Andreas Mitisek at the Long Beach Opera offices. Photo by Greggory Moore.
The first Long Beach Opera performance I attended took place at the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool and featured a soprano who has performed numerous times with Metropolitan Opera singing a 21st-century take on the Orpheus myth.
The combination of those three factoids—renowned talent, unusual venue, modern opera—tells you a lot about what goes on at LBO. In 2013, we’re in for more of the same. And under the guidance of Andreas Mitisek, who is beginning his 10th year as LBO’s artistic and general director, it could not be any other way.
“I didn’t grow up liking traditional opera,” he says. “I liked theatre, I liked music and I liked the combination of both. […] People say, ‘You just need to see a good opera, and you will love it.’ No, I don’t think so, not necessarily.”
Although as an instrumentalist Mitisek eventually began to appreciate opera from a musical vantage point, he was often distracted by what he labels “the disconnectedness of some of it [from] what I found interesting. […] I couldn’t do any operas that I felt were just great music, where there’s no story to tell or something to grab your attention; or just have great stories with music I don’t feel confident about.”
To be sure, the operas LBO presents often feature stories that one can find compelling despite the music. My two favorite LBO performances are perfect cases in point: 2010’s Nixon in China portrays President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit to China and discussions with Mao Tse-tung; and last season’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat relates one of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s curious cases of neurological deficit.
Both of these operas premiered in the mid 1980s, and that recency is hardly a coincidence, as Mitisek consciously avoids canonical of work by the likes of Mozart and Verdi in favor of modern pieces performed far more rarely and that stray into musical territory beyond the typical operatic conventions.
“I do often find that the word ‘opera’ is almost a hindrance for people, because their clichés come up as soon as you say that word,” he says. “[…] It’s interesting to hear the patrons who don’t like opera who come [to LBO performances] describe their experience. […] The good thing is that there are so many works out there that no one knows. And even though the work is hard to do, it’s almost easier than if you have an opera company where you [recycle] the same 10 or 12 operas. […] We have a lot of other operas out there. I’m always happy when our audience doesn’t know any of [the operas LBO does in a given season]. Then we’re doing something right.”
On that score, LBO is very likely doing something right this year, with two West Coast premieres and two U.S. premieres. The season opens on January 27 with the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
If you know your Poe, it’s easy to see how The Fall of the House of Usher—along with Stewart Copeland’s (yes, the former drummer of The Police) Tell-Tale Heart—fits into LBO 2013’s “borderline” theme, what with Poe’s characters crossing the threshold of madness.
“It’s this really weird story that withdraws from reality, and I think Philip Glass’s music really fits that very well,” Mitisek says, “because it kind of suspends time and place, and [this] really helps you be drawn into the House of Usher.”
Madness also pervades season-closer Macbeth, which Mitisek proudly points out is not the famous Verdi version.
“Of course we are doing a different Macbeth, because we are Long Beach Opera,” he says. “[…] What I like about [composer Ernest Bloch’s version] is that it’s much more dramatic and much more driven by the text itself. It uses a lot of the original Shakespeare text, in English. The music…I don’t know the best way to describe it…Richard Wagner/Richard Strauss on drugs. There’s a very strong emotional impact [musically] which falls very much in line with the story and the craziness in there.”
Meanwhile, Michael Gordon’s Van Gogh (with Tell-Tale Heart,part of a heavily rhythmic double-bill that will be performed at the EXPO Building in Bixby Knolls) uses the letters from the troubled artist to his brother Theo to explore the territory of suffering that led past the border of what Vincent could endure.
Second up in 2013 will be Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Únicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!), which borrows from real interviews, tabloid articles, and the Mexican ballad “Contrabando y traicion” (smuggling and betrayal) to tell a story of drug-smuggling across the U.S./Mexican border.
“It is really for [LBO] to give experience—then you call it ‘opera’ or whatever,” Mitisek says. “I use ‘opera’ as a [general term] for experiences—out of the box, provocative, engaging, relevant, adventurous; taking it to places that are unusual. That’s how I define opera in our context. I think that has been very valuable to our audience.”
With a 500% increase in its subscriber base since 2008, clearly that audience has responded to Mitisek’s adventurous vision, which includes performing in varying venues, which have ranged from that pool to the EXPO to a parking garage. Each of the four LBO events this season takes place in a different venue from the other three.
“It helps to change your perspective, you know?” he says. “You’re sitting in a different venue, you’re sitting in a different space; you’re surrounded by an atmosphere that is kind of relevant to what the story is. Really what I’m looking to do is disappoint our audience in a positive way.”
Mitisek feels it’s that same adventurousness that helps attract top-flight operatic talent to Long Beach.
“I think that the people within the music world know about us and know what we do here; they know that this is very special,” he says. “So a lot of people who really want to do something different…Like, we had Elizabeth Futral when we did the opera at the swimming pool [viz., Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice]. She’s sung at the Met and everywhere, and she really wanted to do [LBO’s Orpheus and Euridice] because it was a really interesting challenge, very different from what she usually gets to do. I think that is what is attractive to a lot of the talent that we get: unusual works, things they would probably never get to explore at a standard opera house. […] Everyone knows when they come here that we can’t pay a lot, but they get a lot of great room to play here which they can’t get anywhere else.”
I can honestly say that I didn’t know I could like opera until I came to Long Beach Opera. And despite the slim chances of any piece opera ever joining Pink Floyd and Modest Mouse in my CD collection, I look forward to every LBO show. If you want to see whether the same revelation might happen to you, go to longbeachopera.org for more info.