The first two times the Ian Judge production of Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet were performed by LA Opera, Kitty McNamee was the choreographer. It was her first time choreographing an opera. This year, the third time around for this production, McNamee is sitting in the director’s chair and serving as choreographer.

McNamee had her own dance company in Los Angeles: Hysterica which launched in the late 1990s. She’s choreographed many other opera (for LA Opera and other companies worldwide).

McNamee has also worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hollywood Bowl, Pasadena Playhouse and more.

Hopping into the director’s chair was both exciting and daunting for McNamee. Though she knew the production well, there were things she wanted to do to freshen it up. A serious re-working of the production wasn’t an option. She found the areas where she felt she could bring something new to this tragic story of star-crossed lovers.

McNamee discusses her journey on this production, the power of love stories where couples don’t end up together and whether she can see herself in her work in Romeo and Juliet. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with McNamee, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Composer Charles Gounod is quoted as having said, “My opinion changes rapidly. One minute I can think it is very good and the next time I look at it, I see all the flaws and weaknesses therein.” How much does does that perspective reflect your experience as a choreographer and perhaps as an opera director now?

I think that resonates so profoundly with me. I mean, I could have written that myself particularly when there is an audience watching with you. You just feel so exposed because any little problem or shift in the flow, you take such responsibility for. It’s interesting because I can look at the archivals to give notes and I’m removed and it’s not people with me. I’m so much more comfortable. And you think, wow, this is really gorgeous production. I can see the strength and the beauty of it. But watching with an audience is really terrifying.

Is it more terrifying now that you’ve taken on the title of director?

Yes, because this is the first opera I’ve ever directed. Actually, Romeo and Juliet was the first opera that I’d ever choreographed. So the first time I was quite nervous. The second time, less so. But this feels right and feels like a great fit for me. But my palms were sweaty. 

There are certain restrictions on how much you can change an existing production. This one was originally directed by Ian Judge. You told San Francisco Classical Voice that you don’t have that much freedom except to “freshen it up.” How would you define freshening it up as this production looks compared to the two previous productions? 

That’s a great question. The set is as it is. I can’t change the set. I could adjust slightly, maybe the timing of transitions, but the set functions in a very specific way. I inherited that. Also, the score calls for when people enter the story, calls for who comes in and what happens. So that’s all fixed. But the nuancing of performances and making some choices. For instance, having Mercutio stay on stage after he dies. The Romeo and Mercutio, Duke [Kim] and Justin [Austin] are also friends, have worked together and they have a very dynamic chemistry. So I decided to keep him onstage.

I think my biggest impact is in the performance of of the singers and how I can perhaps add my my sense of drama, my physical interpretation of storytelling and utilize that to give their performances a little bit more freedom.

If you had the freedom to not do a 100% overhaul of this production, but say if you had the freedom to change 50% of it or more freedom than what you had, are there things that stand out to you as things that you would like to see different? 

I would like to somehow simplify the transitions. There’s quite a few. Towards the end it’s very challenging. So that would be my number one thing. I think the set is glorious. Maybe in the past we had more bodies on stage to help deal with things or the budget is not quite maybe what it was before. And I have to say a shout out to L.A. Opera, by the way, for continuing to make work and continuing to bring this extremely high level of talent to L.A. audiences.

This is your third collaboration, as we discussed, with L.A. Opera on Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. How have you seen your work grow in the 19 years since you first were involved with this production? 

I think the number one thing is that I trust my instincts more. I think that I’ve learned to trust my instincts. Within the noise of directing there are so many people asking you so many questions, which is very different from just choreographing. My assistant director, Erik Friedman, was incredibly helpful. He handled a lot of the task-oriented, schedule-oriented [work]. But also in the room he said, “You know, it’s your voice, it’s your vision that counts, Kitty. In this situation you’re the director.“

You’ve stated previously that you wanted this production to be experienced through Juliet’s eyes so there’s more agency of her story and her fate. How do you, as a director, make that something an audience is going to inherently feel or just think about?

Our Juliet is very powerful as a person. Amina is very powerful. She is insightful and not afraid to voice her opinion. When I encountered her, and she came in very late, I had to remind myself I wanted her opinion. I wanted her point of view. Duke is elegant, princely, wonderful and gentle. Like the epitome of a romantic lead. And I knew that trusting my gut was going to bring this fire, this sort of pressure to the role. So I just tried to listen to her and actually truly let her have agency, which I think comes through in the production.

The way it came through to me is and I am assuming this is part of the construction of the opera, is how quickly Juliet says yes to marrying Romeo. I just feel like only somebody who has that agency can say yes that quickly.

And is willing to risk everything for it. Particularly, for me, in the poison potion aria when she makes that decision. She’s willing to risk everything to not only fulfill her love for Romeo, but also not be given away. Not have her body given away. Not have her soul given away by her parents to someone. She had already committed to Romeo at that point.

Is it important for the audience to understand this?

Maybe I just assumed that they would. Sometimes I just make those assumptions. I just assume people would make that leap. She’s a heroine. In my mind it should have gone smoothly. This should’ve been a romantic comedy, but the parents had to get in there and society had to get in there. One thing that I really appreciated about Amina was that she’s able to pull off the lighter youthful tone in the beginning of the opera and she has the resonance and the depth of character to make the later moments plausible.

Why do you think we, as an audience, respond so strongly to stories where the couple does not end up together? Why is great love doomed to separation or death? 

It’s weird when you put it that way. It makes me want to cry. It does. And I’m not a crier. But there’s such hope for me in young people believing in love and believing in a peaceful existence. It’s so incredibly hopeful. I think that all of us wish that this never-ending hatred, this never-ending war… And people don’t know why it started, but it continues. How the young people today would love for peace and for love to rule. It’s manageable to see this tragedy in an opera. It’s done. We can walk away. It’s cathartic, but it begins with the hope and they start with the purity of love. So maybe it’s a way for humanity to sort of manage reality. 

Or get a sense of how fragile that purity of love really is. 

I thought about my first love. Other people’s first loves. How you just had every hope in the world that it would be this beautiful thing forever. Then reality smacks you in the face. The differences creep in and reality creeps in the day to day. Maybe this is just a way to hold on to that hope.

With Romeo and Juliet now open, does that fuel a desire to direct more operas? Was this so gratifying that you can’t wait for the next one?

Yes. Even though it was terrifying, I felt very much that I was in the right place. It felt so comfortable. I love music. I’ve always been obsessed with music. I’ve always been obsessed with storytelling. Usually it’s telling the story through movement and music with no text. Even though I’ve worked with opera singers as choreographer, it was different because I was working with them directly with their interpretation of these roles over time. You know, I loved it.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews wanting to work with composers Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid, two women who I think are amazing composers and they’re also disruptors of what the form is. If you look at a couple of male directors, Yuval Sharon, James Darrah, they’re also disruptors. How important is it for you to either be a disruptor or to work with disruptors as you continue your work in opera?

It’s fascinating because my company was called Hysterica and we were in L.A. for ten solid years. But we were very much disruptors in the dance world. And all of the people that came out of my company are very much disruptors like Ryan Heffington and Nina McNeely, both of whom just won Emmys for work in a medium that ten, 15 years ago, would not have hired any of us. It’s kind of ironic that I’m in this very classical world given where I started. I was like a punk rock dance company. I feel like all of these startups are bringing me to the place where maybe I can do what I did in the dance world in the opera world.

How important is it now for you to take a risk yourself?

It’s very important because, I’m not going to lie, when I got the job, I was like, don’t fail. That’s all I kept thinking during the entire rehearsal [process]. Don’t fail. You hate to fail. I think my entire life has been open to risk. I have failed in the past and you suffer. But the joy of taking the risk is larger for me than if I didn’t take the risk and I turn the opportunity down. That is more of a failure for me. 

Martha Graham is quoted as saying, “Nothing is more revealing than movement.” What does your movement on stage, whether in Romeo and Juliet or anywhere else that people have seen your work, reveal about you?

First of all, I love Martha Graham. Some of my dancers from Hysterica days came to opening night. They said we can see your touch in this super-heightened format. They’re still human and you can feel the humanity in the way they’re moving. I think that’s really what drives me – human reaction.

And do you see yourself on the stage? Not just your work, but do you see aspects of yourself on that stage?

If I look back at my contemporary dance work, I’m like, my God. Looking back at it now, my whole psychology is on parade, right? I mean, I’m a romantic. I think that’s on display. My personal dream for that pure love is on display and my investment in that.

To watch the full interview with Kitty McNamee, please go here.

LA Opera’s production of Romeo and Juliet continues at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles through November 23rd. For tickets and more information, please go here.

Main Photo: Kitty McNamee (Photo by Nate Lusk/Courtesy KittyMcNamee.com)

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Schubert now steps up for another challenge: the sole singing role in Kate Soper‘s Ipsa Dixit. Long Beach Opera is performing Ipsa Dixit at the Art Theater in Long Beach on June 8th and 9th. It’s a very difficult work that Soper wrote for herself to sing accompanied by three musicians on flute, percussion and violin.

For this production, director James Darrah is adding two dancers (Anna Souder and Leslie Andre Williams) from the Martha Graham Dance company performing choreography created by Janet Eilber.

