San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Opera San José adopting online song recitals
“Dichterliebe”: Streaming as of Saturday, July 11. $15-$50. www.operasj.org
What do you do if you’re the ambitious head of a regional opera company in the midst of a pandemic with a company of resident artists, a canceled season and an unexpected infusion of cash?
If you’re Khori Dastoor, the director of Opera San José, you start looking around for ways to assemble those elements into a viable path forward. Maybe you transmute your large rehearsal space into an intimate performance venue, suitable for a solo recitals. Let’s say you tap one of your resident singers to give one of those recitals — just one singer and one pianist, no more — and suppose you throw it up on the internet behind a ticketing paywall.
What happens then? Well, we’re about to find out, because those are in fact all the things Dastoor did. And she undertook it in a spirit of exploratory inquiry.
“Creating a musical performance specifically for video capture turns out to be an entirely different art form,” she said during a recent phone interview, “and we found we didn’t know exactly how do it. So starting with something small is a good way to learn.”
The company’s first project since COVID19 quashed what was left of the 2020 season is a recital featuring bassbaritone Eugene Brancoveanu singing Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe” (“A Poet’s Love”) with piano accompaniment by conductor Christopher Ray. The recital began streaming on Saturday, July 11, at the company’s website, operasj.org.
The performance was recorded in the Fred Heiman Digital Media Studio, a facility created at the company’s headquarters thanks to a sixfigure gift from Peggy Heiman in honor of her late husband, both of them longtime board members. The fact that the donation came with no designated use set Dastoor’s creative juices flowing.
“Just putting the money towards operations and having it evaporate doesn’t really grow our capacity,” Dastoor said. “This seemed like an opportunity to help the company serve its mission and also generate some revenue.”
Dastoor, in other words, has her eye on the company’s future, at least for the medium term. Performances have been canceled through 2021, and she’s all too keenly aware that a return to a traditional operatic lineup is probably far in the future. So she’s scouting for alternatives.
“I’ve been meeting with composers to talk about that eightminute opera they’ve been meaning to write, or to figure out what other little jewels they may have lying around. There’s a little twocharacter opera by RimskyKorsakov, ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ that would be fun to do,” she said.
“And I’m letting the artists tell me what they want to do, not vice versa. Any artists who have dream projects, I want to be pitched!”
“Dichterliebe,” in fact, was the choice of Brancoveanu, a former San Francisco Opera Adler fellow whose vocal artistry — both capacious and subtle — is perfectly suited for the art song repertoire. It helps, too, that he grew up in Germany and has an intimate knowledge of both the cycle’s music and its poetry (by Heinrich Heine).
“When I was asked to spearhead this effort, my mind went immediately to ‘Dichterliebe,’ ” he said. “This is a work that has been with me for over 20 years, and it seemed to embrace all the yearning and the emotional anguish that so many people are feeling right now.”
Also, the scale of the piece felt suited to the performance venue.
“Schumann, like Schubert and other art song composers, was writing for a salon setting — basically a large living room, with the audience no more than 4 or 5 meters away,” said Brancoveanu. “The intimacy of this space lent itself perfectly to that.”
The recording, which took place, on June 25, followed a tightly regimented protocol. A producer from Atomic Productions, an outfit whose previous work was in commercial video, came in with a threeperson skeleton crew.
“Everybody in that room got a test, and everyone quarantined for two weeks ahead of time,” Dastoor said. “If there was a COVID case on the first project right out of out the gate, that would’ve shut us right down.”
And the company is definitely planning further undertakings.
“At some point when the health officials say it’s safe for us to have gatherings of 25 peo
ple, I could imagine transforming the space into something suitable for a slightly bigger production — maybe a 30minute program that we do three times a day. The space has big loading dock doors that we can open up so there’s not a bottleneck of patrons at a door.”
Even the financial aspects of producing during the pandemic are experimental, with sometimes surprising results. For the “Dichterliebe” stream, the company instituted a paywhatyouwant policy, with prices ranging from $15 to $50. Dastoor said that the payments average about $25, as one might expect, but almost no one is paying exactly $25.
“The payments are clustered almost entirely at the two extremes. We have people either paying $50, which is to support the company, or $15, which is ‘OK, I’ll give it a try.’ ”
Finding her way through these uncertainties seems to bring out Dastoor’s most inventive instincts, as well as a willingness to try new things.
“There are so many platitudes about what audiences will or won’t go for, but the truth is that nobody really knows anything,” she said. “Supposing that we can’t control the outcome because of the pandemic, are we really going to insist that it’s fullsized opera or nothing?
“Sure, it’s hard not to feel demoralized when you think about how much we had planned. But honestly, I’m surprised at how much is possible. We’re trying to embrace the moment for what we can offer.”
Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman