The Double Madness of Lucia

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor

Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival

Opening Night Gala

Theatre at St. Clement’s

March 12, 2016

Soil feels like freedom to Lucia
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: How does a mad or sick person hear music? This is the point of departure for director Louisa Proske’s visionary take on Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, featured at this year’s Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival. Hers is an adaptation of the bel canto classic, where both plot and score are stripped down to a 90-minute show (against the roughly 150-minute duration of the original), displaying the brilliant talents of 5 musicians and 6 singers. At this point, purists may be cringing – no chorus, no orchestra, wild cuts to the plot. But they would be mistaken. Heartbeat Opera’s Lucia turned out to be one of the most electrifying performances I have ever experienced. Proske delivered a chamber riff on Lucia, placing the power of bel canto vocal acrobatics front and center in the intimate space of the Theatre at St. Clement’s in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, with the result that the sound waves and the emotions they carried struck us with such force that they remained with us for a long while.

Lui: The show starts with the stage divided in two on the diagonal by a translucent curtain. On one side, the floor is covered with the dirt of the Scottish moorland, strewn with props from the opera’s plot: an antique desk and two ornate chairs, as well as a piano and music stands for the rest of the ensemble strewn across stage right. On the other side, through the curtain we can see a vaguely retro looking hospital room. A woman, the one who is going to spend the next ninety minutes living out the story of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in the fantasy playground of her institutionalized mind, is restrained by her wrists and ankles to her bed. As the lights go up on the asylum portion of the stage, her lifeless body slowly begins to writhe out of discomfort, like a woman possessed struggling to get free. A nurse and doctor check on the patient and sedate her with an injection.  

Donizetti plays on the radio and the crazy get crazier
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

As the nurse exits the scene, she turns on the radio. Through its scratchy speaker, we hear the first signature bars of Donizetti’s score played by a full orchestra. It is as though the opera is being beamed in to the poor patient from a distant place and another time. In just that moment, one by one, the musicians file in and take their places on the other half of the stage, like musical ghosts conjured by the mind of the sick woman. The clarinet is the first to kick in. He begins to shadow the recording until the five piece ensemble takes over completely and the first scene of Enrico and his sidekicks begins to unfold right before the protagonist’s eyes. She is captivated by the action on the other side of the screen. Longing for her freedom she eventually gets up the courage to penetrate that fourth wall of gauzy muslin. She passes through it like a thin tissue that separates her life of captivity and illness from the world of story, dream and imagination. Maybe this really is how a crazy person listens to music.

Lei: In this take, the Lucia character travels back and forth between the “real” world of the insane asylum and the opera’s musical imaginary world populated by belligerent flashy gangsters (donning Versace looking jackets and brandishing gold plated guns). The line between the two universes is often blurred until the madness scene, when Lucia pushes the curtain aside and the worlds collide from that moment on. The fact that all singers (except Edgardo) doubled as actors in the hospital scenes worked amazingly well to emphasize Lucia’s fantasy attributing known faces to the opera characters. The men who make her suffer in real life are also those who make her miserable in the imaginary opera world.

Ecstatic rapture (and a toy piano)
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Musically, Heartbeat’s co-music director Dan Schlosberg accomplished the herculean task of adapting the original Donizetti score to something that could be performed by five musicians. Granted, the quintet was very hard working and played a slew of instruments between them (cello, clarinet, electric guitar, classical guitar, two pianos, and as many as a dozen different types of percussion). The soundscape created by the ensemble was wildly diverse and at times even bordered on the wacky (toy piano) and often consisted in a series of disjointed musical outbursts linked to the peaks of emotional distress. While this approach took away any real fluidity to the score, it did work perfectly with the concept of a mad person listening to music. Schlosberg’s adaptation work was ambitious and impressive, with heaps of out of the box and irreverent ideas (some more successful than others), all while conveying the musical core of the Donizetti original. The guy not only inventively adapted, but effectively conducted and played (pianos), too, truly executing his vision with force and energy. Having managed so much with only 5 musicians, I would be curious to see what Schlosberg could do with a bigger ensemble.