There are also film elements from Carl Theodore Dreyer’s silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. Christopher Rountree conducts.

Recently I spoke with Schubert about her passion for contemporary opera, taking over a role originally performed by composer Soper and finding the inspiration to tackle such complex roles. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: You are a passionate advocate for new works and for contemporary classical music. What do you think are the greatest misconceptions about what new music is today?

I think one of the greatest misconceptions is that the audience won’t understand it or won’t respond to it, or especially that new audiences will not want to see it. Every time I do any new work I have people come up to me afterward that say, this was my first opera, or, this was my first time coming to see something like this. I didn’t know opera could be like this. I didn’t know that this kind of music existed. And they’re always really excited, just entranced by what they saw. 

You have worked with Kate Soper before on The Romance of the Rose. What do you most respond to in her work? 

I think an advantage that Kate has as a composer is that she knows what she wants and she’s very exact about what she writes and how she wants it in the score. Oftentimes she’ll write staging out. In The Romance of the Rose there was staging written in already. With Ipsa Dixit there’s like 30 pages or so of performance notes before the score, that have text and translations and notes about what certain figures might mean – in terms of the sound that you’re supposed to produce. Everything is written in there for you. 

But there is freedom for you as an artist to bring what you do to it as well, right? It’s not regimented.

There’s plenty of room for artistic interpretation as well. But she is very meticulous in the details of her work. More so, I think, than other composers that I’ve worked with. But yeah, there is still plenty of room for like, how do I want my face to look or what kind of a forte do I want to make this. It doesn’t have to be the exact same as everyone else’s or hers. She was the first one to perform this and the person who most performs it well.

That gives her an advantage as a composer because she is writing for her voice, which means she must know very well how to write for voice. 

I think she knows very well how to write for a lot of instruments. She does write really well for voice, but I think also she has like a unique instrument that she writes for specifically. As a soprano, I rarely have to go below a middle C, and she goes below middle C a lot because I think she has a very unique range where she can just belt out in her chest voice. I think the lowest note I have to go down to in this piece is a D flat below which I had never sung out loud before. Then the highest note is a high D, so it’s a very rangy piece.

You’re kind of trying to fit into the the box that she created for you. If maybe you’re used to kind of existing over here, well, for this piece you need to exist here. So you better figure it out.

If you were to describe Ipsa Dixit to people who have no idea what it is, how would you describe it?

I don’t know, because it’s not an opera. And it’s not a song cycle. And it’s not really a chamber piece, but it is also all of those things. It is hard to define it. It is just like a doctoral thesis, encapsulated in a piece of music. It’s very, very, complex and intricate and there’s a lot of philosophical text; there’s philosophical questions posed and answered. There’s also drama. There’s also poetry. There’s the drama of opera, but there’s also the poetic nuance of art song and then there’s also a bunch of extended technique and the wild things that we’re doing.

Given how many different sources are used for the text, is there any part of the text that you most that most resonates with you that you are most passionate about?

I think the metaphysics movement – which is movement five of the whole piece. It’s this whole existential question where she’s talking about what is matter? What is existence, really? It’s the only part of the piece where I get a break as the singer, where the instrumentalists just take over for a few pages. It’s kind of eerie, but it’s also calming in a way.

This is not your first collaboration with Long Beach Opera. Nor is it your first collaboration with James Darrah, who, I thin, in the best possible way, is a disruptor. But only in the sense of moving the art form forward. How does this production accomplish that goal?

This is an opera company and this is a very nontraditional performance for an opera company to offer. I think something that James is very passionate about, and something that I appreciate as a performer myself and someone that loves to do new works, is that he programs so much new music on the main stage. It’s part of the main season. It’s not a side project.

Opera, whether new or old, I think is at its best when it’s dealing with really big emotions and complex issues. But what are the personal challenges of delving so deeply into this kind of material?

For me, that’s always been about having some kind of balance. I know with p r i s m, it just weighed so heavily on me while we were rehearsing it. I mean, how could it not? When I’m here, in my home, your time is your own. In the weeks leading up to this, I was just rehearsing by myself at home as much as I could. Now that we’re in rehearsals, I’m trying to keep my home a much more sterile place. I’m done rehearsing for the day, I’m going to go home and do dishes and make food for myself and see my family and take my dog on a walk. I think that helps compartmentalize.

When I spoke to Kate, she told me that she hopes that one of the reasons her stuff is you’re sticking around is because it’s just really challenging and interesting and a fun experience for the performers. Is this work fun to do?

I’m going to be honest, this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever put together. I was actually going to send her an email today saying as much. Memorization wise, it’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to memorize. All new music is more challenging than we’re used to when you’re only studying super tonal, melodic, beautiful, romantic things in school – which is often the case. I don’t think that this kind of music is studied enough or prioritized enough in conservatories, at least in the US.

This music is very, very challenging, and I’m sure she wrote it to be that way. But therein lies the satisfaction of putting it together. I think she’s right about that, because it is challenging. That’s one of the reasons that it’s had a long life because everyone wants to climb that mountain, right? When you see something difficult, you’re just like, well, I want to show people I can do that.

There’s a manipulated film component to this production and that’s Carl Theodore Dreyer’s, silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dreyer is quoted as having said, “There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside and turning into poetry.” How does the mysterious power of inspiration work in your life, both professionally and personally?

It’s still mysterious to me in a lot of ways. Inspiration strikes me at all those inconvenient times [like] when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. When I’m working on a piece and I’m just really in the thick of it, I find myself going to sleep at night and thinking about the words.

I tend to find the most inspiration when I am outside, away from overstimulation. Definitely on a hike. Or I like to be outside at night. I can’t count the number of times I’ve just gone on night walks by myself and listened to music that I love.

You have a whole universe swirling around because you’ve been able to just block out all the extraneous noise. The stillness in there. So that I think that is when I find my mysterious inspiration strikes.

To see the full interview with Anna Schubert, please go here.

Main Photo: Mona Tian and Anna Schubert in Ipsa Dixit (Photo by Jason Al-Taan/Courtesy Long Beach Opera)

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Schaal is directing Highway 1, USA by William Grant Still for LA Opera. It is on a program of two one-act operas (the other being Zemlinsky’s The Dwarf). Opening night is Saturday, February 24th at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It will be performed through March 17th.

The opera tells the story of Bob (Norman Garrett) and Mary (Nicole Heaston). They have gone to incredible lengths to support Bob’s brother Nate (Chaz’men Williams-Ali). They hope that once he has finished his education he will move on with his life. Though Mary dislikes Nate, Bob is honoring a commitment he made to his mother on her deathbed. Nate doesn’t move on and complications ensue.

It is with the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar that many audiences became familiar with Shaal. Her direction of that opera, coupled with the music and libretto by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, catapulted the opera into the modern day repertoire.

Just before traveling to Los Angeles to commence rehearsals, I spoke with Schaal about Still’s opera and his optimistic view of the future; the question she’d most like to ask Still if given the chance and the importance of having stories from “people who have built worlds even when the world was against them.”

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: This work premiered in 1963, but remained relatively unperformed until Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did it in 2021. What do you think the two plus generations of opera goers who didn’t get a chance to see this opera missed out on?

I think we missed out on maintaining American lineage. I think this is an incredible work. Of course, Still’s symphonic works were celebrated. His operatic works weren’t as widely received. So I think we missed out not only on this piece, but on Still’s oeuvre, all of his operatic works. The idea that this was birthed in the 40s and then didn’t get its production until the 60s. So it really is, as you said, multiple generations who’ve lost this music. 

We probably don’t have to go too far out on a limb to speculate why, in 2021, an opera company decided to give new life to this opera. But I assume you can’t do it just because of socio-political issues. You have to do it because there’s something in it that warrants it as well. What do you think is at the core of this opera and the way William Grant Still tells this story that warrants continued interest in it?

I think like with so much of Still’s music, there’s really a sense that he is building a world. This music is him dreaming into existence the future. And quite frankly,the future of all of these works being in the world as well. He started writing it in a backdrop of war. That’s this moment. That’s the birth of American sitcom, which I very much think of as an American dreaming container – this home of our aspirational class stories.

The operatic canon also has lots of station in life tensions and class struggle as well. So I think these ideas sit well in this form. But I think touching this music now is an opportunity to also be in our own moment of a backdrop of war. Spending time with this music you can think about the kind of facade of the 50s, the kind of disjointedness of that world. What does it look like to hold the disjointedness of our world now? What are the ways that we resolve these fractures? I think this opera holds all of that.

It’s also a classic story about family dynamics. Particularly as it relates to Nate and his role in the story. The noise that surrounds family dynamics may change over decades, but the core of what family dynamics are really remain the same, don’t they?

One of the delights I have in this music is that I think there’s a dissonance between the words we receive on the page in the libretto and what we hear; the harmonic complexity of Nate’s music, the sweeping kind of mythological landscape that his music invokes. I think there’s a way to think about this character and think about all of these characters beyond a kind of moralism. The libretto, in some ways, is very straightforward. You could feel it like a morality play. You could feel it like a tight sitcom inside of a small apartment. But musically, there’s a complexity to all of the thought. I am very interested in what happens when we strip away the kind of moralistic lens and invite ourselves to really sit in the in the complexity of how we receive these characters in the music.

