Cincinnati Opera follows Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg,” first production of its 2010, 90th anniversary season, with Verdi’s “Otello.”
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday (July 7 and 10) at Music Hall and will be conducted by Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Heading the cast is tenor Antonello Palombi as Otello, with soprano Maria Luigia Borsi as Desdemona and baritone Tom Fox as Iago. Director is Bernard Uzan, scenic design by Allen Charles Klein. The opera, to be sung in Italian with English surtitles, is based on the play by William Shakespeare.
Spano, who is making his Cincinnati Opera debut, comes perfectly positioned to comment on Verdi vs. Wagner, having recently led two cycles of Wagner’s massive “Der Ring des Nibelungen” for Seattle Opera.
“It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t hear the tone of Verdi’s voice when he said, ‘Wagner is dead; it’s so sad,’” said Spano, between rehearsals of “Otello” July 1 at Music Hall. “In a way, ‘Otello’ feels to me like a letter to Wagner saying, ‘I can do in two hours what you can’t do in six.’ There is a concision and an absolute mastery of craft and an opposite time scale. If you think about how long any event takes in ‘Otello’ -- what’s the storm (beginning of the opera), two and a half minutes? ‘Fuoco di gioia’ (Cypriots rejoicing over a bonfire in act I), a minute and a half?”
“The drama is constantly being propelled. It’s a marriage of musical time and dramatic time (as later in Puccini). Essentially, dramatic time unfolds much more quickly than musical time. That’s why recitative was invented (rapid, speech-like passages linking arias in opera performances).”
“Meistersinger” (performed June 23 and 26 at Music Hall) is not yet a “music drama” in the sense that “The Ring” is. It has arias and choruses and is more of a “grand opera” in the mid to late-19th-century tradition (such as Verdi’s “Aida”). But at over four hours to “Otello’s” two-and-a-half, it operates in a different time frame.
“When you enter Wagner’s time zone, you’re no longer thinking about how long it’s taking. Wagner will often just suspend dramatic time and go into a kind of psychologically ruminating musical time. In a sense, he is outside of time – historically, too, because he’s doing it in a way that’s unique to him.
“What’s so amazing about Verdi,” said Spano, “is that he’s Wagner’s equal, but totally different. At this point in my life (“The Ring” was Spano’s first big Wagner immersion and “changed my life around,” he said), I would be unwilling to pick between them.”
Raised in Elkhart, Indiana, Spano, 49, was born in tiny Conneaut in the northeastern-most tip of Ohio (population 12,745 in 2000). We left when I was two, but I went back every year at least once. It was part of my childhood even though I didn’t grow up there.” His father, a flute maker and instrument repairman, worked for Conn and Gemeinhardt in Elkhart. “He’s officially retired, but he still works all the time. He’s now working for Selmer. At 76, he just can’t stop.”
Spano played piano, flute and violin and began composing and conducting in high school. He graduated from Oberlin Conservatory as a piano major, then went to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia to study conducting with former CSO music director Max Rudolf. His first job was director of orchestra activities at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, after which he returned to Oberlin as a faculty member. He served as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa and began teaching at the Tanglewood Music Center in the summer, heading its conductor training program from 1998-2002. He was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1995-2004, a storied tenure that brought it widespread recognition for cutting edge content and presentation. Spano guest conducted the Cincinnati Symphony most recently in October 2002 and has the highest praise for the orchestra. Music Hall, he says, is “beautiful. It’s just too big. That’s a challenge you don’t need.”
(The Atlanta Symphony performs in 1,762-seat Symphony Hall at the Woodruff Performing Arts Center. Plans to build a new 2000-seat hall have been stalled since signature architect Santiago Calatrava’s $300 million design was rejected last year. Music Hall currently seats 3,516, though plans for “revitalization,” including reducing the number of seats, are in the works.)
Spano has been making waves since becoming ASO music director (like CSO music director Paavo Järvi, his gala inaugural concert in September 2001 was dimmed by 911). One way is by cultivating new music – and new audiences for new music.
“What we’ve found,” said Spano, “is we don’t have an audience. We have audiences. We have a different audience if we’re doing world premieres than if we’re doing Mahler Five (Fifth Symphony). Then there are the people who want both. The reason I know we have plurality of audiences is that I get opposite complaints from different people. I always figure if I’m making everybody equally unhappy, I’m doing my job well.”
Spano and the ASO have adopted a group of composers, referred to as the “Atlanta School,” whose works they premiere and feature prominently in concert and on disc. They include Jennifer Higdon (an Atlanta native), Osvaldo Golijov (whose opera "Ainadamar" was performed by Cincinnati Opera in 2009), Christopher Theofanidis and Adam Schoenberg. At present, said Spano, “my marketing director expects a 5 to 15 percent ticket spike if we’re doing music of our Atlanta School.” They have even built their season on it and marketed it accordingly. In 2005-06, Golijov’s “Ainadamar” and “La Pasion segun San Marcos” (“The Passion of St. Mark”) were the twin pillars of the season, which was dubbed “Pasion.” “It was a risk to the market the season on new music, but it did pay off,” said Spano.