Lui: One of the most striking adaptations of the Donizetti score was the mad scene, the first bars of which evolved out of a guitar accompaniment akin to something out of a dreamy Beach House song. The soundscape then morphs into the uncanny creativity of a Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson. Yet you could still feel the Donizetti at its core, underneath it all along, even in the tinkling of the toy piano keys that pianist Schlosberg deployed to heighten the sense of childish regression implicit in this extreme phase of her psychiatric state. Leaning down to his right while conducting and seemingly doing a million other things at once, he put to good use the toddler’s instrument half buried in the dirt of the dreamy moorland.

The flashy gangsters
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

The highlight of the mad scene, though, was soprano Jamilyn Manning-White as Lucia. It was a real star turn for her, as everything about her was well suited to this take on the opera. When she was in love, reunited with her Edgardo in the first “act,” her eyes glistened and sparkled with real feeling. As her madness intensified, her eyes grew to big tender full moons, inspiring compassion for this sensitive soul who only seems to ever find herself under the thumb of oppressive patriarchal society in one way or another. What is a girl to do? I was afraid her voice would be too shrill and friable in its upper range to carry the evening, but instead she showed that her voice has continued to mature with her exploration of the role. I found her to be ever dynamic, moving from a girlish chest voice to an increasingly crazed head voice. She made for a thrilling Lucia in every way.

I just stabbed my husband (or was that my hand?)
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: The beauty of Manning-White’s voice is untraditional to say the least, but she nevertheless used every inch of her instrument to stunning effect for this take on the Lucia role. The soprano carried the show between the two worlds with a sensational performance vocally and acting-wise. Particularly endearing was her joyful rolling in the dirt in her first moments of freedom in the world of music, when she also dreamily cozies up to the pianist/composer as the music is so beautiful. But, all the extremity of her emotions quickly explode back into madness, and the wall between the two worlds comes down with some highly dramatic moments (think of the husband-murdering scene: Lucia mimics the climactic killing on her hospital bed though it turns out she is really stabbing her hand with surgical scissors). This Lucia was ALWAYS on stage either actively or as a spectator from her insane asylum room, reminding me a lot of the take on Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco at La Scala earlier this year. Really a tour de force for Manning-White who managed to express an incredible range of colors and emotions through the sheer force of her singing: crazy, happy, loving, furious, defiant, scared, victim, murderer, desperate. And that’s when you know that you have a sensational Lucia.

The doomed couple
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Lui: Tenor David Guzman’s Edgardo exuded experience and confidence. It shows that he is a singer who has been around and he really brought a lot to the role. His sound is warm and his characterization was of the dutiful young man ready to serve with integrity and poetry the demands of love and war. So many of Edgardo’s arias are central to the thrust of the story that by the end he fully inhabits the emotional core of the opera right alongside Lucia. And Proske’s take really put him right there with her. His Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali was transcendent. Though here they cut eight minutes of the build up to his big dramatic final gesture, jumping right to the crowd pleaser aria was still potent, especially in Guzman’s hands. He was tender but guttural and his big masculine voice soared like the wings he gives to Lucia’s soul with his song. It sent shivers through my whole body. As he slowly walked backwards off the stage singing the last few bars of his concluding aria and thus fading to black his presence in Lucia’s dream life, he left us alone with a nearly lifeless inpatient sprawled out on the side of her bed, I did not want the steady euphoria to end.

Lei: Guzman is definitely a warm, swoon-inducing tenor. His is a full voice, manly, heart-wrenching, solid and secure. Both his Sulla tomba and Tu che a dio spiegasti l’ali were masterfully delivered, he did not flinch once, not even on the highest notes of the final aria, that he rode with superhuman control. This is a charismatic singer of that rare breed of earth-shaking irresistible and seductive tenors. To follow closely.