The opera runs an hour. There are two scenes in it. There’s not a lot of time for enormous exposition about backstory and the way the opera is constructed. Is a backstory important for you in approaching this particular story and the way you want to present it? 

In terms of backstory, I think that depends on the singers, and I cannot wait to be in the rehearsal room with them and to be building the frameworks that they need to hold the music and hold the story. But from my position, holding the stage, the frame for this investigation and this kind of moving beyond the moralism is Mary’s first music when she sings about the fox and the hair. Of course, she’s drawing on br’er rabbit and br’er fox, these African-American folklore kind of traditions of tricksters. These are stories that came across from Africa into America. So I’m very interested in that trickster lineage that this opera starts with. We actually do have a manifestation of the fox and hare on stage to keep reminding us of these other forces that are at play as we receive the story.

I read an interview that you did around the time of Omar where you talked about how great opera operates in many different languages and that it was your role to build a library through which a story will be told. What’s the library that Highway 1, USA requires from you?

So many. One of the conversations that I had early on with the production designer, Christopher Myers, was really thinking about this dark underbelly of these times that get presented so often in that plastic forward facing 50s container. So much was going on globally. We’ve been looking at various artists who think about disjointedness and rupture and wholeness in different ways. One of them is James Rosenquist and another is Alma Thomas. Very different ways of dealing with rupture and joint. But those are two artists who’ve been important to me in how do we explode this apartment and begin in the rupture and begin in the mythological landscape of these ideas.

I do not come to the opera for a kitchen sink with running water. I come for myth and violence and holiness and contradiction. So I wanted our stage to be able to hold and begin in that vastness and in the disjointed world before we find ourselves in the intimacy and in the healing and union of Mary and Bob.

William Grant Still did not put any specific mention of race into this work. In fact, Christian Mark Gibbs, who sang Nate at St. Louis, said Still wanted it to be done by various cultural groups. Do you share that opinion of Still’s intention for this work?

I hear him trying to dream this world. I think it’s a challenging dream. An un-raced fantasy is a challenging fantasy. It is as problematic as it is glorious. That is what I hear in the music. And I think he meant it. There’s lots of speculation. Was he saying that in order to protect the legacy of the work and pray that it would get produced, or was he saying it because he was dreaming this future? I would argue he was dreaming this future. This complex, magnificent and also a little problematic future of this un-raced possibility.

Do you feel like this is progress of performing works by Black composers, whether in the concert or the opera house, is going to be sustainable, or do you have fear that this is a response to a moment in time? 

I don’t know any way through this moment that is separated from the global processing of war that’s happening. That’s separated from the election year terror that we have nationally, or that’s separated from the immediate and existential crisis of a warming planet. I think through all of that we rely on our dreamers and the people who have built worlds when the world was against them. And who have left us these seeds and these scaffoldings. I think we need artists who are very skilled in that way. Often those are artists who’ve been excluded from the conversation.

Are there are there differences for you between lesser-known works and even world premieres that people have no awareness of whatsoever? 

Well we don’t get to hang out. It was nice to hang out with Michael and Rhiannon. As we got to work, there’s a richness to that. But I think in terms of the task as a director of holding all of the artists who hold this music and the, what shall we call it, the weight of the task, I think incomparable, but also of the same magnitude.

Since you could hang out with Rhiannon and Michael, if you could hang out with William Grant still, what would you most want to ask him about this opera? 

I would want to talk to him about the dream. I would want to talk to him about that fantasy that he is writing into that music of where we could all head. And I did do one thing he asked me not to do, which was put the gas station on stage. But I have done that because we need the mythological landscape of these ideas, and because I believe in my heart of hearts that he put that there because he didn’t want misery porn. He wanted the dignity and the beauty and the tenderness and the care and the exquisite attention to home craft in that apartment. So I would also just want to run that by him and give him my pitch for why it was important.

I read a conversation that you did with Alicia Hall Moran and two others with Kimberly Drew. You said in that conversation, “I am looking for an opera that tells glorious and horrific stories with grace, violence and beauty.” Moving forward, what are the stories you think that need to be told now and in the near future, whether they’re set in present day or not? 

So many things. I am interested in how we’re all processing war right now. I’ve been in the early phases of working on a piece that takes a text from Ocean Vuong, the mighty poet who thinks so beautifully about processing war. I’m curious about the parade of women, the kind of orgy of women dying of consumption in the canon and the hysteria of it all. So I’ve got some irons in the fire there. And then most of all, I’m always interested in the stories that talk about what happens in the in-between spaces, in the shadows we all cast on one another. I think the opera is the best place for asking all those questions. 

I’m hoping somebody does an opera about Flint, MI. That has everything in it. The fact that it’s still being neglected at this point…that is not the country I grew up in. It just continues, doesn’t it?

For the kind of violence and horror of of everyday life, the form has to be this big. It actually has to be this big. 

To watch the full interview with Kaneza Schaal, please go here.

Main Photo: Kaneza Schaal (Courtesy LA Opera)

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“Yes, 100%,” he told me last week as we discussed his LA Opera debut in the role of Don Basilio in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. The production opens this Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and runs through November 12th.

He continues, “I learned this very early in my career. I was 27 years old in Salzburg singing Masetto [in Don Giovanni]. And I thought, small role, I’m Italian, this is going to be a walk in the park. It turns out that between Nicholas Harnoncourt conducting and Martin Kušej director, I learned very quickly there is no such a thing as a small role. If you put enough effort, you can make something interesting in anything you sing. I’m very pleased that I had that chance, because it made the difference in my career right away.”

Don Basilio is not a large role at all. Certainly not for someone who has sung the title role of Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera. It wasn’t the size of the role that appealed to him.

“I like to choose roles that I think are interesting dramatically,” he said in a conversation last week. “In the buffa repertoire Basilio is one of the staples. When they asked me if I wanted to do it, I said immediately yes! It’s a fun role. [There’s] a great tradition of great singers singing this role. So I want to challenge myself and do it.”

At this point it would be good to point out that this is also the first time Pisaroni has sung this role. Though he’s no stranger to Rossini’s work as he counts Il Podestá in Gazza Ladra; Alidoro in La Cenerentola; Mahomet II in La Siege de Corinthe and Mustafá in L’Italiana in Algeri amongst the over thirty roles in his repertoire.

His approach to the mostly comedic role of a music teacher in The Barber of Seville to be a more of our time than might usually be seen.

“I can go 1950 Italian comedy. But I think in 2023 we can probably add another layer in trying to make it a bit more modern,” he revealed. “It’s a challenge. I come with a fresh approach and [am] trying to be as honest to the character that I can be. I have a great cast to work with here because a lot of them have done the role so many times: Isabel Leonard as Rosina and Josh Hopkins [as Figaro]. It’s my intent to try to make it a more sober and modern character.”

When asked if having something in common with his characters was essential, Pisaroni immediately said no.

“It’s called acting for a reason – because you act,” he said a bit surprised at the question. “It doesn’t have to be you. You just have to find the motivation to portray the action of the character. It’s not that because I play Don Giovanni I mistreat women or because I play Basilio I try to make a joke every time I say a phrase. You just have to do your job. One thing that I do is to find, in my life experience, something that I can use to either make a joke or convey something and sometimes it helps.”

Once reminded that there is a movement afoot to suggest that casting now should be based on lived-in experience, Pisaroni made the argument for allowing actors to do what they do.

“For me, the great thing about being an actor, it’s actually the opposite. Meaning I can try to play somebody that is completely different than me. Understanding this person makes me a better person because then in real life I can take that experience and say, Oh, you see, they went through this. So I will be even more kind and even more understanding in real life. If we go down that road it’ll never end. Then there is a sub category of subcategories and then your repertoire is going to become so small that then what? I can play only Italian roles because I am Italian? We need to give us credit to have sensitivity to be able to say something even about subjects that are so far away from us.”

What isn’t far away from Pisaroni is the presence of music teachers in his life. One particular instructor played a prominent role in his development as an opera singer.

“His name was Renato Sassola and he was a great tenor of Teatro Colón for 30 years. I met him by chance in Milano. It was a difficult period for me because I was in the conservatory singing a repertoire that was not really my repertoire. I felt I was not ready to sing the kind of stuff like Nabucco. Like Ferrando from Trovatore. I wasn’t happy and he really changed my perspective. He helped me really free my voice, free my technique and my relationship with music and how to produce it. I eventually moved to South America for six months to work with him. He really did make a big difference for me. He passed away some years ago, but he has a really special place in my heart.“

In The Barber of Seville Don Basilio has one very major aria: La Calunnia E’Un Venticello which is about how slander and rumor can have far too much power. In our world today, where anonymity and freedom to express yourself anywhere, anytime without major repercussions, Pisaroni finds the aria to be applicable to a multitude of people.

