We profile Oakland’s West Edge Opera. Pictured: Artistic Director Mark Streshinsky (left) and Music Director Jonathan Khuner.
In just the past few years, this enterprising East Bay company — which began life as the Berkeley Opera but has seen a flowering with its new name, mission and leadership — has become one of the region’s most exciting cultural touchstones. Operating on a shoestring budget and a seemingly boundless font of energy, West Edge offers a blend of new and recent work, early music and pieces from the standard repertoire done in innovative ways.
And audiences have responded with enthusiasm. This summer’s three-opera festival, which opens Saturday, July 30, with a production of Janácek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” hasn’t even gotten under way yet, and already one of the productions — Thomas Adès’ darkly scabrous chamber opera “Powder Her Face” — has sold out its opening date, leading the company to add a fourth performance to the schedule.
Yes, you read that right. An opera from 1995, written in a witty but densely knotty style, is selling tickets.
“My colleagues are always asking me how I get by on a budget of $500,000,” says General Director Mark Streshinsky, “and the truth is that I don’t really know. I guess the answer is that I work hard, and I use my intuition to pick pieces that will really inspire people and get them excited.”
Some of the buzz around this summer’s schedule, which also includes Handel’s “Agrippina,” is a carryover from 2015, when West Edge pulled off an even more counterintuitive coup by turning Alban Berg’s 12-tone master-
We’re constantly being told that opera is an increasingly hard sell, and it’s a plausible story. In a fragmented age full of countless cultural options competing for attention, the odds would seem low that this irrational and exotic entertainment can carry its weight with the public.
But in that case, how to explain the runaway success of West Edge Opera?
piece “Lulu” (never a popular success under the best of circumstances) into a critical and financial hit.
It featured a breakout performance by soprano Emma McNairy in the title role, as well as impassioned conducting by Music Director Jonathan Khuner and a canny stage production by director Elkhanah Pulitzer. For a few weeks last summer, the question on the lips of every local opera lover was, “Have you been to ‘Lulu’ yet?”
And perhaps the most telling spillover from that “Lulu” was the discovery of a picturesque new home for the company’s productions, the abandoned train station at 16th Street in Oakland. The station closed in 1994 after sustaining damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake, but the elaborate Beaux Arts architecture and the overall air of grandeur gone to seed made it a perfect setting for Berg’s tale of menace, corruption and sexual depravity.
“There’s a historical feeling you get when you walk in there, and people feel that instantly,” Streshinsky says. “I remember during ‘Lulu’ watching people turn in their tickets, walk inside and immediately pull out their phones and start shooting pictures.”
It also seemed like a malleable venue for a range of repertoire, which is what the company — homeless since being priced out of its former base at El Cerrito High School — had been searching for.
“We were clear about the station right away,” Streshinsky says. “It’s a magical place where something needs to happen, and happily the people who run it feel that way about us.”
Much of the company’s success is attributable to the odd-couple collaboration between Streshinsky, 48 — a voluble, silver-tongued extrovert who is equally comfortable working as a stage director and wooing donors — and the more scholarly, diffident Khuner, 68. They’ve worked out a template for the company’s annual offerings — one work from the 17th or 18th century, one from the early 20th and one from the 21st — that gives them plenty of flexibility, as well as the opportunity to plug for their favorite corners of the repertoire.
“We know each other’s tastes pretty well,” Streshinsky says. “He like pieces that are more academic, and I like them more pretty.”
In addition to the three productions each summer, they recently launched a series of concert performances titled Opera Rara that allows them to delve into obscurities by Donizetti, Leoncavallo and others that would be too risky or unsuitable for a fully staged version.
This taste for works that are off the beaten track goes all the way back to the company’s beginning, though it has often been present in a somewhat latent form. The Berkeley Opera was created in 1979 by Richard Goodman, a professor in the engineering department at UC Berkeley who was also an amateur baritone with a desire to have a vehicle for performances. Khuner, an assistant conductor, coach and prompter for the San Francisco Opera, joined a few years later, and took over the helm when Goodman retired and moved out of town.
“I had no desire to run a company,” Khuner says. “I just enjoyed doing the music. But I had no regular work except the San Francisco Opera, so I really had no excuse.”
Throughout the ensuing decade and a half, the company’s activities were a series of compromises between Khuner’s musical interests and the blunt realities of a limited budget and patchwork schedule. There were a handful of premieres by local composers and rarities like Fauré’s “Pénélope,” as well as plenty of traditional repertoire.
His own diffidence as an impresario also came into play, Khuner admits.
“I was never all that ambitious. For me, it was always fine if we had local singers, and did the best we could as a community company,” he says.
“Mark has a whole toolkit he brought to the company that I never had. He’s energetic, he’s more visually astute than I am, and he’s really good at raising money. But we have more or less the same goals for the company, which has grown very smoothly into the edgy company it is today. I don’t think it veered off in a new direction, it just fulfilled the spirit we wanted it to have from the beginning.”
Streshinsky and Khuner became friends during their years at the San Francisco Opera, and their partnership was born backstage during a lull in a rehearsal for “Carmen.”
“He said, ‘Do you want to direct ‘Eugene Onegin’ in four months?’ ” Streshinsky recalls. “I said, ‘Let me think about it . ... Yes.’ ”
Before long, Khuner had passed the general directorship of the company to him, and the company embarked on a more ambitious stretch of projects, taking the name West Edge Opera in 2010. The productions became diversified, including ambitious undertakings like Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Copland’s “The Tender Land”; the quality of the casting began to improve with an increase in the budget.
Looking ahead, both directors agree that the current format seems likely to serve their goals for the foreseeable future. The next step, says Streshinsky, is to “increase our ability to operate at a professional level — by which I mean up our fees.”
“I’m continually saddened at the fees I’m forced to offer singers, and grateful at their willingness to accept them,” he says. “I’d like to get the company to the point where we can seek out the singers we want, and pay them what they deserve.”