GORGEOUS LUXURIOUS ROGUE 2213 TINY HOUSE FOR SALE IN CA
For more infomation >> How Does Woman Explain Being Offered $10,000 For A Cuddle Session? - Duration: 4:19. 
For more infomation >> Troopers: Search for Man Who Shot at Officers - Duration: 1:04. 
For more infomation >> GoFundMe for the World Lacrosse Championships 2018 - Duration: 1:09. 
For more infomation >> Search On For Missing NYC Cabbie - Duration: 2:01. 
For more infomation >> Packed House At City Hall For Busy Council Meeting - Duration: 2:43. 
For more infomation >> Congressman Steve King Discusses Need for "Mayor Libby Schaaf Act" - Duration: 4:13. 
For more infomation >> Help 'Be the Thunder'! Are tickets still available for Game 7? - Duration: 2:28. 
- Good evening.
(audience applauds)
Thank you. Thank you for that reception,
it's completely deserved. (audience laughs)
My name is Jerome Weeks, I am the senior arts producer
reporter for KERA's Art and Seek,
and before we start our panel,
I need to make some thank yous.
I wanted to thank the Kimbell Art Museum
for collaborating with us on this and providing us
a handsome facility.
I want to thank TCU's School of Fine Arts, as well,
and Fort Worth Opera.
Fort Worth Opera will be providing
the entertainment afterwards,
you did not realize that you could have a discussion
and entertainment, a show, afterwards.
There will be a soprano, Megan Koch, singing up there,
but there will also be beer, wine, food available,
so we can just continue
our conversation upstairs afterwards.
And I'd like you to show your appreciation
for the woman who's responsible for a lot of this,
my boss, editor Anne Bothwell, at Art and Seek tonight
is her last official act before she
goes on her honeymoon, Anne Bothwell.
(audience applauds)
As many of you probably know, opera is simply
the Italian plural for works.
Opus, work, opera, works.
And it seems to me a remarkably dull
and nondescriptive word for something that is so rich
and varied and complicated and glorious and grand.
One imagines, in fact, a representative
from the Duke of Mantua appearing to Claudio Monteverdi
and asking what he has planned for the duke's entertainment.
And Monteverdi says, I'm going to retell
Orpheus in the underworld.
I will need an orchestra of 30, including two pipe organs.
I will need 12 singers.
I will need a chorus of demons, a chorus of nymphs,
a chorus of shepherds.
We'll have to have a set of the underworld,
and we need the machinery that will fly Apollo
in at the end to make everything right.
And the representative says, good lord,
what do you call that thing?
And he said, I'm giving the duke the works.
He could have called it the whole enchilada,
but the fact is, what I'm trying to make, is that
the operas, they are so varied, and so rich,
one thinks that they would be adaptive enough
to get past today's dilemmas
and continue to survive and thrive.
But, art forms do die.
Poets still write epic poems, but we don't sing them
after dinner anymore.
So, with that cheery thought, let's turn to opera.
Tuomas Hiltunen was born and educated in Finland.
He received his training at the Guild Hall School
in London, before receiving the Fulbright Scholarship
to Columbia University.
Most recently, he was the director of management
administration at the Barenboim Said Foundation,
which was established by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said,
and, of course, he is now the general director
of Fort Worth Opera, Tuomas.
(audience applauds)
Sheran Goodspeed Keyton is the director
of educational outreach at Fort Worth Opera, Sheran.
(audience applauds)
David Gately has directed more than 300 productions
for 60 companies around the world,
including 20 just for the Fort Worth Opera.
Since 2015, he has been the director
of the opera studio at TCU, David.
(audience applauds)
And Paulina Magdaleno is the director
of community outreach and special events
with Fort Worth Opera, Paulina.
(audience applauds)
Now your eagle eyes may have noticed a final chair there
that's still empty.
We believe Jonathan Eaton has been delayed by weather
from coming here from Denton.
He is the director of the opera studies program
at UNT, and we hope he will join us later.
But, coincidentally enough, I was gonna begin
with Jonathan anyway, because amongst his many accolades,
the highest surely was the fact
that he was interviewed by me.
We have a weekly series called The Artist's Spotlight
in which we profile north Texas creative artists,
and I profiled him as the new director
at UNT's opera program.
And I wanted to begin with a kind of baseline
as to what opera is facing now, and why it might
seem to be in trouble.
And so, this is an outtake that I didn't use for that story.
This is an outtake from Jonathan from that interview.
Jonathan was very thoughtful.
We seem to have some technical difficulties at the moment.
Well, I will read what he said,
as backup, not nearly as interesting
because he has a lovely British accent.
There's a business and an artistic model of grand opera,
which I believe is ultimately going to be unsustainable
other than very few areas of excellence.
Nothing against grand opera, I love it,
but the model is you have a very large theater
of 3,000 seats or more, and 90% of the operas
we perform were not written for 3,000-seat theaters.
And if you're in a theater that size,
you've got to hire singers with big voices,
and they're expensive.
The stages are big, and you've got to put
lots of scenery on those stages with big effects,
and a big orchestra, and a huge chorus.