“Everybody has a telephone. I wish people were a little bit kinder to be honest with you. There are so many performances of great singers that nobody ever knew. They went to Bologna or Parma, it just was a relationship between the singer and the audience in that night. Now you can do a terrible concert in the middle of Brazil, in the Amazon, and everybody is going to know because somebody has a phone and recorded it. Which puts, I think, an incredible stress on performance today.”

Then there’s the subject of reviews with which Pisaroni has a very firm point-of-view.

“I think we need to be a bit more careful when we criticize things so harshly. I think for the young generation, there is only one way to protect yourself. Don’t read it. Because at the end of the day, even if it’s a bad review [from] the Los Angeles Times, it is one opinion of somebody that didn’t like you. Doesn’t mean that you are not worth it or that you should stop singing because one person doesn’t like it. Even people that I think are gods like Luciano Pavarotti got bad reviews. If he got bad reviews, Luca Pisaroni can be trashed. It is fine, because he was God for me.”

Not that it was always fine with Pisaroni.

“At the beginning of my career I would do Figaro and I would get 19 good reviews. But the only one I remember is the one that was a bad review. I don’t remember the good ones. Don’t read them and don’t be confronted. But doesn’t mean that you don’t have to have critical thinking. I think you need to be critical and you have to be brutally honest with yourself. And when you’re unhappy about something, work on it. Also you need to have a circle of people that are brutally honest with you who can say this is not good. You need to work on that or you didn’t sound very good, so that you can actually keep working on yourself and grow as an artist, as a singer, as a performer.” 

To see the full interview with Luca Pisaroni, please go here.

Main Photo: Luca Pisaroni in The Barber of Seville (Photo by Cory Weaver/Courtesy LA Opera)

The post Bass-Baritone Luca Pisaroni Believes There are No Small Parts appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

This is Willis-Sørensen’s third production of Otello. She has sung in a wide range of operas from Puccini to Wagner to Beethoven. She recorded the final aria from Otello for her album Rachel, which was released last year. Two months ago she released her second album, Strauss: Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

I recently spoke with Willis-Sørensen about Otello and her various experiences with it, the present-day resonance the opera has and the experience of performing Otello with a Black singer in the title role. What follows are excerpts from my conversation with Willis-Sørensen that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

How much does the philosophy expressed in Bird Set Free by Sia, where she says, “Sing for love, sing for me,” resonate with you as you’re preparing yourself before going on stage?

I love that song. My daughter actually showed it to me. It’s so beautiful. “I don’t care if I sing off key. I found myself and my melodies. I sing for love. I sing for me. I let it out like a bird set free.” That’s what it feels like to me when I’m singing. There’s this incredible freedom of expression. Everyone is sitting there looking at me and it’s like I’ve been given the platform to express myself. It’s just the most incredible feeling.

To me there’s something more valuable in expressing something honest than in doing it perfectly. I’ve been varying degrees of toxic perfectionist all my life. With singing the best performances I’ve ever given, I would never say they are the ones that were the most technically perfect. It’s more the ones where I accessed something very real and shared it with the audience. That’s where I feel the most rewarding fulfillment.

Can you tell when you’re in a good production versus when you’re in one that isn’t working as well?

Yes. I’ve been wrong a couple of times, to be fair. I mean, no one’s perfect! But generally when the story is discernible, it’s legible – so to speak from the audience perspective – it’s going to be a good production. If it is not, then it’s going to be a concert with some weird, confusing nonsense happening in front of the audience. Which is not my favorite, obviously, given that I described it that way. It’s hard. I don’t envy a director the task of trying to coordinate all of those multitudinous moving parts.

This is your third production of Otello. How much does a production itself influence your approach to the role?

I’m finding that each nuance that I learn from an old production sort of informs the next one. It’s only my third. But it seems if you are asked to look at something from a different perspective, potentially it enriches your viewpoint on the role. Then depending on the flexibility of the director or the amount of time, you can really hone something.

I think it’s never identical. There are no two performances that are identical. The first production was very traditional. I think making a role debut in a production like that is a gift because you’re just doing the show, you’re just telling the story as well as you can, which is always ideal for a role debut.

The second production that I did was very modern in Munich and the take on the character was so different. I find that the strength of presentation from the second has informed this third one significantly. This is more traditional, but I think that my telling from day one has become a lot stronger than it was previously. 

LA Opera conductor James Conlon is a passionate fan of Verdi’s. Are you that passionate about Verdi as well? 

Absolutely. I’m in a very fortunate position where I get to sing a wide variety of repertoire, probably wider than is normal to do you could argue. But Verdi is certainly, if not my absolute favorite, then somehow among the top two favorite composers to sing. It’s just written in such a grateful way and the characters are always really interesting to play. I just love it. It suits my throat. I find singing Verdi feels very physically satisfying. Very often you die in the end, which is nice in a weird way. I mean, it makes you really think about your own mortality to die on stage. It makes you more grateful to be alive, but also the act of doing this somehow…I don’t know. I almost recommend it as a therapy, enacting your own death physiologically and then trying to lie there. 

Let’s talk about Desdemona’s death. The audience is led to believe that Desdemona has been killed. Then she seems to come back to life to sing her final passage in the opera before she does die. How do you navigate something like that to make it the serious moment it needs to be?

She’s dead. She’s not dead. Wait, is she dead? I know it’s very strange. It’s not very logical. Maybe it wasn’t common knowledge that it takes 3 to 5 minutes to choke a person. But I think [Otello’s] just knocked her unconscious. Clearly something is physically wrong enough that ultimately she dies from it. But she comes two for a second after the fact.

After the physical struggle, I don’t want to think. I want it as absolutely clean as possible. So that’s what I’m trying to focus on during those moments. Then I just try to not breathe visibly for the rest of the show.

Sonya Yoncheva said in 2015 about this role, “Desdemona is a strong woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. The only thing that escapes her is the level of craziness attained by Otello. I personally think she’s very brave. Her greatest strength is her love for Otello. She defends her love, her man, to the very end.” History has not really viewed the character that way. She is viewed more as a tragic victim. Where do you find her?

I think she’s strong in that she marries Otello against her parents wishes. She’s somehow emotionally healthy enough to believe she didn’t have a poor relationship to her parents. She didn’t escape them to marry Otello. They didn’t want her to marry him. She was so in love that she made this decision to stand by him and run away with him. That represents some kind of chutzpah, right? Who does that? 

But her love for Otello is so big. His specificity, his difference from all the other men she’s interacting with, I think is part of what contributes to that. She is a tragic victim. I just don’t see her as weak because I think it’s too easy to say that only weak people become the victims of abuse. I don’t think in the real world that’s how that plays out. When your tenderness is taken advantage of by another person, in whatever way, that could basically happen to anyone. It takes so much to be able to stand up to an abuser if they are someone you love.

So I think it’s a very relevant story. We have to feel like it’s a terrible mistake, it’s a terrible misunderstanding, and that Otello has done something very wrong. 

I also think there’s something even more topical than that, which is the whole idea that lies take on a truth of their own. If you repeat something often enough, you get a huge percentage of people to believe you. Social media is a hotbed of complete and utter falsehoods. 

It’s enough just to have an accusation. That’s enough to ruin you. Just the accusation. There doesn’t have to be any proof. There doesn’t have to be any investigation as soon as an accusation is made. That is another part of the story that’s really relevant.

I have three little children: a nine-year-old daughter and twin sons who are almost eight. My son was saying to someone, “It’s okay if you like something and I like something different. We can both like different things and still be good friends.” We can have divergent opinions and not be accusing one another of stupidity. That’s a beautiful notion that I’m trying really hard to teach my children. I think that’s really missing in public discourse.

What was once acceptable in opera for this role is no longer acceptable. Your other Otellos were not Black performers/singers. Creatively does it make a difference to see Russell Thomas, a Black man as Otello, singing opposite you? Do you think it’s important that that continue to be what is done on opera stages?

I have loved working with all of the Otellos that I’ve worked with. They have been very impressive and interesting storytellers. I think that Russell also is an incredible storyteller. I think he has experience to access in order to tell this role in a different way based on being an actual Black man. So when he talks about being a Black man among white people – I think they water down for the supertitles – but it’s something that he is able to tell in an different way. He’s very passionate and he’s a wonderful colleague. Singing with him is a joy.

I’m not entitled to have an opinion on the controversy because I am a white woman. But I do think that what differentiates opera from other art forms is the singing. At any given time in the world there may be five men who can do the role of Otello. So to make their skin color be requisite, we will just never get to do the piece.

I think Aida is the same. There are actually a few really wonderful African-descent singers who could sing either really well and they should do it. For that reason, I’m nervous about undertaking that task myself, even though it’s been offered a couple of times, because I don’t want to be part of the controversy.

It just doesn’t have an easy answer. In the productions I’ve done where we altogether ignored it, it’s fine. We’re still telling a story about jealousy. It just becomes not an issue of race. So I guess you can see much more clearly the issue of the racial dynamic, if the tenor is actually Black. So I think that it’s worthwhile doing either way. But this does definitely make this particular production of Otello extra special. 

Verdi wrote in a letter he sent in 1871 to Giulio Ricordi, “I deny that either singers or conductors can create or work creatively. This, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.” If you had the opportunity to either refute or concur with Verdi, what would you tell him?

