Gamble paying off for Opera Philadelphia
Former Torontonian brings the art form to ‘non-traditional spaces’
PHILADELHIA— It’s opera season again in Toronto, with the Canadian Opera Company running Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian in repertory at the Four Seasons Centre, and Opera Atelier about to celebrate Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Elgin Theatre.
It’s opera season elsewhere as well, with Opera Philadelphia pointing sister companies in Canada and the United States toward a more experimental approach to this tradition-weighted art form.
Opera Philadelphia hasn’t exactly abandoned tradition. A few weeks ago, the French director Laurent Pelly helped open its current season with a staging of Donizetti’s ultratraditional Lucia di Lammer
moor, starring Brenda Rae, in one of the continent’s last surviving 19th-century opera houses, the elegant Academy of Music.
But Lucia di Lammermoor was surrounded by five productions of a decidedly contemporary sensibility, collectively identified as Festival 018, a follow-up to last year’s groundbreaking Festival 017. Both events represent general director David Devan’s attempt to re-invigorate a company experiencing audience decline and set it on a new path pointing toward a creative future. A former Torontonian and alumnus of the Canadian Opera Company, Devan recognizes that he is gambling by opening his season with so much newness.
Not that he is turning his back on the past. Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Puccini’s La Boheme are on the way. But the world premiere of an opera concerned with Alzheimer’s disease, a gritty, cabaret-style re-working of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and the revival of a year-old opera inspired by a violent clash between Philadelphia police and Black protesters do not exactly constitute business as usual.
Mostly, the festival has taken place in non-traditional spaces, including a downscale theatre on the city’s funky South St. and one of America’s most distinctive art museums, the Barnes Foundation. Unsurprisingly, these venues have helped attract non-traditional audiences, younger and drawn in part from the worlds of theatre and the visual arts.
A costly experiment? Surely, since box office revenue in these spaces is small relative to cost of production. Without philanthropic support, the project would be untenable. What Opera Philadelphia is discovering is that there are donors particularly anxious to invest in the future
“The collision of all this different stuff creates an energy,” Devan believes. “We have 26 colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area and there is an appetite for what we are doing. Young people like to feed on the energy. You want to see your tribe. You also want to see other tribes.”
It was a special experience to walk down South St. through tribes of young people out enjoying the night and into the Theatre of Living Arts, where Patricia Racette was looking and sounding nothing like a Metropolitan Opera star while portraying a woman coming unhinged during the course of a telephone call.
And then over at the Kimball Centre’s Perlman Theatre there was the experience of watching another Metropolitan Opera star, Frederica von Stade, portray a woman’s descent into dementia and discovery of a new life and love. In Sky on Swings, Lembit Beecher, a former composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia, portrays the subject of Alzheimer’s (in company with librettist Hannah Moskovitz and director Joanna Settle), with what he describes as “an unstable sonic world that is moving and shifting,” producing a music of fragmentary recall and uncertainty.
What a contrast to Glass Handel, a multimedia vehicle for countertenor Anthony Roth Costanza, in which 18thcentury arias by George Frideric Handel are juxtaposed with the 20th- and 21st-century music of Philip Glass and accompanied by choreography, videos and on site painting by George Condo.
Glass Handel epitomizes what Opera Philadelphia’s festivals are trying to do — link past and present, tradition and innovation. “I don’t want people to walk away hating what we do,” David Devan smiles, “but I don’t mind them scratching their heads.”