Did program notes bring down Opera Boston?

Well, the Globe story on the Opera Boston mess dropped today, revealing that the company's closing seems to have been not so much a case of malfeasance (as I once speculated), as a case of clashing egos, childish pique, and a culture of financial mismanagement. Which, of course, is all malfeasance in its way.

Long story short: Opera Boston was perennially over-extended, and lived hand-to-mouth, relying on a small clutch of wealthy donors - and particularly one Randolph Fuller, who reliably came through with at least 10% of the annual budget, and who seems to have begun some sort of vendetta against incoming General Director Lesley Koenig after she edited his program notes for Maria Padilla without his consent (or even a call of apology). No, you read that right, according to Edgers - even though it sounds like something out of Guy de Maupassant, that slight seems to have been the start of the feud.  But then one gets the impression that Fuller had long held court on the Board, and had also always had the previous general director, Carole Charnow, in his pocket.

Koenig, however, may have played her own part in the company's collapse; cutting your biggest donor's program notes without even an apology is, well, a pretty big lapse in the bow-and-scrape world of arts-board etiquette.  I'm surprised she did that.  But then  Koenig was already a star in arts management (whereas Charnow had little experience outside Opera Boston), and so probably had her own ego, and her own plans.  And to be honest, she seems to have been aware of another major mistake the company made: budgeting on the assumption that they would win a major grant from the Fidelity Foundation, which did not in the end come through.  This, plus low ticket sales for the season opener, plus Fuller's putsch against Koenig, essentially did the company in, according to Edgers.

Of course, in the final analysis, this is a story about Opera Boston's Board, and not about Koenig, or even the company's finances.  In an admittedly bad situation, they made a stunningly bad call.  Given the collapse of the year's budget, and even given a looming, expensive production in February, the company still had options - it could have re-grouped, made a public appeal, or abandoned one, but not all, its productions, etc., etc.  It's hard not to get the impression that Fuller and his cronies simply took their ball and went home, and destroyed Opera Boston out of spite.

And it's worth noting that Fuller seems to have done this before - he brought down the Boston Academy of Music in 2002, apparently in a single day, over seeming dissatisfaction with its founding director; prior to that, he'd walked out of Boston Lyric Opera (which had the resources to survive his departure).  And what that means is: Fuller will probably be back, with checkbook in hand, looking for a new favorite operatic entrepreneur.  And I know it's hard for arts producers to resist that kind of temptation - but at the same time, they shouldn't forget what happened to Opera Boston; if you live by Fuller, you should always have a Plan B; because you could die by Fuller, too.

Thoughts and wild speculations on Opera Boston's demise

A lot of people have been emailing to ask, "Why the hell are you diddling around with the sh*t that Parabasis says, when you're not covering the collapse of Opera Boston?"

And I don't really have a good answer to that.  Although I have been trying to find out the truth about why the fat lady sang for that intrepid opera company, really I have.  I wasn't always kind to their productions, I admit, but I always appreciated what they were trying to do - that is, forge a niche in Boston for productions of both rarely-produced and avant operas.  And more than once they succeeded brilliantly - last fall's mounting of Béatrice et Bénédict was often enchanting, and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was one of the best (and funniest) opera productions the Hub has seen in a decade at least.  Previous seasons had boasted strong productions of Nixon in China and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  Boston had much to thank Opera Boston for, and its closing was a tragic loss - as well as something close to an insult to the incredibly hard-working guiding light of the company, musical director Gil Rose.

So like many of you, I was really shocked that the Board could act so precipitously - and on so seemingly thin a pretext (a debt of $500,000, hardly small change, but also hardly a death knell in the world of opera), leaving not only many employees and visiting artists, but also a whole host of subscribers, in the lurch.

And to be honest - the suddenness of the action made me a little suspicious.  We have a history of boards behaving badly around here, and from what you could piece together from press accounts, the Opera Boston Board's last-minute actions sounded a bit fishy.  The pieces of the puzzle included: a suddenly looming debt; newer Board members who were eager to put together a plan to save the organization; and a sudden agreement to shut up shop anyway by the elder members, in a meeting from which many younger members were missing.  Essentially, a contingent of the Board closed down the company summarily and unilaterally - even the Artistic Director didn't find out till after the fact.

The question of the hour is - why?

Now you don't really have to be Sherlock Holmes to begin piecing together a rather unflattering picture from those disparate data points.  I mean, to put it bluntly - why would you suddenly slam the door on a basically-viable organization - unless you wanted to slam the door on its books, too?  Was there something that one part of the Board knew that it didn't want the other part of the Board to find out?  Hmmm.  No wonder the rumor mill has been buzzing! But nobody I know will go on the record about what they know - at least not to me.

But I do know that Geoff Edgers is writing up a story about the whole affair for the Globe (which to its credit, called for an investigation into the Board's actions on its editorial page). And that's never a good sign, is it? No, it is not.  Word is it the Edgers story will drop this week.  So for once I'll be buying the Globe!  Can't wait.

Soft stillness and the night at Opera Boston

Julie Boulianne and Sean Panikkar as Béatrice et Bénédict.

Opera fans who don't have tickets yet for Béatrice et Bénédict will want to hustle: there's only one performance left (on Tuesday night) for Opera Boston's season opener, Berlioz's short-but-sweet genuflection to the Bard's Much Ado About Nothing. Devotees of the human voice will certainly want to be there: the production boasts at least four world-class voices: soprano Heather Buck, mezzos Julie Boulianne and Kelley O'Connor, and tenor Sean Panikkar. In the past, a recurring carp I've had with Opera Boston has been that they often seemed unable to assemble a full Met-level cast; their stars would shine, but the ensemble was sometimes variable. Not this time. Not only are the (rising) stars sublime, but the supporting roles are capably sung, and the chorus sounds great, too. Béatrice et Bénédict is solid, shining vocal gold.

Whether fans of Shakespeare will find the comedy as glittering, however - well, that's a harder call, particularly given that we're experiencing a tsunami of Shakespearean opera these days. Last spring we saw Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the summer brought both Gounod's Roméo et Juliette as well as Verdi's Falstaff. This season we're being treated to not only Berlioz's take on Much Ado but also Verdi's Macbeth. And next spring Opera Boston returns with Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi.

Now generally in Shakespearean opera you find the dramatic stakes and emotional moods have been heightened, but the intellectual structure has been stripped out.  And while you might imagine the very-literary Berlioz could prove (like Britten) an exception to that general rule,  I'm afraid the highly-edited Béatrice et Bénédict hews closely to that simplifying tradition, with one unusual wrinkle: the sombre romantic notes that Berlioz often strikes aren't much in evidence in the original play.  There's much worldliness in Much Ado - and far more shadow than Berlioz allows - but only one stretch of mournful, moonlit melancholy, and unsurprisingly, it's a musical interlude (the song before Hero's supposed grave).  Now Berlioz has ditched entirely the sinister plot against poor Hero, but he has retained, and even extended, the sweet eeriness of that song into two set-pieces that are probably the high points of his opera: a duet, "Nuit paisible et sereine," that's a kind of mutual dream for Héro and her maid Ursule at the close of Act I, and a haunting chorus offstage just before the joint wedding in Act II.

Both are paeans to love, but they resonate not with the joy of youth but with the rue of age; unsurprisingly, Berlioz composed the opera, his last major work, near the end of his life (while Shakespeare was just 34 when he penned the play).  The elder artist also had perhaps a more pointed view of human folly - there are a few more "caustic" jabs (in the words of the composer) at the play's self-deluded heroes than there are in the original (although there's also a brilliant piece of psychological insight into Béatrice in one aria that I'd say Shakespeare actually misses).

Julie Boulianne by moonlight.

Which isn't to say that Béatrice et Bénédict is in any way grim; it's simply light on its feet but mature; its occasional bitter-sweetness only enhances its piquant comedy.  If only, that is, its comedy were funnier.  For I'm afraid Berlioz, unlike the Bard, was no comic genius, and Béatrice et Bénédict  may strike Much Ado fans as something of an uphill comic struggle.

