What Regional Opera Houses Can Do To Compete with the Met Movies

This article in the New York Times has had me thinking recently about what regional opera companies can do to capitalize on the Met's HD performances. It is, needless to say, a struggle for regional opera companies to compete with the opera movies; as one regional manager put it in the article, "They're invading our space." I sympathize with their plight and have never had personal experience running an opera house, but I do think there are a number of innovative tools local theathers can use to keep their neighbors coming to live performances.

My ideas gravitate around Utah Opera in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is because Salt Lake is the "regional" city I am most familiar with, and I am somewhat acquainted with their advertising, programming, and audience demographic. Utah Opera has the unusual distinction of being folded into the same organization as the Utah Symphony. This cooperation started about five years ago in an effort to maximize budget and resources, and it's had mixed results. For my purposes, I will stick with ideas for the opera even though all of these would have repercussions for the symphony as well.

1. Localize the live performance experience. In short, know your audience. The thing the Met can't do is understand a community and know exactly their tastes and interests. In Utah, this could mean introducing "theme nights" that take advantage of local populations. An "Apres Ski" night could invite tourists from down the mountain to dress casually and enjoy hot chocolate during the intermission. A "Family Night" could take place on a Monday, to capitalize on the LDS Family Home Evening, and use apprentices or University of Utah singers in a more intimate, child-friendly environment. Targetting the legions of young dating students in the area seems like a wise move: "Date Night" or "Romance at the Opera" or something like that could feature a particularly romantic opera, invite formal dress or sell roses at intermission... The point is that these are local groups unique to the Salt Lake region. Advertising for these nights could be done in a targetted market to reduce costs: just at the ski resorts, just at family hangouts or just at the universities. Opera can no longer be considered a sacred experience to be untouched by gimmick marketing. Audiences must be targetted and the product attractively packaged.

2. Insist on cinematic productions. Yes, that means casting for looks as well as voice. It's no longer acceptable to cast a physically unattractive woman as Turandot, the princess men die for, even if her voice is glorious. From what I've seen over the past couple of years, Utah Opera still has an opportunity to improve on this front.

3. Work to sync interesting programming across performing arts and academic organizations. If the University of Utah is producing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, put the Gounod opera on the program and then work with the University to cross market the contrasting works. This cross programming and cross marketing could be done with a number of different works and genres: work with the local art house to show the 1936 movie of Camille while La Traviata, featuring the same story, is playing at the opera. Do an exploration of Faustian characters across genres. (A similar idea was carried out with some success by Pamela Rosenberg at the San Francisco Opera.) Don Juan could be another theme: the Symphony could program Strauss' Don Juan tone poem while Mozart's Don Giovanni is playing across the street. This idea takes coordination and strong relationships with the other arts organizations, as well as additional funds for specialized marketing materials, but all the organizations benefit from this kind of cooperation.

4. Build alliances with other regional opera houses to share sets and costumes. This is already done frequently among houses, but I'm suggesting a more formalized union. I don't know much about the logistics of how this is done, but it seems to me that regional houses in the Rocky Mountain Region would benefit from working together to maximize resourses.

5. Abandon visits to schools and redistribute resources to getting students into the theater. I think there's very little benefit in bringing singers to school assemblies, etc. Opera music is so entirely different from what most young people are accustomed to today that one visit by a singer isn't going to make them immediately prefer a vertical melodic line over horizonal rhythmic music. Plus, they'll always associate it with school and who wants that. A more powerful introduction is the experience of actually going to the theater: seeing the otherworldliness of the curtain going up, people singing without microphones into a huge hall, learning to sit quietly out of respect for the performers, and most importantly, giving the students a sense of pride in their local organizations. This can be achieved by opening dress rehearsals, or using apprentices or vocal students in tailored programs.

6. Let donors decide where their money goes. To the extent possible, let donors decide if their money is going into the production costs, the singers' salaries or the young artist program. Maybe even let them pick the specific opera they want to put their money towards. Give donors a sense of ownership so that when they attend a performance, they can say, "My money helped create those costumes!" This kind of pride of ownership can only exist on the local level. Going to a Met movie doesn't give this type of satisfaction.

7. Promote the movies. As a regional opera house, do not let the community see that you fear the Met. Within a regional company there needs to be a healthy sense of the Met as competition, but I strongly believe that any audience interest in opera is good interest. It is too early to tell what the long term effects of the Met movies really will be on regional theaters, but my gut tells me that opera as an industry will benefit in the long term.

Some of these ideas take too much money; others are being carried out already. I'm sure there is a host of other creative ideas being tried across the country. I hope for the best for regional opera houses and applaude those who are doing their best to run them.

