Opera North: Finding a Balance Between Risk, Reliability

By Nicola Smith Valley News Staff Writer

Pamela Pantos, on stage at the Lebanon Opera House, became the executive director of Opera North in 2008 after working in corporate finance. Pantos had an early career as a mezzo soprano in Europe. Valley News - James M. Patterson

Last year, Opera North's executive director, Pamela Pantos, saw firsthand the effect that the performing arts can have on an audience not traditionally thought of as embracing an art form like opera: teenagers.

As part of its arts education program, the company brought opera to 1,000 students in 13 high schools in the Upper Valley in 2010. The show was The Telephone, a one-act comic opera written in 1947 by the Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti in which two young lovers are brought together but also separated by the phone. Since the rotary phones of the post-war years are utterly foreign to a young generation, Opera North updated the opera with a nifty bit of stage business by having the two performers use cell phones instead.

In the audience at one of the performances, Pantos observed one young man, slumped in his seat before the show began, a stereotypical picture of adolescent boredom. As the opera progressed, he began to pay attention and when it was over, he approached her with a succinct review of what he'd just seen. "That was wicked cool," he told her.

"That's why we have all these alternative venues," Pantos said in an interview at the Opera North offices in Lebanon, one day after the close of the 2011 season that saw well-received productions of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Rossini's Cinderella. "You've impacted someone's life."

The reaction of the young man, charmed by something he perhaps didn't expect to be charmed by, may not have turned him into an opera lover overnight, but it did give him a glimpse of the power and appeal of an art form that is often thought of as the exclusive province of urbane, affluent audiences.

An orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera in New York will set you back $95 to $320; then again, according to a report in the New York Post, it costs the Met an average of $4 million to mount a production.

The Opera North budget this year, including administrative and theatrical costs, was $650,000, said Pantos; she estimated that the minimum cost for a small production would be $220,000 to $250,000, taking into account that operas with more sets, costumes, singers and orchestra would, of course, have a higher budget. The top orchestra ticket at Opera North this summer was $80: not cheap, but given the intimacy of the Lebanon Opera House, the general quality of the productions and the cost to the company of production, a reasonable price.

Next year, Opera North will mark its 30th anniversary in the Upper Valley. With short-term and long-term plans in place, the company, said artistic director and conductor Louis Burkot, is in a "stable" position.

"The fact that it's lasted 30 years and has shown the ability to change with the times is a very good barometer for the future," he said.

But, if smaller, regional opera companies like Opera North are going to flourish in an era of global economic turbulence and diminished financial resources as a result of federal and state spending cuts to the arts, reductions in grant funding and decreased ticket sales, educating a public that has the potential to broaden opera's audience is critical to the survival of these institutions.

"With arts groups," said board member Andrew Garthwaite, "financial security is always the toughest component." It is critical, he said, that people in the Upper Valley "understand what we're doing and why we're doing it."

"One of the things all opera companies are trying to do," said Beth Rattigan, vice-president of the board, is looking at "how can we widen our market audience? How can we introduce new people without alienating the regular audience?"

The key to audience expansion, Pantos said, is "telling those stories in places where people wouldn't expect opera."

To that end, Opera North has brought music to schools, museums, hospitals and, next July, at the outdoor amphitheater at the Vermont Institute for the Natural Sciences in Quechee, it will stage a condensed, English-language version of Czech composer Leos Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, a light-hearted work set in the forest that features animals both wild and domestic.

With a background as an opera singer, an MBA, and a career in finance and mergers at W.R. Grace in Massachusetts, Pantos, a native New Englander, arrived as executive director in the fall of 2008, concurrent with the crash of the stock market and the deepening recession.

One of the directives early on in her tenure was to come up with a concrete five-year plan and 10- and 20-year goals for the company. The five-year plan, agreed on by the board of trustees, was finalized this summer, just as more gloomy news emerged about the struggling American economy. The national financial picture represents both restraints and opportunities for Opera North.

"It forces you to look at the reality and look at the audience and think about what does the audience want and what does the community want?" Pantos said. "What are the resources available to you and how should you use them?" Any arts organization faces these issues but what sets a well-run organization apart, she said, is that it has the "economic sustainability and endowment which allows you to weather bad times."

