Wolf Trap Opera

I spent the week in Houston, in a bit of unplanned time on the piano bench, coaching some young singers. (The jury’s still out as to whether that was a good idea, but it’s behind me now, and I survived.) In these few minutes before I desperately try to catch up on all of my Wolf Trap work, I leave you with this brief summary of how Trappers seem to be everywhere.

The Rape of Lucretia dress rehearsal on Tuesday featured Michelle DeYoung (’95) in the title role, with Ryan McKinny (’06, ’08) as Collatinus. (photo at left)

At Traviata on Wednesday evening, WTOC alums were onstage and in the house. Chad Shelton (’99) stepped in for an ailing Alfredo, wedging the Traviata in between his performances of Lucia in Austin. His Lucia colleague and WTOC alum Weston Hurt (’06)  traveled from Austin for Chad’s performance. HGO Studio singers and former Trappers Catherine Martin (’10, ’11) and Nick Masters (’09, ’10) were onstage as Flora and Grenvil, and former Studio Artist Brittany Wheeler (WTOS ’08) sang Annina.

I ended up in this mess as a favor to our dear friend Eric Melear, once a pivotal member of our Wolf Trap team (and before that, a WTOC Fellowship recipient), now Associate Music Director of Houston Grand Opera.  Hearing him play and speak at their competition finals (Concert of Arias) was a pleasure in so many ways. I was taken care of this week by none other than the inimitable Amra Catovic (HGO Studio Administrator and former WTOC intern), and my partner in crime on the coaching staff was Grant Loehnig (Co-Manager of the Wolf Trap Opera Studio).

My colleagues on hand for the Concert of Arias and the next day’s house auditions included Forth Worth General Director Darren Keith Woods (’84 & ’85) and LA Opera Artistic Administrator Joshua Winograde (’00, ’01). The finalists in the competition (9 singers chosen from among the 600 who auditioned) included Sarah Larsen (WTOS ’08 and our Sarelda in last April’s Inspector premiere) and a soprano who is about to become a member of our clan as a 2012 Filene Young Artist (look for our Season Announcement on Sunday, February 12!).

It’s a small world, an even smaller business that we’re in, and people in whose careers Wolf Trap participated are everywhere. To everyone out there who helps the WTOC make a difference in their careers, from our donors and patrons to staff members and artist mentors: Be proud, people. It’s good work, this.

A guest post from my colleague Lee Anne Myslewski

I said I would write this blog post. I had a great idea and everything! But boy, am I struggling to put it into words. You see, I want to talk about youthful enthusiasm – it’s one of those things that, as a company, we have in droves. But it’s also something that, personally speaking, I have less and less of as each year ticks by. (Funny how that works…)

So, how to talk about it? I know! Liken the Wolf Trap Opera Company to a vampire! Vampires are cool (well, they were…although that could’ve been so ten minutes ago. But bear with me.), they’re ageless and they feed off the lifeblood of young, attractive people!

THAT’S SO US!

(Hmmmm… Well, that’s not a very flattering spin, if I think a little more about it…)

In some ways the visual holds water: We traffic in highly talented, exuberant artists. And we give them big opportunities… opportunities that, for some of them, can result in big career moves. They’re at exciting times in their lives, making crucial decisions about their artistic selves and voices; they’re figuring out how to navigate this tricky (and shrinking) field. We’re happy to get behind them, support them, serve as sounding boards and shoulders on which they can vent.

But we’d be fibbing if we said all this support it’s 100% altruistic. You see, the three of us that are in the office all year round? Well, we look forward to May like some folks look forward to Christmas. For, as well as we work together, as much as we enjoy each other’s company? We LOVE that heightened sense of energy that the summer brings. Long days? No problem. Seventeen million things to do? Bring it on. Crazy, unpredictable personalities? YES. Because the energy and the art-making are the things that light our fires, that keep us invested in working through those cold, wet, gray February days. In many ways, that operatic adrenaline IS our lifeblood… so the vampire analogy isn’t terribly off base.

But rather than comparing the Wolf Trap Opera staff to the cast of Twilight (since I’m not actually able to do so, as I’ve not read the books or seen the movies. For shame.) let me instead tell you about some related interactions that I’ve had in the past few days that have made me excited for the summer.