Introducing the Really Terrible Orchestra

A friend of mine who lives in London just introduced me to the Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO), a group of amateur musicians from Edinburgh, Scotland, who somehow attract a paying audience. It seems that their founder is Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and an amateur musician himself. I'm not quite sure what to make of this ragtag group, but since I've never heard them perform, perhaps I'll defer to my friend's own description:

"None of [the musicians] have any real talent and they play songs like "Yellow Submarine" between jokes and readings by the author Alexander McCall Smith.... And if any of them progress to "good" status, they have to leave the group. Admittedly, it is bizarre fare but also delightful."

The RTO will be performing in New York on April 1st. (Is it a coincidence this is April Fools Day?) I would love to see what the appeal is: Is it a feel-good experience where the audience cheers on dedicated but inept souls for pursuing their dream, or is there an element of mockery that delivers an evening of perversely satisfying schadenfreude?

Two Violinists Take to Subway Busking

I loved this profile in the New York Times' online edition. Henrique Prince is a self-taught violinist who jams in the Times Square subway station with his own bluegrass band. This is so New York to me: the chaos of the streets punctuated by the unexpected person making human connections. It may be what I love most about this city. As I've returned here after years of being away, I've been struck with what a prominent role music plays in the lives of people here, in a much more professional, academic way than the rest of the country enjoys it. This photo essay demonstrates this perfectly. In an effort to acknowledge this fact, I always let my children give money to subway buskers. They love this tradition and I know it helps them acknowledge how many people give their lives to their art form.

The profile also reminded me of the fabulous experiment conducted by Joshua Bell in April, 2007, reported in the Washington Post. Bell, a world-reknown solo violinist, dressed in jeans and a cap and annonymously played during rush hour in the L'Enfant Plaza station of the D.C. metro. The experiment was to see how many commuters would stop to hear the professional's music, or at least how many would pause in some subconsious recognition of exceptional skill. The official video of the experiment has been watched on YouTube by over a million viewers. That half a dozen people stopped out of the hundreds that passed by shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this country's abysmal recognition of classical skill, but I was amused recently to see that portions of the Post's article have shown up in a email chain. The "isn't this terrible this happened?" tone of the email underscores the irony of the whole experiment: in theory, we believe classical traditions and skills are important to our culture but when those skills are put right under our noses, we still don't recognize them. It is terrible, but without the trappings of the concert hall and pricey tickets most of us would have probably walked right by Joshua Bell ourselves, although I like to think my kids would have given him a few bucks.

A Night at the Ballet

I had the opportunity recently to watch two full-length story ballets, which is unusual for me since I don't follow ballet with the same regularity that I follow other classical art forms. The last time I attended a story ballet in person was probably about a decade ago, in San Francisco, where I thought the ballet company was, at that time, the finest performing arts organization in that city. (The opera was a little staid at that time and I heartily disagree with Tilson-Thomas's passionless Mahler.)

I much more prefer the storyless one-acts of Balanchine et al, but I had the opportunity to see these recent two through the eyes of my oldest daughter, who is five. We attended Coppelia at New York City Ballet (Esme pictured with her friend, above) which was Esme's first live ballet performance. I was actually surprised we made it through the whole performance, since the ballet started after my daughter's normal bedtime. I found myself surprisingly pleased by the ballet itself. The music of French composer Delibes added an element of interest for me during the first two acts, which are dominated by mimed/danced storytelling, and then the third act offered a full half hour of satisfying dancing in an elaborate wedding scene. Perhaps it was just that my daughter was enthralled by the whole experience, but I found it refreshing to watch such a traditional performance of a wholesome, delightful show when so much of performance today is about reimagined productions or edgy cynicism.

Following Coppelia, my family watched the San Francisco Ballet's new production of The Nutcracker on TV. I know it's January and like everyone else, we're sick of Christmas stuff, but it was on our TiVo on a Sunday afternoon and somehow it sounded intriguing. I have seen (and performing in) the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker countless times, and this production was unlike any of the candy-coated tinsel that is passed off as ballet on so many stages during the holiday season. Taking its inspiration from the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair, the production has a restrained art deco influence. The set for the second act -- marzipan columns dripping with sugared fruits in so many other productions -- consisted only of a simple backdrop echoing the design of the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. The second act performers represented countries instead of candies or foods: Spain, Arabia, Japan, France etc. instead of Candy Canes, Marzipan, Hot Chocolate and others.

San Francisco's exceptional dancers, including the inestimable Yuan Yuan Tan, brought the highest quality to the dancing. On a cold Sunday afternoon in January, my whole family enjoyed the warmth of The Nutcracker as if we were seeing it for the first time.

Quartet for the Beginning of an Era

Change. Hope. Yes We Can. While all of that was very exciting, what I was looking forward to most at this morning's inauguration was the quartet by John Williams based on the tune "Simple Gifts". Before full details of the quartet's performance were made public, there was speculation here that a performance for violin, cello, clarinet and piano could only mean one thing: Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Considering that Messiaen wrote the piece in a concentration camp in 1941 for the musicians he had on hand, I would have found a performance of the Quartet - however transcendental the piece may be - a little creepy on this inaugural occasion. Instead, I was thrilled with the multicultural but still exceptional performance of an all-American tune representing the all-American sentiments of responsibility, sacrifice and integrity.

