Program Change: Opera Night at the BPL

Overcoming Obstacles: Producing Opera in Boston

Tuesday, January 24, 2012
6:00--7:00pm
Rabb Lecture Hall

Boston Public Library, Copley Square

 

In opera, perhaps the  most dramatic of art forms, the danger, peril and passion are not always exclusively on the stage. Behind the scenes are a multitude of challenges to be met. Join a panel of Boston opera producers, Esther Nelson of Boston Lyric Opera, Aliana de la Guardia of Guerilla Opera, and Sharon Daniels of the Boston University Opera Institute, to discuss what must be overcome and what must go right to bring opera to the stage.

Opera App is more than a Toi! Toi! Toi!

I come from a household of teachers. Both my parents teach and raised me in the classroom. I graded papers (multiple-choice only) and ran ditto copies (yes, kids, that was how people made copies before Xerox). During summer breaks in college I worked as a teaching assistant with special education elementary children. Now, I run a box office which requires me to ‘teach’ on a daily basis – from ‘teaching’ my intern how to sell tickets to ‘teaching’ new subscribers about our production -- I ‘teach’ opera in 2 minute or less.

My wife, a volunteer coordinator for elderly services, works with many student volunteers from BHCC so I jumped at the opportunity to work with these students. The Office of Community Engagement oversees these partnerships.  The office helps students develop tangible skills through community service, civic engagement, and student activism. Through civic-centered or service-centered involvement, the Office of Community Engagement demonstrates to students the connection between community involvement and professional and personal development. What teaches personal development better than a 400 year-old art form associated with the socially elite and performed in a foreign language, right!? This challenge called for a creative lesson plan. (More after the jump)

Happy New Year!

35 Seasons of opera and we couldn't do it without you!

Watch a holiday message from Esther Nelson, General & Artistic Director.

From our family to yours, best wishes for a happy new year!

It's your BLO. You make opera happen.

Whistle While You Work, Part 2

Last week we revealed what some of our staff listens to at work. We may work for an opera company, but it's not all opera all the time for us!

Here's another peek inside our work-music habits!

Erik Johnson, Artistic Coordinator:

Britten for contracts, Pärt for budgets, and Handel for everything else.

Joa Stenning, Audience Services Coordinator:

Before I arrive at work, I start my day with the sounds of Nicki Minaj’s “I’m the Best,” which helps me to feel good about myself and feel motivated for the day ahead. Most people get along just fine waking up to the beep of an alarm clock, but I feel much more positive waking up to something loud and dance-able. Once I’m settled in at work and I begin a project, I like to listen to Ingrid Michaelson or Neko Case. Ingrid’s music is light, catchy, and fun to sing along with, which helps me get through the more mundane tasks. Neko’s music is soft, soothing, and soulful, which is much better to listen to when I need all of my focus on the project at hand. I also love listening to Neko’s music because she and I are both cowgirls at heart. I spend my days in an office in bustling downtown Boston, but sometimes I wish I was roaming the prairies like “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” instead.

Sarah Blume, Senior Major Gifts Officer:

Currently have Pandora tuned to Arvo Pärt.  Good work music.  I tuned to Pärt following Boston Ballet’s Bella Figura, which I loved, last season which used music by Pärt.  I thought it was the first time I’d heard Pärt, not realizing that I’d heard his music at Providence Waterfire one year and was so struck by Tabula Rasa that my mother-in-law hunted down the CD for me.   

The Pärt station occasionally plays the Henryk Górecki Symphony No. 3 – which I love.  It just makes you want to weep .... 

Julie House, Education & Community Programs Manager:

Cello concertos and almost always one of the big three: Dvorak, Shostakovich or Elgar. I like them because I know them well enough that they can make nice background music, but if I really need to be inspired by something I can just turn up the volume. Sometimes I need something totally different and the last time that happened I turned on Jeff Bridges’ new country album. It’s excellent.

Cassidy Fitzpatrick, Development & Artistic Associate:

It’s a range, sometimes Usher, or other loud dance music when I’m particularly stressed. Mostly I find I just get fixated on one song, be it rock, pop, hip hop, folk or otherwise, and listen to it on repeat for an entire day, seems to soothe the nerves and helps me to block out everything so I can get stuff done.

Karen Robichaud, Design & New Media Manager:

I really enjoy having something in the background to even out the general 'white noise' of working in an open office; be it music (pop, musicals, movie soundtracks) or radio programs. I find the news weirdly soothing, even though I don't actually listen to the stories. Some of my projects are so involved that focused concentration is the only way to complete them, and listening to something helps me concentrate.

Whistle While You Work

Behind the scenes at Boston Lyric Opera we have administrators of diverse backgrounds and interests working away to bring you beautiful opera. Do we listen to music at work? What do we listen to while we work? It's not all opera all time around here.

