(bright orchestral music) - [Announcer] Tonight, on "Showcase with Barbara Kellar," Artistic Director of the Cincinnati Opera, Evans Mirageas.

Stay tuned, "Showcase" starts right now.

(baroque orchestral music) (water rushes) (birds chirp) - Hi, I'm Barbara Kellar, welcome to "Showcase."

I have today one of your favorite guests of mine, one of my favorites, Evans Mirageas, who is Mr. Opera here in this town.

And opera season is almost upon us, and we wanted to talk to him about all things opera.

I have a beginning question here, the question I am asked mostly by people is, "How do you choose your guests and your topics?"

So I want to know, how do you choose your operas, what you're gonna do, what is the formula?

- It's an interesting word that you use, formula, because for my 17 years here, we've probably had 17 formulas.

- (laughs) Okay.

- At first, it was a little bit like the old saying about planning a wedding, "something old, something new, "something borrowed, something blue."

And when we did four operas in Music Hall, and a lot of people remember that, that's where we landed after the years at the Zoo, and the first years in Music Hall, but it was four operas in Music Hall when I arrived.

There was always the thought, well, every year, you should end the season with one of, what we call the top-10 operas, the ABCs of opera, "Aida," "Boheme," "Carmen," right?

For all sorts of good reasons, first of all, it's the opera and the season to which you potentially sell the most tickets, but it's also the opera with which you close the season that has people seeing Music Hall filled to the brim, and say, "Ah, I want to come back," "I want to subscribe," or, "I want to resubscribe."

It's also important, and that's one formula that hasn't changed, because most people are introduced to opera in one of two ways.

One, it's a familiar title, they recognize it, either because it's been on television, they saw "Moonstruck," or whatever, or they're brought by a friend, or a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or a teacher, or a parent, or an aunt, uncle, or grandmother, those two factors combine to really oblige us to end the season with something that everybody knows.

I never tire of producing the top-10 operas because they are masterpieces.

And of course, every time we present them, we have a different cast, - Yeah, exactly.

a different conductor, a different set, most times.

So that's the one thing that hasn't changed, we will almost always end the season with something that you know, or think you know.

The rest of the season has evolved over the years, because we also like to start with something relatively familiar.

We're gone for, let's say 10 months out of the year of the people's consciousness, the Symphony is in Music Hall from September through May, May Festival is around, a rich theater life, a rich ballet life, CCM.

I mean, it's a very crowded field in the fall, winter and spring, and it takes people a while to remember, ah, yes, opera, in the summertime.

- Yeah, that's right, exactly.

So we like to come back with something that you think you know.

So not another top-10 opera always, but something that is a little bit more familiar.

Then in the middle, used to be, we would do an opera which we would call "the patron's opera."

So this is an opera that is maybe a little bit less familiar.

I like to say it's a less famous opera by a more famous composer, or a more famous opera by a less famous composer.

Now, all of that has evolved a little bit, because what we decided in 2013 is that there was a whole range of operas that we weren't presenting, or couldn't present, because we had to fill the, then, 3,400 seats of Music Hall.

- Right, and that's a lot of seats.

- That's a lot of seats.

Plus, if you did an esoteric opera that had, let's say a small or devoted following, you know the vastness of Music Hall, those 500 or 700 diehard fans would look around and say, am I the only dummy who bought a ticket?

So we were very fortunate when SCPA came online, and the School for Creative and Performing Arts, which is at the corner of Central Parkway and Elm Street, has a beautiful, fully-equipped modern auditorium that can conceive opera production.

Erich Kunzel made sure of that, that was one of his passions in helping get the school moved to that location.

So we moved into SCPA so that we could do either smaller operas, newer operas, operas we wouldn't consider putting on in Musical Hall.

So then the calculus changes, and you can actually, if you're performing in two theaters, start doing what we call repertory.

So you could go to the show in SCPA one night, and a show in Musical Hall the next night.

