out all the more achingly sweet.

The closer, William Bolcom’s short Barnyard Boogaloo, was probably the most theatrical of all of the shorts due to a few strains thrown in that seemed a bit inspired by rock musicals. Perhaps not the composer’s best work, but it made good use of the cast (the largest ensemble of players among the works), and it even featured music director McLeer in the role of the master of the barnyard.

The range of the feel of the different shorts was mostly well-programmed, and while I love the comical operas, I would hope that they can include even more dramatic ones in future shows as well.

Remarkable Theater Brigade.com
Official website

Tom Cipullo's The Husbands in Rehearsal

11/4 at 8 PM at Weill Recital Hall: Opera Shorts 2011

The third annual installment of the Remarkable Theater Brigade’s Opera Shorts program is this Friday. These mini-operas – ten minutes or less – are an emerging composer’s dream: a chance to hear a brief slice of their work on the stage. But Opera Shorts draws some heavy hitters to the mini-opera game as well. The 2011 installment features works by prominent songsters Jake Heggie, William Bolcom, and Tom Cipullo, as well as emerging creators Marie Incontrera, Mike McFerron, Davide Zannoni, Anne Dinsmore Phillips, Patrick Soluri, and Christian McLeer. Given the length of that list, it’s lucky that none of them have Wagnerian ambitions — this time out at least!

11/4 at 8 PM on the water: Bennett Brass at Bargemusic

BoaC. Photo: Pascal Perich and Julien Jourdes

Gorecki. Photo: ©Gerry Hurkmans

Missy Mazzoli

Life in ETHEL is frantic these days. In the midst of meetings, emails, conference calls, and intense rehearsals, I sometimes (sadly) lose touch with the sense of wonder that originally drew me to a life in contemporary music. Missy Mazzoli is one composer whose music always brings me back to a fundamental excitement about what I do. I have been working with Missy on her solo violin piece, Dissolve, O my Heart, which I will be performing at Bargemusic on October 5th (8PM) as part of my ongoing Journaling series.

Originally written for Jennifer Koh, the piece is essentially Missy’s emotional reaction to J. S. Bach’s D minor Chaconne (one of the great masterworks of the solo violin literature). She starts the piece with the same iconic d minor triad, in which, she explains,  the listener immediately “acknowledges the inevitable failure of the assignment.” Missy is referring to the impossibility of achieving the structural perfection of Bach’s work, and how, from her perspective, the only way to create her  own piece was to embrace it as a “failed Chaconne.” It’s a gorgeous failure, if you ask me. The version that I will be performing in October includes live electronics (three different kinds of digital delay), which Missy and I have been developing together.

Abigail Fischer in "Songs from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt" (photo by Lindsay Beyerstein)

One of Missy’s massive new projects is to create three operas, each one about “a fascinating female character from the 20th or 21st century.” Part one of this trilogy, Song From The Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, is sure to be spellbinding. The libretto, co-written by Royce Vavrek and Missy, is based on the journals of Isabelle Eberhardt, and depicts more than a dozen scenes from Eberhardt’s life. The opera begins at the moment of Eberhardt’s death, and continues as a series of flashbacks.

Eberhardt, who was a Swiss writer and explorer of the early 20th century, has been alternately idolized and shunned as a symbol of female liberation. Missy points to Eberhardt’s relentless search for personal freedom and independence, her complicated love life, and her gender ambiguity (as a cross-dressing female artist) as themes that continue to be relevant to women today. Another interesting through-line of the opera is how Eberhardt navigates the conflict between Eastern and Western cultures. Eberhardt moved to North Africa and converted to Islam when she was a young woman. “She fought in street battles in Algiers against the French,” Missy explains, “but she was also working for the French as a journalist, so she was caught between these two worlds.”

The opera, directed by Gia Forakis, has already been workshopped at Galapagos in Brooklyn, New York City Opera’s VOX, and Bard College, and will be premiered at The Kitchen on February 24, 25, and March 1-3. Performers include singer Abigail Fischer and NOW ensemble; with films by Stephen Taylor.