Firstly, we have an eager, opera-hungry volunteer with us this spring named Sam. He is into opera the way I was when I was a student – totally, completely, borderline fanatically. Sam will start his studies at Rice University in the fall, but in the meantime he’s spending some quality time with us researching and translating and formatting supertitles. He’s stationed in our library, and has been taking full advantage of our collection of cds and dvds (with some sage guidance from fellow volunteer John Feather) to continue his studies. Watching him discover recordings and singers, and listening to him talk about them is exhilarating – not just in a Rip Van Winkle, “I remember back in the day…” kind of way, but in a manner that reminds me of how excited I was to discover an amazing voice, an incredible art song, a definitive rendition. And Sam is also a reminder of all the best reasons that I got involved in this crazy field in the first place: a love of beautiful music, of compelling performances, and of sharing those stories with others.

Secondly, I had the opportunity to talk about auditioning with some students at American University on Sunday. It was a two hour class, and it flew by – I’m not sure who had more fun, me or the students. (Actually, I’m pretty sure the winner was me. It was a blast.) I blabbered, and they took notes, overlooked my awkward stories and asked fantastic, thoughtful questions. The three ladies who performed mock auditions were well prepared, flexible and quite gracious. They incorporated my suggestions on the fly, with good humor and seriousness, and seemed to make genuine connections quickly and deeply. And again, I was struck by the sense of passion, of excitement, of possibility that seemed to charge the air in the room.

So, to Sam and the students at American University, thank you so much for giving me that infusion of lifeblood that I so desperately needed to tide me over until summertime. (I hope that you’ll let Wolf Trap Opera return the favor by joining us for one of our performances this summer!)

I’m not a visual person. My first instinct is to hear, touch, smell, taste, guess… almost anything except see. It comes therefore as a bit of a surprise that our relatively recent forays into vocal concerts with visual prompts have resonated so strongly with me.

Next month’s America’s National Parks: Through the Artist’s Lens concert was a beautiful brainstorm of my colleague Lee Anne. We’ve had success pairing song with paintings, largely through our partnership with The Phillips Collection on our summer Vocal Colors series. Lee Anne suggested that this time we draw inspiration from the photography of Wolf Trap Foundation CEO Terre Jones for a concert pairing songs with images from American’s National Parks.

Guest artists Melissa Shippen, Jamie Van Eyck, David Portillo, Alex Tall and I spent time with a gallery of these photos, allowing the images to conjure up songs from our current repertoire as well as music that we’ve heard and loved but never had a chance to perform.The process of choosing the music was extremely personal and wildly variable. A dust storm in Wyoming begged for Copland’s setting of Emily Dickinson’s “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle.” Rachmaninoff’s impetuous “Spring Waters” immediately suggested the drama of waterfalls in West Virginia’s New River Gorge National Park. A saturated New Mexico sunset called up the jazz standard “Orange Colored Sky.”

The grandeur of these photographs lent itself readily to music that is lyrical, sentimental, passionate and/or contemplative. But it was also incumbent on us to find the other side of life in the Parks, and this is where some of the true brainstorming came in. We found the humor in the animals that wandered into Terre’s lens – an imperious and quizzical billy goat in South Dakota, a lone bison in Wyoming, and this horse-meets-machine moment:

Of course, the big challenge of the moment is finding my chops, as I relocate from the desk to the piano in preparation for the concert on February 17.  The first few times I did this after being away from the piano for weeks (ahem…months…), it was terrifying. I thought I’d never be able to play again. But now, after spending 15 years at my desk, punctuated by brief intense flurries at the keyboard, the routine is predictable. I shall ignore these first few days of feeling as if my brain is no longer connected to my hands, and before I know it, the music will flow. This time, with beautiful and inspirational images of natural beauty on the other side of the stage.

Here at Wolf Trap Opera in January, the volunteers outnumber the rest of us.

How fortunate we are to have this small army of dedicated opera lovers! Last year, our four regular volunteers logged over 600 hours, and their time and talents have quickly become indispensable.

John Feather‘s natural habitat is the media room of the Foundation’s music library. His encyclopedic knowledge of opera recordings has quickly endeared him to our artists, and he’s a great resource on discography. Shown here with his trusty LP-to-CD digitizing machine, he’s steadily converting our store of historic recordings to easy-to-use digital formats so that our artists can access them.

Fred Mushinski works with WTOC staff member Susan Weinsheimer to keep the library catalogued and organized.  Most recently, he’s been in dogged pursuit of standardizing and updating our supertitle rental library. We’ve thrown a lot of things Fred’s way, and he’s cheerfully caught them all!

Sandra Saydah watches over the CD library and is a huge help every autumn when over a thousand audition applications, resumes and headshots threaten to drown us all. While I was working on my 40th anniversary WTOC history project (which is not abandoned, I promise… I will get back to it and not leave you hanging in 1985…), Sandra was a godsend!