Games with medical gauze
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lui: Even though Edgardo’s emoting in the finale was reduced to the greatest hits, Lucia’s mad scene was given all the stage time it deserves and Manning-White was up to the task. She rose to the occasion and put all of her virtuosity on display. Particularly impressive was the passage of her metamorphosis into a bird. Suddenly interacting with the orchestra in a dynamic call and response, she seems to be hearing voices riding on the air. Then she tests out her voice in a fantasy conversation with the instruments that call back to her, only to sprout vocal wings and soar out in front of her musical accompaniment like a joyous little bird, either that or a woman possessed. This is the moment that she unfolds her wings to God, virtually literalizing the metaphor that Edgardo deploys in his final aria, Tu che a dio spiegasti l’ali. Is this what a crazy person experiences when they listen to music? I can’t speak for all the crazy people out there, but it sure was phenomenal for me.

Enrico torturing his sister
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: Baritone Matthew Singer was a brutal, powerful yet lyrical Enrico. In his opening aria Cruda, funesta smania his voice boomed with menace but also possessed a seductive beauty (this is bel canto after all!), the finale of which was punctuated by the most violent apple-chopping I’ve ever seen. Singer’s Italian is impeccable and his characterization of the opera’s main villain was deliciously vicious. In Lucia’s sick mind, this Enrico is a threatening, scary thug sporting a red leather coat and bowler hat (and playing Russian roulette with a gold-plated gun). Interestingly, after showing Lucia the fake letter from Edgardo, Enrico injects her with a drug, to emphasize that Lucia would not have changed her mind so easily if she was in her senses and to make a dreamlike connection back to the hospital. This was a clever touch that attempted to lend an air of greater believability to a juncture in the plot that usually demands the suspension of disbelief from the audience.

All of the men oppressing Lucia
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

John Taylor Ward as the priest Raimondo was mellifluous and Mephistophelic, through a beautiful smooth bass, which was surprising to me as I was never particularly impressed by or interested in the Raimondo character in other versions of Lucia I’ve seen. This Raimondo was key to the repulsive yet hypnotic scene in which the gang of men conspire to finally convince Lucia to surrender as he dressed her into her wedding gown with medical gauze (incidentally, the same singer doubles as the doctor in the hospital world who would later wrap her hand after she stabbed it in her hospital bed). Ward’s slightly perverse and very corrupt clergyman was one of the highlights of the evening. Tenor Christopher S. Lilley on double duty as Arturo and Normanno displayed solid lyrical bel canto phrasing. Mezzo Monica Soto-Gil as Lucia’s confidante Alisa had a nice sound and was particularly brilliant in the ensemble pieces.

Moving to the musical world
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lui: Louisa Proske outdid herself with this one. It takes real courage to play so fast and loose with Donizetti. Though she is not catering to the purists with this outing, she nevertheless undeniably has real vision and her Lucia is hands down one of the most accomplished evenings of theater I have experienced in a long time. All the moving parts came together for an experience that was just: Wow! Beyond wow! She mustered all the tools in her box of stagecraft tricks to tell an utterly invigorating version of this classic operatic story. The lighting, stage design, directorial concept, and setting were all superbly polished. And it didn’t hurt things at all that the singing was so top notch. Not to mention the phenomenal talent of Dan Schlosberg who reset Donizetti’s brilliant bel canto score. His fantasy alone had us on the edge of our seats. He took us on a musical journey from an ostensibly Max Richter-style riff on a classic, into which he introduced pop elements in the guitar accompaniment, to the kind of the experimentation one has come to expect from creative minds as diverse as Brian Wilson and John Cage. This was an evening of opera like few are able to deliver on any level of the spectrum from the best independent companies to the major leagues. Louisa Proske (and her team) is one to watch out for!

An inmate gets treated
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: This Lucia was a display of bold, innovative vision, exquisitely executed with an attention to detail and perfectionism in every single aspect of the production. We may have come to appreciate Louisa Proske for some of the frilly comedies she has done in the past, but here she definitely flexed her dramatic muscles and delivered a hauntingly multi-layered tragedy that was both deep and dark. This is a cutting edge innovative fresh reinterpretation of the operatic canon done at a miniature intimate level. Opera distilled to its essence, indeed, and reinvented too, casting a new thought-provoking light on a classic while staying true to the core of the original. It’s with artists like Proske that opera remains timeless yet radically new at the same time – there is hope for the art form after all. I cannot wait to see what Proske does next (rumor has it that she may be conducting LoftOpera’s Così in the fall, which would be the best of all worlds!).

