“Ultimately, a university’s job is education and an opera company’s job is putting on operas,” says Moores Opera Center Director Buck Ross over the phone. “They’re a little bit incompatible as altruistic as a lot of these programs are, and everybody has their own agenda and they gear different. It’s difficult for both of them to stay true to their mission.”
Yet, when Ross founded the center just over 25 years ago in 1986, he ultimately created a program that tempers education with a healthy dose of opera production. Housed within the University of Houston, a school with just under 40,000 students in 2011, the Moores Opera Center (MOC) caters to just less than 100 undergraduates, masters, and doctoral candidates (a number that includes music education and other nonperformance disciplines; roughly 25 graduate students are in the vocal degree program at any time). It’s a healthy number for a vocal program, but even healthier is the MOC’s true claim to fame: four fully staged productions each year, all double cast.
“Our job is to prepare people for careers in the business, and so we’re obviously doing that through comprehensive academic training—but also making sure that they’ve had a sufficient amount of stage time,” Ross explains. “A lot of schools, you can get through an entire program and not even do one role, whereas our students typically get to do two to three significant roles a year.”
“The strength of a program, I think, can be measured by the opportunities you’re given, and the Moores Opera Center really offers someone a lot of opportunity to get their hands wet,” adds Sandra Bernhard, the director of HGOco, the Houston Grand Opera’s initiative devoted to making opera relevant to changing audiences. “Applying the theory and pedagogy of what they’re learning really helps them inform themselves as artists.”
“By the time I left the Moores School of Music, I had quite a substantial résumé, having completed five big roles in shows that I’ve repeated,” says Javier Abreu, who completed his master’s degree at the Moores Center after following voice teacher Joseph Evans from Miami and who now has a flourishing international career (he returns to Texas this month to sing Lindoro in Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri at Austin Lyric Opera). It was the amount of stage experience Abreu had that encouraged him to pursue opera as a career, after spending his undergraduate year on the fence between music and pre-law and then initially exploring other genres of music.
Abreu isn’t alone in the career revelation. The repeated exposure to performance opportunities has given many Moores students a taste for an art form that constitutes the bread and butter of their music careers. Even a tenor like Joseph Gaines, who did a five-year degree at the University of Houston and who didn’t focus on opera until the last two years of his undergraduate studies, was able to get five operatic roles under his belt.
What’s more galvanizing is that Gaines’ five roles ranged from Orfeo in Peri’s Euridice (the first surviving opera from the days of the Florentine Camerata) to Pedrillo in Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the Rector in Peter Grimes to Danceny in Conrad Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons. “It was not necessarily where I thought I would have gone,” says Gaines, a native Houstonian who was introduced to the school’s campus during high school choral camps. “But when I was presented with the school and everything that it has to offer, I was like, ‘Why would I leave?’”
Four opera performance opportunities each year is one thing, but the care and craft that goes into the full Moores experience is another. When it comes to programming, Ross ensures that the operas each year are bespoke to the students on hand, even if the singers don’t realize it themselves. “My second year there, we did Il viaggio a Reims, and I had never heard of this show, I had never sung Rossini. But Buck had it in his head that I needed to sing Rossini,” says Abreu, who was later praised by Opera News as “a natural Rossini singer.” He reprised his role in “Reims” at New York City Opera.
As “Reims,” a Houston premiere, implies, uncommon repertoire is common at Moores. “We did Mozart’s Lucio Silla a couple of years ago because I happened to have the right people for it. I didn’t have a ‘Giovanni’ cast, so we didn’t do ‘Giovanni,’” Ross explains. Last spring the center produced Der Rosenkavalier, a work normally unheard of for a school to do, but one appropriate for the MOC last season as, in Ross’ words, “I happened to have a Baron Ochs walk in the door.”
“They don’t do anything here they don’t have the singers for,” adds David Ward. The Baron Ochs in question, Ward is a 51-year-old bass-baritone who opted for the Moores Center for a graduate degree to teach and direct. Discussing his dream roles and directorial gigs with Ross, Ward mentioned wanting to direct The Dialogues of the Carmelites. Ross’s response, according to Ward, was “I’m waiting for the year that I’m really short on men, or I have a year where I have a lot of women that can do the show really well.”
One hallmark, however, is the Moores Center’s commitment to contemporary repertoire—at least one performance each year is a work of a late-20th or early-21st century composer. In fact, the center, when it was known as the University Opera Theatre, was inaugurated with a production of Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All. Subsequent seasons have included world premieres of Houston alumnus Christopher Theofanidis’ The Thirteen Clocks and Robert Nelson’s A Room with a View (available on DVD).