I tend not to agree with that because, and I always say this, if there were only one right way of doing it, just record it and be done. But we do it again and again. The beauty of the live experience is one thing. But I think the diversity of experience with different casts, I felt that myself in different casts, every singer brings themselves into what they’re doing. I would argue you have to work creatively.

But on the other hand, maybe what he meant, which I do agree with, is that you follow what is written on the page and you will make magic. We don’t have to create magic. We get to make the magic that Verdi already wrote down on the page. I do think his articulations, the expressive markings, the tempi, the dynamics, there’s room, of course, for rubato, there’s room for naturalistic interpretation. But most of that information is already on the page. When you follow those guidelines in a naturalistic way, you tend to do better than if you go rogue and ignore them.

To see the full interview with Rachel Willis-Sørensen, please go here.

Main Photo: Russell Thomas and Rachel Willis-Sørensen in LA Opera’s “Otello” (Photo by Cory Weaver/Courtesy LA Opera)

The post Rachel Willis-Sørensen: Desdemona Is Strong appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Composer Pauline García Viardot is not well-known to modern audiences. She was a composer in the 19th century. She was befriended and celebrated by the likes of Brahms, Chopin, Charles Dickens, Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann and Wagner. She was an opera singer who so enraptured Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev after performing The Barber of Seville that he followed her to Paris and was with her for over 40 years until her death. But we don’t seem to know much of her work. Soprano Camille Zamora wants to change that.

Zamora, a soprano who has performed on opera stages around the world, was first introduced to Viardot’s work when she heard Cecilia Bartoli sing Havanaise on her 1996 album Chant d’Amour.

After getting the opportunity from Harvard in 2017 to review the manuscript of Viardot’s 1867 opera Le Dernier Sorcier (The Last Sorcerer which has a libretto by Turgenev), she set about to bring new life to this opera that had been lost for 150 years. In 2019 Bridge Records released the first-ever recording of Le Dernier Sorcier with Jamie Barton, Eric Owens, Adriana Zabala, Zamora and more.

This Friday Le Dernier Sorcier will be performed at The Wallis in Beverly Hills. Zamora, in addition to singing the role of Reine, will co-direct with Sharyn Pirtle. The cast includes Babatunde Akinboboye, Monique Coleman, Anastasia Malliaras, Karim Sulayman and Zabala.

Along with Monica Yunus, Zamora is the co-founder of Sing for Hope, an organization dedicated to creating a better world through the arts. Friday’s performance is a Sing for Hope production.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Zamora about Viardot, the opera itself and her work as a citizen artist. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To watch the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

I watched your commencement speech at Juilliard from 2019. You used an expression that I had never heard, in bocca al lupo, which means “into the wolf’s mouth.” What prompted you to go into the wolf’s mouth on this project? And how did you first become aware of Pauline García Viardot? 

I feel so much of my life has been determined by happy accidents. I was in the middle of a gig with a dear friend, Adriana Zabala, a beautiful mezzo soprano. We were nerding out about music, the sort of highways and byways of composers that we love. And we both said Pauline García Viardot; we have to find more of her stuff. Let’s see what else is out there.

We literally went into the Google machine and started poking around. Lo and behold it actually turned out that that very year Harvard University had collected from a private collection of this previously lost manuscript. That was Pauline’s original score of The Last Sorcerer, this amazing piece. It’s sort of an eco-feminist fairy tale in operatic form.

I don’t know that that’s the language that Pauline herself would use to describe it circa 1867. But I do believe that was her intent. It’s a piece about the often ignored voices, in particular in this case, the young, the very folk who have not really been given their due. It’s about elevating those voices that are too often left outside of conversations. And it’s about taking care of the earth and restoring the natural order. 

Was there an A-ha! moment where you go, this is not just a discovery of a lost work, it’s a discovery of a lost good work?

This piece initially attracted us because we were on a kind of feminist mission to find a piece that had not gotten its due by a woman who really was reportedly one of the most incredible intellects of the latter part of the 19th century. But as soon as we started delving into these melodies they just took over.

Her music has that sense of being arresting and shakes us up. But it also just sounds so right and so organic. We fell in love with the score which we were introduced to in manuscript form. So we commissioned a transcript of it to sort of beat the official piano vocal score that we would work from.

I looked at your website for Le Dernier Sorcier and it says this opera was a hailed as a treasure by the likes of Franz List and Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. Was it just that it was written by a woman was the reason it was relegated to the dustbin of a private collection?

Why did it present itself in its debut in her living room with her students and herself at the piano as opposed to at the Palace gala? You know these are social questions. I think we know the answer. But I also think it’s waiting for our scholarship. It’s waiting for our study in that question. Perhaps a more recent question might be why did we wait until 2016 for the Metropolitan Opera to do its second opera [by a woman], the first having been in 1908? 

Do you think she wrote with a better understanding of female voices than male composers might have? 

Part of the joy of her vocalism and of all of her sort of pedagogy is that she was part of this hot moment in European vocal history. She was the daughter of one of the great voice teachers and singers, actually two of them. But her father, in particular, was a very famous voice teacher. Her brother was a famous voice teacher. Her sister was Maria Malibran who was the great diva of the age. She died in a tragic accident at the age of 28. She grew up surrounded by vocalism. This is written by someone who really understands how the voice works. 

You found the work in 2017. The album came out in 2019. So there’s been six years that other performing arts institutions have now had as a result of the work that you’ve done. Have you recognized any greater appreciation of her and her work as a result of this endeavor? 

I do think our ears are trained to hear opera with orchestra, which is, of course, the ideal. In Pauline’s life she worked with the resources that she had at her disposal. That was her piano with her fingers on the keyboard and her students. Her piece really wasn’t afforded that full production treatment.

Two years later, apparently, it did get a theatrical release in Weimar, I believe, and it was with full orchestra. Apparently they were under-rehearsed and it wasn’t a great orchestration. So all of that to say, I do dream of a scenario where eventually we can truly present it with full orchestra. And that will give us a bit more of the grand soundscape that you expect.

The world has undergone a lot of change since you first discovered this work and since you recorded it. Are there things that resonate more with you now about Le Dernier Sorcier than did when you first started looking at it? 

I think a lot about this industry because it’s so beloved to me. I really do think that there’s something about the un-amplified voice and about this great, wonderful animal that is opera that brings together music and design and dance and composition and entertaining and the greatest melodies in the world. There’s something magical about it. 

The fact of the matter is the delivery systems can be problematic. That’s the hard thing about systems. They’re hard to dismantle because they are no one’s intention. A lot of people aren’t invited in or they don’t feel themselves to be invited in. I’m particularly compelled by models that allow for the highest level of international operatic talent and all of that stuff that we call excellence, but also the most radical sense of welcome. A mutual welcome of mutual respect and of honoring the creativity that is hyper-local, even as we bring in these glorious artists from around the world.

I think all of the great companies are certainly trying to do that and I think there’s a lot of amazing innovation happening right now in our opera world. The more that we could go in that direction, the better. The opportunities in this moment are tremendous and we ignore them at our peril.

As a citizen artist and somebody who believes that education in the arts is of paramount importance, what is the prognosis for expanding arts education in a country where we’re now being told that you can’t discuss certain characteristics about people, you can’t have books on library shelves or in teacher’s rooms unless they’re vetted by a panel and who knows what their their criteria is?

It’s inconceivable to me. It really is. I think that’s actually part of the problem. I will frankly share with you that I do not know a human being who doesn’t believe that kids should have free access to libraries. So I think part of the problem is we’ve all hardened ourselves off from people who are not like-minded. That is a problem. I need to know these people. We all need to know these people across the aisle. Discourse is something that we have lost. We have two sides that are dug in. 

Part of the thing about music is that it does allow us to see each others as humans before we ask what side of the debate are you on. I do think that’s tremendously important – the opportunity to come together before we get into it.

I think that most people who will come to this opera, chances are we have similar feelings about censorship. Chances are we vote in similar ways. That in itself is a problem. We need to not just preach to the converted. We need to have people who who think radically different from us. It’s really concerning that we have lost those opportunities.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia used to go to the opera together. They would vote against each other during the week and then go see an opera at the Kennedy Center on the weekends. There is something to be said for that concept of worthy rivals being able to engage in dialogue with someone who’s not like-minded. 

To watch the full interview with Camille Zamora, please go here.

Main Photo: Camille Zamora (Photo by Liron Amsellem/Courtesy Camille Zamora)

The post Camille Zamora Rediscovers “The Last Sorcerer” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“I couldn’t imagine being just a composer and letting somebody else perform and never, ever being a performer myself. I love the thrill of walking on stage now and sort of getting nervous. It’s really wonderful.” That’s how composer (and obviously conductor) John Adams describes his ongoing relationship with his music.

It’s a relationship that he’s been cultivating for decades. Adams is a Pulitzer Prize winner (On the Transmigration of Souls), an Erasmus Prize winner and the recipient of five Grammy Awards.