– Lei & Lui 

Heartbeat Opera: Reverence, Irreverence and Viscerality

An interview with Heartbeat Opera’s founders 

The Cotton Candy Machine, Williamsburg

February 20, 2016

Catching up with Heartbeat Opera's founders Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Founded in 2014 by Yale School of Drama theater directors Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard, Heartbeat Opera is one of the most exciting new companies on the New York independent opera scene. Last year they had a very successful opening with the intriguing combination of Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Offenbach’s Daphnis & Chloé. This year they’ll be producing a ten-day March Festival at the Theater at St. Clement’s, showcasing Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, as well as three evenings of experimentation with new contemporary works.

We met with Louisa and Ethan between rehearsals on a balmy Saturday afternoon at their Williamsburg rehearsal space, the ex-Cotton Candy Machine, to chat about their vision and projects, from regietheater to baroque drag shows. We discovered that Heartbeat’s founders are not only pedigreed theater folks but also skilled musicians, who understand opera and the need for music as the central pillar of their venture, hence their close collaboration from the very beginning with co-music directors Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg, of Cantata Profana.

 

Heartbeat in drag: A venerable tradition.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

This company is extremely serious about its craft, from set design to costumes to musical arrangements, but at the same time its work shows streaks of renegade irreverence, all while maintaining a dialogue with the classic repertory they produce. Heartbeat is truly a well-rounded company with a strong core concept of stripping opera from convention and distilling it to its essence. And if all that were not enough, this venture also focuses on outreach programs spreading the opera gospel among young people, to help build the audiences of the future.

 

Last year's Kafka Fragments challenged audiences and performers alike.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

How did you pick the festival model for your productions?

Louisa Proske: The festival model emerged organically in the first year because the company was founded by two directors and very quickly we had two music directors whom we invited to be part of the company. So it just seemed from the start that two productions was going to be kind of our fate. Co-directing and co-creating turns out to be a great model. Also, having two productions, it’s a great way to make use of our resources, especially in terms of the space.

Ethan Heard: The pairing of different works is also a plus. Last year Kafka Fragments and Daphnis & Chloé were as different as could be. We were showing off the different kinds of things we could do. This year, thematically, Lucia and Dido story-wise really resonate together. You have two women who are falling in love and dying of love, arguably.

 

Bacchants revel in last year's Daphnis and Chloe.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

How wedded are you to the space of the stage? Does your directorial vision tend toward staging on the space of a proscenium as opposed to a more unconventional venue?  

EH: Part of it stems from our collaboration with Cantata Profana and Jacob and Dan. Last year Jacob was on stage for Kafka Fragments and in Daphnis & Chloé the band was in costume part of the show. We really want to have the musicians on stage front and center in both pieces – that’s something we want to make our signature. Also, opera traditionally has stage, proscenium, orchestra pit and then the audiences yards hundreds of feet away from the action. For Dido I want to subvert that: we are going to bring about twenty people from the public on stage for a special experience.

Cantata Profana in action.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

LP: This is part of a larger conversation that we’re constantly having and that’s been evolving a lot over the last two years. We’re a small independent renegade opera company, what can we do that the Met or San Francisco Opera cannot do? We don’t want to be a company that replicates the same idea of opera on a tiny budget, but we want to make use of the freedom that comes with not having to adhere to these rules, like not having an orchestra pit. How can we then really make the musicians part of the action part of the process? How can we find surprises for the audience given the musicians and singers are so close?

 

Ashworth flaunts all the rules.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

EH: I think a lot about reverence and irreverence. Opera is often regarded as this high-end, prestigious, elitist art form that you have to be educated to understand, you need to have a lot of money to go to. We want to reverse that concept. Every year we think about what can we do to make it more accessible, to have students and younger people come to our shows.

