As Vero Beach Opera turns its full attention to the upcoming Marcello Giordani International Vocal Competition next month – and another concert by the great Met tenor himself – the South Florida opera world has its eye on another stage – at West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center, where a newly invigorated Palm Beach Opera is generating plenty of buzz.
Critics from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal were in the audience last month for a much-talked-about world premiere – almost unheard of for a regional opera company — of Ben Moore’s “Enemies, A Love Story,” based on the novella by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
As the season wrapped up last weekend with the company presenting Donizetti’s “The Daughter of the Regiment,” there was more good news: David Stern, who conducted “Enemies” as well as last year’s successful “Macbeth,” has been named chief conductor, the first regular presence at PBO’s podium in three years.
With a company newly invigorated at the helm of its relatively new general director, Daniel Biaggi, Stern’s role also includes fine-tuning the orchestra and auditioning new members.
“Those are big shoes to fill,” says Vero Beach Opera’s artistic director, Roman Ortega-Cowan, who knew Bruno Aprea, PBO’s last conductor and artistic director who left at Biaggi’s nudging.
Ortega-Cowan also knows Biaggi: he brought him to Vero to judge the 2013 Giordani competition. He also Ortega-Cowan, who has just hired Palm Beach Opera’s former assistant conductor, Bruce Stasyna, to be VBO’s music director, is not acquainted with Stern but says his qualifications are laudable.
“Looking at his CV, they have done a great job,” Ortega-Cowan says.
Palm Beach Opera’s success is Vero Beach Opera’s gain, says Ortega-Cowan. “It enhances what we do here,” he says. “VBO’s nature is to be enthusiastic,” he says. “We are nurturing and approving of anyone presenting this type of spectacle. It’s good for the health of the art.”
Stern will conduct one opera per season and assist in orchestra auditions. Based in Paris, the son of the late violinist Isaac Stern is music director of the Israel Opera, and tours regularly with the London Mozart Players. This season, along with Palm Beach Opera, he guest- conducted with the Vienna Symphony, the National Orchestra of Mexico and the Edmonton Opera. A graduate of Yale who went on to Juilliard, he was music director of St. Gallen Orchestra and Opera in Switzerland until from 2008 to 2012.
In addition to the six weeks he’ll spend in West Palm, Stern has taken on a new role in Crested Butte, Colorado as opera music director for the summer musical festival there. He also has on on-going role in Paris, where he lives: he is founder and director of the Paris-based Opera Fuoco, a period-instrument ensemble and opera studio.
Stern conducted last month’s world premiere of Ben Moore’s “Enemies: A Love Story,” based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, with a libretto by Nahma Sandrow and featuring the Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch in the lead role. In 2010, Okulitch originated the role of Willy Wonka in the opera, “The Golden Ticket,” based on Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
“Enemies, A Love Story” was a major step onto the world stage for Palm Beach Opera, which raised the entire $1.2 million needed to stage it before announcing the production. With luck, it will re-coop some of that when the production is staged elsewhere.
For fans of opera, including those in Vero Beach willing to travel for large productions, the apparent turnaround of Palm Beach Opera is a welcome sign at a time when regional companies around the country are scrambling to stay open.
Orlando Opera, for example, closed its doors in 2009. Florida Grand Opera in Miami has lost money every year but one since 2006.
With a current budget of $4.1 million, PBO is the third largest opera company in the state, after Miami’s Florida Grand Opera and Sarasota Opera. Yet it is only now recovering from a punishing ripple effect as Bernie Madoff depleted the resources of many of its largest donors. That was compounded by the collapse of the real estate market, causing the opera to rely on sound financial structure rather than beneficent deep-pocketed opera buffs.
With the arrival of Biaggi in 2009, things began to turn around. Aprea’s departure in 2012 allowed Biaggi to invite a roster of guest conductors from which he could eventually hire a successor.
PBO also vigorously recruited new board members, including prominent Manhattan arts supporter Sandy Fisher, now PBO’s board vice-chairman. It was Fisher who commissioned “Enemies” eight years ago. Increasingly, board members are coming from areas besides the island of Palm Beach – it’s now about 50-50 island and elsewhere, and efforts are underway to further diversify the board.
Last summer, the opera company was one of only seven organizations in North America to receive a grant from the service organization Opera America to draw new audiences to its productions. With $30,000 through the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, PBO beefed up an interactive app it developed to help audiences with translation during its new annual free outdoor concert, Opera at the Waterfront, that drew 4000 people in December.
And last summer, PBO received a $134,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties to attract African-Americans and Hispanics to its productions.
It is also debuting a “sensory-friendly” area for kids on the autism spectrum at its children’s performance of “The Daughter of the Regiment,” Saturday afternoon.
Palm Beach Opera was one of three opera companies cited by Opera America’s Marc Scorca as having “retrenched, re-envisioned, and re-emerged in a new position of strength” in an open letter sent out in May. (PBO’s Biaggi is on Opera America’s 29-member board.)
Scorca’s open letter came after San Diego Opera rescinded its decision to fold. That threat had followed New York City Opera filing for bankruptcy, and the closures of Connecticut Opera, Baltimore Opera and Opera Pacific, all since 2008.
Scorca praised PBO’s “savvy social media marketing campaign,” and its move to reduce the number of productions from four to three, with one less performance of each, while adding more public performances. But nothing drew as much notice as undertaking the world premiere.
Staging “Enemies” was not without risks, by director Biaggi’s own admission. A dark comedy about a Holocaust survivor juggling three wives, the opera featured a set designed by Allen Moyers that opera writers called ingenious – in part because it can be used when other companies stage the work. On the stage’s lower level were three boxes that served as apartments for each wife. They were set against a backdrop of a 60 by 10 foot video wall that would screen instantly changeable scenes from 1940’s New York.
“Enemies” was a first opera from Moore, who is known for writing audience-pleasing songs for divas including frequent Vero visitor Deborah Voigt and Susan Graham.
The opera drew generally favorable reviews, including from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal; in both those papers, Stern was singled out as an “able conductor.” The South Florida Classical Review, which gave Palm Beach Opera kudos for staging such a challenging production said Stern “drew gorgeous playing from the orchestra.”
Stern also conducted “Macbeth” for PBO last season. His three-year contract calls for him to conduct one opera per season; he’ll start with “Carmen” in January.
The company, founded in 1961, has a chorus of 50 singers (auditions for 2016 are this weekend). The Palm Beach Opera Orchestra was added in 1993. It also has a Young Artists Residency program, which Vero’s Bruce Stasyna once ran. Those singers are featured in the One Opera in One Hour series at one of Kravis’s smaller theaters.
Stern, who has signed a three-year contract, follows a colorful list of PBO conductors. The Austrian composer Paul Csonka began in the 1960s; rumored to be the illegitimate son of Kaiser Franz Joseph and the third child of an oil mogul, he left Europe before the war to develop Cuba’s national opera. When Castro came to power, he left for Miami and conducted Florida Grand Opera before founding Palm Beach Opera. His charm lured friends who were huge stars: Beverly Sills, Luciano Pavarotti, Robert Merrill and many more. Csonka stayed until 1984, when Anton Guadagno joined the company. His great friend was Placido Domingo, who performed in 1999.
Guadagno died in 2002 and was not replaced until 2005, when Aprea came on board and conducted for the next seven years.
Over the years, the opera’s fund-raising galas have featured stars on an international scale. They include Jose Carreras, Susan Graham, Kiri Te Kanawa, Renee Fleming, and last year, Joyce DiDonato. The 2016 gala, held as usual at the Mar-a-lago Club on Palm Beach, will feature soprano Diana Damrau.
And for the first time, Palm Beach Opera will collaborate with the Society of the Four Arts to bring the Met’s Stephanie Blythe to sing the songs of Kate Smith in a program “We’ll Meet Again,” the same program that was recently broadcast as part of PBS’s “Live from Lincoln Center” series.
