New York – Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his adversary opera The company made its first performance: in a Yoga study before an audience of 30 people.
“We did the ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ by Kurt Weill accompanied by a vertical piano that we obtained for free in Craigslist and a violin,” said Schlosberg, music director of the company and one of its founders.
They called his company Heartbeat Opera, “of the idea that singers would be away from you,” said Schlosberg. “And so you would be experiencing their voices in the long term and that would make a resonance in your heart.”
Today, at a time when Many opera companies are fighting Financially, Heartbeat seems to be thriving, with an annual budget that has just passed $ 1 million.
But faithful to its initial vision, the company still works in small places, most with a seat capacity of approximately 200.
“Very few small companies take the ambition to make the fullness of small -scale opera,” said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and artistic director of Heartbeat. “We do not make a small opera. We make a large opera in a small space.”
And despite their success with critics and the public, the actions are exhausted regularly, the company has deliberately maintained a modest calendar.
In general, there is a theme draft show around Halloween and then two operas organized in performance spaces in New York City in winter and spring. Each work is condensed at 90-100 minutes without intermediate with new orchestrations that require only a few musicians.
Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, believes that Heartbeat is intelligent not to expand too fast, an error that has caused some small businesses to collapse.
“Growth itself should not be an objective. Excellence should be an objective,” he said. “I always prefer that companies plan their trajectory as slow as possible so that they do not establish and exceed.”
Unlike some small businesses, Heartbeat does not focus on the new work or brought to light the old unfortunate oddities. Instead, its website promises “incisive adaptations and revealing arrangements of classics, reinventing them here and now.”
It is that reinvention that attracted Sara Holdren, director, writer and teacher who first worked with the company in “Carmen” de Bizet in 2017.
“Their approaches to the storytelling of stories feel extremely of our world and our world,” he said, “without falling on that line in a kind of trilliant news where you say: ‘Oh, yes, I understand that a relevant political point is being made-we-we-a-ca-capital-r” “.
For “Fidelio” by Beethoven, Heartbeat went to prisons and recorded the voices of imprisoned people, who appeared on video singing the prisoner choir. For the “Eugene Onegin” of Tchaikovsky, the two main male characters became lovers, which reflects the composer’s own sexuality.
And for “Salome” by Richard Strauss this season, the character of the teenage title was dressed in a skirt and pink sneakers with flyers; Juan the Baptist was imprisoned on stage in a cage with transparent sides instead of in an underground cistern; And during the seven veil dance, it was a lascivious Herod who took off his clothes, did not salom.
Heartbeat’s casting for “Salome” reflected the premium that gives theatrical values in addition to vocal capacity.
The baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, who portrayed John the Baptist, recalled that “a large part of the audition was simply acting directly. And in the essays, there was a real approach in the narration of stories.
“I have not experienced that in many other opera companies in that regard,” he said.
Soprano Summer Hassan, who was chosen as Salome, admits that he was nervous at the beginning “because he had never played a role where I am the main character.
“I was really doubting, thinking about how this girl looks so young?” She said. “And they said that his physicalness will do it on his own. Make it seems safe and make her look like a safe girl. They gave me the tools to discover that I was inside me.”
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this “Salome” was Schlosberg’s reorchestration. Instead of more than 100 players as requested in the original, he took the example of the initial notes in a clarinet and scored the piece for eight clarinetists (which also played other instruments) and two percussionists.
The local local offer of Heartbeat of the season will be Gounod’s “Faust”, to run at the Baruch performing Arts Center from May 13 to 25.
“He had mentioned Jacob that I really love the devil’s stories,” said Holdren, who directs production. “And I was fascinated by the idea of taking something so big and so heavy with history and assumptions and seeing how much we could open and fly the dust.”
She sees Mephistopheles less as a “mustache villain” and more like “a figure of hunger and loneliness sliding in the vacuum cleaners that human beings create when they are so desperate or disgusted with the life that there is an openness for him.”
Its production will be established in contemporary times, sung in French but with a new English dialogue, and will make great use of shadow puppets. It is the first offer of beats for which Schlosberg has not made reorchestation.
That task fell to Francisco Ladrón de Guevara, a Mexican violinist and composer who has scored the opera for seven musicians, most of whom play two instruments, including Ashworth, who will play violin and mandolin and also leads.
Schlosberg will return to the organization of a rare incursion of the heart out of the city this summer. The company has been invited to organize a revised version of “Vanessa” by Samuel Barber at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts.
“I am really excited for what they have been doing, particularly in the reinvention of the classics for contemporary times,” said Raphael Picciarelli, co-administrator director of the festival.
For Heartbeat’s debut in Williamstown, the festival is establishing a new performance space that should make the company feel at home. It is in an abandoned grocery store, and there will be seats for just over 200 people.