Pretty soon you get this process of elephantisis,
everything has to get bigger in order to pay its way.
And in order to pay its way,
it then has to increase yet again.
It starts to leave behind the human experience
of sitting in an audience and seeing other human beings
on stage and getting caught up in their drama.
That's what draws me to opera,
otherwise we're in danger of becoming something
of a museum piece.
And I thought I'd begin with Jonathan's remarks,
and turn to David and Tuomas and ask,
is that a fair assessment of where opera stands?
- It's an assessment.
And it's a true assessment.
It describes a certain kind
of opera company and experience.
I think that, Tuomas and I were actually talking
just before the event, about how we're constantly
looking for new models in this experience we call opera.
We're trying to get audiences closer to the action.
We're performing in smaller spaces.
I mean, there's always gonna be the Metropolitan Opera,
and the Chicago Lyric, and the San Francisco Opera,
and they're gonna perform in their large houses,
and that's their mission, and that's what they do.
But everybody is looking for alternative spaces.
Tuomas can talk about that, too,
because I think they're doing one of their pieces
this year in an alternate space.
And actually in my experience with the Fort Worth Opera,
we always did, as well.
We would suit some smaller pieces to smaller spaces.
The last thing I did was Voir Dire,
and it was done in a black box,
and it was an audience of only about,
I think, 150 people, and it's a piece
that was suited to that kind of experience.
You wouldn't want to see that in a large opera house,
and so you're drawing in a whole crowd.
I see my dean sitting out there in the audience tonight,
and she was instrumental, Anne Helmreich,
who is sitting out in the audience tonight,
in helping us just do a world premiere just last weekend
of a piece that we did, now this is quite an unusual thing,
because our co-producers were the soldiers chorus
of the United States Army field band.
And we went together with them and some other opera
companies, including the Seagle Music Colony,
Seattle Opera, San Diego Opera,
and commissioned a piece that was about a soldier's
experience in Iraq.
And we premiered that at TCU in a situation
where we had about 400 seats in the house,
once again an intimate experience,
full orchestra, it was only 11 pieces in the orchestra,
but full orchestra, a smaller cast,
and it was a way to make the experience smaller
and more intimate for the audience.
I don't want to talk too much.
- This art form that was created 420 years ago
wanted to reimagine Greek theater and added music to it.
This art form now is becoming more and more global
and international, there are, like he mentioned,
lots of co-productions, international co-productions.
At the same time, the art form can become more regional.
There are regional differences.
In this community, there are more people who speak Spanish
as their mother tongue.
That is an invaluable piece of information for us.
And often,
you mentioned that we are doing one piece
in an alternative space.
Yes, we are doing Brief Encounters, it is a collection
of three short operas by Heggie, Illick, and Adamo.
And what happened was, and I'm gonna keep this very short.
I love long form.
We went to do a small concert at Botanic Garden
in December, and we took our singers there.
It was a holiday concert.
And we discovered that the auditorium there was fantastic.
The acoustics were just amazing.
Our singers loved that space, and that architect
knew exactly what he was doing.
You look up, you see the undulating ceiling,
there are no panels on the wall,
and yes, when you look at the seats,
they are all brand new.
It's been here for 32 years, it's a sleeping beauty.
So our singers after the concert said,
when can we do something here again?
And so we decided to take our Brief Encounters
to that space.
It is a fantastic space. Singers can use
a very quiet voice, and it stays very crisp,
but then they can also use their bigger voice,
and it doesn't break.
So I hope that you will come to discover these short operas,
and also to experience that space.
- I think what we're saying here is that Jonathan's
assessment was about grand opera, and not about
all of opera, it would seem,
that opera is varied enough.
But what about the lovers of grand opera?
And also those operas that seem to break the rules
and go for scale, Angels in America is a kind
of event opera; Moby Dick, Jake Heggie again, but still,
it was kind of an event opera.
Angels in America broke the rules for theater, too.
No one does a two-part, 12-hour play, but they did.
It's been successful all over the world.
So what about that, is it simply a matter
that they could be adapted to smaller scale?
- I think you can do it in a couple of ways.
Okay, so if a piece isn't under copyright anymore,
you can do reduced orchestrations, and you can rethink,
and you can make it happen in a smaller space,
and use your creativity.
If it's still under copyright, you don't have
that much freedom to mess around with things.
And yes, there always will be grand operas,
but, you know, opera companies will do some of each.
They'll do that big grand Aida, which calls for huge forces,
and then they'll do a piece in a black box,
or somewhere else, just to give a wide variety
of experiences so that the people
who want grand opera still get that.
And yet, we have to make this art form alive,
and we have to keep it growing, or it will die.
We have to explore new ways in which, and new pieces,
and new composers.
Sometimes you have to shut me up, 'cause I talk a lot.
You know, when I was getting started in opera,
many years ago, it was almost impossible
for an American composer to get a piece produced.
That was because they were expensive, and they could
never get another company to do them after they were done
once, so it was a huge investment for a company.
And so there were three or four,
there were Argento, Carlisle Floyd, Thomas Pasatieri,
there were a few people who could get an opera produced.
