Wolf Trap Opera

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.)

We’re busy furiously casting and planning for the 2012 opera season, and there’s not much I can say until the rest of the pieces fall into place. So I take this opportunity to welcome you to surf on over to a post by one of my alter egos.

Has George Frideric surfaced again this Advent?

Are you suffering from Hallelujah Fatigue?

Do you share the sense of dread at seeing the M-Word on your December calendar?

You’re not alone, my friend. But I’m doing my best to “get over myself” (my husband’s favorite admonition), and here’s the result.

Before I left Boston on Friday, I paid a quick visit to the office of Boston Lyric Opera. In a lovely bit of synchronicity, the city that is home to the studio that recorded and engineered our upcoming Inspector CD is the same place that will host that opera’s second production. The Inspector opens April 20 at Boston Lyric Opera. Watch their website this spring for more news about the New England iteration of The Inspector, featuring Wolf Trap’s world premiere production and a brand new cast.

Addendum to my Boston trip: See below for the lobby wall o’ CDs at Soundmirror Studio: second row, third from left:)

I had never been to Symphony Hall. Thursday night’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert was a revelation on many levels, not the least of which is the almost unbelievable acoustics in that storied hall. We sat in the first balcony (I will never understand people who like to sit on orchestra level for almost anything…), and the sound was immediate, warm, clear and resonant at the same time.

I was also struck by how important narrative is to me, especially when the story I’m being told is new. Harbison’s Symphony No. 5 includes three different poems circling the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, and a quick 2-minute skimming before the concert began proved enough for me to be able to track almost all of the text during the performance. What would’ve probably been an intriguing but probably variable and jerky experience with a piece that was new to me turned into an equally intriguing but less jarring journey.  Sadly, my mind goes too many places when left to its own devices. Some of those places are irritatingly technical/professional topics concerning stupid things like dynamics, texture, architecture, orchestration, balance, etc. Given a story to follow, words to chew on, characters to explore… the noisy chatter inside my head dies down a bit. Guess that’s why I produce opera instead of concerts, eh? :)

(Above, mezzo-soprano Fiona Murphy and baritone Alex Tall in our 2006 production of Telemann’s Orpheus)

We brag a lot about the alumni of the WTOC, and justly so. We played our part in helping them become the interesting people and accomplished artists they are. But in addition to hitching our wagon to their various stars, we love the way the former Trapper community allows us to connect almost anywhere.

While we were sitting in the studio yesterday, we learned that Soundmirror was recording last night’s performance of John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5 and that Sasha Cooke was the featured mezzo soloist. Within an hour, our wonderful engineer colleagues had secured a couple of tickets for us, and I had made arrangements to catch up briefly with Sasha backstage at intermission.

On the way into Symphony Hall, we passed posters for upcoming concerts which included Sarah Coburn and Morris Robinson. And I sat down, opened the program book, and was reminded that the Harbison Symphony we’d come to hear was premiered by Kate Lindsey and Nathan Gunn.

Earlier in the day, we lauded our Soundmirror colleagues, who were nominated for Grammys for (among other things) Florentine Opera’s recent recording of Elmer Gantry, featuring Keith Phares, Patricia Risley, and Heather Buck.

A single day, in a far-flung city, peppered with an abundance of riches, as these artists with whom we spent formative months in their young careers move on to leave their marks on every part of our industry. It’s a wonderful thing.

(P.S. – Not a WTOC thing, but a Wolf Trap connection nonetheless: the soloist in last night’s Beethoven 4th Piano Concerto with the BSO was Jonathan Biss, the first debut artist featured on our Discovery Series at The Barns.)

I took the commuter plane to Boston this morning.  My fellow travelers were rocking their suits and heels, but I was happily clad in jeans. Dress code for recording studios is blessedly relaxed, and I get to spend my day helping producer Blanton Alspaugh* and composer John Musto make the magic.

We’re at Soundmirror in Boston, mastering the live recording of The Inspector – Wolf Trap’s latest opera commission. We’re obsessively comparing footage from three performances and a patch session, ferreting out errant pizzicati, minimizing random stage noise, and micro-managing diction. Easy enough to drown in the details, but when I step back for a second, I am gobsmacked by how much of this score the cast nailed.  In live performance. In a fairly physical comedy.

Did you miss The Inspector at Wolf Trap? Catch it this spring at Boston Lyric Opera. And of course, look for our recording, coming to iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, and the lobby of a Barn near you! (You’ll need it to add to your Grammy-nominated Volpone recording. You do have one of those already, right?)

*UPDATE 12/1/2011: 54th annual Grammy nominations were announced last night, and Blanton is once again nominated for Producer of the Year!

The ever-popular Aria Frequency lists from this year’s audition tour are now available for your post-turkey tryptophan haze viewing pleasure!  Hop on over to the Aria Lists page to link to a separate document for each voice type.

Best wishes for a lovely Thanksgiving! See you on the other side, where I’ll begin to drop cryptic hints about what might be in store for next summer :)

Kim

The set and costumes of our 2011 production of Wolf-Ferrari’s Le donne curiose have traveled south from The Barns and will take the stage this weekend at Shenandoah University. If you’re anywhere near Winchester VA this weekend, check it out!

Audition tour 2012:  Eight cities. 11,326 miles. 1,215 arias. Planes, trains, taxis, hotels, surprises, frustrations, adrenaline, fatigue.

It might seem as if we’re done, but only now does the rubber really hit the road. We’ve been gathering information for a month, and now it’s time to use it. We hold off on making decisions about repertoire until we hear all of our auditions, and as of 4 hours ago, we are officially done. And now we have about 3 days to make sense of it all and start making offers.

Whenever I talk with aspiring arts administrators, I learn that the thing they crave the most is the chance to cast an opera. (Yeah, turns out that no one really lusts after reconciling spreadsheets.) Truth be told, it’s pretty heady stuff. But it’s not easy, and every choice means multiple roads not taken. We’re carrying over 40 singers forward as finalists, and we’ll probably be able to hire 15 at most.

I continue to learn that the questions are the most important things. For too long a time, I believed that being grownup, being in charge, meant having the answers. Only recently have I really understood the power of asking the right questions. Ask the wrong questions? Get the wrong answers. For of course, you only get answers to the questions you ask. Choose wisely.

“Did I really communicate the essence of that aria?” instead of “Did they like me?”

“Who is likely to reap the biggest benefit from this opportunity?” instead of “Who is the safest choice for this role?”

“How can I be the best steward of these limited resources?” instead of “Why don’t I have enough money to do what I want?”

“How can I approach this career so that it feeds my soul and my bills still get paid?” instead of “Why can’t I get ahead?”

“Which opportunities are important enough to justify the abandonment of others?” instead of “Is there any way to do it all?”

Good luck to all of us.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” [Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet]

And just like that, we’re in Texas.

Off the plane, bags thrown in the hotel, and suddenly we’re at the Wortham Center, bathing in the beautiful sound of the HGO Orchestra playing Beethoven.

It has been 20 years since I saw Fidelio, and this evening was even more compelling because of the WTOC alumni onstage – including Simon O’Neill (at left, WTOC 2003) as Florestan, Norman Reinhardt (WTOC 2005) as Jacquino, and Brittany Wheeler (Studio Artist 2008) as Marzelline.

And on our way out of the theatre, EM (former WTOC staffer and now big time muckety-muck at HGO) and I tried to coax a tune from the awesomely large and pink piano from the Barbiere set.