One further wrinkle happened about seven or eight years ago, is that we also realized that lots of people who are new to opera want to come to slightly shorter operas, and also like going to, let's call it a non-traditional performing space, "Boheme" in a bar, all right?

- [Barbara] (laughs) Yeah, all right.

- And we have lots of breweries now, and so non-traditional, let's say not a proscenium theater with the orchestra in the pit, and the singers on the stage, and you removed, lots of people like to go to smaller spaces.

And, the enthusiasm for newly composed works is on the rise, especially among younger opera-goers, who are willing to try something new, because they don't have a 20-year tradition of going to see "Aida," "Boheme" and "Carmen."

So that changed the calculus even again.

So we would then think about, all right, now, what is something we can do in a smaller space that is a little bit more cutting edge?

So we did a little beta testing, as we called it, in the years that we were at the Aronoff, you know, like everybody else, we moved out of Music Hall, so it could be renovated.

And when we were in the Aronoff, we did a first opera by Missy Mazzoli, wonderful composer, called "Song from the Uproar," about an incredible adventuress who lived in the 1920s by the name of Isabelle Eberhardt.

Very small-scale show, six or seven instrumentalists, that was a hit.

So now what we have is more than one venue, and more than one type of opera, we still have those pillars of ending the season with something that you love, it can be, as I said, "Aida," "Boheme" and "Carmen," and we have much more flexibility now as to what we can present and where we can present it.

So every year there's going to be a new formula, because it will depend on whether we have been involved in the commissioning of a new work, we wanna make sure that that has the right spot on the stage.

So the other aspect of what we choose, is when it plays, and what's the size of the production.

So let's say we want to do something really ambitious, technically, an elaborate set, something that is really amazing from that point of view, we tend to put it at the beginning of the season, because we have more time on stage before we begin our first production.

The second production in Music Hall has a little bit less time, so we have to be very careful, it can't be too elaborate in terms of its technical requirements, it still should be dazzling and beautiful, but we work very hard behind the scenes with our director of production, Lyla Forlani, to make certain that opera number two in Musical Hall is a little bit easier to get into the theater.

Doesn't mean it gets less time to be rehearsed, but it needs to be a little bit more convenient for getting in and out of that vast space.

But then we have these other two beautiful moving parts of an undisclosed location, as it would, we've done things in the Wilks Studio now in Music Hall, and SCPA, so then those become, I would say, little moving targets, and they go, those operas go wherever they are best suited to butting up against another main stage opera, so that there could come the time when you could have a destination weekend of opera in Cincinnati and see three operas, in three different places.

- Wow.

- So that's what drives some ways of how we pick titles.

But beyond that, it becomes, often, what haven't we done lately?

What are operas that we are seeing other companies do?

I'm talking about operas that exist, not new pieces.

What are operas that we are seeing trending around the country?

I'll give you a wonderful example, we haven't done it yet, but it's beginning to take on, there's a wonderful opera by Tchaikovsky, now, not "Eugene Onegin," which we've done, but it's called "The Queen of spades."

I personally think it's the greater of the two operas, but it's the less well known.

20 years ago, nobody was doing "The Queen of Spades."

Then the MET did a production, and then San Francisco did a production, and then Chicago did a production, and then you begin to see other companies around the country saying, ah, we want to do "The Queen of Spades" as well.

So in some ways, existing operas have vogues and come into people's consciousness.

And now of course, with the incredible MET HD broadcasts on the weekends, which are, of course, coming back, people are being exposed to a broader variety of repertoire and saying to me, when are you gonna do X?

Then there's this other arm, which is newly composed operas.

Since the beginning of my tenure, and even predating me, Cincinnati Opera has taken a bold step in presenting, almost every single year, a newly composed opera.

It's either something that we've been part of commissioning, or something that we've seen someplace else and that we want to bring to Cincinnati.

And that's part of the calculus that is wonderfully new, because we are staying in touch with a profession that continues to evolve.