LP: At the same time, we don’t want to be a company that just dumbs it down to the lowest possible denominator. That’s not how we think of it. Like this conversation in the theater world of making Shakespeare “accessible.” We definitely want to challenge people and show them where are the places where we can pull them in, but not at the expense of quality.

 

The classical music experience that takes you places.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

Louisa, what is your take on Lucia?

LP: I’ve been obsessed with this opera since I was a girl and I saw it in a very traditional production. I’m haunted by the music. The story itself is so insane, if you treat it naturalistically it just does not work. He shows her a letter and then two seconds later she’s convinced that her lover has betrayed her – it does not make sense! But it’s the craving for this extremity of emotions and this absolute love that makes sense on a much more weird and visceral and imaginative level.  

Heartbeat workshops Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Very early on I thought about inventing a framing story where this girl is restrained and tied up in an institution, possibly an asylum. She is listening to the radio, to an old recording of the opera and starts to imagine, starts having hallucinations of the story in her brain. So the plot is filtered through this oppressed person who needs extremity, color and imagination. There’s a beautiful Octavio Paz quote which states that the man who, in shackles, closes his eyes and dreams of freedom, will set the world on fire. The imagination of someone who is tied down having this combustible energy and explosiveness, I wanted that as part of the storytelling. The story of Lucia is always done as if she’s this wistful, frail, feminine heroine from the start but I think the music suggests that she’s absolutely wild and unfettered and daring and anarchic. A sort of Emily Bronte romantic heroine, with all her good and bad sides.

Ethan, what is your take on Dido?

Heartbeat's March Festival 2016.

EH: I’m drawn to the baroque. There’s something about the symmetry, the structure, the elegance, and the way passion is expressed in a more composed way that I really enjoy. What I love about Dido is that it has the high and the low in a Shakespearean way. It has this supreme elegant and transcendent final aria that is one of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces of music, combined with the mischievous bawdiness and naughtiness of the witches. It’s this image of Dido on the precipice looking down and then she falls in glorious rapturous love and she plummets down into this horrible tragic end. And that fall to me is so juicy and dramatic and delightful. Dido is a Cleopatra, a Queen Elizabeth and has taken a man into her bed, potentially a second husband, and her honor is at stake. Also what is so fascinating about this opera is that the witches are a force of chaos and malevolence that could mess up anyone’s life. There’s something about the human spirit that enjoys this sort of shadenfreude thing.

What about the COLLABORET feature you’re adding as part of the festival? How does it play into your vision of producing both classics and contemporary works?

EH: We’re calling it a co-lab-o-rey. It’s a mix of collaboration, lab and cabaret. Again this shows how the practical and artistic shape each other. We had three dark nights and saw that as an amazing opportunity to bring some friends and artists in to share and develop relationships. I would love the COLLABORET to become a workshop to funnel new ideas. It’s a chance to try things and I’m looking forward to the eclecticism of that and hopefully also to bring in new audiences.

 

The festival calendar runs from March 10-20 in Hell's Kitchen.

LP: It’s also an attempt at defining the festival more as a festival, involving artists who are not part of the two main productions and, also, an opportunity to get a sense of new collaborations that are shaping up, both for the audience and for us. We’ve rented this space that’s significantly bigger than last year, so we’re asking ourselves what can we do to expand our audiences. Last year it went incredibly well and we basically sold out. We feel we’re ready to expand but, still, it’s scary!

How does COLLABORET fit in what you see as the future of Heartbeat?

LP: In terms of our main season event I have a feeling that this festival model will last. There will always be two productions and then some ancillary events. There’s hopefully an aerialist duo coming as part of one of the shows that can be part of our next drag show in the fall (think: flying opera singers with wigs and wings!). It seems exciting to invite them to the COLLABORET and see what they do. For really big ambitious projects, if you have a workshop you get a sense of the ideas and what they can be – you learn so much by just dipping your foot in the water. Heartbeat is an ever-expanding idea. This summer we’re bringing Heartbeat to the High Line, our drag show will be on New York’s biggest runway! That’s a new thing that may develop into something even bigger in the future.