Missy has some other exciting projects coming up, including two new pieces – one for the Albany Symphony, and one for cellist Maya Beiser. Her all-star band Victoire (Olivia De Prato, violin; Eileen Mack, clarinet; Lorna Krier, keayboards; Elenore Oppenheim, bass; and Missy on keyboards), whose CD Cathedral City was one of NPR’s top ten classical albums of 2010, will be performing at the Bell House in Gowanus on October 17. Not to be missed!

This post was also published in Urban Modes

Rhymes with Opera

This Spring, Baltimore-based composer David Smooke composed Criminal Element, a “nonopera” in a fabricated language, for Rhymes with Opera, a company devoted to presenting opera in nontraditional spaces. Alongside works by Martin Zimmerman, Ryan Jesperson, and George Lam, it premieres Friday, June 17th in Brooklyn at Cafe Orwell. The program, titled Criminal Intent (hopefully Dick Wolf won’t sue), will be repeated in Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston.

As if it weren’t hard enough to compose an opera, non or otherwise, in the midst of a busy semester teaching at the Peabody Institute, where Smooke is a faculty member, the composer decided to create his own libretto, in a made-up language built out of IPA no less! To help us translate this phonetic construction and its backstory, I asked for some further information about the piece, which he shares below.

Smooke says, “In this nonopera, I consider the fraud—the unveiling of which helped spark the recession of 2008—perpetrated by Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader from France’s Société Générale who appeared to me to function as the archetypical white-collar criminal. Like his British counterpart Nicholas Leeson, who brought down the venerable Barings Bank in the 1990s, Kerviel was an interloper in the European banking society. These men were among the first working-class hires within traditionally upper-class departments and both appear to have perpetrated their crimes as part of their vain attempts to please their superiors through outworking and outsmarting their colleagues. Here, scenes of trading—number arias—recur throughout, with each growing progressively more tense. Life beyond the office is represented by a lullaby sung by paternal and maternal figures (Kerviel’s parents were a blacksmith and hairdresser in Pont-l’Abbé, Brittany), and by snippets of city life that include an invitation from friends to join their revelry. Although this piece creates theatrical scenes with some referential elements, it is a meditation on class differences and on the germinating factors in exorbitant criminal events, and is not intended to portray the life of any specific individual.”

“There is no text; the action is conveyed through an invented language notated in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The action therefore remains relatively ambiguous and non-specific. I ask the singers and the string quartet to explore many unusual performance techniques, which force them to stretch beyond their normal comfort zones.”

Criminal Element in rehearsal

CRIMINAL INTENT

Featuring the West End String Quartet
Orphée Redux and Someone Anyone directed by Elspeth Davis

Friday, June 17 at 7pm | Café Orwell
247 Varet St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

Saturday, June 18 at 6pm | Windup Space
12 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21201
*A party for Friends of RWO after the show!*

Friday, June 24 at 7:30pm | Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT 06106

Saturday, June 25 at 2pm | Yes!Oui!Si! Space
19 Vancouver St, Boston, MA 02115

• RYAN JESPERSON Orphée Redux
• MARTIN ZIMMERMAN and GEORGE LAM Someone Anyone
• DAVID SMOOKE Criminal Element (2011, premiere, commissioned by RWO)

This is an amazing production of a compelling musical, visual and visceral work, with wonderful sound – magical – with Ms. Lauten controlling the Electronic Orchestra, and excellent performances by the cast and the production team.

Don Juan, the archetypal seducer, meets empowered women in this opera: to quote Ms. Lauten, there is “something compelling about Juan as a character: he has courage, passion, and above all, he is thoroughly human, because he is after love and freedom. Something about him resonates in us, both women and men, and we cannot bring ourselves to hate him.”

Don Juan dances and sings with empowered female spirits – reminisces of the women in his life – as performed by Douglas McDonnell as the title character, Don Juan, and Courtney Symonds as Death as a Woman, Arianna Armon as Death as a Lover, Mary Hurlbut as Death as a Spirit, and, Alisha Desai as Death as a Shadow. All give compelling performances, with varied and memorable singing, dancing and acting.

