On a breezy evening in March, baritone Nathan Gunn took to the stage of Dallas’ Winspear Opera House and sang: “Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above/Don’t fence me in.” Cole Porter’s familiar lines earned a rousing applause from the audience, who were still buzzing from Gunn’s performance earlier that evening: a world premiere of a Jake Heggie song cycle.
The moment was shortly lived, but encompasses Texas’s art scene on the whole. Equal parts classic and cutting edge, a combination of standard and strange, the nation’s second-largest state boasts a staggering number of opera companies that have made it on the international scene and are popular with singers around the world—not to mention an abundance of church jobs, several key symphonies, and a bevy of early music groups and choirs that grace the state.
This all begs the question: Why Texas?
First and foremost, as I learned after spending extensive time in the land of Bush and brisket, opera is a part of music is a part of Texas. “I did a concert in San Antonio once for the Tuesday Morning Club,” recounts Dallas native and soprano Laura Claycomb. “It was in a Baptist church . . . and there were a thousand people there in San Antonio. There is the audience; there is the artistic will to do really wonderful things here.”
Soprano Ava Pine, a native of Fredericksburg (in Austin-neighboring hill country), had no exposure to opera as a child. Nevertheless, she lights up at the mention of Texas’s musical traditions, especially choir.
“The All-State Choir is the lifelong journey of every high school singer,” she gushes. Both Pine and Claycomb also echo the old chestnut that everything is bigger in Texas, a bigness that lends itself to the grand, large-scale nature of opera. “If we’re gonna build a music school, we’re gonna build a darn good one. If we’re gonna have an opera company, it needs to be the best one we can possibly make,” says Pine.
With that bigness comes space. And in the last few decades, that space has been maximized in part thanks to private capital and civic pride to construct four state-of-the-art opera houses in Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and Austin.
“I was extraordinarily impressed by what this city has accomplished in the arts district, and the fact that they could raise over $3 million dollars just for the most recent part of the performing arts district and produce this fantastic opera house,” says Dallas Opera General Director Keith Cerny. That private capital amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars to build One Arts Plaza, Dallas’ answer to Lincoln Center.
Dallas may have the newest house on the block, but there are other key spaces in the state. Houston Grand Opera inaugurated the Gus S. Wortham Theater Center on October 15, 1987, with a production of Aida that starred Plácido Domingo and Mirella Freni. Carl Cunningham, writing for the 2005 commemorative book Houston Grand Opera at Fifty, calls this “a proud, impressive moment in the company’s history, one that attracted broad international attention and put the company’s artistic profile in bold relief.”
Like the Winspear, the Brown Theater in the Wortham Theater Center skews large with 2,465 seats (the Cullen Theater has 1,100 seats, perfect for chamber operas). Its claim to fame, however, are “frying-pan” pods that, accessible by walkways over the orchestra level, send music into areas that would otherwise be considered dead spots for audiences.
On the smaller scale, Fort Worth Opera’s Bass Performance Hall (part of Fort Worth’s cultural district, the third-largest district in the country) is a multi-use venue for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and Texas Ballet Theater, which opened in 1998. “People love singing there,” says longtime FWO singer Jonathan Blalock of the hall. “It’s like coming home.”
Austin Lyric Opera’s Long Center is a new space and an upgrade from another Bass Hall, at University of Texas–Austin, which ALO tenor Brian Joyce compares to Dallas’s Fair Park. “The Long Center is so much better. It’s beautiful inside, the backstage is really nice, it’s easy to sing in there. You’re not oversinging at all.”
But it’s truly the people that make houses—even opera houses—homes. And Blalock is not the only guest of a Texas company to compare the working experience as “coming home.”
Making both his company and role debuts as the Count Almaviva in HGO’s recent production of Le nozze di Figaro, bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni described the atmosphere as “a great place to make my role debut as the Count.”
“It was the perfect environment to add a vocally challenging role to my repertoire,” adds Pisaroni, who was previously a known Figaro and made a major shift in taking on the role of the Count. “I felt at home in the atmosphere and I look forward to making many other role debuts there.”
Pisaroni’s cast mate, Patrick Carfizzi (Figaro), concurs: “One thing that keeps me coming back to Houston is knowing that I’m going to be working with an amazing and supportive group of people—and because of that, I’m going to be performing at my best. Everyone on the HGO team gives you 100 percent, and you want to turn around and give that right back. It feels like coming home.”
“I just mentioned, ‘Please, can I get the same apartment where I stayed the last time and time before?’” Russian baritone Sergei Leiferkus recounts of his relationship to Dallas Opera. “No problem. They organized that immediately. . . . Doesn’t matter if it’s the artistic director or the drivers, that’s the family. That’s the family business, and you are inside the family. That’s the fantastic thing.”
“You feel like you want to work,” says soprano Elena Bocharova, who sang opposite Leiferkus in Boris Godunov as Marina. “Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do and everybody cares about making something good and putting it all together.”
