Go easy on the handshake, if you want to congratulate Bruce Stasyna next week on his appointment as Vero Beach Opera music director.
Those hands will be mid-marathon on the grand piano at the Performing Arts Center of Vero Beach High School. Stasyna has got to play 80 selections for 80 opera singers competing in the Marcello Giordani International Vocal Competition – more, when you count the final rounds and Saturday night’s winners’ concert with Giordani himself.
Every afternoon and evening for four straight days, then in concerts both Friday and Saturday nights, Stasyna will be the unsung hero of a mammoth effort that will boost awareness within the opera world of not only the competition’s winners, but of Vero Beach Opera and the town itself.
Accompaniment is just one facet of his new role. As he did with January’s production of “Il Tabarro,” he will conduct the full operas staged by the company, typically once a season, including rehearsing the musicians and singers. He will also help develop the programs for the opera. And one day, says Vero Beach Opera’s Roman Ortega-Cowan, “in a year or two,” even, he could take over his role as artistic director.
“He’s very, very capable of being artistic director,” says Ortega-Cowan.
Along with his post here, Stasyna is chorus master and assistant conductor for Washington Concert Opera, a post he has held since 2010. He is also artistic director of Vermont’s Green Mountain Opera Company, though that company, after nine seasons, has called off its 2015 festival due to budget constraints.
He was as chorus master and assistant conductor of New York City Opera in its world premiere of “Anna Nicole” and served as guest chorus master for the company’s production of “La Périchole.”
A former assistant conductor of Palm Beach Opera and director of its Young Artists program, Stasyna met Ortega-Cowan and his wife Joan, who is VBO’s president, at a Young Artists concert.
Stasyna, who is based in New York, will be able to reconnect with Giordani while he’s here; they were slated to perform together in Toronto in December at the Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall. Then Giordani canceled citing family medical issues.
As it turned out, Stasyna was happy to finish out his stay there regardless: Toronto is his home town.
Stasyna had only one family member who was musical – his Ukrainian grandfather played violin. But he showed talent early on, and as a young boy, studied piano at the Royal Conservatory. By high school, he had switched to jazz trumpet and played professionally with a much-in-demand Toronto reggae band, headed up by the father of his best friend. Performing in nightclubs on weekends before he was even legally old enough to drink, he was making great money and loving the music.
The band even played on a float in the carnival parade at Caribana, a summer Caribbean festival in Toronto.
“It was so much fun,” says Stasyna. “I seriously thought at that point in my life that I was actually going to move to Jamaica and work as a session musician at one of the big studios.”
Instead, he went on to York University still focusing on jazz trumpet. By the middle of his sophomore year he was back to classical piano.
“I craved polyphony,” he says. “I needed to play more than one note at a time. It’s thinking of music in a different way. You’re thinking vertically and horizontally on an ongoing basis.”
Stasyna became entranced with chamber music, and with a buddy and two percussion players, they formed a group that focused on Béla Bartók sonatas and the “fiendishly difficult exotic landscapes” of American composer George Crumb.
“It was a chance to make music with friends of mine,” he says.
The group ended up giving concerts at the university and were recorded at Ontario’s main classical music station.
After university, Stasyna went on to the Mannes School of Music, part of the New School for Social Research in New York.
Though his studies had not included voice, eventually “opera found me,” he says.
“It was a very good fit. If I have some sort of gift, it’s my affinity for the voice and what the voice wants to do as a musical instrument. I could always understand what the voice wanted to do – how a voice breathes, how a voice spins vibrato into a line of sound. I seem to connect to on a very visceral level.”
He had heard his first opera as part of a project in an undergraduate history class, studying the socialist realism period of Soviet culture. The project involved a production by the Canadian Opera Company of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” written by Shostakovich in the 1930s, and so overtly sexual that it got him thrown in jail.
“I didn’t know what to expect and it kind of blew my mind,” he recalls. “I thought, what is this opera stuff? From there, I started to avail myself of opportunities to go and see other operas.“
In the years leading up to his working professionally with opera, he had to become proficient in various languages as well as learn the repertoire. From there, he had to work “from the ground up,” beginning as a rehearsal pianist in the opera house. That role ranged from master classes in which the pianist “is sitting very quietly and doing his thing and doing it at a very high level but not participating in an overt way,” to opera rehearsals in which the pianist must substitute for the entire orchestra. “That’s tough because you have to be on all the time. You are substituting for the orchestra and you have to learn what it is to reflect an orchestra’s texture at the piano, so the people can have a sense of what to expect once the orchestra comes into the pit.”
He played at recitals, then coached the chorus.
Of all the roles a pianist plays in opera, the most creative, he says, is rehearsal. “Somebody in the industry once told me, ‘The pianist is the heartbeat of the entire rehearsal process.’ It’s the color of the score. It’s a critical role.”
As music director for an opera here, he first has to learn the libretto “so I understand every single word,” and the orchestration, “so I know how the orchestra fits in with what’s going on on the stage. The orchestra can comment on what’s going on dramatically; it can foreshadow what’s going to happen, and understanding all those structural relationships is what I have to aspire to.”
With opera being opera, and multiple jobs a must, Stasyna will always have the next gig in the back of his mind. In Vero though, he will also take time for himself; an avid cyclist, tennis player and wave runner, he will make the most of good weather that comes his way.
“I love coming down to Vero Beach,” he says. “It’s always a fun time for me. I love the area and I love the people. That’s a very important aspect to me.”