For over a dozen years he’s held the position of Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

This weekend Adams will conduct the LA Phil in a concert version of his 2017 opera Girls of the Golden West. He collaborated with Peter Sellars on this opera that is set during the Gold Rush in California in the 1850s. Most of the cast that appeared in the opera’s world premiere at San Francisco Opera are returning for these two concerts. This includes Paul Appleby, Julia Bullock, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Ryan McKinny and Davóne Tines.

Last week I spoke by phone with Adams about the opera, his career and the future of classical music. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

This area of California where the gold rush was centered was an area that resonated with you as soon as you came to California. How has your relationship with that area of the state where you live and its history evolved over that time? 

I’m an immigrant. Like all the people came out here looking for gold in the 1850s. I came out here in 1971. I suppose California was a sort of dream at the end of the rainbow for me. I was born in New England and actually had never been anywhere else. I didn’t expect to stay here, but I never went back. Not too long after I arrived I started going up to the Sierras and I eventually bought a cabin up there at about 6700 feet. So it’s pretty high up. I have a very deep feeling for the land.

I did not know a lot about the gold rush history until I started researching for this opera and these stories really became intensely important to me. Making this particular piece was very special. In some ways it’s the most personal piece of mine because of that resonance with the land and with the history.

After the premiere in San Francisco you reworked the opera and made some cuts. How much does this revised version, which I assume is the version that’s being performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, reflect a clarification of what you wanted to accomplish?

Well, it’s actually the third version of it. This particular version I had to prepare because I have this extraordinary opportunity to record it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And I can tell you for any composer alive to get the chance to get a good recording of an opera is extremely rare and I’m just very fortunate. But all of my operas have been recorded.

We had to squeeze it into a regular subscription week, which is very limited rehearsal time and the orchestra obviously has not seen it before. So I did have to make a compressed version of it. But I like this version because it’s focused very, very intensely on the narratives of the characters. The original version had a lot of songs, a lot of entertainment. Things that I’m sort of sorry to go, but really weren’t entirely germane to the story. It was really long.

I had no idea I’d written so much music. It was 600 pages of score. Even when it was revised for Amsterdam, it was still too long. Particularly my musical language, which is sort of wry and tight and economical – the way you might pack a backpack to go hiking in the Sierras. I really felt that this story needed to be told in a more compact, shorter version. 

I would assume that even squeezing in these performances as part of the season, it must be a blessing to have all but one of your original cast members back.

Of course. I don’t want to use the word squeezing it in. The Philharmonic has given me as much time as they can. I would say that of all the orchestras in the world, and I have conducted most of them, the LA Phil was the ideal orchestra for this because they have one of the fastest learning curves of any group of musicians in the world. And they know my music. They play it every year and I’ve been conducting them since the 1980s – back when they were at the Music Center. So this is the ideal situation if I’m going to work with an orchestra.

Grant Gershon conducted the premiere in San Francisco. How do you think your approach to this opera, from the conductor’s point of view, will differ from his? In what areas might it be the same?

You know, it’s not like [German conductor Wilhelm] Furtwängler versus [Italian conductor Arturo] Toscanini or something like that. Obviously when Grant conducted that he had singers on the stage and they were doing all kinds of physical activity. And they were singing off book, which puts such a huge responsibility on the conductor. Here I’ve asked the singers to use music because we just want to get it as good as it can. Obviously this is a concert performance with no action on stage. My goal is to just get as good a performance and tight of performance as much as possible. 

But do you feel that you conduct your music differently than others do?

Well, sure. I’m very, very lucky. I’ve had the best conductors on the planet doing my music. That’s a real luxury. But I stay in touch with all my pieces. I conduct them regularly and I think I’m a good conductor – at least for my own music. I work regularly with the best orchestras in the world. That’s a plus that most composers can’t do.

You know I saw Aaron Copland conduct when I was a kid. The Boston Symphony loved him, but he was barely able to conduct. It’s a rare group of people who can conduct and compose: [Leonard] Bernstein and [Pierre] Boulez and Esa-Pekka [Salonen]. But most composers just don’t have the experience.

By having that continued relationship with the vast number of your works that you conduct, how does that fuel your ideas for what you want to do moving forward?

Of course it does fuel it. When I do my pieces I really understand what is right about them and what’s not right. So I’ve had the benefit of doing various pieces many, many times. It’s interesting because I was having to make some programs this week for various orchestras because they’re all ready to announce their seasons. I was looking at scores of [composer] Charles Ives that in the past I’ve conducted. I think Ives, whom I love on a certain level as a wonderful human being and a kind of visionary, but there’s something very unsatisfying about most of his orchestral pieces. The reason is that he never heard them played. So they were all kind of speculative. Then you look at a composer like Ravel or Mahler or Richard Strauss who are just constantly sharing their pieces and refining them. The ideal is to have a hands-on experience with your work.

You and Peter Sellers did an interview at Guggenheim Works in Progress in September of 2017. He described the music that you wrote for Scene five of Act two as of Girls of the Golden West as being able to perfectly give voice to what was happening at the time and that historians will be able to look back at that music and see that you had “actually touched what’s going on.” When art and current events collide in the way that he’s describing, is there a part of it that feels like it’s perfect planning or is it the world working in mysterious ways? How do you view that kind of synchronicity? 

I think I’m more modest in my expectations. I mean, it really sounds great, very grandiose what he said. But I’m always a little skeptical of language like that. I think basically people have very intimate experiences with a work of art. They may be sitting in a big crowd with thousands of people. But how you respond to something is a very intimate experience. I don’t think you can really predict how people are going to react.

Even though a lot of my pieces deal with historical events, when I’m composing I never feel that I’m preaching to people. I never want to preach or think that I’m going to grab them by the lapel and give them a lecture.

You’re also heavily involved with L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group. You have a concert coming up with them in March. What gives you the most optimism about the contemporary classical music that we’re going to discover in the next few years? Do you think that there are composers who are on the cusp of having a breakthrough the way you did with Phrygian Gates?

I think it’s always been the case that there’s never been more than a handful of truly great composers at any particular time. If you look at the era of Beethoven there were all the other composers, his contemporaries, but we only listen to them out of historical curiosity. There was a period around the turn of the 20th century when there were an amazing number of really great composers all alive and working: Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius. But that was rare.

With that said, I think that this is a much healthier time to be a composer than when I was in my 20s or 30s. Back then that was what I call the bad old days of extremely obscure approaches to composition. Whether it was serialism or chance music, various systems that created a kind of music that was absolutely inaccessible to most listeners. I have no idea why it became so prestigious. But it did. When I was in college in the late sixties, early seventies, that’s the music that was treated seriously. And of course, one of the things that did was it frightened audiences away.

Even to this day I still suffer from that. If a piece of mine is on the program and your average concertgoer doesn’t know who John Adams is and looks at the program and sees Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Adams, the first thing they think is that it’s a new piece. It’s going to be unpleasant. That’s the long tail off of what happened back in the sixties and seventies. Now composers are not driven by style and they are very conscious about whom they’re writing for and what they’re writing about. 

I think there’s a lot of interest in encouraging young composers. Virtually every orchestra program I see these days, at least by American orchestras, has a piece by an emerging composer. It’s astonishing because you never saw that 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. So there is interest, but the issue is writing a piece that’s going to have legs that people want to hear. That other orchestras and performers and pianists want to share. That’s really where the dividing line is, because there are very, very few pieces that have legs. 

Do you think that that the world is is catching up to what you have been doing throughout your career?

Well, you know, I’m like any contemporary composer except maybe John Williams. I have a modest audience and I say modest compared to a pop musician. But I have what I think is a quality audience who appreciates deeply what I do and loves my work. The reason we call it classical is because we always feel what we’re doing is going to have a very long shelf life, hundreds of years. We’re making something that is not just for now, but for many, many generations ahead. 

Bachtrack had you as number three on the top ten contemporary composers whose works were performed last year. [Arvo Pärt and John Williams were in the first and second position.]

I guess maybe it’s just because I’m a Yankee at heart. I’m just very skeptical of grandiose language and things like that. But maybe that’s healthy because I still keep doing very original things. You know, I came back to this opera, The Girls of the Golden West, thinking it had been a failure. I hadn’t even listened to it or looked at the score in five years. [When I did] I thought, not bad.

Main Photo: John Adams (Photo ©Riccardo Musacchio/Courtesy John Adams)

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Composer Ricky Ian Gordon had two operas produced this year: Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by New York City Opera. We focused on the latter when we spoke with him early this year. Because of some strong language, you’ll have to watch this one on our YouTube channel as it is age restricted.

Mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča talked about her career and more with us in March. It has proven to be one of our most popular interviews.

We spoke with baritone Etienne Dupuis while he was performing the five-act French language original version of Don Carlos at the Metropolitan Opera.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun talked to us in advance of the world premiere of In Our Daughter’s Eyes in Los Angeles.

The most eagerly-anticipated new opera this year was The Hours by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce. We talked to Puts in advance of a concert performance of the work before it was fully staged at the Metropolitan Opera.

Last week we published our interview with conductor/pianist Christian Reif about El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered. Reif, in collaboration with Julia Bullock (his partner), truncated the John Adams opera El Niño into a one-hour work. We also discussed Bullock’s first album, Walking in the Dark, which finds Reif conducting and accompanying her and his very new role as a father.