So the formula is many formulas, in the end.

- When you say "we," is that you, and who else?

- It takes a village.

So when I go and talk to my fellow producers, artistic directors, around the country, and I tell them that I have a very active, very loyal, and very knowledgeable artistic planning committee of the board, they throw up their hands in horror.

- Oh, yes.

- "You let your board have a voice in what you do?"

- Oh yeah, that is problematic.

- Well, I'm fond of saying, I'm not Oz, it's not, pay no attention to that- - To the man behind- - Behind the curtain.

- No.

- And I'll tell you why, because we are blessed in this city with passionate opera-goers.

We may not be the biggest city that produces opera in the country, but the women and men who serve on our board serve because they love opera.

And many of them have the time and, thank goodness, the treasure, to go and see opera all over the country, all over the world.

That's beginning again after COVID, of course.

And so I have a committee that helps us with their own opinions, their own experiences of going to see operas, and I try to convene that committee at least twice a year, and we throw out ideas to them.

The staff, obviously, myself, Chris Milligan, our chief executive, Lyla, our director of production, our marketing manager, wonderful new Todd Bazold, who's joined us from the symphony, actually, and many other members of our knowledgeable staff, all are always shooting ideas to us.

So we then sort of boil it down to what we haven't done lately, what we really feel needs to come back more frequently, or less frequently, and also keep our eyes and ears on what's new.

We take that to this committee, they give us input as well, in the end, really, it's Chris and myself who have to make the final decision, because of course, all of this doesn't happen without funds.

- I was just gonna ask, budget has to come in there.

- That's right, you can dream all you want, but if you can't afford it, you can't produce it.

- You can't afford it, right.

- So that's where our wonderful director of philanthropy comes in, and Joe Peacock and his team are amazing, because they know, let's say they had a conversation with a potential donor who said, "You know, I love Russian opera," a little bell goes off, writes down a note in his book to say, next time we wanna do "Boris Godunov," this is the person to call.

It's far more complicated than that, ultimately, because it is grants, it is foundations, it is of course ArtsWave, which plays such an important part in our lives, and in everybody's lives in Cincinnati.

So what we do is we begin to narrow in on a slate, let's say, and then we start crunching the numbers, and quite often, I will tell you, there have been seasons that when we finally announced them, where like the development of computer programs, it's sort of 2015-7.6, because 17 operas have come and gone in the course of our planning, when we finally settle on it, it is this combination of production, what are we going to put on our stage to beguile the eyes of our audience, the singers.

Cincinnati, as you know so well, Barbara, you've been going to the opera a long time, is blessed with a long reputation of having some of the finest singers - The greatest.

- on the planet come here.

- We're spoiled.

- Well, and I'm fond of saying, and this is a backhanded way of saying it, but I'm fond of saying that it was actually, of all people, Adolf Hitler who gave Cincinnati Opera its prominence, because starting in the mid 1930s, when the National Socialists took over Germany and started instituting their laws against Jewish culture, Jewish performers did not want to go to Europe, in the summer, especially, and then eventually, ever.

And then as the war clouds darkened in the late 1930s, and the war began in 1939, nobody wanted, or could go to Europe.

In those days, there was only one place in the entire United States that was putting on grand opera, Cincinnati.

- At the Zoo.

- Yeah, that's right.

So we were the beneficiaries of a world conflict, because the performers were basically stuck in America, and they needed to work.

And in the old days, they would go to the Salzburg Festival, the Orange Festival or the Baths of Caracalla, or the Proms in London, all, closed.

So all of a sudden, you started seeing, and you can look at it almost year by year in our annals, how the cast gets starrier and starrier.

And so, by the middle of the war, we had everybody, almost every single great opera star has sung on the stage, at the Zoo.

And luckily, after World War II, in peace, the tradition was established, our audiences were expecting it, people were willing to give us donations to make certain that we would continue to have stars.