Fear not, much of the leading couple's "merry war" is here, verbatim (the dialogue of this opéra comique is wisely done in English - perhaps for this reason - while the singing is in French).  But Berlioz has dropped Shakespeare's clowns, and supplied his own musical jesters instead; he has added a pompous, incompetent musician to the mix, 'Somarone' - which, in a nod to Shakespeare's Dogberry, translates from Italian as "Great Ass."  Bass Andrew Funk gives the role his best shot, but I'm afraid the forced hijinx fall flat - even if his musical offerings fall flat, too, in just the right amusing way.

Even where Shakespeare's sparring has been retained, however, it has sometimes been interlarded with director David Kneuss's ad-libs, which are set in a modern idiom (like the costumes and staging, mostly), and, well - is it really much of a criticism to say that Kneuss just ain't Shakespeare?  (And btw, bring back "For man is a giddy thing," Mr. K.)

What surprised me more, however, was that Kneuss's stage business wasn't nearly as inspired as his work on La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein a year or so ago, which was a lively, witty riot. What went wrong this time around? I don't know, but over and over again I felt the dreamy atmosphere of Héro and Ursule's duet was tugging at the whole show.

I should also add, I'm afraid, that Julie Boulianne (above left) and Sean Panikkar aren't quite convincing as the opera's eponymous lovers.  Both are pleasing personalities; Boulianne, despite the difficulty of delivering Elizabethan quips in English (she's Québécoise) proves the more accomplished comic actress; it's just that neither feels romantically "right" for the other, an accident of casting which is simply too bad.

You could forgive all that, though, once either began to sing.  Boulianne is blessed with a complex and darkly lustrous mezzo that conveys through its very timbre everything you need to know about her character.  And Panikkar's clarion tenor - perhaps a shade too light for Bénédict's bluffness - seemed to open up to a dazzling size as he climbed higher in his range.  Meanwhile, as Héro, the gorgeous and delightfully poised Heather Buck took a little time to warm up, but achieved a kind of soft, luminous rapture in her duet with mezzo (but almost-alto) Kelley O'Connor, whose own smoky tone may have been the most sophisticated color yet in this dazzling vocal palette.

The same sophistication wasn't always evident in the orchestral playing - although under Gil Rose's baton, the performance was always solid, if not stylish (things did improve when the moon came out).  But it certainly extended to the elegant production design, by the Met's Robert Perdziola. You could quibble, I suppose, with Perdziola's pretty costumes - the gorgeous gowns all seemed to be from roughly 1947, while the men's suits were from . . . well, something like a forty-year span! I wasn't sure what that was supposed to convey; but I forgot all about it when I took in the exquisite, subtly-painted set - particularly when it opened up to reveal a ravishing moonlit scene for the "Nuit paisible et sereine." Here soft stillness and the night did indeed become the touches of sweet harmony.  Heather Buck and Kelley O'Connor took us to the moon vocally; Perdziola did it visually. Together they brought this memorable production to the edge of the sublime.

Everything opera should be

Time is short today, but I had to put in a quick note about Opera Boston's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, which I caught at its final performance last night. It's been a rough year for Opera Boston - Ewa Podleś phoned in Tancredi, and Madame Whitesnake turned out to be a bust - so it was wonderful to see their season end on a note higher than anyone could have anticipated. La Grande-Duchesse, Offenbach's lightly sardonic operetta on the intersection of love and war, turned out to be not only one of the best productions of the year, but one of the best opera productions seen in Boston in many a year, and certainly the best thing I've ever seen Opera Boston do.

It wasn't hard to see why. Stephanie Blythe, a mainstay at the Met and on opera stages around the world, was essaying for Opera Boston one of her signature roles, and it was apparent that not only had the company put its best foot forward for the biggest star it had ever entertained, but that much of the production had been styled directly for her (by director David Kneuss of the Met). Which was all to the good. For not only was Ms. Blythe in fine vocal form, in a role which matches her range and (gorgeously rich) timbre perfectly, but theatrically (and comedically) she was also at a peak that most professional actresses would envy. Her performance was, simply put, perfection in every way - it was everything opera should be.