Elodie Lauten performs the synthesizer and Electronic Orchestra; and, Jonathan Hirschman, the electric guitar.

The music, libretto and visual imagery is by Elodie Lauten; it’s directed by Robert Lawson and Henry Akona; Alexander Bartenieff is the Lighting Designer; Ron Benjamin, the Audio Engineer; Robert Mendoza, the Stage Manager; Anna Thomford and Carla Gant, the Costume Designers; and, Elodie Lauten, Producer and Musical Director.

The theater is in NYC at 155 First Avenue, (10th Street), May 5 – 22, 2011. (Tickets $15 / $10 students & seniors; Thurs., Fri., Sat., 8pm; Sunday 3pm matinee; box office tel. 212-254-1109.)

Ms. Lauten’s program notes sketches out the whole opera, its theme, the libretto; and its creative process, employing both Western and Eastern methods. I need not repeat it. Ms. Lauten is a Parisian romantic post-minimalist composer, who lives and works in New York, and who is most imaginative in her craft and emotional focus – this is a brilliant and moving piece; most entertaining and thought-provoking.

Are we there yet? For years, we’ve been listening to virtual instruments, even virtual orchestras, but the sound samples and sounds produced were but distorted shadows of the acoustic instruments. This sound sounds real.

Ms. Lauten, by patient work and brilliance has gotten the sound right – and we’re finally there, with her one-woman keyboard controlling a virtual orchestra (with a live electric guitarist).

Furthermore, the imagery – psychedelic, to some extent, a child of the 1960s, but out of wellsprings of much older traditions, is convincing, powerful and beautiful in its imagery.

This is real opera, but it is also real theater; and, it is as powerful and accessible as a Broadway musical, even though it has a seriousness of purpose and attention to detail that is rare in either theater or operatic settings.

Real opera should be passionate – not tidy, but vary large emotions and small details, with enough changes and transformations to keep things interesting, and enough consistency to have a story to follow. Real opera, like real life, should be unpredictable, even when one sees things coming. Real opera should be real theater: there is no boundary line between musical theater and opera (although one has classically-trained singers and conventions, there is no need pigeon-hole one).

Are we there yet? Yes, thanks to Ms. Lauten, we’ve arrived at the point where electronic technology – virtual orchestra and imagery – has the realism and power to be real, vivid, and emotionally true.

(Houston, TX) Houston based opera singer Misha Penton opens her unique performance space Divergence Vocal Theater this Friday, April 15th. Located at Spring Street Studios, home to many of Houston’s finest visual and mixed media artists. Divergence Vocal Theater will bring together Ms. Penton’s team of singers, musicians, composers, dancers, and lighting and costume designers to present new chamber opera repertoire. Klytemnestra, a collaborative opera dance theater work featuring music by composer Dominick DiOrio, sung text by Misha Penton, spoken text by John Harvey, and choreography by Meg Brooker, is receiving a great deal of positive press in advance of its premier April 15th and 16th at Divergence Vocal Theater.

Ms. Penton’s mission is to subvert the social mores and business paradigms preventing singers from creating their own works. In the wake of reality after graduate school, more and more classical instrumentalists are creating their own business and career models, going further and further out into what is, for many musicians, uncharted territory. Violinist Todd Reynolds, the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and Houston based pianists Jade Simmons and Kris Becker are a few examples of musicians who are each developing a sustainable means for commissioning, performing, and deriving an income from playing contemporary classical music. Their approaches are as varied as their personalities, and there is much to discuss when it comes to what is actually working for one musician as opposed to another. But in the near future, these intrepid instrumentalists are going to find that more and more singers, including Misha Penton, are “out there” with them.

Misha and I met shortly after my relocating to Houston and I quickly recognized a kindred spirit. This interview took place via email in advance of the premier of Kyltemnestra.

Chris Becker: In a recent interview you said: “One of the things I want to do…is restructure the way people think about who does opera, how it’s done, who makes it, and who performs it…What I do with Divergence is…create my own works and I sing in them. It’s very much something actors and dancers do, but singers are not encouraged to create their own products.” Do you think this model that you’re describing is the future of classically trained musicians?