Here's what a few of our staff have to say about their listening habits at work:

Heather Laplante, Annual Fund Manager:
Music by Matt Nathanson is my go-to during the workday. It’s mellow, fun, and I’m a sucker for a boy with a guitar.

Nicholas G. Russell, Director of Artistic Operations:

Daytime, I tend not to be listening to music as background--but occasionally am checking recordings or youtube on certain singers.

If I am working late, or weekends, I am more likely to put on 'unsolicited' recordings either of singers seeking work, or composers, looking for a house to put on their work.

With so much listening involved in my day to day activity, I rarely put on music as 'background' as I find myself getting distracted from the work I am doing--listening too much to the music, evaluating it, and not focusing on the task at hand ... so sometimes the best music for me is the white noise of whatever is going on in the background ...

David Cullen, Accounting Manager:

I listen to a mix of opera and Broadway show tunes. When I’m working on a difficult project, I find that Bach, Mozart and Philip Glass help me to concentrate quite well.

What do you listen to while you work? What helps you focus?

More selections from the BLO staff next week!

Musical men about town

By David Angus, Music Director

Well, tonight’s the opening of Macbeth–very exciting–and we are all winding ourselves up for a high energy performance. The Dress Rehearsal was a big success and the invited audiences were thrilled with it. First Night is always quite a nervous affair, wondering if everything will go right and if the audience will like it, but having such a good Dress Rehearsal sets us up well and means that the nervous excitement should all be positive.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and we are already getting going with the next project–The Lighthouse--in the background. We have been extremely lucky that the composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, happens to be in the USA for a short tour at the moment, and is spending nearly 3 days in Boston. He lives on a remote island off the north of Scotland and is 77 years old, so he doesn’t travel to the US very often any more. He will be attending Macbeth tonight, but I spent most of yesterday with him.

We began with a visit to the JFK Memorial Library, where we will perform his Lighthouse, and we showed him around and explained why we had chosen that location. I interviewed him (you will be able to see this on our website) and we caught up with each others' news.  We had worked together many years ago at Glyndebourne Opera and had also crossed paths at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra a few times. We also both studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and both began our careers as music teachers in schools, so we have a lot of common background.

The view of Boston from Smith Hall, our venue for The Lighthouse

 Sir Peter, or “Max” as we all know him, is a remarkably sprightly man with a very alert mind, and he is highly articulate, so talking with him is very stimulating. I found out many new things about the opera, including several very spooky coincidences which you will hear about on the interview. 

We visited the museum while we were there and were taken back in time to our childhood memories by all the history and artifacts of that time. It was a real nostalgia trip. When JFK was assassinated I was an 8-year-old at boarding school in Cambridge, and Max was studying over here at Princeton. We both remembered clearly hearing the awful news.

We travelled back into Boston for a lovely lunch of Scallops at Legal Seafoods, where the waiter turned out to be a Musicology Major from Harvard, who was thrilled to meet Sir Peter–what a coincidence!

The trip ended with a visit to see the set for the Lighthouse under construction in Cambridge, and to have the model explained. Everyone is very excited about the whole concept and it is really going to be a very strong show.

We finished the day with a lovely dinner at the home of Esther Nelson, our General and Artistic Director, with some VIP guests and a delicious meal cooked by her husband, Bernd. All in all, a great way to relax before tonight’s big event!

Flying with 200% concentration

Music Director David Angus, photo by Michael Dwyer

David Angus, BLO’s Music Director, on the final rehearsals for Macbeth

Tonight’s the BIG one, where everything comes together for the first time. 

The thing I love about working on opera is the way it grows and grows. We start preparing at home on our own, then we get together and sing it through with piano, begin to sort out the staging, gradually add props, substitute costumes, bits of pretend scenery, and bring in the chorus. The director and designer know what they want it to look like, and I know what I want it to sound like, but we have to get to know each other and work together for several weeks to make a complete picture where everything coordinates and drives the piece forward in an exciting and intelligible way.

On the side, I prepare the orchestra and then we add the singers, but this week is the exciting week, when we first try things out on the actual stage. Tonight is the “Stage and Orchestra” where all the elements are put together and we see our show complete for the first time, with full costumes, wigs and makeup, and, for me, the most exciting element that has been missing, the lighting. It is an old joke in the business–whenever you see a tatty old bit of scenery or costume, someone always says “just wait until it’s lit”, but it’s true–lighting can transform everything, give instant atmosphere, change night into day, excitement into fear, just at the press of a button.

