Richard Wagner may be the opera composer most associated with epic grandeur: huge orchestras, huger sets. I never imagined I’d hear a full performance of one of his works while sitting just a few feet from the singers.
But Des Moines Metro Opera, a four-week summer festival founded in 1973 and running this year through July 20, has made a specialty of squeezing pieces usually done in front of thousands into a startlingly intimate space. The company’s 476-seat theater wraps the stage around the pit and juts deep into the audience, drawing even the last row into the action.
At the opening of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in the last week of June, the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny could brood in a murmur as the endlessly wandering captain of the title, while the choruses of raucous sailors were ear-shakingly visceral. It registered when the subtlest Mona Lisa smile crossed the face of Julie Adams as Senta, whose romantic obsession leads her to sacrifice everything for the Dutchman. Try that at the Met.
“When you first get here, it’s a little intimidating,” said the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, a Des Moines regular in recent years. “There’s no hiding, or even trying to. Everything is in hyper detail. Everything is in close-up.”
The effect would be striking enough in Mozart or chamber opera. But the company has made a habit of putting on big, challenging works of a sort rarely if ever done in theaters so small: “Salome,” “Elektra,” “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “Billy Budd,” “Peter Grimes” and “Wozzeck,” with modest adjustments to some orchestrations, given a pit that fits about 65 musicians.
“I’m not going to shy away from anything, of any size, if we can get it into the pit,” said Michael Egel, the company’s general and artistic director. “I think pieces like that benefit from the space, benefit from looking at them through a different kind of lens. In ‘Salome,’ with her carrying Jochanaan’s head around and writhing on a rock, all five feet from the audience, the proximity was so exciting.”
In an opera landscape of caution and contraction, Des Moines has become one of the country’s most ambitious and successful smaller companies. Alongside “The Flying Dutchman,” this summer’s festival features Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” all difficult to prepare and difficult to sell — titles of the kind that even many larger houses fear to touch.
Since Egel took over about 15 years ago, the company’s annual budget has more than doubled to roughly $5.4 million, and the endowment has grown to over $20 million from $7 million. The top-notch orchestra draws players from around the country, and the quality of singers has soared. About a quarter of attendees are from out of state, and even risky fare succeeds at the box office: Last summer, 15 of 17 performances sold out, par for the course of late.
“The local audience here always surprises me,” Egel said. “Because their taste is far more sophisticated and curious than it might seem on the surface. It’s overly simplistic to think that people who are coming on an airplane want ‘Lulu’ and people coming from down the street want ‘Carmen.’”
The company, based on the campus of Simpson College in Indianola, about 17 miles south of downtown Des Moines, was the brainchild of Robert L. Larsen. A music professor at Simpson, Larsen was a visionary — not only for founding an opera company in the corn fields, but also for pushing beyond “La Traviata” and “La Bohème.”
“From year one, Robert cultivated a willingness to take risks,” Egel said. The company’s first season included Puccini’s “La Rondine,” Britten’s “Albert Herring,” and a pairing of Menotti’s “The Medium” with the American premiere of Arthur Benjamin’s “Prima Donna.” The decades that followed were similarly, delightfully offbeat.
But over time, the company drifted from its lovably scrappy origins toward something closer to summer stock. Larsen, who conducted and directed every production, used the same singers over and over, and started repeating operas. The productions grew more stale.
Egel, an Iowa native, had come to Simpson as an undergraduate in the early 1990s intending to study musical theater. He became involved in Larsen’s company simply as a summer job, driving singers to and from the airport, cleaning the bathrooms, tending bar and eventually graduating to props and marketing. (Even today, company members spot him vacuuming carpets and watering plants.)
Realizing he was more passionate about behind-the-scenes work than performing, he became the company’s artistic administrator. When Larsen was forced to retire because of health problems in 2009 (he died in 2021), Egel took over as artistic director, and a few years later added the chief executive-type responsibilities of general director.
Following a founder is never easy, especially after almost 40 years, but Egel was the rare successor who had both insider credibility and fresh ideas. “I made a pledge,” he said, “that every season there would be at least one title we hadn’t done before.” He wanted 15 years to pass before repeating a title.
“Michael and I really staked our reputation on 2013, with ‘Elektra’ and ‘Peter Grimes,’” recalled David Neely, the company’s music director. “After the first orchestra rehearsal of ‘Elektra,’ we all looked around and went, ‘Damn, we’re good.’ That experience changed the entire game. If we can do that and ‘Grimes,’ we can do anything.”
Egel invited directors to experiment more than Larsen had, embracing the distinctiveness of the space.
“I was like, if we’re going to work in the round, which is essentially what this is, let’s really do it,” said Kristine McIntyre, an artistic partner with the company who staged this year’s sprightly “Vixen,” which juxtaposed Vita Tzykun’s folk-rustic costumes with high-definition LED video by the designer and filmmaker Oyoram.
Though the opening night performance of “Vixen,” on June 28, had to start over because of a technical malfunction, Oyoram’s contribution was surreally enchanting, the singers were eloquent and, under Neely, the orchestra captured both Janacek’s angularity and his glowing lyricism. If Joshua Borths’s “Flying Dutchman” production was too mild-mannered, the ringing tenor Demetrious Sampson Jr., a former Des Moines apprentice who sang the small role of the Steuermann, showed off the company’s excellent ear for young artists.
The recent premieres of “A Thousand Acres,” based on the Jane Smiley novel set in Iowa, and “American Apollo,” about the relationship between the painter John Singer Sargent and one of his models, were part of a costly stretch around the company’s 50th anniversary. Its Second Stages Series, which brought smaller-scale pieces to unconventional spaces around Des Moines, needed to be put on hiatus.
“I’d like to see it come back,” Darren Jirsa, the chair of the company’s board, said of the program. “It gets us out of Indianola and exposes the opera to more people.”
That will take even more money, though, as the company also begins a fund-raising push toward a renovation of its theater’s cramped, outdated backstage facilities. New technical capacities could bring the possibility of more performances or main stage productions; Des Moines is the rare company these days with the demand for tickets to justify growing a bit bigger.
Next summer features Karol Szymanowski’s “King Roger” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men.” And, yes, Puccini’s “Tosca,” even if here the standards count as unusual fare. But Egel’s programming dreams tend more esoteric: “Lulu,” the company’s first Handel, something by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
“I have so much to say, and I enjoy saying it here,” Egel said. “I’m from here. It helps if the general director is of the community and understands the community. Because then the relationships are personal, and the success is personal. I just really want a thriving opera company in my home state.”
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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