Blog

Well, I’m in the Houston airport waiting to board my flight to NYC.  I will be auditioning for the music director position of the New York Youth Orchestra on Sunday.  I have to admit that if someone had suggested the position to me a few years ago, I probably would not have even applied.  At the time, I didn’t feel like I had much to offer kids other than “conducting.”  In a lot of ways, it is because of Maestro Masur and my time in Paris that I finally feel that I have something to offer young musicians.  I learned so much during my time in Paris about performing classical music, and I finally feel like I’m ready to work with young musicians on that.

So, I haven’t talked a lot about Opera Vista lately, but I think we have finally narrowed down the scope of what we want to do.  The project originally began as the idea of doing purely contemporary opera for an entire season, but the more we began working on the project, the more it morphed.  We never left the idea of doing contemporary opera, but as opposed to trying to maintain an entire season of opera, we decided to go with forming a contemporary opera festival.  What really excites me is that we have the opportunity to truly champion young composers.  We decided to do 2 productions of contemporary opera – and for this year, we are thinking John Adams’ I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky and the world premiere of James Norman’s Wake!  (In other words, on the first weekend, we would perform Norman’s opera along with another one act opera and on the second weekend, we would perform the Adams.)  The truly interesting part of the festival would be the Composer Readings.  We would put out a call for scores of operas that have never been performed or operas that have received only one performance.  We would take them and select 4-5 operas to be read.  We would perhaps do an afternoon read through and then an evening read through.  At the end, we would select one of the operas to be performed the following season in the festival. 

It gives an opportunity for composers to have their compositions work-shopped and hopefully it will lead them to the opportunity of having their works performed.  It will also hopefully give the public an opportunity to see what it takes to get an opera prepared for performance.  The compositional energy it takes to write an opera is immense.  The requirements are extremely difficult to meet (given the fact that there is a multi-century tradition to deal with). 

I have the greatest respect for young composers who approach opera, especially since the art form is so difficult to break into.  Major companies can usually afford to take risks on tried and true composers, but given that, it is difficult for young composers to become tried and true opera composers without the opportunity of having their works performed.  (The famous Catch-22 – you can’t find a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.)  My hope is that the Opera Vista festival will give those young composers that very opportunity of gaining the experience necessary to write opera well into the future.  It is only by doing this that we can hope to see operas from this century enter the canon.