Misha Penton: Actually, I do – but it’s already happening. And it really isn’t anything new…instrumentalists in particular have been savvy to this model for a long time – the success of independent ensembles like Eighth Blackbird comes to mind immediately. Some conservatories are starting to take entrepreneurship seriously. Opera America has a great feature about entrepreneurship in its spring magazine and about singer-led initiatives, and entrepreneurship is the theme for the conference this year as well. Obviously rock and jazz musicians work this way and always have. I’m seeing more classically trained singers take on their own projects, but it doesn’t seem to be as encouraged by the vocal teaching tradition as it could be…but again, that is all changing. The more opportunities we, as artists create, the better we’ll be able to define success for ourselves. As a singer, I’m only partly an interpretive artist. I’m a theater artist and writer too, so I’ve always done creative work. I think of myself as an independent artist who happens to create work collaboratively.

Opera Singer Misha Penton (photo by Kerry Beyer)

CB: Who are some of your peers among singers that are doing something similarly subversive?

MP There are more and more small opera companies popping up that singers are joining forces to create – that’s absolutely fantastic. And classically trained singers are branching out into all sorts of music projects. I meet singers all the time who say, “Hey I have this idea for a project” – I just love that. Go do it!

In general, I question the traditional company and nonprofit structure – so I’m not sure that’s the best survival tactic nor the best creative model. There are so many options for funding work now without forming a nonprofit (fiscal sponsorship, crowdfunding, etc). The last thing I want on my back is an “organization”. I work project-to-project and I’m aspiring to a Robert Fripp-ian model – a “small mobile intelligent unit”.

CB: You now have a dedicated space for your work as Divergence Vocal Theater. Before this, where and how did you produce your work?

MP: In the past, I primarily used alternative dance spaces – and the acoustics are dreadful in those spaces, so it makes it very difficult to hear anything. I used a church for one piece – because I thought of the work there as artistically site specific, I didn’t feel that I could continue to create work in churches (which are not as easy to access as one might think!). I have very strong ideas about what types of venues are conducive to my vision, and although I love alternative spaces, they need to be acoustically and physically friendly to the art form. I don’t want to spend my time and energy competing over rehearsal space, performance dates, and juggling the schedules of artists. A very serendipitous opportunity arose for me to create an intimate chamber music and multi-performing arts space in a new art studio building in Houston – Spring Street Studios – so that’s what I’ve done. I have to brag of its beautiful reclaimed wood floors, 20-foot ceilings – and we just treated it acoustically and it sounds amazing. I don’t know of any place else like it. This is all very new to me and I think of it as a grand experiment. Who knows what the future holds?

CB: You’ve worked with two excellent Houston composers. Elliot Cole (now studying at Princeton) and Dominick DiOrio. How did you meet these two? And what drew you to their writing for the voice?

MP: Through the grapevine, really. I love new music and I love working with composers. I started up conversations with both Elliot and Dominick about collaborating and that led to the creation of two new opera theater works, both settings of my words (Selkie with Elliot and Klytemnestra with Dominick). For me, this is exactly the type of work I want to do. I’m completely in my element collaborating to create new works and bringing them to life.

Dominick is a singer also, so he has a wonderful grasp of the voice as an instrument – and I sang for him a good deal before he started writing – so he became very familiar with my voice, with my specific instrument. Dominick’s music has a dramatic complexity and depth that really resonates with me. Klytemnestra’s music has an interwoven quality – web-like, veiled, cyclical, a masterful interplay between the parts. The music is deeply psychological and reflective of a Greek heroine.

Elliot writes in a broad range of styles and he has this particularly delightful avant-chamber-pop thing going on in a lot of his writing – I just really love that about his music – it’s intense, intelligent, and accessible. For Selkie, I think Elliot wrote specific to what my text evoked for him as a composer – so that was really special, I think. The style of the composition was influenced by the text. Selkie has this big, lush, swirling sea-ness about it that makes me weak in the knees. I admit, I nurture collaborative relationships with amazing people – Elliot and Dominick are fun to work with, it’s not more complicated than that.