And a whole post-World War II generation of people, and they're legendary names now, like James Morrison, Beverly Sills, you name it.

So we have a tradition of birthing our own stars and nurturing them, as many companies do, but also having the appetite and the willingness of our patrons to say, we want to see major opera stars on the Cincinnati Opera stage.

And I'll tell you the other reason, is because we are blessed with the Cincinnati Symphony.

So we were rehearsing the first opera of this particular season, for the first time in the theater, a couple of nights ago, "La Boheme."

Our director is French Canadian, he's been with us many times, Alan Gauthier is his name, Alan's done lots of operas with us, and he came walking up to me with tears in his eyes at the end of the rehearsal for act three.

It was just the singers on the stage in their street clothes, the set wasn't even on the stage yet, but the Cincinnati Symphony with Mark Gibson in the pit playing "La Boheme," and he was crying, he said, "I forget how great an orchestral score this is, because normally most opera orchestras are okay, but they're not the Cincinnati Symphony.

- Yeah, you know, it's also true about the ballet, had a fine, perfectly okay orchestra, but the difference in having a major symphony playing for the opera, or the ballet, and we have Louise Nippert to thank for that.

- The Louise Dieterle Nippert Musical Arts Fund is the other thing that every other producer in the country looks at me, not with horror, but with envy.

Because I tell them, "I don't pay for my orchestra."

And they look at me, and they say- - It's already paid for.

- "What do you mean?"

Because Mrs. Nippert established this fund, the draw from that fund, which is given to the symphony to disperse amongst its own needs, and also to guarantee that they play for the ballet and the opera, is unique in the entire country.

Only in Europe, where opera houses are subsidized by the government, do you have a similar situation, so we are doubly blessed in Cincinnati.

- Exactly.

So having that as a foundation, it's hard not to be successful.

(laughs) - Well, it's hard not to be successful, but anybody can make a dud, and goodness knows, I have privately- - But the music is always good.

- I have privately said, "Why did I put that soprano on stage?

Oh, well, better luck next time," everybody does it.

But what it does oblige us, and I say this when we're in planning meetings, and budget meetings, to say, we've got the CSO playing this score, we have to have a singer who will be their equal.

- [Barbara] Who is up to it, yeah.

- And it's a wonderful tool.

And they reinforce one another, I cannot tell you how many times a singer at the first orchestra rehearsal comes up to me at the break and says, "This orchestra," I say, "Yeah, I get to work with this orchestra all the time."

- Exactly, yeah.

Some people may not realize that conducting that orchestra for opera is very different, the normal orchestra conductors don't conduct opera, it's a very different... - There are some who are double threats.

So for example, our own music director, Louis Langree, very experienced opera conductor, actually got his start in opera.

But you are absolutely right, there are many orchestra conductors who don't do opera, either, it's not that they don't like it, it's just that they didn't train to do it.

But I've always said, if you're a good opera conductor, you can be a great symphony orchestra conductor, because all of the greatest of the symphonic orchestra conductors, Karajan, Solti, just to start there, Ricardo Muti, James Levine, everyone, they started in opera.

Because if you think about it, if you can combine keeping this, 60 or 70 musicians who are below you in the pit coordinated with a 65 or 70-piece choir on the stage, like for "Aida," and seven or eight principles, some of whom who are 45 feet away from you, and you can make it all come in on one, you can conduct a model symphony, there's no problem with that.

- [Barbara] You can do it, yeah.

- So good opera conductors always make good symphony conductors.

Sometimes good symphony conductors have a struggle becoming good opera conductors, but not the other way around, no.

- Yeah, right.

I think it's very interesting, and a thing that people don't... And Cincinnati, the Pops, it's the orchestra, the Symphony, it's the orchestra, the ballet, the opera, it's, those, orchestra.

And that's basically what Louise Nippert believed, that first you have an orchestra- - That's right.

- And then everything else can be of the best quality.

- It really sets the standard.

And of course the other secret weapon we have is musical, because people who are not familiar with Music Hall, when they come into it the first time, their jaws drop, because they have stepped back into the 19th century, and the grandeur of it, but also, since the renovation, I will tell you a little, and maybe that's too inside baseball, but when I came to work for the Cincinnati Opera, I was told about the legendary acoustics of Music Hall, and they are fantastic.

But before the renovation, conducting opera in Music Hall was hard, because the pit was, what we call very live, the pit stopped right at the wall of the stage, which made the projection of the orchestra like a cannon shot.

And so, conductors were always having to be extremely careful not to overwhelm the singers.

One of the most beautiful things they did about their renovation is they made the pit wider underneath the stage, and they made it underneath the stage at the back.

So now, the loudest instruments, the brass instruments, are tucked under the stage a little bit.

They still have a perfect view of the conductor.

But I was sitting in the Hall for this rehearsal the other night, and I heard a bloom of the sound that I don't remember from my earlier years.

So everybody ultimately sounds fantastic in the Hall, singers love it, and now it's even better.

It's easier for conductors to balance the orchestra with the stage because of the improvements made in the renovation.

- Yeah, well, that was what it was sort of all about.

Except making it a little bit smaller.

- Yeah, and also bringing it up to date for ADA, and also making it a- - The air conditioning and the heating.

- When you're as old as 1878, you need a refurbish once in a while.

- Yeah, right, I know about that, I know about that.

So we're so blessed with all of it, but you've got a season coming up.

- Yes, we do.

- Tell us a little bit.

You got two war horses, which we caught.

- We do.

- Well, actually, I would say almost three, because "Pirates" is- - Which we haven't done since the '80s.

- Well, tell us about it.

- So what happened was, when Chris and I were going through 2022-6.3, let's say, we looked at a perfectly lovely season, said, there are no laughs, this is all very serious... Now, mind you, most opera is serious, a lot of people die in opera.

But we said, there are no laughs, and we- - Or even lighthearted.

- Yeah, I mean there's no romantic comedy, even "Don Giovanni" has a few laughs.

So we looked at the menu, and we knew we wanted to do "Aida," because that was the one opera from our 100th anniversary, which we didn't have, because of COVID, that we wanted to preserve.

We hadn't done it in many years, we had a lion in a really wonderful production we hadn't presented before, so "Aida" was there, it was fine.

We also knew that we wanted to start, particularly this year, after people had been away from opera, with another familiar title, we sort of blew two top-10 titles in one season to open with "La Boheme," but we felt it was important to lure people back into the theater of an opera that is shorter, and that has a very familiar story.

But what about that middle slot?

I'll talk about the two world premieres in a second.

That middle slot was the tough one, because we'd sort of gone through the typical comedies that a grand opera company would present, recently.

We have done "The Marriage of Figaro" recently, so we couldn't really do that again.

And I found myself saying to Chris, "Why not G and S?"

Specifically, why not "The Pirates of Penzance?"

Chris knows, and my colleagues know, that I've never been a huge fan of G and S until a few years ago, and I went and saw a production at the Atlanta Opera of "The Pirates of Penzance" that originated at the Opera Theater of St. Louis directed by a wonderful choreographer-turned-opera-director by the name of Sean Curran.

And it was like a cartoon book.

It was lighthearted, and it was cast with real opera singers, and conducted with real flare for opera by a very established opera conductor.

I said, "If we can get that production and that conductor, let's do 'Pirates of Penzance,' because we will then do it at the same level that we do "The Barber of Seville."

And that's, for G and S to succeed, I feel, you have to treat it the same way as you treat any of the greatest comedies of the early 19th century, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, because Gilbert and Sullivan basically steal from all of those musical genres, they make it their own, but Sullivan, who was a very accomplished composer of big, grand oratorios and symphonies and whatnot, had an incredible gift, not mimicry, he was more like a magpie, in other words, he stole a little of everything, and then made his own aesthetic.