What's more, for once Opera Boston left its taste for intellectualism and ascetic sets at the door - the sets and costumes for La Grande-Duchesse were beautifully rendered and nearly opulent, and often cohered (as at the top of the second act) into glorious stage pictures. More, please! And Ms. Blythe was not the only thing worth listening to, either - although there was some vocal variability in the cast. Scott Ramsay's tenor was far too thin to stand up to Ms. Blythe's redolent glories, and James Maddalena sounded a bit rough, at least on the last night. But there was lovely singing from soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer and baritone Lee Gregory (above left, with Blythe), and both proved to be gifted comics as well. Although actually everyone in the cast - including the hard-working chorus - was irresistibly funny and seemingly up for any kind of hijinx.

It's true that at three hours, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, despite all this onstage inspiration (and lively playing down in the pit), is almost too much of a good thing. But you also couldn't blame everyone for soldiering on with the fluff, as they were having so much fun doing it. By the time the curtain fell, it was hard not to feel that some new standard had been set for local opera production.

A tedious Tancredi

This is a short post mortem on the Opera Boston production of Rossini's Tancredi, which closed on Tuesday. Due to other commitments, I had to attend the final performance - and perhaps therefore saw a rather tired Ewa Podleś in the title role. Still, I found the great contralto disappointing (given that I predicted she'd provide one of the highlights of the classical season). Podleś has plenty of power, and can summon a deep, gloriously mournful tone at will. But to be frank, she no longer has the full range of color I imagined she'd command (and which the role demands), and even though this is one of her signature roles, her acting was a bit flat - the contralto semed dramatically stuck in a certain bland nobility and pathos, and all but ignored the contradictions of the rigid firebrand at the heart of the opera.

Her acting problems extended to much of the rest of the cast - but not her vocal ones, I'm happy to report. Indeed, this was easily the best-sung production I've ever heard from Opera Boston, a huge step up in consistency from the likes of The Nose or The Bartered Bride. Which is a good thing, given the demands of Tancredi, in which Rossini regularly sends bel canto into the vocal stratosphere. Luckily, lead soprano Amanda Forsythe (left, with Podleś) came equipped with an exquisitely pearl-like tone; tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan, if at first a bit reedy, was spectacularly at ease at the top of his range; and bass DongWon Kim impressed with a smoothly menacing resonance. The chorus was likewise coherent and robust, and there were appealingly nuanced solos from Victoria Avetisyan and Glorivy Arroyo.

But alas, of these vocalists only Forsythe managed anything like a real dramatic characterization (although it must be said that her character's self-sacrifice was ethically complicated by the singer's own actual pregnancy, which the production seemed to emphasize). Manucharyan in particular may be a wonderful tenor, but as yet he's no actor. To be fair, the singers weren't helped much by Kristine McIntyre's limp direction. I guess McIntyre was aiming for a hypnotic dream-pageant, but what she got was somnambulists wandering across Carol Bailey's minimal, modernist (but at least, by Opera Boston standards, attractive) set. What eventually undid the production entirely was McIntyre's (and Podleś's) mishandling of the big set-pieces for the hero in the overlong Act II; here these arias devolved into tedium.

But to be fair, it would take truly muscular direction to triumph over the Tancredi libretto, which is risible even by operatic standards, and which I won't go into here (it's hard to believe Voltaire was the source of this tripe). Needless to say, the opera is remembered for its score rather than its story, and Gil Rose gave a good account of it in the pit. Composed in 1813, Tancredi stands near the height of the bel canto tradition, but a certain classicism still echoes in its orchestration - and Rose seemed to understand that, as he drew a warm but consistently clean tone from the orchestra. Alas, as the drama ground down, his tempi did too.

[A brief sidebar on the press reaction. Of course the Globe and the Herald, which have long been in the bag for Opera Boston, did handstands over the show; luckily, the Wall Street Journal gave a more accurate account. I've long been the holdout in the local press for my rather-less-impressed assessments of this rising critical favorite. But ironically enough, as Opera Boston reaches a wider profile - and its vocal standards improve - the company may begin to attract critics from beyond their circle of friends, and face more criticism like mine.]