CB: Klytemnestra will include sung text that you’ve created as opposed to spoken text created by playwright director John Harvey. What is the difference between the two texts? Was either of the texts inspired by the other? How do they interrelate in the opera?

MP: About a year ago, John Harvey asked me to portray Klytemnestra in his new translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – and I thought, “Oh, God – I have to memorize lines!” It’s funny, but in response to that, I thought, “Well, if I have to deal with memorizing lines, then I want to create an opera companion piece”. Like that’s easier! And so, during the process, John asked me to write from Klytemnestra’s point of view… and my writing became the libretto for the opera. Actress, Miranda Herbert, is also performing in the opera as another facet of Klytemnestra. Her lines are John’s words, so the sung words are mine and the spoken words are his. Meg Brooker, a brilliant dancer, is the third aspect. The work is set for viola, piano, soprano, actress, and dancer. I think of the piece as an original collaborative work in its totality: the way a choreographer might think of their work. The theatrical vision for the piece is neither separate nor superimposed over the music, it’s part of it. Agamemnon and Klytemnestra run on consecutive weekends in April as a Dionysia Festival.

CB: How does choreography and dance come into play into this performance? Is your movement onstage choreographed to some degree?

MP: I work very compositionally in a visual sense and every piece I’ve done has had a dance element. I continue to move closer, with each successive piece, to the entire work having an overall physical stylized feel. Visually, I keep working with the idea that the piece in its staging shifts from painting to painting. That’s how it feels to me. Klytemnestra has a complete movement score. Meg is a highly skilled dancer and Miranda and I both have dance and physical theater backgrounds, so the three of us created a collaborative movement world. Ultimately, it is up to me to shape the work and to keep true to my concept for the piece, so I sift through video and assess what we do in rehearsal… but it is all highly collaborative. I’ve worked with Meg and Miranda several times before – that’s another key to making work with a strong theatrical identity – and they both very much understand my aesthetic. It’s kind of like having two more versions of me with different skill sets, but that feed a common vision. And that’s a very, very big deal.

Klytemnestra premiers April 15 & 16, 2011, 8pm, at Divergence Music & Arts at Spring Street Studios, 1824 Spring St, Houston, TX 77007. To purchase tickets, visit the Divergence Vocal Theater website.

Jochen Kowalski (center) and the Long Beach Opera Chorus in Akhnaten by Philip Glass

If you have the slightest interest in contemporary opera or modern drama, you must see Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, scheduled for one more performance by Long Beach Opera on Sunday, March 27. It is a brilliant update of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which Glass’s music, staging by Andreas Mitisek, choreography by Nanette Brodie, and video projections by Frieder Weiss all combine into one amazing whole.

At the heart of the work is Glass’s monolithic score and libretto. The story itself is a series of tableaux depicting the rise (Act 1) and fall (Act 3) of Akhnaten and his dangerous idea—there is only one God, Aten, the Sun. (Act 2 is devoted to Akhnaten’s implementation of monotheism). Glass’s repetitive music, with its Brucknerian phrase lengths and static textures, creates a deep sense of ritual underlying each scene.

The modern operas favored by most American companies strike me as unsatisfactory hybrids in which a recent contemporary musical vocabulary is poured into a 19th-century dramatic form. With the typical American opera libretto adapted from a novel, film, or conventional play, the narrative is linear, the presentation of material straightforward, rarely employing any 20th-century dramatic innovations. What Glass did with his Einstein/Gandhi/Akhnaten operatic trilogy was to bring opera up to date with contemporary dramatic thought. Even though Akhnaten is almost 30 years old, it seems fresh and novel compared to the retooled verismo of so much recent American opera.

Another problem for me in contemporary opera (although it’s a problem over 100 years old) is that of vocal parts consisting of continuous recitative or through-composed arias or whatever you want to call them. In the Baroque through Romantic periods, an aria sung by a character operated according to clear structural principals—the da capo aria or classical number aria. What has replaced that organizing device in modern operas? Complete formal freedom—in many contemporary operas, the characters sing in a continuous recitative. Berg solved the problem by shaping the scenes in Wozzeck according to the principals of multi-movement instrumental music.

