If the Bronx had an ambassador, it would undoubtedly be Michael Spierman, the Bronx Opera’s artistic director and conductor.
Spierman has lived his life in the Bronx, the northernmost of New York City’s five boroughs, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science. Soon after completing college as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduate school as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he joined the music faculty of Hunter College, where he continues to share his love of music with students today.
The Bronx has produced a number of artists and performers over the years, but many of them prefer to tell their Bronx tales today from afar. The Bronx is still Michael Spierman’s home, however, and he is unapologetic in his enthusiasm for the borough that has nurtured him, the borough where he cofounded the Bronx Opera Company in 1967.
“Some people regard ‘Bronx Opera’ as an oxymoron,” explains Spierman. Many modern Americans view opera as one of the most unapproachable arts—and just as many view the Bronx, in its own way, as equally unapproachable. Yet opera and the Bronx have come together in a company that has been producing acclaimed opera productions for almost 40 years.
I met with Spierman at his apartment in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx. It is a large, bright, inviting space, filled with numerous scores, books, recordings, and memorabilia. Its walls are alive with photographs of many productions and pictures of Spierman with various mayors of New York City and musical giants such as Pablo Casals and Aaron Copland. Photos and reviews also adorn the walls; so do newspaper clippings from Brazil and other faraway locales, along with letters from grateful community leaders who, like Spierman, are dedicated to creating a vibrant artistic climate in this diverse and fascinating part of the city.
When the Bronx Opera began in 1967, New York City offered few opportunities for young singers. Spierman and the colleagues who founded the company worried about what they felt was a “subliminal chaos” in many opera productions resulting from a lack both of adequate rehearsal and attention to production detail. They wondered what would happen if an opera production were prepared as carefully as, say, a chamber music recital, and presented in an intimate setting. In 1967, average operagoers usually found themselves sitting in the balconies of large theaters, missing most of the subtleties occurring on stage, and experiencing only a minimal emotional connection with the artists. Productions at the smaller companies often attempted to recreate large-scale operas in modest spaces, ignoring the potential for intimacy and nuance.
Spierman and his colleagues believed that if they could put carefully prepared, talented performers and productions in close proximity to their audiences, those operagoers could realize more of the art form’s nuances, and come away with a richer and more powerful experience of opera as a whole.
The company’s policy of singing all of its productions in English added accessibility. At the time, presenting opera in the native language of the host country was an accepted practice abroad, but less common in the United States. Presenting English-language productions with modest admission prices has always been the focus of the Bronx Opera—and that philosophy has been working for decades, developing a large following from all over the New York metropolitan area.
Critics have also been enthusiastic, from the New York Post in 1973 (“The young people involved in such a performance, acting well, pronouncing clearly and singing musically before a delighted audience, testify that musical theatre is alive and well in this city”), to New York Magazine in 1984 (“Sometimes eager, fresh young singers can vitalize an operatic staple that seasoned professionals take for granted, and this talented cast communicated all the excitement of a masterpiece discovered for the first time”), to New York Newsday in 1992 (“If this were the best of all possible worlds there would be Bronx Operas going strong in every neighborhood of the country, melding local folks and promising youngsters in deftly staged productions of the rare and common, feeding the grand companies with new talent and helping opera itself to thrive”) to the New York Times a few months ago (“The Bronx Opera Company has always been a model of what can be done with modest resources”).
The Bronx Opera mounts two productions per season, beginning with a rarely performed work in January. In this slot, the company has championed American composers, such as Aaron Copland, Douglas Moore and Kirke Mecham, as well as Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo, Smetana’s The Secret, Rossini’s L’equivoco stravagante, Suppé’s Boccaccio, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love, Carl Nielsen’s Maskarade and many other works that veteran operagoers had not seen elsewhere.
Spierman and the company present a standard repertoire item each spring but stay away from the large-scale warhorses often favored by other small companies, preferring to leave the “Toscas” and “Trovatores” to larger companies with the resources to mount them more effectively.
During the past decade, the Bronx Opera has added an innovative Arts in Education Program to its schedule. Performers—often the company’s understudy cast conducted by Spierman’s assistant conductor—visit Bronx public schools to present morning children’s performances. Many of those public school students return with their parents for the full weekend performances, and are treated to a Spierman-led backstage tour prior to the curtain.
Many, often exposed to opera for the first time, have become “regular” audience members in later seasons.
The Bronx Opera is more than ideals and goals, however, and is certainly more than Michael Spierman, as he is the first to assert.
“It is above all about people, very talented people,” says Spierman, “coming together with all of their creative energies to produce a whole that is often greater than the sum of its parts.” This includes talented assistant conductors, pianists, orchestra musicians, design and backstage personnel, and, of course, creative stage directors, including Spierman’s son, Benjamin, who has established himself throughout the country as an outstanding young director.
The singers are at the forefront of it all, doing what Spierman believes is: “arguably the most complex and challenging task in all of the arts.” And doing it remarkably well, as the long list of alumni performing in major houses—Neil Rosenshein, Sir Willard White, Brenda Harris, Lori Ann and Mary Phillips, Philip Cokorinos, and many, many others—proudly demonstrates.
The Bronx Opera’s 40th anniversary season will include a revival of Copland’s The Tender Land, first done in collaboration with the composer three decades ago, and the company’s first-ever production of Carmen (in its original opéra-comique version). Performances will be at the Lovinger Theatre of Lehman College (the company’s home in northwest Bronx), at the Heckscher Theater in upper Manhattan in January, and, in May, at the John Cranford Adams Playhouse of Hofstra University on Long Island. For more details, visit the company’s website, www.bronxopera.org.