In addition to pitching in with his colleagues in the library, Joe Fleig cheerfully logs hours in our general storage area, keeping up with the physical paper records and helping us along on our path to digitize our files.  Joe, Sandra and Fred are also part of our volunteer housing host program (see below).

In early 2012, this regular group was joined by a young volunteer who is an aspiring opera singer. Sam Waters is spending two days a week with us this winter/spring, and his first project (wildly labor-intensive) has been prepping the supertitle powerpoint files for one of this summer’s operas.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to mention the other group of big-hearted folks without whom we simply couldn’t operate: our housing hosts. We enjoy the support of over two dozen families who open up their homes every summer to provide lodging for our young artists and staff. (We still need a few good homes for artists and staff this summer… to find out more, contact us at wtoc@wolftrap.org.)  Thanks to all of these wonderful folks who shower us with elbow grease and good will, we are much better than we have any right to be!

I spent this workday morning at an event that was both somber and joyous – a memorial service for a member of the Wolf Trap family. Mary Frances Pearson founded Wolf Trap’s Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts in 1981, and she was a steadfast and enthusiastic fan of Wolf Trap, its education programs and its opera company. She lived a long and beautiful life, but as always, it was hard to see her go.

Mary Frances’ daughter-in-law delivered the homily, and she used an analogy that will stick with me a while. She spoke of the act of living as diving deep below the surface of the water; struggling to get to the dark undiscovered territory at the bottom, grabbing a fistful of the things there that no one else had ever seen, then breaking free and springing with burning lungs toward the light. The evocation was primarily spiritual, but I was struck with the degree to which this analogy describes the artistic life both in its sum and in its daily small parts.

Artists of all types (and don’t think that if you can’t paint, sing or dance that you’re not an artist…) can lose hope when the road seems long and lonely, and their path gets dark. But that’s how we get at the stuff that only we can bring to the light. It has to get dark and dangerous before we can find what’s important, but we must have the courage and faith to keep diving until we truly find it. Then we can take it, hold it tight to our chest, and churn to the light to share it. So it is with life, with music, with anything that can stay.

On this day celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a link to a letter he sent to Sammy Davis, Jr. in December of 1960.

It’s been a long week.

We’re saying bon voyage to a valuable member of our team. Since 2009, Ryan Taylor has been our Manager of Community Development, our summer marketing and development liaison, our 2012 season audition consultant, an invaluable colleague and a wonderful periodic addition to our small regular staff in the”off” season. He’s heading west to Phoenix, having just been tapped as Arizona Opera’s new Director of Artistic Administration. It’s fabulous news for Ryan, and we couldn’t be happier for him. (Well, we could be, if we could just find a way to clone him…)

In recent seasons, we’ve sent Administrative Fellow Joshua Winograde off to be LA Opera’s Artistic Administrator.  Eric Melear was the Music Director of our Opera Studio (having gotten his Wolf Trap start as a Coaching Fellow), and he’s just landed in Houston as their Associate Music Director. And now Ryan’s leaving us behind. Isn’t it enough that the young artists go through a revolving door and out into the world? <sigh>

We haven’t been able to hire an Administrative Fellow for a few seasons, and in light of this transition, we’re re-opening that position. To find out more, go here.

Since I seem to have little brain space for anything substantial, here’s my list of links for this Short Attention Span Friday. Happy surfing :)

• You’ve probably heard about the unfortunate cell phone incident at the NY Phil this week. I am personally terrified that my phone will learn how to turn itself on in my purse and mortify me like this. Ouch.
• Tweet Seats: Can we really welcome smart phones into the theatre in this way? I have a love/hate relationship with the idea.
• Big opera news in your nation’s capital this week. Exciting stuff for my old employer, the Washington National Opera. The return to the Terrace Theatre isn’t the biggest news in this story, but somehow it’s my favorite part.
• Aretha‘s been to Wolf Trap many times, but I wonder if she knows we have an opera company… Hmmm….
• The Virginia Opera blog scored a huge hit this week with a discussion (well, kind of a lovely rant) on pop culture’s fascination with children who sing “opera.”
• And finally, Wolf Trap’s own From The Inside Out blog featured critic and blogger Tim Smith’s take on opera trends for 2012. He says there’s nothing more foolhardy than making predictions, but I think he’s spot on.

Happy weekend!

A guest post from Lee Anne Myslewski

When we talk about our little corner of the opera business, we like to point out that we’re different from many other companies.

Sure, there are other young artist companies with great singers. There are folks who mount productions to feature their young artists. There are programs who have a mix of recital and concert work in addition to opera. And I definitely have colleagues who have as vicious a travel schedule as we do during the autumn audition tour.