The administrators don’t believe that keeping their singers happy and comfortable is an elusive science or Holy Grail type of secret. “So much about attracting singers is making sure they have a good experience and they want to come back,” explains Cerny. “The kind of artistic talent that we aspire to work with can perform anywhere, so just offering someone a commission or a contract to sing is really not enough. We need to really make them feel welcome and part of the community.”
For Fort Worth Opera’s artistic director (and former performer) Darren Keith Woods, it’s also a no-brainer. “When I was a singer, I was always starving after performances, so for my singers now I make sure they have nice, hot, catered food waiting for them in their dressing room right after curtain call.” It’s these little touches that make the job so appealing to singers—and when it comes to interacting with the public, there are just as many perks.
“After opening night of Julius Caesar, I met a gentleman who was straight out of cowboy casting central,” says Pine. “And he said, ‘Ma’am, I want you to know that this is my very first opera I’ve ever been to. And I loved it.’”
“Whenever you go to a new place, you always hope that the audience is going to click into the show that you do,” says soprano Nili Riemer, who made her ALO debut as Princess Laoula in Chabrier’s L’étoile. “And I wasn’t sure about that, because I wasn’t sure what Austin audiences were like. But I quickly found out that true to their city slogan, which is ‘Keep Austin Weird,’ Austin audiences were absolutely exuberant.”
The cowboy going for baroque with his first opera and Austin’s embracement of an out-there French operetta are just two examples of the ownership Texans have over their companies and their artists, even beyond the monetary support and even if there is an initial resistance to change.
“When I came to Fort Worth, I said I was not going to babysit a Top-20 opera company,” explains Woods, who came in at a time when Fort Worth Opera’s future was shaky at best and managed to turn it into a vibrant summer festival. “They thought I set the house on fire,” he jokes of the initial reaction. The massive changes—adding in contemporary repertoire like the Southwest premiere of Péter Eötvös’ Angels in America, the world premiere of Jorge Martín’s Before Night Falls, and this last season’s regional premiere of Glass’ Hydrogen Jukebox (which sold out before it opened).
“It’s kind of savvy on their part. It was a big gamble, I know, to do that, but it seems to have paid off,” says Blalock, one of the cast members of “Jukebox.” “One of the most exciting parts of it musically deals was the Iran-Contra Scandal and the drug wars, and it pretty blatantly exposes the first George Bush as being culpable in the situation. There are a lot of really conservative business people on the board, so he was really nervous about that, but some of the staunchest conservatives were some of the biggest fans.”
At HGO, David Gockley made it part of his mission as the company’s general director to bring new works to Space City. Cunningham described it as “one of the most salient features of the company’s artistic profile,” a feature that first brought to the stage works like Thomas Pasatieri’s The Seagull, Mark Adamo’s Little Women and Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess (a work that Fort Worth will produce next summer), and Tod Machover’s Resurrection.
There is also, of course, the juggernaut premiere of John Adams’ Nixon in China, a landmark in the American canon. It’s no surprise that, with Peter Gelb giving the Metropolitan Opera a new face with a toe in the contemporary operatic waters, one of their highest-lauded company premieres would be a refurbished version of HGO’s same “Nixon” production. It may have been 24 years overdue, but it speaks to the staying power of the gambles taken on by some of Texas’s feisty companies and explains why companies continue to take risks—such as Dallas with an impressive world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.
“You have the new music scene and you have the live music scene,” says Joyce of Austin. “I think [Austin Lyric Opera tries] to tie that in with doing more up-to-date, more modern works. And I think that’s part of what they’re digging into: we are what’s happening now.”
“It’s only natural for people to be afraid of the unknown. We are creatures of habit. But what do you do? You have to educate people. [Artistic Director] Jonathan Pell took a risk of doing [Moby-Dick], and I think it was the smartest thing,” says Bocharova.
The risks don’t end with works and composers and stagings, but also include singers: Claycomb and Pine are two examples of local singers making good—not a surprise, given the musicality of Texas beyond the classical sphere (“All the variety I was exposed to helped to shape me as a musician. . . . I have a lot more breadth to my musical vocabulary,” says Pine).
This is a state that has hosted the American debuts of Montserrat Caballé, Plácido Domingo, Waltraud Meier, Joan Sutherland, Felicity Palmer, and Cecilia Bartoli at companies like Dallas and Houston. It is also a state that fosters the next generation of talent.
Blalock credits his first professional job to Woods. Claycomb concurs. “He’s able to go out and find young artists who he wants to support and that he thinks should be seen and who don’t necessarily have a name at all—yet—and brings them to Fort Worth and takes a risk.”
Whether you’re a studio artist in Houston working alongside Susan Graham and David Daniels or in a cast of predominantly up-and-coming singers in Austin, it raises your own performance level. And, from uncommon artistic opportunities to a break in income taxes, there’s very little chance here of being fenced in.