“We look for balance,” said Spano. “In a sense, we use the museum gallery analogy. We want to make sure our standing exhibits are tended to and taken care of. We also want to make sure the gallery is fresh and changing, yet with enough consistency that you know you’re going to get a certain kind of experience, even if it’s always going to be a little different. There is some trust built there. We did this slowly and in a quite calculated way, and what’s been gratifying is that it worked.”
Spano’s mission was “totally different,” in Brooklyn, he said. “In Brooklyn, I didn’t feel we had any reason to be a museum. We were at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a hot spot of avant garde art, dance, theater and music. Anybody from Brooklyn who wants to can easily get to midtown and hear the New York Philharmonic, so while I was there, our decision was to present that which you weren’t going to hear unless you came to the Brooklyn Philharmonic. It was a niche kind of attitude. In Atlanta, we are the flagship institution, so we have to play a larger role. We have to be the New York Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.”
Surprisingly, considering his wide-ranging reputation and experience, Spano’s discography is small. He has made only a dozen or so recordings (nine with the ASO), but he has garnered six Grammys. Three were for Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “A Sea Symphony” (Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album, 2003, for Telarc), two for Golijov’s “Ainadamar” (Best Opera Recording, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, 2006, Deutsche-Grammophon) and one for Berlioz: Requiem (Best Choral Performance, 2005, Telarc). All were for performances with the ASO and ASO Chorus.
Although Telarc, having been acquired by Concord Records and become part of the Concord Music Group, has stopped producing its own recordings, Spano and the ASO still work with Telarc producers. “What we’re investigating now is how to distribute. We’ve had a few options in front of us for a while and we’re very close to making a decision. What that means is we’ll be producing the recording itself with our ‘Telarc-ians.’”
Spano has confidence in classical music and feels no need to “dumb it down” to attract audiences. “I approach it with a real sense of naiveté,” he said. “I trust quality. You start there and it works. Elitist attitudes like “if you enjoy it, it can’t be any good” are “just nonsense,” said Spano. “Those of us who want to present great art make too many assumptions about who might be interested in it.
“I trust that the great stuff attracts more people than crap. I also think there are some great things that will never attract a lot of people. There are things that I’ll love and a few people will share that love with me, while most other people are never going to love it. That has nothing to do with elitism and doesn’t mean it’s better. It means that that sensibility is more rare. There are some things that aren’t so great that will attract a lot of people, and that doesn’t mean they have no value either.
“For me, the trap in a democracy is to equate public opinion with an assessment of artistic value. I don’t think there’s any truth in it one way or the other.”
Spano navigates all climes when it comes to music. Recipient of an honorary doctorate from Emory University in 2009, he has named Distinguished Artist in Residence last October. As such, he will lecture, co-teach seminars and present recitals on various aspects of music for three weeks a year. The program began in March with a focus on metaphysics and the origins of music in western culture.
“Each year I have a faculty liaison and we create a seminar
together. The guy I got to work with
this year is just brilliant, Steve Everett, who is on the music faculty. We got fascinated with the idea that every
cultural thread in European history you trace to the Greeks. Should we be able to do that? What is the connection with Pythagorean
musical thought, which is quite precisely, mathematically acoustical as well as
speculative and cosmological?”
Sound heavy? Visit http://www.robertspanomusic.com/artist.php?view=media for clips; also http://blogs.emory.edu/harmonicexperience where the affable Spano expounds with Everett on everything from numerology to sonata form. (Coincidentally, Spano once pursued an advanced degree in philosophy, having had a passion for it since high school, he said.) While at Emory this spring he also spoke to MBA students on how a leadership model works within an orchestra.
In 2011, Spano will work with an Emory sociologist on “the ways we access music and how musical experiences are different.” In 2012, his theme will be text in music and he will work out of the English department, he said.
Being named Distinguished Artist in Residence at Emory was “horribly intimidating,” he said, “knowing that my predecessors had been the Dalai Lama and Salman Rushdie. I don’t have an orange robe or a fatwa.”
Spano is glad that the plight of symphony orchestras today --their financial woes and declining attendance – is finally “boiling up.”
“I remember when I was a kid people talking about the symphony orchestra model not being sustainable. It’s continued to falter throughout my lifetime and since 2008, everybody is in big trouble. Symphony orchestras have known as long as I’ve been alive that we have to work on how we structure ourselves, what we do and how we fund it. It’s just more obvious now, and if we don’t adapt, we’ll die.”
Key to orchestras’ survival is renewal, he said. “Music is like dance, an art form that has to be continually created in the moment. It’s not an object. You can’t have it. You have to constantly make it.” As Spano told Emory University Secretary and Vice President Rosemary Magee in a special “Creativity Conversation” April 14, “art must be vital to life now. If it’s not done by symphony orchestras, so be it.”
Robert Spano conducts Verdi’s “Otello” at 7:30 p.m. July 7 and 10 at Music Hall. Tickets are $26-$157 at www.cincinnatiopera.org or call (513) 241-2742.