Corraggio, amici!

(Posted by Ken Cazan)

Hello all of you—this is my first blog entry ever and it is new and slightly strange! I hope the beginning of the school year doesn’t find you too obfuscated and panicked. The first three or four weeks are always crazy. Eventually they settle down into something resembling a routine.

I am sitting here in my loft looking at the beautiful skyline of L.A. on a bright sunny day. I should be working but I am just too enthralled by the sun, the sounds of busses and trucks passing below my window, and the car whose alarm won’t shut off. And I am grateful for all of the work I have lined up for the next three years or so. I am grateful because after that I know I am going to have to tighten my belt. We are heading into another recession if not a full blown depression and no amount of posturing by presidential candidates and Congress is going to spare us.

As always when finances get tight, the arts get slammed. It happened in my career in the late 1980s and it is now happening at the beginning of your careers, in the late part of the first decade of the 2000s. Some opera companies and universities will hit the panic button and revert to performing opera’s “greatest hits.” There will be endless trashy productions of Carmen, Butterfly, Traviata, Boheme, etc. They will be safe and sanitized and not terribly interesting. These same companies will disband a penchant for using younger (cheaper) singers in favor of more established artists to build audience and sell tickets. Apprentice programs will be put on hold as far as numbers go and everybody will huddle, terrified around the stove, trying to sacrifice artistic excellence and risk to the fire to save their jobs.

I, however, believe that this is precisely the time to take risks. This is the time to branch outside of the box for at least one production per season with THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA (or any Britten for that matter) or Rota’s ITALIAN STRAW HAT or perhaps Henze’s ELEGY FOR YOUNG LOVERS. These pieces could very easily bring in a younger and new audience who don’t want to laugh at the over-blown dramatics of badly produced standard opera pieces. Use younger singers, as well, to people these productions, singers perhaps better trained in contemporary theatrical techniques. Let the audience feel that they are discovering the next Deborah Voigt, Renee Flemming, Marcello Giordani or Rene Pape. These great artists all had to start somewhere and work their ways up from obscurity and part-time waiter/waitress jobs to attain the level they are at today.

When money gets tight, the arts as a “luxury” item suffer and dwindle. Some theatre and opera companies, museums, and symphonies will disappear. We need to be ready to tighten our belts and breathe deeply and be willing to re-conceive our theories of opera production. Through this re-conception, we will be forced to be more creative with less money and “re-invent the wheel” as the adage goes. We must not dumb down opera, musical-theatre ,legitimate theatre, museum exhibits, or symphonic programming to fit a wrong-headed notion that in doing so we are somehow bringing in more public and consequently more income. We will also keep the careers and hopes of many fine young artists alive and thriving amidst the frustrations of companies hesitating to take the risk of using them.

Corraggio, amici! Fight the good fight!

Ken Cazan is the Resident Stage Director for the USC Thornton School of Music and an internationally renowned stage director of operas, musical theatre, and legitimate theatre.

"opera singers are not at all like normal musicians"

(Posted by Damien Elwood)

Last Friday’s vocal forum was a master class by Thomas Allen who is currently playing Gianni Schicchi in L.A. Opera’s production of Il Trittico. He was lively and intense, showing passion for his craft. I found him very enlightening and some of the things he said reinforced concepts I have come to believe about art and opera singers as artists.

I believe that all good art is specific and much of what Thomas Allen said last Friday reinforced that. He often talked about the need to have specific ideas, emotions, and concepts when singing. It’s not just a matter of understanding the origin and meaning of the text and presenting it with a precise performance of the music. The singer must also place her performance within a context specific to herself. She must bring to bear a catalogue of experience in which to frame the emotion of the moment. These are not general ideas of how the character should feel or act, but specific sense memories drawn from a catalogue of intentional recollections of experience both on stage and in life. This is something Ken teaches in his acting classes and insists his performers develop and use.

There is a lot of other attention to detail that goes into making art out of opera. Much of the work Brent does before he ever picks up the baton is to develop a detailed understanding of the music through research of style, tradition, and performance practice. This is passed on to the performers both though coaching and staging rehearsals, which Brent conducts religiously. Also, the specific orchestration of an opera impacts every phase of production and performance. Decisions on instrumentation and drawing the “pit map” can have an enormous impact on the success of the music and drama once we move into the theatre.

The other belief I have, which Thomas Allen reinforced for me, is that musicians are not at all like normal people, and opera singers are not at all like normal musicians. He told a story about being a student at the Royal College of Music and how different the musicians looked and behaved from other students he encountered. Here at USC the Thornton School, like many academic communities, has its own brand of student geeks. The hours a musician spends in often solitary practice can create a certain inward nature characterized by bloodshot eyes, pasty skin, and wearing all black in the middle of the day. But within this culture, opera singers stand out. Not only do they tend to dress a little more dramatically but, as I call it, they live life out loud. Opera singers can, and to my thinking should, live in an emotionally honest way. This is not always easy. Neither is it always pretty, particularly when dealing with young adults. But it can serve as a foundation for the curiosity that Thomas Allen insisted was essential to building an opera singer’s arsenal of weapons, weapons used to reach into the hearts of the audience and take them to the specific world the opera is portraying.

Next week Ken Cazan will make his first post for the year.

(Damien Elwood has been managing the USC Thornton Opera since 2004)

We have a season!

(posted by Damien Elwood)

The semester is finally underway. We have chosen our fall opera, Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, and cast it. The spring opera, Don Giovanni, has been cast as well. And the scenes are almost done!

This is always a fun time for me; new students, new music, new designers and crew. Brent and Ken pick a season and I get to wade into it along with everyone else wondering what it will have in store for us. It’s like inviting relatives over to stay for 8 months or so. They move into your home and you have some idea what it’s going to be like but you really don’t know for sure. There are always surprises good and bad.

Lucretia is relatively new to me. I did see it at Central City this summer. The production was very good. The music is truly incredible and the story is devastating. I can genuinely say I am a Britten fan but confess some trepidation about living with the opera for three months. Some of it is due to the challenging nature of Britten’s music, some of it to the fate of Lucretia herself. But like the ambiguity one would have about relatives coming to stay, I am not certain, when all is said and done, how I am going to feel about this fall’s house guest. Will I miss her when she leaves?

Of course, it’s not all joy and light for me when we do an opera I am familiar with. Living with our production of The Rake’s Progress was a kind of slow death for me. Many years ago I performed the role of Tom Rakewell for a local community college. I was asked to prepare it in less than a month with minimal coaching support. Needless to say the result was less than stellar. And the time I had to prepare was just enough to truly understand the crime I was committing against the audience, Stravinsky, and God. As I lived through the USC preparation of the opera, it got easier to hear the music. But it took most of the semester.

I will write more about our season as the school year progresses. Mozart, in addition to being the favored composer of opera training programs the world over, is as stern a task master as one can find. And our scenes program is always challenging both in its breadth and focus. I am looking forward to my part in both.

Finally, I want to make one more comment. One of the things I love about this job is that through my friends and colleagues, both Thornton based and otherwise, I get to attend and/or participate in amazing performances and events all over this incredible city. The diversity of art forms, venues, communities, and ethnic tradition is staggering. And whether it be Mahler’s 8th at the Hollywood Bowl (thanks Shirley), blues at Harvelle’s in Santa Monica, or singing E lucevan le stelle in the L.A. River under the 6th St. bridge, I get front row seats to the spectacle of living in one of the world’s great centers of art. Awesome.

Damien Elwood has been managing the USC Thornton Opera since 2004.