Ticket sales the past two years have been stable, although less than they were in previous years, said Sandy Torget, associate director of development for Opera North. But from an artistic standpoint, this year's season was judged very successful, in terms of audience response and critical reviews, she said.

"What we achieved this summer has to be maintained," Pantos said.

The Young Artists program is thriving and has become a benchmark for young opera singers who want to break onto the major American operatic stages in Houston, Santa Fe, Seattle, San Francisco and New York. Because of its reputation as a springboard, Opera North received this year a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to help fund its Young Artists program.

The company is also able to attract singers who are major national performers: Anne-Carolyn Bird, who sang Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro will sing a solo role this season in Massenet's opera Manon at the Met and Levi Hernandez, who sang in Cinderella sings regularly at the Houston Grand Opera, to name just two. "I've seen an increase in the trajectory of the quality of productions," Garthwaite said.

Opera North, said Pantos, is now in the position to become a destination for opera-goers just as Santa Fe, N.M., and Cooperstown, N.Y (home to the Glimmerglass Festival) have become meccas for people who can't live without opera in the summer. "People come here to see us," she said. In turn that money goes back into the local economy. "Opera North becomes a revenue source for the community," Pantos added.

In Opera North's favor is the potential for further collaboration with such Upper Valley arts organizations as Northern Stage, the AVA Gallery, the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts and the Hood Museum of Art. Northern Stage, for instance, lent costumes to both Figaro and a production this summer at the Hopkins Center of American composer Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe.

Despite the challenging financial realities, Louis Burkot said, "you can't think in any way that whatever you're making decisions about financially will" result in something that is "artistically less" than satisfying.

The recent repertoire has been heavy on what Burkot wryly called the "spaghetti circuit," the more popular operas composed by the Italian masters such as Verdi, Puccini and Rossini, or the Mozart operas sung in Italian, such as Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute.

These operas sell tickets, to be sure, but too steady a diet of them risks artistic atrophy. It wouldn't be feasible for Opera North to undertake Wagner's monumental Ring Cycle, but what about German, French and Russian-language operas? Twentieth- and 21st-century operas? Full-length American operas?

It's not that Opera North has skirted riskier works altogether (Burkot has conducted three operas by Benjamin Britten, and in earlier years, the company performed Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos or Verdi's late masterpiece Falstaff), but the last three years have seen the old war horses like Carmen, Barber of Seville, La Boheme and Marriage of Figaro cantering out once more onto the parade ground. The company has to tread a line between staging operas that reliably sell tickets and breaking artistic ground.

"You can only do Tosca or Figaro so many times," Pantos acknowledged, but added that the company had to bear in mind operas that are accessible to a broad range of people, some of whom have never seen a live opera before. A modern, dissonant work like Alban Berg's Lulu or even the cosmopolitan, Viennese sexual sophistication of Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier might alienate audiences, rather than drawing them in.

Nonetheless, Pantos said, they are looking at doing an American opera and exploring lesser-known works by popular composers.

She pointed to Cinderella as an example of an opera by a beloved composer that many Upper Valley opera goers had probably not seen live. And, said Rattigan, one of the recent decisions by the board was not to repeat a production of an opera within a 10-year period.

Pantos likens an opera production to an iceberg. The performance is the tip of the iceberg, but the massive supporting structure is invisible to the audience. There are factors affecting a production that the audience isn't aware of, from how the company chooses the repertoire to the cost of renting rehearsal space and the cost of production (sets, costumes) to the requirements for the size of the orchestra and chorus, to the ease of singers in a given language.

While most young singers are familiar and comfortable with the Italian repertoire, Pantos said, shifting to French or German represents a step up in the training and rehearsal time needed to sing with facility on stage. And with rehearsals for the three-week August season beginning in early July, rehearsal time is tight. "What are the pieces of the puzzle we need," said Pantos, to achieve "artistic balance?" It is an ongoing conversation.

Although next year's season is not yet set in stone, it is likely, she said, that they will do two comic operas, as they did this year, because of the positive response of audiences in a climate of wearying financial and political upheaval.

What is certain, she said, is that Opera North will continue to open doors to the public in new ways.

"What's the point of having an art form if you don't serve the community?" she said.

"It takes a whole Upper Valley to put it together, to make it possible," echoed Garthwaite.

Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.