 

Baroque lends itself to the drag in this year's benefit.
Photo credit: Russell Rowland

EH: For me opera is music, storytelling, dance, theater, all the genres coming together. It can have electronic sound, it can have ballet. I would love to do Donizettis and Purcells and Verdis but also new work.

LP: We really strongly feel that we want to be able to do everything from Purcell to contemporary. There’s something about specialization that has infected the culture. There’s this notion that as an artist you only do this one thing. That feels unhealthy and constraining.

Heartbeat strikes a Kafka-esque pose.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

One of your stated mission objectives is to “distill opera to its essence,” what’s your special touch to achieve that?

LP: A very collaborative, horizontal, joyful, rigorous process that we bring to each piece. We bring excellent musicianship. That’s a big pillar of the company and that is why we have a resident ensemble. We’re extremely picky in our casting and we look at the whole performer from dramatic capacities to the voice.

EH: We’re also building a team of designers who can make magic happen with small budgets. We’re interested in creating a whole world. For me, collaboration includes designers and instrumentalists and that’s a defining characteristic of Heartbeat. Our music co-director is recruiting friends, people who want to create something new and be in the room with us for long periods of time.

 

Proske and her choreographer Chloe Treat consult during rehearsals.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

There’s a booming independent opera movement right now. How do you see Hearbeat Opera fitting into it?

LP: When we founded the company everybody was wrestling with NYCO having closed its doors. How do you make opera that’s viable and exciting and relevant and present in our century? How do you really reach out to new and younger audiences and excite them with this art form? Our conversation is about what if you strip away what you feel like is decorative or elitist or tacked-on over the ages, the sets and costumes and conventions that haunt these pieces, the way it’s always done? How do you arrive at a place of telling these stories in a way that feels here and now? And this does not necessarily mean updating them.

Heartbeat's Opera Outreach.
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera

We’re developing our outreach program. We went to talk to high school girls about opera and that was so rewarding and rich and successful that they will come to see Dido and Aeneas. We brought mezzo-soprano Kristin Gornstein, she started singing this aria from Bellini’s Capuleti and it was really a magical moment. There were forty kids and when she first started there was a little bit of laughter, this uncertainty rippling through the group and they were a little freaked out. They really had not heard this kind of voice before. And then as the song went on they were drawn in. Opera singers can create such magic. It’s part of opera. It’s not pedestrian but yet there’s this human essence in the stories and this experience of sound. It was so wonderful to see the trajectory of these kids who went from freaked out to so confident with it in just a forty-minute session. This work just needs to be done, it needs to happen all over the country. You just need a direct approach that’s not talking down but really leveling with young people about what this is.

 

Daphnis and Chloe, March 2015.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

EH: If you look at the names of the other independent companies, Loft is a space, Onsite is a space, Prototype it’s about the newness. As our name suggests, Heartbeat is about the humanity of it, the inside, the vibration and we’re really interested in the experience of human beings making opera mean something in the world. That’s partially our theater backgrounds, the experience we had in the opera practicum at Yale where we were playing like kids with opera singers, and it felt so different than the Met. When you talk about opera education, so much of it is being in a small room with singers and feeling the humanity of that.

 

Heartbeat Opera's Winter Friend-Raiser.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Let’s say that in six months a very generous donor decides to give Heartbeat Opera $500K, what do you do with the money?

EH: I would ask would you like to give a million? Free tickets!

The stars of the show.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

LP: I think immediately about 5 seasons, it allows us to plan for the next five years. I don’t know if anything fundamental would change about our festival model. Paying our artists better would be very high on the list. We have a strong desire to pay people so that they can live and pay rent during the time that they work for us and don’t have to work at bars at night because they’re giving their souls and hearts and talents to us and that’s such a huge conversation just in the arts as a whole. Then I would expand the outreach program, really take seriously the mission of bringing school kids and young people in and growing new audiences. And then, passion projects! I want to do a Pelleas et Melisande site specific – with the audience sitting amid the landscape. I so badly want to do a Heartbeat Mozart, maybe a Don Giovanni or Figaro, although we need to be at a place where we can do more rehearsals and have a bigger band to meaningfully do Mozart.

