No,” says Dale Johnson, “this is not a golden age of singing.” This realization reached him with the force of a “revelation” during an auditions tour of opera companies in the United States and Europe. “I just began to hear that there really wasn’t good singing going on,” he explains. “There are good voices, but what you hear is a lack of expression, singers who are singing as loudly as they possibly can, squalling, pushing, with no understanding of the music, no attention to musical style, or rather, a very generalized style.” Why? “Singers are not being taught in colleges and training programs to appreciate style and the nuances of language. Opera companies are making too many compromises for the sake of stars, and the audience idolizes very generalized music making.” Johnson feels that it is time to get back to basics: the music. He agrees with Rossini that opera is voice, voice, voice, and wants to produce operas that singers can sing beautifully, as exemplified by the tenets of bel canto. He has adopted a philosophy based upon the inspiration of bel canto. “Not that we produce hundreds of bel canto operas, even though I’d like that, but that we bring that same kind of philosophy to every work that we do. We look at the singer as the strength of the piece rather than, ‘we’ve got a cool production design. Let’s try and plug some singers into it whether they can sing it or not.’ We are codified by Rossini,” he continues, and inspired by Pesaro’s example, he wants to produce more of Rossini’s opera serias, as well as some Donizetti rarities such as Maria de Rudenz or Maria Padilla.
To develop singers from an early age in the tenets of bel canto is the goal of the young artist program, now 3 years old. Seven singers are currently enrolled. One, Stephanie Lewis, is a promising coloratura soprano; another, Andrew Gangestad, a Metropolitan Opera auditions finalist, was the highly impressive Oroe in Semiramide. The program will be expanded next year to include a young conductor who will be taught to understand the musical line and the needs of the singers.
The Minnesota Opera has also reached the conclusion that an investment has to be made in the audience as well, and education programs to that purpose are now in operation. There are now hour-long operalogues before each performance narrated by Dale Johnson. (I attended the one before the performance of Semiramide and found Mr. Johnson witty, erudite and entertaining. The sizeable group present obviously enjoyed it thoroughly.) Two-hour seminars are offered a couple of weeks before each premier; there is a program that sends performances out to schools; a 3-month tour takes certain productions throughout the midwest each fall. These have been so successful that there have been overtures from Europe for visits by the touring company.
A season tape had long been sent out to subscribers, but a grant from Opera America enabled Minnesota Opera to put together an educational CD for their production of Georges Antheuil’s Translantic. Johnson felt that although their audiences are progressive, their ears might need to be attuned to this different style. The educational tool helped to make the production a huge success. Another CD, “The Art of Bel Canto and the Romantic Generation,” was issued this year. It is surely unique, brilliantly conceived, giving the listener an overview of the bel canto period, the music, its style and performance traditions. Dale Johnson narrates it superbly, and the musical examples are drawn from the catalogs of Opera Rara and Columbia/Sony, as well as Delta Entertainment. “We are ushering in a new era with a thoughtfully articulated artistic vision based on the philosophy and values of ‘beautiful singing,’ which came out of the Bel Canto period at the beginning of the 19th century in Italy,” said Mr. Johnson. “The primary values of these periods and the philosophy it engendered are the effortless and expressive delivery of tone, the mastery of appropriate musical style and the natural beauty of the voice. Our artistic vision will not only result in a commitment to staging one Bel Canto-period opera every year, it also will inform every aspect of production, from casting and rehearsal time to set and costume design, so that each element serves the values of bel canto.”
This enterprising opera company clearly knows what is required to produce a golden age!