This Bride is a mixed, but enjoyable, bag

Let me first say that it's wonderful that Boston has two genuinely thriving opera companies - Boston Lyric Opera, which leans toward standards, and Opera Boston, which generally programs rarities, and I wish both well. If I often sound skeptical about the praise lavished on Opera Boston, it's because they seem to have a patron saint in former Globe critic Richard Dyer, who writes their program notes (and who long belittled Boston Lyric Opera while carrying the torch for Sarah Caldwell, who was basically a lost cause). And current Globe critic Jeremy Eichler, of course, has taste that not-so-mysteriously matches Dyer's, while Keith Powers over at the Herald gushes so much over Opera Boston that he makes Eichler's promotional pieces seem staid. And it's worth mentioning that Opera Boston's conductor, Gil Rose, is firmly embedded in the local musical hierarchy in an interesting way, as his Boston Modern Orchestra Project serves as a kind of vanity performance venue for local music professors (who sponsor concerts of their own works). It's true there's good reason to applaud Opera Boston for programming all that rarely-heard repertoire; still, if all these connections sound rather cozy - well, they are; but certainly no cozier than Harvard's pull with the Globe, say. Local critical writing has always been, and will always be, a patchwork of hidden alliances, agendas and allegiances; there's a Harvard mafia, there's a gay mafia - and of course there's always the Mafia mafia, too. That's life.

But back to The Bartered Bride (at left), another rarity which Opera Boston presents this weekend through Tuesday, and which is one of the strongest productions I've seen them give. It's certainly more enjoyable than their production of The Nose, which I suppose was nothing to sneeze at, but with which, to mix my metaphors, they had clearly bitten off more than they could chew (its local reputation strikes me as nearly delusional). There are, however, still the vocal gaps in The Bartered Bride that one expects from Opera Boston; the tenor, who has a beautiful timbre in his middle range, thins out abruptly further up (and just barely hits his top notes), and the soprano, who likewise has a bold, golden tone in general, can get a little shrill when she's not careful (both above left). Sometimes this troupe lands a major talent like Dawn Upshaw - next season they're promising Ewa Podleś - but in general they haven't broken into the vocal tier from which Boston Lyric Opera casts.

And beyond the vocals, there were other problems. The "woodcut" set seemed at first outright ugly (again, par for the Opera Boston course) - although to be fair, it came together for the surreal circus scenes, with the help of some abstract set-pieces. And the production was studded with odd choices - its relocation to the American Midwest seemed to half-connect to American musical comedy, but didn't really yield any new insights into the material (in a nod to the local academy, it was set in Stillville, Iowa, where the professors know Dvořák spent a summer). Meanwhile the costumes seemed to float somewhere between the early 70's and the 30's. The "folk dancing" looked like Martha Graham's idea of a polka (a chunk of it, however, was replaced with a cute little baseball game), and sometimes the chorus, in a burst of ancestral heartiness, switched from English to Czech (when, in what I assume was a kind of in-joke, the super-titles switched to Czech, too!).

On the plus side, there was the energetic score, which is always clever and appealing, rather like the show's protagonist (although unfortunately it contains no truly great arias), and conductor Rose did well by it. The opera didn't quite sound lusty, as it probably should, but it was always spirited and crisp, and from the opening notes of the famous overture, the orchestra played with speed and cohesive attack. Plus the English translation, by Tony Harrison, was truly witty, and the chorus sang with brio, and generally sounded terrific.

And there's certainly at least one reason to seek out this production: Keith Jameson's performance as the hapless Vašek, the milquetoast whose father nearly manages to purchase for him the bride in question. The role is a comic jewel, but some of its material - Vašek's stutter, for instance - can turn ugly in the wrong hands. Luckily, Jameson (at left) was not just self-deprecating but utterly endearing, and his scenes were a delight, easily the high points of the production. Even more striking was that soprano Jennifer Aylmer, who hadn't been all that convincing in bride Mařenka's romantic scenes, found her feet in her duets with Jameson, and suddenly morphed into a crack comedienne. Their long scene together was comic opera heaven.