W.S.

Gilbert, brilliant satirist, incredible writer, the two together became, probably, the first huge commercial success in modern theater.

But, it needed refreshing, just like the Hall, and Shawn Curran's production does that.

So we did Gilbert and Sullivan in the '20s and the early '30s, then we didn't do it again until the '80s.

I'm told it was done, in a way, to extend the season a little bit in the August side with something light and more popular, but we couldn't have the symphony, 'cause they went on vacation.

- Oh, that's right.

- So we had a pickup orchestra.

We also did musicals, I'm told, not very well.

Because it was all done sort of on the cheap.

So a lot of our older patrons said, oh, Gilbert and Sullivan, I remember when you did it in the '80s, it was no good.

So to overcome any resistance, and then I'll tell you the other part of it, we advertised very heavily, this was going to be a colorful new production, it was going to be done with great opera singers with a fantastic maestro.

And then it started outselling "Aida."

(Both laugh) When we first started selling tickets, we had more single tickets go out the door in a single day for "Pirates of Penzance."

This pent-up demand, we haven't done any since the '80s.

I'm so excited about it.

So we have a few laughs this summer.

But the other component of the summer are our two delayed world premieres, "Fierce" and "Castor and Patience."

These were both designed to be given as part of our 100th anniversary season, but both of them are also designed to be done in a more intimate space, SCPA, in this instance.

So we decided to wait until we could be fully back indoors to present these two operas.

I'm proud of both of them, because they are outgrowths of relationships that we've had with artists.

"Fierce" is composed by Cincinnati native William Menefield, graduate of CCM, phenomenal jazz pianist, and incredibly gifted composer.

Its story is written by Sheila Williams, who is a very established novelist, her latest novel has just come out, called "Things Past Telling," beautiful story.

And Sheila and William worked with young women and men at an incredible afterschool program here in Cincinnati called Wordplay.

Wordplay is a place where kids can go after school and write, from disadvantaged neighborhoods in particular.

And there was a group of young women, we've come to call them the muses, who for more than 14 or 15 hours, several years ago, sat with Sheila and just talked about the challenges of growing into adulthood.

And Sheila took their stories, along with musical influences that William went, at the Music Resource Center, another fantastic afterschool program, and working with the young women and men from i.imagine, which is this incubator for people who wanna do PR, and made a genuinely new story from people's real lives, but fictionalized, that I'm very proud of.

Also "Castor and Patience," written by Gregory Spears, who was the composer of "Fellow Travelers," which was a runaway hit, it's now in it's 11th production around the country, and Tracy K. Smith, our nation's Poet Laureate, writing this incredibly intense and beautiful opera about what's home, where do we call home, and what does it mean to us?

So we're excited, we have that wonderful formula, that is completely new this summer, of two blockbusters, some laughs, a heartfelt story about growing up, and an opera that asks really important questions.

- Yay.

- Thank you.

- It sounds incredible, and with you doing the formula, I think it always will be, and has 17 years.

- That's right, this is my 17th Season.

- I still remember the first day when you walked in here.

- My hair was all one color then.

- Yes, it was.

- Or mostly one color, that's true.

- We all looked a little different then.

But I do, I absolutely do remember when you had first come, and Patty Beggs brought you into the studio, - That's right.

- and you were fantastic.

- Well, it's a privilege and an honor to work for this company, and to work and make our home in this city.

Because when I travel around, I'd just had a taxi ride from the airport in Atlanta this morning to catch my plane, to come back here for rehearsals, and the taxi driver said, "Where are you going?"

I said, "I'm going home to Cincinnati."

He said, "Cincinnati, that's a great town.

More people should know that it's a great town."

- Ah, well, those of us who are here do, and you're part of what makes it a great town.

So thank you, thank you, and we'll see you at the opera.

- With pleasure.

(ethereal orchestral music) - [Announcer] Join us next week for another episode of "Showcase with Barbara Kellar," right here on CET.