Now there are dozens of composers who can get
their works produced by opera companies all over,
because every opera company, almost every opera company
in the United States, wants to include
one new American work in some fashion in their season.
Audiences are clamoring for it, because they've seen
about as many Bohemes as they can take,
and as many Butterflys, and as many La Traviatas.
I mean, they're amazing works, we love them,
but you can't keep reprogramming them
every three or four years and expect your opera company
and your audience to grow.
Fort Worth Opera has this amazing mission
that Tuomas was talking about, about reaching out
to the Spanish-speaking community.
I mean, I think it's like almost a three-year program,
or a four-year program, that you're following.
- No, it is a permanent program.
- A permanent program to continue doing operas
in that language, because that is what our audience
here in Fort Worth is.
It doesn't mean that they won't do Don Pasquale,
or some big, major work, too, so that you can still keep
the standard operas going, but extending it,
reaching out, making it grow, making it a different model.
And as Tuomas said, it's different in every city.
Every city has their own little idiosyncrasies,
and it's important that the opera companies find out
what those are in each and every city.
- Paulina, you are the director of community outreach.
How do you bring a Latino audience to an opera?
Even an opera like Maria de Buenos Aires,
which is Argentinian, how do you do that?
- Well, first of all, we're very dramatic
and intense, so to me, it's kind of like opera
is like a telenovela in a bigger scale.
You know, like if you're not mine, you're not from anyone,
so I'm gonna kill you, but I love you, it's fine.
So we started the initiative, which is not an initiative
anymore, Noches de Opera, last year with a mariachi opera.
We're doing Maria de Buenos Aries this year.
It's a tango opera, it's in Spanish, of course.
So it's a way, you have to start somewhere.
The mariachi opera proved that there was an audience,
that they liked it.
Of course, the story was about,
it had immigration, the immigration element,
borders, leaving your family in another country.
But at the end of the day, we're kind of like,
this appeals to a lot of people,
not just the Hispanic community.
So I'm very proud that I'm part of this initiative,
and that I'm part of this company.
We're here to stay.
We're not just doing it because, oh, it's a trend,
now we want to reach Hispanics.
It's a natural thing.
We will keep doing it, and to me, I consider myself
Exhibit A, I am learning every day about opera.
So part of my job is kind of like to share the enthusiasm
and the joy that I feel every single day
about discovering new things about opera.
And also discovering that, you know, I have heard
that song in a pasta commercial,
you know, or in 1982, again, here we go
with the telenovelas.
La Traviata, I was doing research the other day,
and it was like, that's 1982 Bodas de Odio,
are you kidding me?
And, of course, besides the Hispanic initiative
or outreach, we are trying to do other things
to introduce people to opera,
and kind of sharing this, breaking the stereotype
that it's boring or that you have to dress up,
and just one more thing.
One of the things that we did this January,
and it was super fun, we took opera to a yoga studio,
and we called it ohm-pera.
We played a couple of songs there,
you know, says downward-facing dog,
and it was Habanera from Carmen.
So that's what we do, and like I said at the beginning,
we're here to stay.
- I thought you might want to mention Gaby
as part of your connection to the Hispanic community.
- Okay, so Gaby Natale is our super Latina,
she has a TV show that is nominated to an Emmy
for the sixth time this year.
She is from Argentina,
and I used to work with her a couple of years ago.
So when John de los Santos, Maria de Buenos Aires director,
asked me in a meeting, you know, I need a local talent,
a Latina, kind of bubbly, intense,
for this non-singing role called El Duende,
I immediately thought about her.
There was no other person in my mind that could do this.
So she's now rehearsing, she's part of the Maria cast,
she's local, she's Latina, and it's kind of
part of what we can also do here to promote opera,
including the local talent, and just have fun.
- One of the ironies here is that she is
a TV personality, and a journalist, and an interviewer,
so she's taking a non-singing role in which she plays
a demon, when she's made up--
- A very sexy demon.
- I was going to say that John de los Santos,
who is directing Maria de Buenos Aires,
he is from San Antonio, but he is a graduate of TCU.
- When I spoke to you, David, about The Falling
and the Rising, the opera that you just mentioned,
you were talking about topicality,
that these kinds of issues...
it's a pity Jonathan isn't here, because he's done
an eco-opera, an opera about Rachel Carson,
and he's done a gospel opera.
Why do these kinds of issues, why address them?
Is an opera really the appropriate form?
- It's interesting, because the style of the opera
was kind of a mixture of, in fact, a local reviewer,
who shall remain nameless, said, "not really an opera,
"not really a musical," and that's actually kind of what
we were going for, because it was this hybrid
kind of experience, where you thought you were kind of
listening to a musical, and then it became this much more
serious music than that.
And it kind of got people excited,
it was a way to get people excited about going to an opera
with a language that they could actually,
a musical language, that they could actually understand.
We have a kind of a two-fold reason that we did
The Falling and the Rising.
First of all, there's a huge commitment by TCU
to reach out into the community,
to do pieces that, in the whole school of music,
and I'd say in the rest of the fine arts department, as well,
to do things that involve the community.
This very actively involved the veterans community
in TCU, we got our ROTC on TCU involved,
and actually we had a whole group of soldiers
from the soldiers chorus on the TCU campus
interacting with the students as we were
creating this opera.