There was another nice, seedily comic turn from Frank Kelley as the ringmaster of the circus that comes to town (ably impersonated here by Boston Conservatory dancers), and a lovely vocal performance from Sara Heaton as the gypsy Esmeralda (although Ms. Heaton needs to sing out a bit). As the wedding broker Kecal, Boston favorite James Maddalena proved he had not lost his sense of comic timing, but alas, his voice isn't what it used to be, and was a bit threadbare here and there. And the opera lost its way again when it re-focused on its central couple; tenor Patrick Miller's happy handsomeness was just too bland to hold our interest, and he and Aylmer never generated the romantic feeling that would make the "betrayal" at the plot's center dramatically compelling. The witty flourishes provided by director Daniel Pelzig couldn't really compensate for this. On the other hand, Keith Jameson alone may be worth the price of admission. There's still one more performance, on Tuesday night, for you to decide for yourself.

Post-mortem: Sniffing at The Nose

Shostakovich himself filmed during rehearsals for a 1975 production of The Nose, which was banned in Russia for decades after its premiere.

I caught the Opera Boston production of Shostakovich's rarely-seen The Nose in its last performance because, like so many other people, I was curious about it. I knew better than to trust the raves in the local press; you go to Opera Boston simply to hear the work in question - often either brand new, or fascinating but obscure - rather than to revel in a brilliant production of it. Indeed, the company presents a critic with a curious quandary. Seemingly in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom, music director Gil Rose has carved a popular niche for the troupe via adventurous (rather than conservative) programming, coupled with a hip, this-is-not-your-father's-opera-company vibe. Still, the productions usually slightly disappoint. And the critics tend to pretend otherwise - because, of course, they like seeing and hearing all these rarities, and yes, they also like pretending opera is hip and popular among people under 40.

Still, there are the productions themselves to consider. The Nose was a case in point. Shostakovich's first opera (and next to last, due to official censure) is, indeed, if not quite the masterpiece Opera Boston claimed, then definitely one of the most brilliant maiden operatic voyages in history. But it's also a daunting challenge in many, many respects; the cast is huge, the libretto - about a nose that goes rogue, and finds a prominent post in the bureaucracy - is wildly surreal, and the singing and instrumental requirements unforgiving (almost everyone sings slightly out of their range - the blackly satiric idea is that everybody is in over his or her head - and the orchestra, too, is constantly being asked to scrape either the top or bottom of their instruments' ranges).

And Opera Boston could only intermittently meet these challenges. Its likeable lead, Stephen Salters (at left), sang with warmth and power (which perhaps was actually not quite right for the role), but was, in the end, dramatically merely adequate. There was one brilliant acting turn from Frank Kelley, who played with hilarious aplomb a shrieking police inspector who wound up being led around on a leash - but Kelley was only just up to the leaps into falsetto territory required of him. There were also appealing cameos from the booming Vladimir Matorin as the barber who may or may not have separated our hero from his schnozz, and Yeghishe Manucharyan as the bizarre lackey who imagines he's a troubadour.

But much of the rest of the production felt slightly lackluster. The composer and librettists, taking off from a short story by Gogol, had sketched a brutally madcap romp across society - think Kafka crossed with Tom and Jerry - but director Julia Pevzner and designer Alexander Lisiyansky instead supplied a series of post-surrealist, classically-restrained tableaux (the production in the YouTube above looks much closer to the right idea). There were a few striking moments - a flapping, Czarist eagle was a nice touch, and that police inspector on a leash was brilliant - but the piece generally felt sedately paced (it never got close to madcap), and its weird sexual undercurrents had largely gone missing (despite some seductive moves from Sol Kim Bentley as a pretzel-selling hottie). And down in the pit, Rose - a solid, but not inspired, conductor - had trouble keeping up with the dark energy of the score (he was much better at its eerily menacing slow passages).

As a result, the audience I saw it with grew noticeably restive and bored - but everyone chatted it up positively afterward. After all, nobody wants Opera Boston to fail - we all want to keep getting the chance to hear these rarities! So what's a critic to do?