The Food of Love

The week before Christmas, I was excited to see the cover of The Economist magazine bear the headline, "Why We Love Music". The philosophy of music - why we respond to it, why it holds a prominent place in our culture, and how it affects our moods and behaviors - has always been of special interest to me, although more from a anthropological point of view than a neurological one. I suppose this is because my own musical interests span several different genres, and I wonder why so many different rhythms, tones and styles can all have meaning for me while "only" classical or "only" pop speak to others.

I was a little disappointed in the article's three hypotheses about why music is so eagerly consumed by our culture. While they might be scientifically proven, they seemed trite to me: 1. That music is a representation of our sexual personas and works to further our evolutionary reproductive drives; 2. That music binds groups of people together; and 3. That music satisfies an appetite in humans that is akin to "auditory pornography." It seems that most of the studies done by the scientists in the article are based on observations of primates and evolutionary biology, rather than looking at the particular relationship humans have with this "accidental language," as the article refers to it. A more insightful study of music, it seems to me, would choose to pick apart uniquely human responses to music: why, for instance, has music become more popular than ever in our cultures even though individual earphones have minimized the impact of social listening? Do we still feel unity with each other if we listen only in the virtual concerthalls of our iPods? If we're not listening in a group, what makes us feel like we're part of a group? Do we chalk up that feeling of unity merely to the marketing machine that accompanies most of today's music, or is there still something intrinsic in music -- even if experienced individually -- that links us to other humans?

The article states that "Anecdotal evidence linking music to sexual success is strong," a claim I do not doubt. But humans have drives beyond sex and a desire to belong that I believe also play into our cultural obsession with music. I would list among those alternative drives the desire to elevate ourselves to a more spiritual plane, a drive I doubt exists in primates (and one that was the seemingly-forgotten cultural force behind most of music up until the last few hundred years). Also, a drive to escape depression or to alter our mindset away from debilitating worries. A drive to express our creativity as humans, even if in a manufactured setting like karaoke or Guitar Hero.

Fortunately, this is an area of study that is still much of a mystery, so perhaps in the coming decades philosophers, anthopologists and perhaps even religious thinkers will join the evolutionary biologists in the study of why we love music. It should be a very exciting discussion.

In Memory of John N. McBaine, 1941 - 2008

My father, John Neylan McBaine, passed away on August 27th, 2008, after an 18-month battle with melanoma. It's appropriate to remember him here because even though it was my mother who was the professional musician, my dad was the one who showed me what it meant to have a true passion for classical music.

His particular love was opera. He clearly remembered attending his first opera in 1958 in San Francisco. I believe it was Lucia di Lammermoor, and he remained a fan of the bel canto repertoire his whole life. While he extolled Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, he also closely followed and adored the young, vibrant talent of Anna Netrebko, Angela Gheorghiu and Natalie Dessay. Although he bemoaned that much has changed about opera since his introduction to it in the 1960s, he never complained about the trend towards more beautiful, cinematic divas.

My dad took me to one of the first operas I can remember: a December 1983 performance of Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera, starting Eva Marton and conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. I was not even seven years old and now, as the mother of a five year old, I am astonished by my dad's willingness to risk offending old-school opera etiquette by bringing such a small child. I remember the event so clearly because it provided material for one of the first entries in my new Hello Kitty journal: I kept the program and noted how we sat in the first row, right behind Tennstedt himself. At the end of the opera during the applause, Tennstedt turned to bow, and he winked at the small child sitting in front of him.

My father remained opinionated and vocal about the state of opera and opera companies until his death. He took pride in helping David Gockley assume the helm of San Francisco Opera in 2007, replacing Pamela Rosenberg of whom he was not a fan. Mr. Gockley graciously attended my father's memorial reception a few weeks ago in San Francisco. Also present at the reception was Ruth Felt, director of San Francisco Performances which my dad supported. Most touching to me was the presence of Philip Eisenberg, confined to a wheelchair. Philip was a prompter and coach at San Francisco Opera and at the Metropolitan Opera for many of the years that my mother was singing at those houses. Philip's friendship dates back to the early 1970s when my mom was touring with Western Opera and my dad was serving as the overseer of Western Opera on the San Francisco Opera board. A courtship blossomed in the back of the touring bus between the bohemian mezzo and the society bachelor. Philip was there then, and he was there for me the night of my dad's memorial.

Although my parents separated when I was twelve and divorced when I was nineteen, opera was always an olive branch in our home. It is hard for me to separate objective critique of the art form from the emotional peace it triggers from childhood memories. I am indebted to the singers, composers and directors -- including my own mother -- who offered the beauty and skill that made my father happy.