There's this huge outreach, and also we have a huge mission
at TCU to do new works.
We commissioned, we were the major commissioners
on this piece, and Dr. Gibson, who's the director
of the school of music, is constantly looking to commission
new works in every one of the departments
in the school of music.
So, we have a mission to reach out
and involve a new community.
I think this particular opera really fit that bill
on a number of levels.
- Tuomas. - And that word,
outreach, is a very interesting one.
And we can use the same words,
but mean totally different things.
For Fort Worth Opera, outreach means that we are going
to the community, where there is culture.
We are not just taking our performers to an area
that doesn't have culture.
We are really here to celebrate
what we have here, and rediscover.
It is the question whether opera will survive.
Most of the people here in Fort Worth,
in a city of almost 900,000 people, don't know
that Fort Worth has an opera company.
So we have lots of work to do,
and we need everyone's help.
Just what can people do?
I think that one of the most important things
would be to tell your friends
that Fort Worth has an opera company.
What else could you do?
Bring a friend to opera.
- Sheran, what do you do to tell people?
- I start primarily with young people
as part of my job and my passion
as coordinator of the educational outreach program.
So not only are we dealing with a group of people
who don't know that there's an opera company,
a lot of times they're unfamiliar
with the art form as a whole.
And so my job is to do outreach in these communities,
which takes opera on a smaller scale to these schools
and to these community events,
and hopefully convert people.
I guess convert would mean taking them away
from what they love, so maybe that's not,
maybe I don't want to convert them, maybe we want
to just open their eyes to something new.
Culturally, young people tend to lean towards pop culture,
whatever is popular, whatever they see in front of them
on television and in video games,
and that's not opera.
So part of my job, and my mission, is to teach them
that our version, especially, of opera
is not your grandparents' opera.
This is not just, you have to put on a tuxedo,
as Paulina said, and you have to go sit
and watch a classical opera, and sit
with your hands crossed,
don't clap, and don't say anything,
but you can enjoy it, you can have fun,
you can see it in venues that are more relaxed,
and that you don't have to wear tuxedos
if you don't own one, or trying to make it accessible
to people, all people.
- And Sheran, just real quick,
tell how many performances you guys did
in your outreach this year.
- Oh, holy cow. So back in August, when I took over
this position, I had the amazing task of booking
performances for the TCU Fort Worth Opera,
Hattie Mae Lesley Young Apprentices Artists,
it's a very long title, and we did
more than 200 performances for the fall semester,
September to December, and then the short spring semester,
January to March.
So in four months, they did more than 200 performances.
(audience applauds)
- How many title one schools?
- More than 52% of those were title one schools,
and more than, just a little over 31,000 students
total were served.
- You also told me about a particular program
that I wasn't aware that Fort Worth Opera was doing,
if you could talk about that.
I hadn't realized that it had been going on
for this number of years.
- Yes, we have a wonderful program called Opera Shots.
And Opera Shots is one of those amazing, unconventional
programs where we partner with a local bar or pub,
and we take opera to that venue for an evening.
And we perform everything from musical theater
to art song to opera arias, and sometimes it is
our regular opera followers that come into a bar or pub
that they've never been to, but oftentimes we see
patrons of that bar or of that club walk in,
and totally unbeknownst to them, there's going to be
an opera performance.
- The strangest karaoke night.
- It is, it is, and its quite interesting to watch sometimes,
because they come in, and we see this total conversion
of them sitting down, expecting their normal beer
and country western and maybe a football game playing,
and all of a sudden they hear this odd noise
coming from the back corner, and, you know,
they're taken aback at first,
but then you start to see them start to mellow
and pay attention, and all of a sudden they turn around
in their bar stool, and they're actively listening,
and then they make their way over to our table and go,
what is this, and then we have an opportunity to say,
score, we got another one.
- David spoke about new works, the need to create new works,
and about the commitment of TCU to commission
new works. Is Fort Worth Opera going to be doing that?
- Yes, we have our Frontier Series.
We invite composers to submit excerpts from their pieces,
and then we have a jury that will select a certain number
that will be then presented here in Fort Worth.
Last year, we had a jury that had nine male jury members
and four female jury members,
two-thirds male, one-third female jury,
and it selected pieces that were written by men only.
So this year we decided to try something different.
We found four amazing female jury members
and two male jury members.
(audience applauds)
- What were the results?
- We are presenting six pieces,
and two of those are by women.
(audience applauds)
Next year, we will be presenting a traditional grand opera
on the main stage, which is directed by one of the best
opera directors here in this country,
and worldwide, Francesca Zambello.
It's the first time we are bringing a female director's
work to Bass Hall.
In 2020, we will be presenting
The Last Dream of Frida and Diego, which is being composed
by Gabriela Lena Frank. It is the first time
we are presenting a work by a female composer
on the main stage,
not just because of the gender, but because they're
the best composers and best directors.
We don't want to have token people,
no one wants to be a token.
- David, you spoke about, you mentioned that
The Falling and the Rising was actually a collaboration
amongst a number of companies.
And yet, that was still a chamber opera,
it was a fairly small production.
