The Metropolitan Opera may have its financial woes, but it’s far from alone: Many American opera companies have trimmed back the number of titles they produce or the number of performances each season. Singers are left with diminishing opportunities in an already overcrowded profession.
Symphony orchestras are offsetting that decline, at least partially, by presenting more operas in concert, or even excerpts and fully staged productions, a shift driven largely by their music directors. Next season, for example, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” and the Los Angeles Philharmonic has programmed opera excerpts by John Adams. And this month, the Cleveland Orchestra presented Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”
“I’ve had more concert work recently,” said the soprano Sara Jakubiak, who stepped into the lead role of “Fidelio,” Leonore, at the last minute because of a cancellation. At Severance Hall in Cleveland, soloists in concert attire sang on a raised platform above the stage, with a narrator helping the audience follow the story.
Jakubiak was darkly supple as Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to rescue her husband from his unjust imprisonment. Another standout was the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny as the felonious prison owner Don Pizarro; he brought a cunning, animated quality to each melody and movement.
Cleveland does not have a major opera company. The city’s orchestra has a longstanding tradition of performing operas that dates back to a 1920 concert performance of Verdi’s “Aida.” Its current music director, Franz Welser-Möst, whom Konieczny described as “very old school, very elegant,” has also held conducting posts at major European opera houses. On Sunday, he led a brawnier-than-usual “Fidelio” from the Cleveland Orchestra, an ensemble famous for its refinement and transparency.
Welser-Möst has announced that he will step down in Cleveland at the end of next season, after 25 years. The orchestra is searching for its next music director, and André Gremillet, its president and chief executive, said that a fluency in opera will be essential for Welser-Möst’s successor.
“I don’t think you can really, truly understand Mozart’s music if you don’t know his operas,” Gremillet said. “It’s the same with Strauss. It’s all interconnected.”
In some “Fidelio” productions, the orchestra plays Leonore Overture No. 3, one of the several overtures Beethoven composed for the opera, near the end as an orchestral interlude, a tradition started by Beethoven during one of the opera’s several revisions. Cleveland’s triumphant, bow-shredding intensity seemed more charged in this narrative context than when it plays the overture as a symphonic concert opener.
Another key element of concert opera, which is cheaper to produce, is that the orchestra typically performs onstage with the singers rather than in a pit. The acoustic ramifications can be disastrous, especially with a larger number of players than you would hear in an opera house, so special attention must be paid to balancing the instruments and voices.
The soprano Latonia Moore, who sang in the Cleveland Orchestra’s performances of Janacek’s “Jenufa” last season, said that the platform at Severance Hall negates some of the difficulties of concert opera, in which singers “have to battle the musicians because it’s us against 85 people.” She hopes, she added, that other orchestras adopt a similar setup.
Sales for the opera performances are above average compared with a typical subscription concert, but they seem to be title driven. “Fidelio” sold 85 percent of the hall’s seats, and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” sold 104 percent, while Puccini’s less-familiar “The Girl of the Golden West” sold at 63 percent, and “Jenufa” 65 percent.
In 2021, the Mandel Foundation in Cleveland gave the orchestra $50 million to endow an annual humanities festival built around its opera. The theme of this year’s festival was “courage,” inspired by Leonore, and it included performances of operatic music by the composer Terence Blanchard, as well as symphonic and choral programs, lectures and panels.
Some operas in Cleveland have been proper productions; the acclaimed director Yuval Sharon staged Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” in 2014 and Debussy’s “Pélleas et Mélisande” a few years later. Next season, Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” will get a full production by Frederic Wake-Walker.
The baritone Simon Keenlyside, a regular collaborator with the orchestra, compared performing concert opera with the ensemble to “fly fishing on a chalk stream,” though he also expressed concern about diminishing opportunities, particularly for younger singers, in the United States.
“There are all of these incredible voices coming out there, but where are the jobs, man?” he said. “It’s heartbreaking. I don’t know where they’re going to go.”
For Jakubiak, who will sing Isolde in a concert presentation of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” with the London Symphony Orchestra in July, opera performances with orchestras are “certainly an answer for the interim.”
Concert opera, she added, also allows her to focus completely on the detail and color of the music more than she does in staged productions. “I find it very refreshing to be able to explore this auditory world,” Jakubiak said, “and to have audiences come in and not have to look at anything, but to truly listen.”
The post What Orchestras and Singers Gain Through Operas in Concert appeared first on New York Times.