Darren K. Stokes, Carter Scott & Daniel Sutin

Opera is incredibly expensive to put on with all these different departments working so hard, quite apart from the actual performers–soloists, chorus and orchestra, so rehearsal time with everyone together is extremely limited by cost. Tonight I will have just under 3 hours with everyone to race through the entire opera, stopping to fix anything that is wrong in the music, whilst allowing the staging and lighting to run with minimal interference. It is an intense balancing act. I have to get to the end of the opera, but I have to fix things as well, so every time I am aware of anything wrong I have to make an instant analysis of how serious the problem is, whether it will fix itself next time, or if I really have to stop, explain, go back and do it again. Performances are easy in comparison–I just have to do the show, without any analysis or decision-making.

We started planning this show nearly 2 years ago, and tonight it will all come together for the first time, and we will know if we have a great show, just a good show, or a disaster! From all the elements that we have worked on so far, it has the makings of a great show, with wonderful singing and playing, and a very strong visual presentation. In 2 day’s time, we’ll know for sure, when we have the Dress Rehearsal and add the final element, an audience. But for me, tonight is the really exciting one, when I am flying with 200% concentration in a race against time, but also when we really see our show properly. I can’t wait!

(Rehearsal photo by David Angus)

Office space on the road

When one is on the road for auditions, one must find office space wherever it is available ... 

Where do you work when you are on the road?

Spooky start to the season, indeed!

The air is cooling, the leaves are falling and at BLO we are revving up for a spooky start to our season. On Sunday we explored interpretations of Lady Macbeth's madness at the MFA, Boston with our Signature Series and in just a few weeks we hold our annual Gala, Hocus Pocus, An Operatic Trip to the Dark Side. We open our 35th Anniversary Season on November 4 with Verdi's Macbeth. What better way to get in the spirit of the season??

Right Hand Red

By BLO's Audience Services Manager, Kate Walsh

I’ve often said with regard to box office ticketing that, like sausage making, it is best to just enjoy the end result.  
Much to many people’s surprise, mainly my mother’s, there is a lot that happens before you hand your ticket to the usher.  During the summer months, aside from breaking into impromptu opera dance parties, the ticketing office turns into a giant game of ticketing Twister.  Just go with it... it’ll make sense in a minute.  

Think of the Shubert Theatre. Think of all those seats as circles on a Twister mat.  Each time we sell a subscription we seat a subscriber on a circle.  Now break it apart into three Twister mats as each subscription has three shows.  A lot of times during the subscription renewal process people like to change their seats.  We wait until summer to do this so that everyone has enough time to renew.  We then release the seats that haven't been purchased and begin seating!  Later in the summer subscribers can make exchanges between performances if they have a conflict.  Now imagine 45 Twister mats. As fall approaches we give over seats to the Shubert and Telecharge to sell as individual ticket buys while we continue to sell new subscriptions and complete exchanges. You can see now why we’re very limber people.

At this point we need to get tickets in the mail!  
Warning: This section contains mind-numbing material about computer stuff.  Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after reading.  Do not use if you are pregnant, intend to become pregnant, or might be pregnant.

For this we have to pull data about each subscriber. Name, address, subscription/ticketing information, and send it all to our ticketing printer who will then mail merge and print them. We then receive the sheets of tickets and check them for accuracy. We also put together collateral to tell you more about your benefits as a subscriber — did you know you get restaurant discounts?  Ask your box office about food, we may not be able to tell you why the Red Line can’t get it together, but we can tell you where to get the best meal with the shortest walking distance to a coordinating dessert.  It’s a skill.  We then create an elaborate assembly line akin to Henry Ford himself (thanks for that Wikipedia!)  We edit, fold, stuff, seal and stamp roughly 2,500 subscriptions!  By “we” I mean a staff of 3 including our lovely intern Katie! After the subscriptions are sent out we then print in-house anyone who needs changes as well as all our new subscribers who purchased after the above mind-number data has happened.

My mother always said that working on phones is payback for when I was a teenager and would never get off the phone.
The above is said with complete love of my job, but because a lot of patrons mostly do business by phone due to proximity we do spend a lot of time on the phones. Roughly 35 hours a week to be exact!  We work with colleges and other groups to arrange group ticketing packages and help create memorable experiences for them.  We give directions, help book restaurant reservations and suggest hotels.  We tell you where to pahk your cahr in Hahvad Yahd... not really, but I’m from the South so that’s the best New England accent I can do.  We are the concierges of the arts world.  We try to “translate” the premise of various operas to newbies. My favorite was when a very novice patron said he knew nothing about opera, “Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob tries to kill Bart in Italy by cornering him in the opera coliseum and sings Vesti la giubba?”  “Have you ever seen Looney Toons?”  “Kill the Wabbit!  Kill the Wabbit!”- there, I knew Elmer Fudd would jog your memory.”