How difficult is it to create a collaboration?
One moment, ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Eaton.
(audience applauds)
- Talk about making a grand entrance.
Those opera people, distrust them.
- Thank you for joining us.
- So sorry to be joining you so late.
We can thank some good Texan weather,
and phantom tornadoes. Sounds a bit like opera
already, doesn't it?
And hail the like of which I've never seen.
- I've been doing a poor job filling in for you, I'm afraid.
I was wondering if you could talk about some
of the operas that you've done
at the Pittsburgh Festival Opera
in which you tackled different sorts of subjects,
different ways, things that opera usually
doesn't put on stage.
- Certainly.
I wear two operatic hats at the moment,
I'm the new director of opera at UNT,
which is a terrific institution, so glad to be there,
and for many years I've been general director
and now artistic director only of Pittsburgh Festival Opera.
A bit like Fort Worth Opera, we are the slightly smaller
operatic institution in a city that has
another larger opera right next door.
And we became a summer festival six years ago,
emulating, to some degree,
the direction the Fort Worth Opera took.
We did that better to serve our communities,
so that the two opera companies weren't competing
at the same time of year,
and there were opera offerings all through the year,
and in the summer, also.
And we also did it because we like to be a little different.
And one of the areas we wish to be different in
is in this whole idea of, how do you regenerate the medium?
How do you appeal to new, younger, and wider audiences?
And how do you stop opera becoming a museum art form?
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with museums,
we love museums, we're sitting in a very splendid one.
But opera takes place in the present, it's music,
and we wanted to respond to the feeling that opera
was becoming, perhaps, a little distant and removed
from our audiences.
So we created a series that we call Music That Matters.
And there's a lot of background to this,
and I won't go on about it a lot,
but we decided to commission new works,
one every two years, on topics that were arguably
of very great importance to people in our community,
in Pittsburgh, in America, today.
The first of these was what we like to think of
as the world's first eco-opera.
And there's a bit of common sense in this, too,
because there are large constituencies of people
who are very concerned about our environment.
And it so happens that Rachel Carson, the scientist
who wrote Silent Spring, was a Pittsburgher,
and we availed ourselves of that happy circumstance
and created a piece inspired by Rachel Carson,
written by Gilda Lyons, called A New Kind of Fallout,
set in the '60s, initially, and then ending in today.
Our next work was a work that addressed racial tension,
and particularly violence in our streets in Pittsburgh.
We've had a couple of shootings of young, black men
by white policemen in our city, and we thought
we would take that bull by the horns.
But rather than commissioning a composer who may have
great academic credentials or be a force
to be reckoned with in the world of serious classical music
today, we thought, who are we trying to reach,
who are we trying to talk to?
Why go to Chicago for a celebrated, young,
African-American composer? Let's find somebody local
that has real connection to our community.
And there's a Baptist church that I have spent
many hours in, with many young children on my lap,
the services last three hours, the children
are universally affectionate, and any unadorned lap
they will adorn, and in this church, there's,
I think it's the third champion gospel choir of America.
Interestingly, the minister of music does not have
a formal college or conservatory education.
He's got a good musical background
and runs a fantastic gospel choir.
We commissioned him to do two mini pop-up short operas
in unusual spaces.
And we thought, well, we'll give the guy a big work,
and we'll set him up with a more formally trained assistant
to help convert the musical ideas
into performable scores.
And we did that piece last summer.
It met with very significant interest.
One lady walked up to me after a show and said,
how much money would it take to televise this
and put it on television? And I sort of gulped happily
and said rather more than I thought it would.
But those days I was just the general director,
and these days I don't have to deal
in the money stuff so much.
And this lady gave us a large check, and I'm thrilled
to say that this work will be broadcast
on public television in the Pennsylvania region
on July the first, it's called A Gathering of Sons.
And it was an all-black team that created it
and directed it.
I think it was an offering that for our community
was very good.
Is it a critical piece for the renewal of the medium
across the nation, or in other countries,
I don't know, but I don't know if composers who have
that goal in mind as they approach their work
are realistically going to get there.
It's a whole series of happenstances that convert
an experiment into a national art treasure loved by all.
So we were happy with the result,
and we're thrilled that it's going on television,
and I'm sure I've spoken enough now.
- That's great.
Seeing as we've been discussing the future of opera,
it's convenient that we have two leading educators,
because you will be training the future of opera.
And given these kinds of changes, and these kinds of
innovations or adaptations, how do you train young
composers, singers, directors for an opera world
that doesn't yet exist?
David.
- At TCU, even from the very beginning,
I have emphasized that we need to do all sorts
of different styles of opera.
I do a huge opera scenes program every fall,
which sort of introduces everybody to the children,
the children, the students that we have in opera studio
that year, and we do everything from really, really early
music to things that haven't been
even performed publicly before.
My first piece that I chose to do when I took over
the opera program was Nico Muhly's Dark Sisters,
which is an amazing piece about the fundamentalist
Mormon cult that is in, it's usually found
in northern Arizona, southern Utah.
It's an amazing opera, which studies all kinds of things
about those issues.