Glass came up with a somewhat similar solution in his operas—the sung vocal lines are an integral part of the musical process. The vocal parts in Akhnaten are like instrumental lines, an essential part of Glass’s overall musical fabric. The intellectual rigor of his writing allows orchestral instruments to be substituted for the voices in the Akhnaten excerpt of Jerome Robbins’s ballet, Glass Pieces, (Act 1, Scene 1) without any loss of musical sense or drama.

This vocal writing flies in the face of the American operagoer’s expectations. What, no high C for the soprano? No cadenza for the tenor? (The lack of big stage moments for singers is probably one of the reasons Akhnaten and similar operas are rarely produced in the U.S.).

This is not to say that there aren’t highly dramatic moments in Glass’s vocal parts. The first note sung by Akhnaten is one of the most startling entrances in all of opera. We see Akhnaten for an entire scene during his coronation, but it is not until the last scene of Act I that we finally hear Akhnaten sing; what comes out of his mouth is not the heroic tenor or deep bass we expect from an operatic king, but rather a hooty A above middle C sung by a countertenor. Yes, we knew Akhnaten was a countertenor when we first took our seat, but that does not mitigate the unnerving violation of our expectations when this figure of grandeur opens his mouth and issues forth a sound which would be more appropriate for a giant boy soprano.

Jochen Kowalski sang the title role with a vibrato so wobbly that he could be an honorary member of the International Workers of the World. Paul Esswood, who created the role of Akhnaten for the Stuttgart premiere and the subsequent recording, sang with little vibrato in a style more typical for an early music concert than an American opera stage. Akhnaten was a physically deformed man, yet Kowalski looked like, and played him, as an imposing authority figure. Kowalski’s attitude was firm, his blocking well-defined, his postures exact; it was too bad that his sense of pitch did not share these characteristics. Let’s hope his singing is more disciplined on Sunday afternoon.

The other two prominent roles were ably sung by alto Peabody Southwell as Nefertiti and tenor Tyler Thompson as the Amon High Priest (not “Amon” as the program identified him—Amon was the god). A recent graduate, Southwell already possesses a solid tone and a confident stage presence, and one suspects audiences will see even more of her as her voice matures.

The Amon High Priest is the focal point of the funeral scene and the attack on Akhnaten’s city in Act 3, and Thompson understood Mitisek’s minimal, gradual staging (not always easy for a tenor to do) for both these scenes. His part is accompanied by a bass (Ralph Cato in the role of Aye, Nefertiti’s father) and baritone (Roberto Perlas Gomez as the General, Horemhab). They sing nearly all the time in rhythmic unison, yet Thompson was in his upper range during these trios and stood out from his companions (who provided admirable support). His vocal part in the Temple scene of Act 2 is more independent, and underscored by a tritone-fourth dissonance that must have struck listeners in the 1980s as some of the most chromatically inflected music Glass had written up to that point. Even today, the harsh dissonance in the context of the triadic language Glass uses in Akhnaten is a striking effect. Akhnaten’s key is usually A minor; could this clash in the harmony (Ab-Eb-Bb) represent the conflict between Akhnaten’s monotheism and the establishment pantheism of the priests?

The chorus is a key component to the opera; the choruses Glass composed for the opera are some of the most rousing or beautiful choruses in contemporary opera (right up there with the choruses from Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer). The Long Beach Opera Chorus was remarkable for its tight ensemble and terrific intonation, all sung while building a city or storming its walls in stylized battle.

Andreas Mitisek (designer, director, conductor and artistic director) is probably the hardest working man in American opera, outside of Placido Domingo. His reading of the score with Glass’s unusual pit ensemble (no violins–an orchestration decision arrived at by figuring out how many instruments could fit into the Stuttgart theater serving as a temporary home for the opera there) was heartfelt, his tempos well chosen. At times his musicians weren’t quite up to their task; the low brass had difficulties in several places, and the viola section on occasion sounded like—well, a group of violas trying to play in tune. Overall, the instrumental and vocal performances did justice to Glass’s score.

