My great-grandmother, Madame Dorothea Derrfuss, was a celebrated operatic contralto diva during the early 1930s. She died before I was born but I recently found some tracks of her singing and thought it would be great to do a Natalie Cole-type album like “Unforgettable”—singing duets with my late great-grandmother. I mentioned it to my husband David Otta, an experienced independent film and TV producer in Orange County, California, and we both began talking to friends, family and supporters to help define the project and see if we could put an investment group together to finance it.
I shared my plans with Richard Vitek, a board member of Florentine Opera. I’d met Richard and his wife Marilyn when I did Musetta in Milwaukee in 1997, and we have been close friends ever since. He’s been a big fan of mine and has been enthusiastic about helping me advance my career. Richard and David began contacting people they knew, building a board of investors and they eventually formed a limited liability partnership called Verismo Opera Group and Richard became Executive Producer.
The investors are friends, fans and supporters: people who are patrons of the arts, love opera, and who have closely followed my career since I began singing professionally 15 years ago. They like helping young artists, especially those they believe in.
Richard was thinking I should do something much grander than a duet album with my great-grandmother. I thought that it should be Italian arias and discussed a possible repertoire with my voice teacher and friend, Bill Schuman. Bill felt I should find music that reflected my voice, so I decided that rare Italian verismo arias produced from 1884 to 1934 would be the perfect choice.
I then began discussing this project with others to get their input. A colleague and manager in the business, John Miller, suggested that I do some research at the Metropolitan Opera specifically on operas performed before World War I, when the verismo, or realism, movement had started to fade. Long-time friend and conductor John DeMain gave me valuable direction on how to design the project. When I asked conductor Yves Abel, a friend and mentor who I’d met in 1995 in the Opera Theater of St. Louis’s Young Artists, what he thought about the project, he said: “I think I want to conduct it.” I was thrilled because he’s an amazing artist and I adore working with him.
I also loved the irony of it. It’s not every day that an American soprano gets to record rare Italian music in London with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Yves Abel, a French-Canadian who in the past has specialized in French opera! Yves wanted to be sure I was in good hands, so he gave me an entrée to Michael Haas, a multi-Grammy-award winning executive and recording producer for both Universal Music Group’s Decca/London and the Sony Classical labels. Michael had recently started his own production company, CoralFox Ltd. He agreed to produce the project which included supervising the recording sessions and giving me and Yves vocal and orchestral input for capturing the best takes.
Michael also introduced me to our music engineer, Jonathan Stokes of Classical Sound, whose job it was to mic the entire orchestra and control the sound. Michael worked with Jonathan during the editing sessions and provided his expertise in selecting the best takes to produce the best recording. Jonathan then compiled the edits and mastered the final to a digital format.
So many people helped us and opened doors to make this project happen.
A critical part of planning a CD is putting a program together with selections that work together to create a pleasing palate. Michael suggested two intermezzi and a duet with a tenor to add variety to the repertoire. He believes a soloist CD shouldn’t be longer than 50 to 55 minutes. I was determined to find the most rare music I could to make it interesting not only for me and everyone else doing the project, but for the listener.
I soon discovered that working with rare music is challenging. Finding titles and composers is easy enough but obtaining the music is tough.
My researcher Lee Conduti, another friend, called all over the world for piano vocal sheet music so we could at least listen and see if we liked it. My coach Henri Venanzi, who is the chorus master at Opera Pacific in Orange County as well as for Cincinnati Opera, sat with me for hours as we played through what we found, then we would send Lee out to find more. Since operas from the Verismo period are so theatrically driven, there are few long sections that could actually be called an aria, thus the reason so few have been extracted and done in concert.
In January 2001 I met in New York with Bill Schuman, Yves Abel and a pianist, and we edited. I sang through about 25 arias and we all said, “no, no,” “yes, yes,” “keep it,” “throw it out.” That put us back to square one. We didn’t have enough of a repertoire. At the time I was coaching with soprano Renata Scotto and she suggested arias to research. We had to hurry: the recording session was set for the end of the year, and we had to find orchestral parts for arias that hadn’t been done since the 1920s, or had never been recorded.
That’s when the nightmare began.
We’d try to buy full scores, and when we couldn’t, we’d rent them from every publishing house we could locate, such as Ricordi, Bosey & Hawkes, and Lucks. Then when the music arrived, we’d find that the aria wasn’t in it, having been thrown out by the composer after it debuted. For one of the intermezzi, the conductor’s score did not exist and we had to hire somebody to write it. David was e-mailing all over the world to arrange to buy the music, get the rights and get contracts signed so we could get everything going.
If it hadn’t been for the Internet, this whole project—with all the time zones and different entities involved—would’ve been impossible. Anyone contemplating doing a recording with a rare repertoire should know it will be extremely difficult acquiring parts. You must allow plenty of time before you get to production. As it turned out, the originally slated “Rare Verismo Arias” collection was much different from what was actually produced.
Even with careful planning over 18 months, certain aspects began falling apart and we had to put them together in an impossible time frame. By November, two weeks before our recording date, I was debuting Tosca for the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee—and the English Chamber Orchestra was calling me daily asking for missing parts, including those for a Vittadini aria stored in the vaults of Ricordi in Milan.