And it speaks in a language that was incredibly
challenging to my students, and then we just did
a world premiere.
I want them to be exposed to be able to do everything,
because when they get out into the real world,
the first jobs they're going to get are not gonna be
any more for big opera companies,
it's gonna be for the American Opera Center in New York,
or places that hire young singers to come in
and do brand new works.
And they need to be able to sing, to converse
in any musical language that is thrown in front of them.
So we try to prepare them for that
while they're still students.
And the interesting thing about it is,
they don't even really know the difference,
because for them, Marriage of Figaro is just as new
as Dark Sisters.
So they're just learning stuff.
They don't know that they're being prepared to go out
and have experience in a wide variety of things.
- Jonathan.
- I think we need to train our young artists
in deference to the fact that they need
to make a living, also,
in a good bit of the standard repertoire.
It's really hard being an opera singer in terms
of all that you have to learn.
They have to be able to sing in different languages,
they have to understand what the languages mean,
that's critical. They've gotta have the notes,
the tubes, the pipes, and they have to be able to act, too.
So as I come into this program, I discover that,
like many colleges and conservatories,
there's a terrific focus on singing,
we have wonderful singing teachers,
but there isn't a sequence of movement and acting classes
that leads you up to being a stage animal
and performing on stage.
And I'm working to address that.
With regard to preparing them for a newer, exciting
opera world out there, I think they've got to be able
to do a bit of crossover in very many areas.
So they have to be able to entertain.
None of us should knock entertainment,
I think actually it's, the first requirement is that
you entertain your audience.
If you can then teach them about the meaning of life,
that's something wonderful in addition.
But the big crime, first of all, is to bore people.
So they have to be able to entertain,
they have to realize that opera is a theatrical art form,
and they have to have theatrical skills.
And many of them come into our conservatories
with absolutely no awareness that it's about a lot more
than just singing.
That's one big part of it.
Another part of the crossover then is, how can we train
them to appreciate and be excited by the new?
And we're going to start commissioning some new works
at UNT, hopefully in collaboration with some other
fine conservatories, and, wow, doesn't
the Republic of Texas have a lot of really good
conservatories and colleges of music, really excellent.
So hey, David, maybe we should collaborate
and commission something together, what do you think?
- I already have something in mind, actually.
- Oh good, so this is going to be an interesting evening.
So we want them to do new work.
There's an American composer, Tom Cipullo,
and we're doing the complete works of Tom Cipullo.
Whew, he says, it's only three and a half hours,
'cause he's written five chamber operas.
We think he's one of the sort of up-and-coming
American significant opera composers.
So our students have to be able to do in a year
Marriage of Figaro, a reduced version of Faust,
the reduced version's interesting, too,
Alcina, the complete works of Tom Cipullo,
and Street Scene, the Kurt Weill
sort of Broadway opera crossover.
So that's how we're trying to do it.
I'll let you know in 20 years whether we're succeeding.
- I think Glory Denied, Tom Cipullo's opera,
was done by Fort Worth Opera.
- Yeah, yeah.
- David, you mentioned something about the nature
of The Falling and the Rising, and that it was
consciously aimed at some place, what Jon had called
crossover, between opera and musical theater,
what is that place?
What is the distinction?
- That's a whole long discussion about what's opera
and what's musical theater.
You know, you can talk about it vocally.
This piece demanded a lot that singers be able to sing
in a sort of Broadway style, a lot of middle voice,
a lot of conversation, without necessarily belting
for the sopranos, but still a lot of,
kind of a lighter vein of music.
And yet, then suddenly it would take off
with huge soaring lines, a lot of high stuff
for the soprano, real legit stuff for all
of the men who sang.
So it was just this mix, but it was tuneful enough
that an audience could think that they were
almost listening to a musical comedy, as well,
yet the music itself was very challenging to sing,
orchestrally very challenging,
so that's what the genre was kind of mixed.
When it came out, it's not really a musical,
not really an opera, my answer to that was, yeah, so?
It is what it is, it's a piece of music,
and it speaks in its own language,
and you have to be prepared in all the ways
that Jonathan was speaking about in order to perform it.
You have to be able to sing, act, all of that stuff,
and entertain, and yet maybe it was its own little
hybrid genre, I'm not sure.
- Jonathan, you're dealing with musical theater,
you're foraging through Rodgers
and Hammerstein's back catalog.
- I am, and there's some terrific stuff there,
and I am the proud and happy dad of an American
late teenager who did musical theater in high school,
and I'm here to tell you that it's alive and kicking,
and some of it's really very, very good.
In a way, that is the indigenous music drama of America,
and so it should be.
We should have, say I, 'cause I'm a professor now,
so I'm allowed to profess.
So I would profess that we need pyramids
of cultural activities that extend from the grassroots
very broadly around wide communities, and then
they work their way up through various organizations
until you get to The Met at the top, let us say.
And musical theater is a part of that.
The word in Germany for opera is rarely oper,
it's usually muziktheater, music theater,
and lots of crazy little companies in other countries
use the word music theater and step away, perhaps,
from opera, but ultimately, it's much the same thing.
It's telling stories through music and drama.