In Glass’s expansively scaled music, the introduction of a new pitch, harmony or timbre becomes a significant marker. Mitisek’s staging and Brodie’s choreography is likewise slow, but goal-oriented. In the opening prelude, dancers stand frozen left to right across the stage, assuming the stylized shapes of Egyptians as depicted in their ancient art. Slowly a character (a goddess? a priestess?) moves from right to left across the stage. As she passes each dancer, their stance and limb posture slowly moves into a different position, and one by one they follow her back across the stage to exit on the right as the music comes to a close. In Act 2, Scene 3 dancers and chorus members construct the city of Akhetaten in devotion to the Aten. Brick by brick, abstract columns, walls, and arches are built up until, by the end of the scene, an abstract representation of the city has emerged.

The real jaw-dropper in this show, however, was the interactive video projection by Frieder Weiss. In a quarter-century of attending theater and opera, I have never seen video so well integrated into a production. A field of stars projected on a scrim parts when characters move across the stage, as if they were pushing through the points of light. Rectangles slide down a large ramp, as if falling, and when singers slowly walk down the ramp, they appear to be somehow moving even though their feet are firmly planted on the ramp. Bolts of light drop from the heavens into characters’s outraised hands. In the final scene, Akhnaten, his mother, and his wife ascend the ramp, raised one story above the floor, its end terminating in air. As Glass’s music comes to rest on A’s and E’s (no third), projections on the singers make them appear to dissolve into ghost-like blurs, which then evaporate into blackness. I have never seen video work like this—it was absolutely mesmerizing.

A few technical issues blemish this remarkable show. Foremost was the speaker buzz which rudely interjected itself over the music. Glass requires a narrator who describes, in the audience’s language, what the characters are singing (he used ancient languages and Hebrew for most of his sung texts). Pete Taylor did a fine job acting as the “translator” or tour guide (the last scene is set in modern times among the ruins of Akhnaten’s city, and Glass used a Fodor’s travel book as a text). However, the incessant hum from the speaker undercut the solemnity of Taylor’s narration.

Long Beach Opera makes magical things happen on a miniscule budget, but couldn’t they have found or devised props that resemble stone blocks instead using folded cardboard boxes? The seams were painfully obvious.

Glass devised Akhnaten with a three-act structure, but LBO crams Acts 1 and 2 together without any intermission, blurring the obvious formal structure of the acts and overly testing the patience of listeners unable to adapt to Glass’s time scale. It would have been nice to have that intermission, but the opera still works without it.

That said, if you want to see an opera-a damn fine opera- in which all of its components—music, libretto, staging—are thoroughly contemporary, go to Long Beach and catch the final performance of Akhnaten.

Akhnaten, Nefertiti, and Queen Tye prepare to journey to the afterlife

This Friday and Saturday October 22 and 23, Andrea Liberovici’s multimedia work Mephisto’s Songs premieres a part of the Apollo Theater’s Salon Series. I’m not familiar with Liberovici, but I am familiar with Mephisto’s featured performer singer Helga Davis. In addition to Ms. Davis’ amazing vocals, the piece includes recorded narration by Robert Wilson and cello improvisations by The Kronos Quartet’s awesome Jeffrey Zeigler. Live musicians for this performance include Clarice Jenson (cello), Fred Cash Jr. (bass), and Abe Fogle (drums).

Some of you may be familiar with Helga Davis as a host of WQXR’s Overnight Music. She works frequently with composers Paola Prestini and Bernice Johnson Reagon who, in collaboration with Robert Wilson, created the critically acclaimed opera The Temptation of Saint Anthony with Davis singing the role of Hilarion. And some of you truly hip folks may know that she sings on two scores I composed for dance, Like Dirt for Racoco Productions and La Spectra for Movement Pants Dance. Davis is also a distinctive and powerful composer. Her solo shows combining song, spoken word, theater, and video at venues that include New York City’s Whitney Museum or Galapagos are not to be missed.

Check out the Apollo Theater website for ticket information for their Salon Series. An article about another one of Liberovici’s recent projects can be found here.