Equally essential are the second runs the school gives to works that have had world premieres but were not seen anywhere else. After seeing the center’s production of his Florencia en el Amazonas, Daniel Catán then asked Ross to produce Il Postino, even before the work received its original world premiere in Los Angeles. The opera was served up as part of the 2009-10 season, and the school has committed to doing a complete cycle of the late composer’s operas.
Such a commitment is thanks to Ross, who did his own graduate studies at the University of Minnesota when the Minnesota Opera was in its heyday of producing new works, and then went to Houston from New York’s Encompass Music Theatre. He recognizes the second run as something that “composers need even more” and reveals in many works their potential beyond a first run, as was the case with Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. Before Corigliano reorchestrated the work for smaller companies, the Moores Center produced it—twice. “We can certainly be a huge service by taking [new works] to the next step. One of the things that ‘Ghosts’ did was show that it wasn’t such a behemoth of a show that smaller companies couldn’t do it,” says Ross.
“I had an interesting phone call from an ex-student of mine who was working with the Chicago Lyric Young Artist Program at the time, and he said, ‘Remember those hard operas that I complained I had to learn? Well, thank God, because I’m really prepared to learn things like Lulu,’” Ross adds. “And it’s true, because what happens is our students aren’t afraid of anything because they’re led to believe—which is true—that they can do anything. I think it’s a great disservice to them to think that all they will sing is Mozart. It’s not that we don’t do Mozart, because we do, and that’s very important for them to do as well. But it’s also important for them to not think that doing contemporary opera is an odd thing to do.”
The singing doesn’t stop there. Soprano Julia Engel, who heard of the Moores Opera Center after Ross’s comments on her Classical Singer Competition performance in Chicago in 2009, was sold on the program after hearing about the open policy with regards to studio sessions. Students can participate in any teacher’s session Monday through Friday—an enviable service when it comes to preparing roles, song, or audition rep. “That really blew my mind because I know at the school where I came from and many other schools, it’s just not set up that way,” says Engel, who now feels comfortable asking any of the Moores faculty members for a letter of recommendation.
And for students like Ward not entirely set on a performance track, there are chances to direct—Ward, as a master’s candidate, helmed the mainstage performance of Kirke Mechem’s Tartuffe last spring, relatively unheard of for a first-year student. In between classes in pedagogy and theater history, he’s also been offered the chance to cover for a faculty member’s music appreciation classes, an invaluable on-the-ground experience in teaching.
A base in Houston also means extensive opportunities on campus and off. Beyond Houston Grand Opera, there is Opera Vista, Opera in the Heights, Ars Lyrica, Mercury Baroque, the Eastman Chamber Choir, and more. “A part of education is observing what’s going on, and this is happening on so many different levels in so many places around the city,” says Bernhard. “I can’t imagine being in a better place as a student.”
“There was some point in my undergrad where I was involved in six different choirs and ensembles both inside the university and outside,” recalls Gaines, who names off a schedule that included a Sunday church job, a Friday temple gig, performances with the Bach Society Houston, Celtic Chorale, and Collegium. “The wonderful thing about that—not only does it give you a bit of walking-around money, it gives you tremendous opportunities for all kinds of performing very early on that it completely overlaps with what you have the opportunity to do at the university. You get your first taste of professionalism.” (It’s worth mentioning that Gaines also completed studies with the university’s Honors College to add an extra academic depth to his studies, culminating in a thesis on literary representations of the male passaggio, another edge that Moores has over many of the traditional conservatories.)
An added taste of professionalism comes from the center’s facilities, chief among them the 800-seat Moores Opera House which opened in 1997 and features artwork by Frank Stella. “For me it was a joy to sing in because I sounded like Wotan,” laughs Ward. “But for some of these younger singers, they sound really good in that hall because it isn’t too big. They get the idea of what it’s like to project into a hall, but it’s not so big that they feel they have to push or cannot be heard.”
As voices continue to grow within its practice rooms and performance halls, so does the Moores Opera Center itself. Each summer, it continues its burgeoning program Le Chiavi di Bel Canto, organized in conjunction with the Texas Music Festival’s Institute of Bel Canto Studies (see January 2011). Leading up to a final concert of arias, songs, and ensembles, the program offers an intensive look at the specific musical repertoire in a more concentrated way than many other summer programs.
For all of its manifold offerings, the University of Houston setting also means modest fees. In fact, the school is 12th lowest in the nation for amount of graduating student debts. Moreover, when out-of-state students are awarded a scholarship of at least $1,000 (something that Moores strives to offer each of its pupils), they also automatically qualify for in-state tuition. “No singer can afford to be head-over-heels in debt when they get out of school,” says Ross. “That will sink their career faster than anything, because they then can’t make the kinds of sacrifices that one really has to make in those beginning years.”
Meanwhile, the Moores Center remains a sacrifice-free zone. At least not until they have a cast for Idomeneo.