And if you look at a piece like Les Mis, it's an opera
all the way through insofar as it's sung all the way through,
not a word is spoken.
So sometimes the distinctions are moot.
But the talking to people in a language they can understand
about things that matter to them
is not moot, that's important.
The language doesn't have to be a language
they're always familiar with, but it does have to be
about something that matters, and it does
have to be comprehensible.
You can, at first hearing, enter into a world,
perhaps like your Nico Muhly piece, if the composer
and the librettist are truthful, or have integrity,
or in clever, sometimes these words are hard pressed
to describe some of the responses that opera
really feeds off, but truth and integrity
and beauty are part of it, and that's not just a preserve
of a grand style of opera.
Indeed, I would go further and say that the bigger
the operatic activity, the more in some levels
it removes itself from the day-to-day audiences.
We're trained in the world of drama that's very intimate,
screens mostly, and there's a huge advantage
in something that's up close and personal
if we want to affect people, and touch them,
and talk to them.
And the bigger your theater space, the further removed
the bulk of your audience are from the human beings
on stage, and unless you're careful, opera can become
a business that's about distant singers
on far-flung stages singing in foreign languages.
That would describe a great deal of operatic activity
in some of our bigger companies in bigger cities.
But if you don't have that wider grassroots base
to the pyramid, you're not feeding people
into that system where the further up you go,
the more rarefied the atmosphere.
Did I answer your question?
- More than answered. - More than enough.
- Yes, go ahead. - If I may.
Nico Muhly was a young student at Columbia University,
he was also at the same time studying at Juilliard,
and we did a production of Midsummer Night's Dream,
and I liked the way he composed.
And so when he was still at Columbia and I had graduated,
I asked him to create music for a production
of The Magnificent Cuckold.
He created fantastic music, and he got to work with actors,
got to see how the stage works.
And here we are talking about opportunity.
It is very important with opera to provide
opportunities to young composers.
And another thing that is very important for me is image.
For new audiences, younger audiences, it is very important
that we present an image that they can identify with.
Even before the singers sing the first note,
what the audience is seeing, that has a huge impact.
And it needs to be something that, in my opinion,
audiences need to be able to relate to.
- This is the point in the program which I normally ask
for questions from the audience,
but I thought I'd experiment
with something different tonight.
If you heard my radio promos for this evening,
the promos opened with a question.
What would it take for you to go see your first opera?
And I assume that there are some people here tonight
who haven't seen a live opera,
maybe you only saw them on television
or on The Met Live programs.
I want you to think, seriously, what it would take
for you to see your first opera?
Change in price, assurance that it's not in German?
And those of you who have seen operas,
what did it take for you to choose an opera?
And I don't mean your mother.
I mean when you had that chance, and decided to put
your money down, what led you to say,
Dead Man Walking sounds like a fine date night.
So I'm curious.
I'm sure that the opera professionals here
would appreciate the survey data.
So does anyone have recollections?
If you don't, I'm gonna threaten you
with continuing to talk.
Excuse me, going with a friend?
- [Female] Yes, friend, the invitation.
- Yes. - I remember
in New York City, this was several years ago,
they had New York City Opera, which were super affordable
for young kids who wanted to enjoy the atmosphere,
but couldn't afford The Met.
And that was a really easy way for me to go see something.
These are up-and-coming singers who are about to make it big,
they're practicing their craft.
It wasn't perfect, they're missing notes, and it was awesome,
because you were growing with them, (inaudible).
I think the one thing I didn't know was that there would (inaudible) that opportunity to go.
To see the singers and kind of grow with them.
- Yes.
- [Female] I would like to hopefully attend an opera
that I would be able to experience thinking
in a different language, but also need to understand
in English, subtitles, or some other way
to actually get some meaning out of what they're saying,
not just the emotional.
- Maria de Buenos Aires is gonna be done in Spanish
with English supertitles.
- Yeah, we always have supertitles in our operas.
- I think all of us do.
- So maybe that's something that people don't know,
so thank you for that. - We actually do
all our operas in English in Pittsburgh.
There are only two companies left in the nation,
I think, us and Opera Theater of St. Louis that do that.
So we're doing a Boheme, for instance, in English,
but we're making it an Andy Warhol-style Boheme,
because Andy was a Pittsburgher.
And I've always believed, and will firmly believe,
that comedy in particular is always better
in the language of the audience, and that it's one
of our strange opera snobberies that pretends otherwise.
Not all works may be better in the language of the audience.
It's true that there are a couple of Italian bel canto
works that tend to sound better in Italian,
and maybe some of those are the plots we don't
want to understand anyway, like Trovatore.
- Exactly, but Jonathan, that gets back to another point
you made earlier about the size of the theater.
So if you're in a 3,000-seat house doing opera in English,
sometimes it's almost beside the point,
because you can't understand it, it's so hard
to have diction that reaches the last person
in the house in that language.
So that goes back to smaller houses.
You do it in the language, and then people can have this,
it's like going to see a play, or going to see something
that they would totally understand.
It's that size of the house again that becomes
a real tricky thing about doing.
Sorry to go on, but when I was getting started,
I worked for the Houston Grand Opera,
and we used to do, we had two series.