You too can possess this much useless information.  I can’t tell you who was president in 1902, but I can tell you who won the Tony for Best Leading Actress in Musical in 1978, I can quote 65% of all of the scripts from the “Golden Girls” TV show, and I have an unfulfilled dream of creating “Op-corn” which is selling popcorn at operas in little Viking helmets.  All of these topics of conversation have resulted in the sale of a ticket. 

We build relationships with our patrons and donors. We are at every show, we touch every ticket, we are typically the first interaction you have with BLO and we hope we have made/will make it a positive and lasting one.  We are the few, the proud, the constantly over-caffeinated. We are the Box Office. 

Now… Right Hand Red.

An Exciting new Opera-tunity for Schools

Julie House at the 2009 Open House

A guest post written by BLO's Education & Community Programs Manager Julie House. 


Thinking back, I bet you can remember several field trips you took in school and what field trip days were like. You probably couldn't fall asleep the night before because you were too excited, and you may have had a special outfit to wear for the occasion. Field trips were a formative part of our school days because they let us break our routines and do something fun and creative. We were interacting with the “real world” and not just reading about it from our desks.

Sadly, the days of field trips are few and far between for many schools today. How could this tremendous rite of passage be allowed to slip away? Well for starters, gassing up a school bus is really dang expensive. Given the option of spending money on gas or something else, most schools pick something else. (Who likes paying for gas? Certainly not me.) Second, school days just aren’t long enough for teachers to accomplish everything they need to like the good ol’ “3 R’s” and the new focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). It’s no small feat to get kids ready to be tested in these areas when you only have September-June to do it. The result? Fewer field trips. Oh, and less art altogether, but that’s a post for another day.

If you’re me, you’re looking at this scenario and saying to yourself, “What can I do to help teachers provide some special days for their students where they break routines and do something creative?” The answer? Music! Words! Opera! No, that’s not three answers, it’s the name of the new curriculum BLO is providing to schools that takes opera right into the classroom. No gas to pay for. No time lost driving back and forth. Opera right in front of your desk!

Here’s how it works: any teacher who wants to can come to a FREE five-day workshop August 8-12 at BLO to learn about opera through the Music! Words! Opera! curriculum. We will be focusing on The Barber of Seville since it is part of BLO’s upcoming season. Then, teachers will work on creating an original opera piece with their students! When the school year starts up teachers can apply what they learned in the workshop to leading their students step-by-step through the lessons until they have a piece ready to perform!

BLO will be involved all along the way: Obviously, questions come up and the Education Department is there to help. Teachers can also request classroom visits by a singer, director, and designer and help from a real composer. Students will also be invited to attend a working rehearsal of The Barber of Seville — I refuse to give up on field trips! Finally, each classroom to create its own opera will be invited to a festival day where they will perform for one another. The goal is to get kids involved in making art and gather up all the intrinsic benefits of doing so along the way.

If you’d like more information on Music! Words! Opera! or anything else going on in BLO’s Education Department, call Julie House at 617.542.4912 x242 or email jhouse@blo.org.

-- Julie House, Education & Community Programs Manager

Pay Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

“It will not always be summer: build barns.”

                                                          -- Hesiod

Ah, the summer at BLO. Quiet phones, reasonable amounts of email, the Scooperbowl! In the Artistic Department, this is most certainly a season to rest, lick our wounds, and in many cases, use up all of the vacation days we have accrued over the last eight months. Some of us take particular joy in attending the summer festivals of other opera companies, and as we stand by the bar after the second intermission, sipping a gin and tonic without a drop of production-related anxiety, it is possible to remember how enjoyable opera can be. 

But, like all good things, vacations are soon over, and we soon find ourselves back in the office, looking ahead in the calendar. Almost immediately after the close of the season (and often before), we are busy adding flesh, tendons, and other viscous material to the skeleton that is the upcoming season. While casting is generally complete at this point, there remains a mountain of contracts to be issued, meetings between directors and designers to schedule, and a great big mid-summer concert to coordinate.

This period of preparation is awfully rewarding, and certainly one of my favorite points in the year. From this vantage point, we can see the events of the next year slowly coming together, and the production that was only a twinkle in our eye a few years ago, starting to come into focus. This is also calming to us, because we are, as a rule, terrible at dealing with free time (we simply don’t know what to do with the stuff), and notions of impending arrivals and other deadlines are reassuring.

So, as we head towards July and the office air conditioners spring reluctantly to life, we can be found pushing that huge opera-rock up the hill towards Opening Night (Sisyphus-style), but also maintaining a healthy ‘love-you-from-here’ sort of attitude.

-- Erik Johnson, Artistic Coordinator