In talking with donors and non-opera types, we often draw comparisons to medical residencies (or, for the non-medical types, think Grey’s Anatomy or St. Elsewhere); where young professionals are finally able to apply the knowledge they’ve learned in the classroom, while having seasoned doctors available to consult and oversee tricky procedures. (We of course cannot comment on any behind-the-scenes hanky-panky. And if you know any, please keep it to yourselves…ignorance in this instance is bliss.)

So, what really sets us apart from the other US summer programs? The biggest single aspect is that we wait until we’ve heard everyone before we choose the operas that will best feature our singers.

As I sit here watching the NFL Wild Card games (Go STEELERS!), I’m struck by the similarities between what we do and Fantasy Football. On NFL.com the Fantasy Playoff Challenge highlights the following dictum:

Pick the NFL players who you think will perform best in their actual NFL playoff games.

And that’s exactly what we do, but on a vocal and musical level. Rather than choosing the players that will make it into the playoffs at the outset of the season (boy, that sounds silly, doesn’t it?), we go out and find the most talented singers, who will perform to the very top of their abilities…only after we’ve assembled a kickin’ team of performers do we decide what playoff game – or, in our case, opera – they’ll be performing in.

Now, we can’t choose all sopranos even if there are a million fantastic options (and every year there are), because every opera requires a variety of voice types…in much the same way that a football team comprised solely of running backs would suffer from a marked lack of defense, or a team of all defensive tackles would have a hard time getting onto the scoreboard. Each year we field a few singers in each voice type, but when a rarer voice – say, a countertenor or a dramatic tenor – comes to our attention, we tend to let that voice ‘quarterback’ by dictating some of the repertoire decisions.

The singers you’ll hear this summer have been cherry-picked from the best programs that this country has to offer. It’s an operatic version of a Fantasy Football game like nothing else you’ll experience. And while I’m a little sad at the way the Wild Card game turned out (sigh…stinkin’ new overtime rules!), I promise that our ‘games’ will be as exciting as the Steelers-Broncos game.

They’re true playoff material!

There’s a gem tucked away on the lower level of the Center for Education. Over the last few years, Wolf Trap’s music library grew from a place where I kept my own reference scores and recordings to an astonishing resource including (to date) over 9,700 catalogued items. The library is now housed in two rooms with floor-to-ceiling shelves (thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor). The main room was made possible through a gift from the J&M Foundation in memory of May and Joseph Winston. It is dedicated to scores, books and other hard copy reference materials – including over 1,100 scores, 800+ reference books, over 100 different opera libretti, and more than 2,500 programs for historic performances dating back to 1938.

Next door, the media library boasts 3,600 CDs, including over 2,000 recordings of opera and musical theatre by an astonishing list of 360 different composers. (A recent acquisition from the library of a zarzuela fan has netted us over 100 recordings of zarzuelas by 30 different composers!)  We also have about 250 opera DVDs, more than 1,000 compilation CDs by individual artists, and (lest you think it’s all opera all the time) over 500 instrumental recordings. One of our volunteers (check back next week for a special WTOC volunteer blog post) has already dedicated hundreds and hundreds of hours to digitizing our library of historic opera LPs with our nifty Ion LP-to-CD equipment.

WTOC staff member Susan Weinsheimer is Goddess of the Stacks. She manages our small team of volunteers who tirelessly shelve and inventory the files, and she oversees the hundreds of items that are checked out every summer by our resident opera company members.

How did we come by such a treasure trove, given that there is no (zippo, nada, zilch) budget line for the music library?  We have been the lucky recipients of generous donations from 29 Wolf Trap supporters – including opera company housing hosts, volunteers, and a dozen current and former employees of the Wolf Trap Foundation. There’s only one downside to having the library within 10 steps from my office door… The siren call is so loud that it’s tough to resist it in favor of email and spreadsheets. Perhaps there’ll be a slow day sometime in February or March when I can browse the shelves and curl up in there with a cup of hot chocolate.

Above, images of the library on busy summer days, and a commemoration of WTOC donor and fan Tom Tuch autographing copies of his book Arias, Cabalettas, and Foreign Affairs

Ah, January… I remember you! The sense of possibility, the lure of quiet(ish) days in the office in which to wrangle spreadsheets and think great thoughts.

2012 promises to be full of great music and exciting challenges. This week, Mahler and Copland share my piano rack with Jerry Lee Lewis and Hoagy Carmichael, as I finish programming this terrific concert.

Back soon with more details, but till then, here’s some fascinating reading from New York magazine: What Does a Conductor Do?

(Photo taken during last week’s White Christmas visit to Acadia National Park in Maine.)