Those are just a few of our opera interview highlights from 2022. Please go to our YouTube channel to see all of our interviews and to subscribe.

Photo: Elīna Garanča (©Sarah Katharina/Courtesy GM Art & Music)

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But her story begins in California. She was raised here and went to UCLA. Her education was financed by entering and winning several beauty pageants. Blue won the titles of Miss Hollywood in 2005 and Miss Southern California in 2006. She spent three years in the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program at LA Opera. From there the world welcomed her with rave reviews and this year Blue was named the winner of the Richard Tucker Award.

She is back in Southern California as the lead in the LA Opera production of Puccini’s Tosca. She appears with tenor Michael Fabiano (through December 4th) and Gregory Kunde (December 7th – 10th) as Tosca’s lover, Cavaradossi. Ryan McKinny sings Scarpia. This John Caird production, first seen in Houston in 2010, made its debut at LA opera in 2013.

Last week, after the dress rehearsal for Tosca, I spoke with Blue who was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She was being followed around by a documentary film crew from Germany.

Our conversation took place via Zoom. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Before we talk all things Tosca, I want to congratulate you on this week’s Grammy nomination for Fire Shut Up in My Bones. 

Thank you.

I saw the opera through Live in HD and found it incredibly powerful and incredibly moving. What made that opera special for you? 

I think for me it was the historical aspect of it. It was the first time that the Metropolitan Opera had done an opera written by a Black composer [Terence Blanchard]. Of course, coming back after COVID and having the opera be shut down for a whole year like that, I think all of those historical moments made it what it was for me. I just felt very blessed to be a part of it because it was such a moving moment in time for me. 

And a moving one for the audience as well. What challenges did composer Terence Blanchard give you that you feel are unique to the way he writes opera?

I think the biggest challenge for me was that on the first day of rehearsal he told all of us, “You guys are classical musicians, so I know that you’re going to do what is on the page, how it’s written.” And he said, “I want you to do what is on the page. But I also want you to go back to your roots.”

When he said that I thought about my dad and how I grew up. I did grow up singing opera and listening to classical music. But I also grew up in church, playing the bass guitar and listening to gospel, singing gospel, hearing my father sing gospel, having my father sing classical music as well.

He made basically a blueprint for all of us to follow. Then within that blueprint, he said, I want you to kind of come out of the confines of the blueprint and make it your own by being able to sing something like Peculiar Grace with more of an R&B gospel style. [That] was something that I never get to do in an opera. So it was a challenge in that we wanted to honor what Terence had written, but we also wanted to bring in our roots. So it was definitely a challenge to be able to put the two together, to give myself the freedom to do that in an opera on a stage like the Met. It was awesome.

Now let’s talk Tosca. If my research is correct, this production in Los Angeles is only the second time you’ve sung Tosca. Part of that was because you had two different productions canceled during the pandemic that you were scheduled to do. So after the disappointment that I’m assuming comes along with those cancelations, what does finally being able to revisit this role mean to you now?

First I want to say I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t. To be honest with you I felt like, and I still feel, that when something like what happened with COVID and all of those cancellations, what that afforded me was not just a break, but it also afforded me the time to sit back and think. Maybe this is not the right time to be singing these pieces back-to-back like that in one season. So I wasn’t so disappointed with it because I’m happy with how it is now. I have this production and then I do it again next summer.

I don’t believe in coincidences, so I think that was perfect. This production is very, very traditional. It’s so helpful to sing Tosca in such a way that allows for me to actually really invest in who the character is and really, I think, become Tosca. 

The first production you did would not be defined by anybody as a traditional production. Does this almost feels like this is your first, I don’t want to say conventional, but traditional Tosca anyway?

This is definitely my first conventional Tosca – you’re fine to say that it is. I’m happy to do it. For me the music has always had the same meaning. The singing has always been the same in terms of the challenges. It’s all the same music. Being able to express it in this way is something that I’m very thankful for. It’s a special time and it is the right time – that’s more important. 

What makes it the right time?

It’s just kind of like with COVID; if it wasn’t supposed to happen, it wouldn’t have. It’s the right time and everything is right. I’m at the right age for it. I feel right in my body about it. I’m back in Los Angeles where it couldn’t possibly be more comfortable to be singing this role. This is a role that comes with a lot of, for lack of a better word, a lot of stress. You have to be vocally prepared and ready, also dramatically prepared and ready. As my band Radiohead says, everything is in its right place.

If the schedule had happened as it was planned to this would be your fourth Tosca instead of your second. Is your approach to this opera any different today than it might have been had that schedule actually played out as as originally scheduled?

I think if it was my fourth Tosca production, I think maybe I would have been honestly less excited. I’m just being honest. I probably would have been less excited. Not less excited because of the opera or what have you. For example, I’ve done eight productions, I think, now of La Traviata and it’s not that I’m not excited by the opera. But at some point the artist grows out of something and you grow into something else.

I see myself having the opportunity to really grow into Tosca. The journey is really just starting and that’s good because it’s the right time for it to start. And I hope it’s the beginning of a very wonderful run of Toscas for years to come.

Let me ask you about that 2019 production in Provence that you did – the Christophe Honoré production. There was a new character introduced and you were wearing a hoodie. Not how I normally look at Tosca, but to each his own. What did you learn from that first experience that is informing what you’re doing as a singer, as an actor, in this one?

Flexibility. We have to be flexible as opera singers. It’s important to be able to sing, of course, that’s what our job is. What I really loved about Christophe was that his imagination was just all over the place. It was wild and it was everywhere. And what I loved about it was that he wanted us to go on that wonderful journey with him. Because of that I had to know the music really, really well. What I was saying and what I was singing did not go along with the dramaturgy. It didn’t go along with the staging. So I had to make sure that I knew my music well.

Then on top of that I had to take my imagination to another level of my Tosca being this student, learning from the prima donna who was played by Catherine Malfitano. So I enjoyed it because it stretched my imagination and it made me realize that I’m an opera singer. But I feel like I’m so much more than that because of that production and hopefully the flexibility and the the open-mindedness that I had to learn doing that production. I hope I bring that into this production, even though it is traditional. 

I looked at an interview that John Caird gave to the Los Angeles Times when this production was first performed at LA Opera. Caird said something that I thought was really interesting: that the opera could have benefited from a second female character. He then went on to say, “There are things that are not terribly well done, but you can’t worry too much about the infelicities and the dramaturgy. The music sorts out all the problems.” Do you agree with John Caird? Do you think that it’s a rocky dramaturgical piece of work, but that Puccini’s music compensates for that? 

I’m very fortunate because I have sung the opera with another soprano and not just any soprano, she’s a legendary Tosca. Who knows if sopranos really want to share the role of Tosca. But I think there would be something if there was another protagonist maybe in the show. But Puccini’s heart, everything about this man, every ounce of his being, comes out in the music. I don’t want to say it like this, but I don’t know how else to say it. Perhaps the drama doesn’t fail. Maybe that’s not the right word. But I’ll say this. The music is constantly going. It doesn’t ever really stop. So I’ll say that when the drama sort of slows down, that’s when the music kind of kicks in and keeps it going. So I would agree with him.

In 2019 you did an interview with with Gramilano and you mentioned that Violetta and Tosca were your favorite characters, your favorite roles and that Don Giovanni and Tosca were your favorite operas to watch. From a spectator’s point of view and being in your shoes, what makes Tosca so special for you to watch? 

I enjoy the drama. I enjoy the brass. I love the brass section of the orchestra. Actually I should have said my favorite opera is Turandot. I love the brass section. Puccini, Strauss, Wagner, they use the brass section like none other. And Terence Blanchard, too! I know that because I had to sing with them.

But I love the way he writes for the orchestra in Tosca. The singers just being able to, if I may say it this way, accommodate what he’s written. You can actually listen to the whole opera of Tosca – just the orchestra. Take out everything else: take out the voices, all of it, the choir, and you can listen to it and I imagine it would play the same. That’s why I said we’re there to accommodate. We’re there to almost, in a way, backup the orchestra. Maybe I’ve always felt that way about Tosca. I don’t know how correct that is to say as a singer, but that is my impression of the opera. 

I think for any soprano the shadow of Maria Callas is is unavoidable. In 2021, BBC’s music magazine, Classical Music, named Callas’s 1953 recording of Tosca as the finest recording ever. How long is her shadow and at what point do you think you and other sopranos are not going to have to face the the Callas of it all?

I can only say that I greatly admire her dedication, diligence and devotion to her craft. If it happens that she is the quintessential Tosca for the rest of humanity, then so be it. I’m happy to say that I’ve lived in her shadow. I don’t mind that. I can only say that I’m grateful that I’ve been able to sing the same music that she sings. I was singing, of course, with my voice and with my heart and my experience.

Tosca is one of the greatest opera roles ever. From my perspective any woman who can put herself into Tosca’s shoes, make it through the whole evening and come off stage with their head held high – you’ve done a great thing, regardless of who has the finest recording. In the moment that I’m singing Tosca and whoever else is singing Tosca, that’s our moment. And we honor Maria Callas. We thank her. I honor her and I thank her for the role that she’s played for us sopranos. But if it’s a shadow, I’ll stand in it.

I’m going to finish by asking you about something that Callas is quoted as having said. She said, “An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination. It becomes my life and stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.” Do you feel similarly to Maria Callas? 

I was a young artist here at Los Angeles Opera 15, 16 years ago. Going from being a young artist to singing such a role where I was a young artist – I’m where I want to be. I don’t know if I can, honestly say, “Oh, I have this great dream to sing Tosca here or there or wherever.” I just know that I’m grateful to sing it here.

I agree with her in that the opera starts way before the curtain goes up, because we have to be thinking about it all of the time. I’m constantly working on the music. I’m constantly studying and that will never change. I will be studying until, you know, God takes me out of here.

But I differ from from Ms. Callas in that the opera does stop, because it can’t be my whole life. I have a family. I have a husband. I have a stepson. I have people in my life. That curtain must go down so that I can be Angel. I’m not always Angel Blue singing.

As soon as we’re done with this Zoom and I leave this opera house, I’m going to go eat. I’m going to do my thing. And the curtain will definitely be down. It’ll be down good, too, you know? And it doesn’t come back up until I have to come back and do my job, if that makes sense. But I’m thankful for Tosca. It’s brought me back home. Literally all I can think about is that I’m home.

To see the full interview with Angel Blue, please go here.

Main Photo: Angel Blue (Photo by Dario Acosta/Courtesy Askonas Holt)

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This interview originally ran in March when the Philadelphia Orchestra was giving a concert performance of The Hours. We have updated this story with more details about the Met Opera production, clips from the production and additional comments from composer Puts. We have also posted the complete interview up on our YouTube channel.

The Met Opera production stars Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf, Renée Fleming as Clarissa Vaughan and Kelli O’Hara as Laura Brown. These were the characters played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore in the 2002 film. Both the movie and the opera are based on Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

If you read the book or saw the film you’ll remember The Hours is about three women from different time periods who all have a connection to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Also appearing in the opera are Kathleen Kim, Denyce Graves, John Holiday, Sean Panikkar and more. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct all but the last Met Opera performance on December 15th. Kensho Watanabe will conduct that performance. The production is by Phelim McDermott (Akhnaten).

“The idea came to me from Renée Fleming,” says composer Puts. “She was thinking about it and she thought how interesting to have an opera that takes place in three different time periods all at the same time. It was on her mind because she had just had lunch with Julianne Moore..” That’s how The Hours began its life as an opera written by Puts.

Earlier this year I spoke via Zoom with Puts who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, Silent Night. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Virginia Woolf once asked, “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” Your opera of The Hours is based on a novel written by a man who was inspired by Woolf and is being created and directed by three men. What would you say to Woolf if given the opportunity to address her question?

I can’t answer why, but I would say for me women are more interesting as characters. I don’t know why. I love operas like Billy Budd, but these characters are fascinating and I like writing for the female voice very much.

Just before speaking with you I had the television on and I was flipping channels around and the movie Aliens was on. It’s the same thing, [director] James Cameron is fascinated with female heroines in his story. I don’t know exactly why.

My first opera was basically almost all men and now I’m starting to get my musical mind around having melodies that are essentially around middle “c” on the piano. That is a different kind of thing because then the harmony has to be in a different place, et cetera. I don’t like to get too technical, but it’s very natural for me to write for women’s voices. But that is a very Virginia Woolf thing to say and probably true as well.

You mentioned that, like the novel, your opera takes place in three different time periods. Musically how are those time periods reflected and is that necessary for an audience to stay on course with the story you are telling?

The piece has a very kind of otherworldly and kind of mystical feel to it. But definitely we want the audience to know what’s going on.

I didn’t have a real premeditated idea that there would be three different types of music, which would be extremely different and would signify the different characters. But I think it just happened naturally.

Virginia Woolf feels trapped in Richmond and she wants the wildness of the city. So there’ s a musical language and certain elements of that language which describe that for me. Then there’s her sort of manic desire for London. So there’s that kind of dichotomy in her music.

Laura Brown, the middle period character, was living outside of Los Angeles after World War II. WIth her husband and her three-year-old son, she feels trapped in sort of an alien domestic world that is not natural for her. So there’s a way of describing the world that she can’t fit into, which has its own language.

Clarissa, Renée Fleming’s character, has a kind of musical language that is characterized by Clarissa’s eternal optimism and radiance. She thinks everything will be fine if we just have the perfect party and we get the flowers exactly right.

I really do think of them as musical environments. They’re not leitmotifs, but they’re languages that I think are associated with the different characters and their situations.

This opera has been in the works for quite some time with Fleming, O’Hara and DiDonato attached. Did that allow you to write specifically for their voices?

It was very much written for the three of them because we hadn’t started writing yet. So I knew who we were writing for. I knew Renee’s voice very well having done a couple of projects with her. And I knew Kelli O’Hara’s voice from musical theater. I was talking to her a lot and finding out that she actually has an incredible range and she can sing the lyric soprano roles. And, of course, I knew Joyce DiDonato’s voice. The piece will continue to be written for the three of them over the next several months.

I really think that’s crucial for an opera to make sure that the principles really feel like they can deliver with their parts. It’s funny how minute the changes can be and sometimes that makes a big difference to them. It’s easy for me and actually really satisfying for me to develop these roles within the parts of their voice that work given the situation.

How did Greg Pierce become the writer you wanted to adapt Cunningham’s novel and create the libretto?

Greg had only done one opera, Fellow Travelers, which is a really successful opera with Gregory Spears. I read the libretto and I really liked it. I also liked the fact that he hadn’t done a lot of operas. He had done work in other areas: screenplays, et cetera. He showed me some poems that he wrote. I knew there would be a poetic element to the language. It’s what inspires me. I think that there has to be some poetry in the libretto. His enthusiasm for The Hours was clear. He had been thinking about it for years as a possibility as an opera. In our first conversation I felt like we were already writing it. It just felt natural once I met him.

In the spring of 2021 you had a workshop of the music with Cincinnati Opera. What did you and Greg learn from that session and how did it inform the subsequent work you’ve done on The Hours?

My score was marked in red. I just went to work immediately. Once you figure out what you need to do you just want to forget the past like it never happened.

I think that one of the really crucial scenes in the opera was entirely re-written. It’s a complicated scene actually. A couple of scenes between Clarissa and Richard. I need to work really hard at dialogue. I feel like it should all feel like part of a seamless musical flow and there should be real singing in the dialogue. It should flow naturally like a conversation that kind of ebbs and flows. So those scenes, in some ways, require the most work.

How did that work in the middle of the pandemic?

That was a heroic thing that they did. We were all in a massive ballroom and there were twelve singers – all of the masked in little separate booths with microphones. The pianist and the conductor were in the middle of the room and none of us could approach each other. But we got through the entire opera and we learned a ton from it.

Given that Mrs. Dalloway is so revered, as is the language of Virginia Woolf and that The Hours is revered both as a book and a movie for the language that Cunningham and screenwriter David Hare used, what challenges do you face in continuing with a successful telling of this story?

I think it always is the case when you’re working with a property that’s really known. It’s inevitable. They’re going to be reactions like “well, it’s not like this. And I love the book and it’s too bad that it’s not this way and that way.” It was certainly true of The Manchurian Candidate, my second opera. It was the same kind of challenge.

But I felt like when I began composing that I was doing things on my own terms. It just feels different – just the nature of the piece. I feel like it’s its own thing and it’s not going to feel like the book. It’s not going to feel like the film. The music has its own personality, I hope. But yeah, that’s definitely a challenge. I hope that people will listen to it on its own terms.

The nice thing is the book and the film will still exist independent of the opera.

As soon as Renée mentioned the book I started thinking about the possibilities that can happen on an opera stage that cannot happen in a film. You can’t split the screen in three ways. These stories can begin to intermingle and overlap and they can sing duets that transcend time. That was what was really exciting about it for me because with the language of music and harmony it’s possible to do that. So that’s why I wanted to do it.

I think about that all the time. What’s the point? But I think with this I really thought there was a point.

Michael Cunningham said in an interview when the novel was released that he felt that he entered into some kind of maturity with The Hours and that it was something only he could have written. I’m wondering if you could compare your own thoughts about your perspective of having written this opera at this point in your life and whether you’ve reached a certain kind of maturity and if only you could have written this.

I don’t feel that I’m the only composer who could have written this. But I do think that the way I like to approach opera is well suited to this story. The emotional situations; I live for these these things as a composer. I live for the moments when I can let these situations wash over me and let music come out. This is why I do it.

I think as far as maturity, I feel like now I understand how to not only how to write for voice and how to set the English language and the way I want to that really extracts all the musicality that’s possible out of it. i really love to set English as a language. But also I feel like I’ve kind of tempered my, what is often described in Silent Night, as a kind of a poly-stylistic approach. I’ve tempered that in a way that feels like it’s more cohesive and more kind of all me, even though there are references to different stylistic things that occur in the piece. So yeah, I feel like it was a good time for me to write this opera.

To see the full conversation with Kevin Puts, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Kevin Puts (Photo by David White)

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