Even though ECO librarian Ivan Rockey helped us get through the maze of copyright laws and find much of what was missing, half the parts were not even marked for the instruments to follow, none of the scores had been checked for mistakes, and none of the string parts had any bowings. Even the experienced ECO musicians had never seen or heard the music before and had to learn it. When we needed more players, ECO’s music coordinator Pauline Gilbertson gathered some from the Royal Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestras. The talent she amassed was amazing. Our first chair violin is a concert soloist.
Twenty-four hours before everyone was to fly to London, we still had two arias with missing parts. So there I was on stage in Tosca in Milwaukee and at intermission I had to rush to the orchestra and beg them to mark the parts for the orchestra in London!
To add to the tension, I had a duet scheduled and at the last minute the tenor cancelled. My husband got on the phone to find a replacement for him, and learned that all the tenors we wanted in London were ill. We decided to record the duet anyway and hopefully add a tenor later, which actually happened though an amazing stroke of luck, or fate. A tenor friend, Philip Webb, who I’d not seen in a year, knocked on our door at our home in Tustin, California, on Christmas day just to say “hi.” It turned out he was heading for London anyway, was thrilled to be on my CD, and popped in and did his part in one hour.
Thank God for technology! Our engineer Jonathan met with Philip and later punched in his part to match the one I’d already recorded. We had the perfect duet.
I finished Tosca, and the next morning everyone involved converged in London from all over the globe. On the first day, on the way to Walthamstow Hall for our first and only rehearsal, all of us, in separate cabs, got stuck in a traffic jam due to a big accident. None of our cell phones were working and we were an hour-and-a half late. By the time we got there we ran in ready to slam through every aria. I was jet-lagged and tension was high.
But all the stress stopped the minute the music started. Some of it hadn’t been played since the 1920s. Conchita alone was banned from the Chicago Lyric Opera because it was so violent, and no one had heard it in the United States in 80 years. And here we were hearing it for the first time with a full orchestra. That was magic for me. I just sat there and cried when I heard the first aria. I said, “That’s heaven!” It was really emotional for everyone. For six days we’d talk through music, run through it once with the orchestra, then lay down the tracks.
By the last day it was such a culmination of efforts, we all felt like we had given birth to 13 children. Yves and I were crying, we were so happy. We had done something unique.
Doing a recording is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life because it requires so many different aspects of being a professional singer. You have to have a business perspective, an artistic perspective and a management perspective; you have to be aware of everything that’s going on at all times. But then when you’re singing, you have to be able to block out all those things. Then the minute you’re done, you have to put your business hat back on.
There are so many decisions beyond the actual recording session itself to be dealt with: the music you choose, the album design, setting up photo sessions for the cover, research and translations for the album notes, distribution and marketing.
I was fortunate, though. As Verismo Opera Group manager, my husband David supervised most of this. He is currently in negotiations with a label company that will provide worldwide retail distribution and allow us to retain the rights to the CD so that we can still make money off of it 20 years from now. Our budget of $150,000, which includes marketing and development, is comparable to what a label company would spend on a major recording star.
In all, Verismo Opera Group ended up spending about $15,000 for pre-production, which comprised research, music rentals and preparation, and coaching and voice lessons. We spent $105,000 for production, including the orchestra and travel costs for five people. And $30,000 has been allocated for editing, marketing, designing and photographing the album cover and hiring a publicist.
David and I decided to make the most of every dollar raised and consistently worked to keep costs down. We did as much as we could ourselves, had amazing help—and discounts—from friends. Recording in London helped immensely. Recording in Europe costs about one third of what it would cost in the United States. Equivalent U.S. talent would have meant spending more than $30,000 per session for the orchestra, and our recording required six sessions. Most of the artistic team donated their services, including my husband, whose fee could have been $10,000 to $15,000. If our musical team—researchers, musical coordinator, coaches, conductor, and project manager—had all been paid their full fee, the project would have come in at $30,000 to $40,000 more than it did.
For the artist, it’s not necessarily about making money on the recording. Sometimes it’s for posterity or for historical value. For me it was not only about advancing my career but about doing something unique I could always be proud of.
Michael Haas, our producer, says to think of a project in its entirety, where it’s going and your vision for it, not to focus on global or major retail sales. You have to direct market to your fan base through the Internet, local outlets and at performances.
“Rare Verismo Arias” will be available on the Web at www.robinfollman.com by June, and we’ve set up a toll-free number, 866-4FOLLMAN, to help increase sales. This will help greatly in marketing direct, since I plan to use this number and Web site to pro- mote the CD when I’m doing a national radio tour this summer. In October it will be sold in the lobby for the first time at the Macau International Music Festival, where I’ll be singing Mimi in La bohème. And later this year I’m planning to do a concert of rare Verismo arias.
I was lucky to have the dream situation with my first CD. My next project, planned for this summer, should be much easier and less expensive. It is a duet CD of standard soprano repertoire with tenor Warren Mok, conductor Joseph Rescigno and the Moscow Philharmonic. After that, I’m planning another collection of rare arias, Volume 2, which the Verismo Opera Group will produce. We’ve been in contact with Ricordi, and someone will transcribe the parts and build new parts from original manuscripts. It will have more obscure pieces, those we couldn’t get for the first recording.
And of course, I’d like to do what I originally intended—a duet recording with the voice of my great-grandmother. I think she would have loved that.