We had the international series and the American series.
And the American series was doing the same opera,
but in English with younger singers.
So you do Aida, and you do Aida with the Italian cast,
and then Aida with the English-speaking cast.
The chorus, interestingly, had to learn it in both languages
and perform it on alternating nights
in a different language.
But I'm telling you, when you would sit there
and you would be lucky if you got 40% of what was being said
on stage, even though they were singing in English,
just because it's so hard to project the text
in gigantic houses like that.
- Mind you, I think that's a failing of we educators
or teachers in opera, too, because certainly
the voice teachers, while they may be
committed to language, their job is really
to teach technique, they may well think.
And unless you're in a college or a conservatory
where this notion of clarity of diction
is hammered into you, you can get away with blue murder
as a singer, and pink murder, too, for that matter.
- Anyone else about, yes sir.
- [Male] I saw my first opera when I was a kid,
but fortunately it was Die Fledermaus.
Awesome music, and I think they probably spoke
in English and sung in German.
I think, but had it been, what I would consider
a modern opera, it's atonal and hard to listen to,
I probably wouldn't have gone to another one.
So it was great music, and it was very accessible,
and I encourage you to do more.
- I also think that you'd be very hard put
to find atonal opera now.
There's a whole new language that composers
are composing in today, which is much more accessible.
I mean, if you went to some of those 12-tone operas
during the '70s and '80s, it was torture.
It was torture going to the theater--
(audience member speaks)
But people are writing--
- It's necessary to hear sometimes something atonal and come back to what you're talking about.
Absolutely, and I think, didn't German Gutierrez
who is our conductor at TCU, didn't he just do
a big 12-tone work,
because it was a composer from his homeland
that he really wanted to feature.
So yes, we got a whole big taste
of it again fairly recently.
But there's all kinds of new languages, so you shouldn't
be afraid to go to a modern opera because you think
it's gonna be atonal and weird and ugly,
because people are writing in amazingly beautiful
musical languages now, which is very accessible.
- Thanks to America, I would say.
- Yes, George.
- [George] Ballet has its introductory ballet piece,
The Nutcracker. When will opera,
or can opera, develop a piece that is so universally beloved,
and so accessible to, say, kids, people who are
five-year-old children, can there be such a piece
that is, in fact, a kind of universal introduction
to the idea of opera?
Or do we need to go back to Bernstein
and the concert for children idea?
- Well, I think there are starter operas.
Like Hansel and Gretel is a great opera to get children
to go, and it's a story that they can totally relate to.
Musically, it's incredibly complex, so that it
can appeal, also, to music lovers.
You know, we've got our Bohemes and our Traviatas,
which everybody, I mean I always go back to
Moonstruck, when Cher went to her first opera,
and was crying her eyes out in the end,
because she said, I knew she was sick,
but I didn't know she was gonna die.
So I think that there are a few that I certainly recommend
as starter operas when people come up to me and say,
what should I go see?
- This isn't for children, but for me,
Stephen Sondheim was a gateway drug that,
Little Night Music was the one, I realized that it was
more than just the usual musical.
And so I started exploring from there.
So that's not a bad idea, actually, finding something
that's just simply musical theater that's accessible.
Because when I first encountered musical theater,
I thought it was just strange and boring,
mostly because it was a bad college production.
- And I think it also becomes, again, a little bit
the responsibility of larger opera companies
to produce smaller, pop-up operas, not only
for the community, but for the schools,
because, like he said, he saw that when he was 10 years old.
Most 10-year-olds don't get taken to an actual Bass Hall,
or an actual performance space, so I think that it becomes
the responsibility of the opera companies to create
smaller, more accessible works to take out
into the community and promote those smaller pieces.
I think that that would help a great bit.
- Yes, sir, you had your hand raised.
- For a number of folks, Julie Taymor's Magic Flute could work.
I've not seen that, and I like Julie Taymor's work.
- Magic Flute would be a wonderful introduction.
You do hit the language issue.
Magic Flute can subvert that by having the dialogue
in English, and I know lots of young people
who find going to their first opera in a foreign language
is automatically a barrier.
With The Nutcracker, it's not a barrier,
there is no language to get in the way.
You might say Carmen is a great first opera,
but then you'd still hit, for young people who've never had
a connection, or older people,
you said a first opera doesn't have to be for children,
that the language might become an issue.
And that's one of the challenges we inherit
with the repertoire that we inherit,
which is another reason why we need to do new works
that can draw people in.
There's also a fragmenting, though, of our culture
generally, isn't there.
People get locked more and more in one-on-a-screen,
or one-on-one, or smaller groups of connection
for their entertainment, as well.
And I think opera has to take cognizance of that.
The days when you can automatically assume
that a couple of thousand people will come in
to a big theater, I suspect are going.
And that if opera's to look to the future,
opera does need to produce smaller-scale works
of greater variety, and maybe take them out
to the people rather than expect the people
coming to them all the time.
- As I said, one of the great advantages of this space
is we can continue this conversation upstairs,
and with wine and beer.
So if we could thank our panel.
- And opera. Yes.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much.
Đăng ký:
Đăng Nhận xét (Atom)
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét