Beyond the Walls - Opera Magazine, September 2017

BEYOND THE WALLS

David Shengold on Opera Philadelphia’s new festival initiative

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pera Philadelphia’s triumphant premiere of Breaking the Waves in September 2016 proved an establishing point not only for its composer, Missy Mazzoli, but also for the company that commissioned it. The work—named ‘Best New American Opera’ by Musical America—set the seal on something that had been shaping up for some years: Philadelphia’s opera company is now no longer a sometimes fortuitous provincial troupe, but North America’s major generator of contemporary works and a successful model for audience- and repertory-building practice for the continent. This month, the initiatives that led to this success are given blazing new form in O17, a 12-day festival including six operas, three of which are premieres.

Performances are spread over five venues—or six if one counts the leafy Independence National Historical Park, where the most mainstream offering (Die Zauberflöte, in Barrie Kosky’s popular Komische Oper staging) will be relayed from the Academy of Music onto big screens, free to the audience.

The premieres include Elizabeth Cree, a chamber opera by Kevin Puts (b. 1972), whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Silent Night in 2013 was a happy waymark in the acceptance of contemporary work by OP’s audience. Mark Campbell’s libretto stems from Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem, a Londonset Victorian thriller. This 90-minute work will be staged in the flexible 625-seat Perelman Theater, a key component of OP’s emerging identity. The Wilma Theater, one ■ Breakthrough work: Missy Mazzoli’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ at Opera Philadelphia

last year, with John Moore as Jan Nyman and Kiera Duffy as Bess McNeill

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of Philadelphia’s principal venues for serious drama, hosts We Shall Not Be Moved

by Daniel Bernard Roumain (b. 1971), which investigates the persistence of racial inequality and social injustice through the lens of homeless youth at the site of the MOVE bombing.

That infamous 1985 event—in which Philadelphia’s police dropped a bomb on a house occupied by a radical, largely African-American commune—was a flashpoint in the city’s history, but Roumain (whose work blends classical with black popular idioms from funk to hip hop) and the librettist Marc ■ Corrado Rovaris and David Devan, Opera Bamuthi Joseph (b. 1975) Philadelphia’s music director and general director found that many younger people knew nothing about it. We Shall Not Be Moved developed through OP’s Hip H’opera project, and the input and research of community high school students have been key to the project. The choreographer Bill T. Jones—with whom Roumain has worked before—directs, and the cast includes both classically trained singers and spoken word performers. The third premiere will be The Wake World, composed by David Hertzberg (b. 1990), to be staged in the forum and galleries of the Barnes Foundation. Hertzberg’s work, for which he has crafted his own libretto, fuses the singular vision of Dr Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), Philadelphia’s pioneering physician, chemist and art collector, with an ecstatic story by his contemporary, the British occultist Aleister Crowley.

At the city’s splendid Museum of Art, Robin Guarino stages War Stories, a double bill pairing Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda with I Have No Stories to Tell You, a 2014 opera by Lembit Beecher (b. 1981), one of OP’s three composers in residence. As a fillip to those seeking world-class glamour, Sondra Radvanovsky gives both a recital and a masterclass.

OP’s new festival came to be thanks to an energetic triumvirate: Corrado Rovaris, music director since 2005, a central figure in raising the standard of both orchestra and chorus; David Devan, who started in 2006 as managing director and became general director and president in 2011; and Sarah Williams, the company’s dynamic new works administrator, who came on board in 2014. Rovaris was born in Bergamo—like Donizetti—and studied composition as well as organ and harpsichord. Four years as La Scala’s assistant chorus master under Muti honed his operatic experience, but his interests and abilities have always extended to early music (Pergolesi is a particular interest) and contemporary scores. Rovaris came to Philadelphia in 1999, speaking Opera, September 2017

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virtually no English, to conduct Figaro; since then, he has led contemporary works including Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra, Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD and Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain.

Without his extensive upgrading of the orchestra, OP could scarcely have tackled such works at all.

Philadelphia preserves the one 19th-century Europeanstyle proscenium theatre in North America still used for ■ Henze’s ‘Phaedra’ at Opera Philadelphia in 2011 opera: the Academy. It opened in 1857 with Il trovatore, starring Marietta Gazzaniga, the creator of Verdi’s Luisa Miller and Lina (Stiffelio), and it makes a perfect showcase for Faust, Ballo and other works written at the time. But pushing beyond its walls has been central to Devan’s mission, and has yielded results. He describes Ana Sokolović’s Svadba, which the company performed at the city’s Fringe festival in 2013 in its first US performance, as ‘our first foray into truly alternative space. It helped us create new audiences: over 50 per cent had never been to an opera before, and with Andy [another Fringe offering, about Warhol and his era] we had over 50 per cent millennials. This gave us the confidence about rebranding the company around contemporary opera.’

When had Devan first conceived this possibility? ‘The entry point was The Rape of Lucretia in 2009. We saw that opera in the Perelman could work. We had Nathan Gunn and William Burden, two international artists we’re in constant partnership with. It was so well produced—that was our first show directed by Will Kerley, now part of our artistic “family”—he’s doing our Written on Skin later this season with Anthony Roth Costanzo, another artist whose imagination we like to accommodate; we’re in dialogue with him to find out what kind of work he wants to create. The tipping point into contemporary rep was the US premiere of Phaedra in June 2011. There was such excitement from cast and crew in really creating something, and that fuelled the audience response. It was thrilling.’ Rovaris, who conducted the challenging score, agreed: ‘Phaedra was the moment when I saw we could go this route and take the audience with us. And also the orchestral musicians, who invested very deeply.’

Both Devan and Rovaris affirm that the deployment of key artists on- and offstage helps to guide programming. Besides Kerley, Costanzo and the composers Higdon and Puts, they mention the American baritone Troy Cook, who has made a series of increasingly impressive OP appearances including Marcello, Father Palmer in Silent Night and Posa. He’ll play John Cree in Puts’s opera, opposite Daniela Mack in the title role. And Philadelphia’s high-level conservatoires—the Academy of Vocal Arts and Curtis Institute—have recently been producing many singers prominent on international

stages (for example, you will see Frédéric Antoun, Joyce DiDonato, Joyce El-Khoury, Michael Fabiano, Bryan Hymel and Rinat Shaham on Covent Garden’s roster this season). What Rovaris and Devan have done is to work with both institutions to utilize current students in supporting roles (sometimes as designated ‘Emerging Artists’), building relationships that mean graduates return as leads. Elizabeth Cree boasts two Curtis graduates in multiple roles. Kosky’s Zauberflöte draws its Papagena, Three Ladies and First Armed Man from the schools; the rising stars Rachel Sterrenberg (Pamina) and Jarrett Ott (Papageno) appeared at OP while still studying at Curtis.

Devan stresses that the company will not be programming its seasons in a vacuum.

‘It’s not just Corrado and me sitting around thinking, “Oh, it’s time we did such-andsuch an opera.” Twenty-five years ago there were known commodities to produce, plus a known group of artists who wanted to add roles or do familiar ones. None of those things is certain any more. Our ideal now is to offer opportunities for artists in every category—composers, librettists, directors and designers as well as singers—to do exciting work and to find out what they want to do. Kevin Puts was thrilled when we offered him the chance to work on a chamber opera, which took away some of his accustomed tools but yielded a different kind of concentrated musical drama. We try to plan along these lines—it makes things more organic and exciting, but messy from the general director’s point of view: you’re not assembling Lego bricks but trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.’ Plus there is the question of co-productions and co-commissions, central to Devan’s planning. ‘I’m flying around a lot, looking at sister companies for works in development. I foresee three or four partners for a production like Cree; it’s going to Chicago Opera Theater, and to ENO at the Hackney Empire, which had our Yardbird this summer. They’ll also host We Shall Not Be Moved. Our work—at the intersection of North ■ The creative team for ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’: American and European (l. to r.) Daniel Bernard Roumain, Bill T. Jones and practices—is a good fit for Marc Bamuthi Joseph their community.’

Sarah Williams radiates good-humoured dedication to her work, which in large terms includes expanding on the traditional demographics of opera’s creators and practitioners as well as its audiences. Williams trained as a singer at Manhattan School of Music (where I first saw her in Hoiby’s A Month in the Country under Steven Osgood, whom she hired a dozen years later to conduct Breaking the Waves at OP).

‘New work always drew me; in that “previous life” I go way back with Mark Campbell and Ricky Ian Gordon and

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Jennifer Higdon. I’m like the coach on the team; I get to spend three years working with these wonderful creative people to help them meet challenges.’ One of Williams’s OP innovations is the Double Exposure programme, in which the composers in residence write dramatic scenes that are then worked up and presented by two different production teams and casts. ‘It’s all about the process, and it fosters collaboration: that’s how David Hertzberg hit it off with R.B. Schlather, who helped develop The Wake World and who will stage it.’

Several American companies have reorganized their year-round seasons into short festivals; OP intends to be the first to present a keystone festival as a kick-off to a yearlong season embracing more traditional offerings. This season offers George Benjamin’s Written on Skin plus Paul Curran’s new production of Carmen, with Daniela Mack in the title role and the radiant-voiced Curtis graduate Kirsten MacKinnon as Micäela.

Devan and Williams understandably want to keep the specifics to themselves, but OP’s calendar is planned through to 2020-21, with commissions signed and significant artists on hold. Devan affirms that future seasons will explore other venues—the smaller ones in this year’s festival have quickly sold out—while trying to retain the intimacy that OP feels will help draw newcomers in. Williams confirmed that genre-breaking imported productions—such as last season’s brilliant Macbeth by the South African company Third World Bunfight—will continue to figure in the mix. Audiences and artists— traditional and emerging—are primed for the experiments to come.

Opera Philadelphia’s O17 festival runs from September 14 to 25. See ‘Opera calendar abroad’ and www.operaphila.org for details.

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