What has been your experience in New York in terms of audience? There’s that stereotype of opera as geriatric. What type of public have you been attracting so far and/or are targeting?

Catering to the theater crowd.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

LP: Because Cantata Profana is lodged in the chamber music world and Ethan and I are really placed in the theater world (and in his case in the musical theater world), already we bring in people who do not necessarily go to the Met as much. So there’s a strong chamber music crowd and a strong theater crowd. Beyond that, we are carefully building a following. The fundraising drag shows have been successful at attracting people, even passers-by in the street because of the storefront location. It’s very much like a grassroots movement putting together our audience and animating them to come back. I would say it’s a really mixed crowd and we try as hard as we can to get younger audiences.

Cantata Profana is your resident ensemble, how did that collaboration start?

LP: Cantata Profana is led by Jacob and is an ensemble with a lot of flexibility. They have one leg in baroque music as that’s Jacob’s consuming interest. Both our music co-directors are Yale music people and Jacob having such a strong opera background said “if you guys are forming an opera company we would love to be your ensemble.” And that’s just such a fortuitous thing that happened very quickly within a month of us founding the company, before even the first workshop. 

Something for everyone.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Jacob is an impresario a great music director, a great player, but also someone who has a lot of feeling regarding whom to hire for a project, with a huge rolodex of musicians in New York and surroundings. And Dan is a genius arranger and a great composer and player, with this ability to adapt scores like the Donizetti, which we could never do (and would never want to do) in its full orchestration. He’s thinking of it in terms of how can we actually reinvent the score to give people a completely new experience with the same music they know. Using the same notes but instead of a harp we’re using a vibraphone and when she enters the mad world there will be an electric guitar, so it’s like really creating a new sound world in very much the spirit of and in conversation with Donizetti. So it has a leg in faithfulness and a leg in irreverence.

Musicians gone wild.
Photo credit: Christopher Ash

What’s the best thing you saw this last year?

LP: I am a student of Willy Decker. Even if I don’t think the revival at the Met recently was as strong as the original, seeing his Traviata was an amazing experience. I think it is one of the most important productions of the last century. On a very large scale, it’s doing what we want to do with Heartbeat, which is take a piece that we all know so well and strip everything away and point to this one thing and then kind of let the whole production evolve out of that. In this case, this idea of a woman on the verge of death and what that means and how she is spiraling into a face-off with her own mortality. It’s taking this piece that we associate with jewels and big costumes and parties and saying, “No, it’s about this, actually.” For me it was such a revelatory moment.

 

Stunning theatricality.
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

That brings us to our last question: where do you draw the line with regietheater?

The drag benefit.
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera

LP: Oh god, I wish we had more time for that question because it’s a really complex and long answer! I partly left Germany because I was at a point where I just had enough of regietheater. It’s not that great geniuses are the problem, but it’s all the B and C versions of people who think they can reinvent something with a lot of money but actually have very little of something real to say. Having spent a lot of time in the UK and then the US, I now miss the freedom of that theater culture and also the funding frankly. For my taste I think a conception always has to come somehow out of the center of the piece or out of the piece itself. I’m not so interested in someone just using a piece as a sort of meaningless canvas to write their own thoughts on, but without any real dialogue with the original work. Or the other version of the German regietheater that 85% of the time I find really problematic is to do a piece out of a real hatred for it. This happens a lot, like let’s show how conservative Goethe really was and ridicule him and vomit all over it. Sometimes it can be interesting, but most of the time it’s just like once you’ve seen that you’ve seen it. There always needs to be something in the piece, even if it’s not the thing that the ten directors who came before you have found, that really connects with the human concern of yours, and you work from that.  If that’s missing then I get bored really easily.

- Lei & Lui