Brian Dickie

Chicago Sun-Times

An interesting piece in the Sun-Times on Sunday, including an interview with Matthew Epstein - my breakfast companion of last week.  Well worth a few moments of attention.

Toronto

Today I have been in beautiful Toronto for a day of Neue Stimmen auditions combined with regular ones for COT.  This is a fertile hunting ground as a rule – during this season just finished five excellent Canadian singers contributed to our productions,  and whenever I come here I  expect to find more new talent for future seasons.  And so indeed it has proved.this time.  Some excellent candidates to go to the Neue Stimmen final rounds in Germany in October, and and there are some other amazing prospects for 2007 and 2008 at COT.  Torontonians love Chicago so an invitation from COT is always welcome!   

During the break I joined two pillars of the Canadian Opera Company, Sandy Gavinchuk and Phil Boswell, who must have served the company in total nearly 50 years between them.  Both served my predecessor as General Director of COC, Lotfi Mansouri, and remain with my successor Richard Bradshaw. They were, as always, amusing, charming, and ever welcoming  – and full of support for the extraordinary young singers that Canada  persists in producing in defiance of the population statistics.  The COC is doing a remarkable job in the advanced training and development of opera singers; and the teaching of Mary Morrison and Patricia Kern, and other distinguished members of the faculty at the University of Toronto, is undoubtedly also a major factor in providing them with the material to take on to great things.  I predict major international careers for at least three of the current crop.

This morning I had a look at the new opera house which opens 15 months from now. Still much a construction site of course, as you can see from this photograph taken this morning, but it is apparently on schedule and the COC opens their first season with the Ring.  This will for sure be a major event to which Wagnerian pilgrims (aka Ringheads) will flock from all over the world.  This is the same phenomenon that is seen in Seattle and Adelaide for example – those Wagnerites can not get enough of it.

I had walked over to the site on Queen and University from my hotel, the Novotel (not at all bad and fabulous value), via the Hummingbird (formerly O’Keefe) Centre which is the long time, and just for one more season, horrendous performance home of COC. These pictures speak for themselves. Oh man!!! Dora the Explorer fans will know what I mean – others will think I have lost it!

I am writing this on my flight back to Chicago – a splendid Memorial Day evening.  We are on time and I should be home by 8.30 and will post this as soon as I can.  But dinner will take priority.

Some outrage

Yesterday's auditions highlighted what I consider to be not just a serious problem but an outrage - that so many young men and women are allowed to graduate from distinguished and expensive universities with Master's degrees with no realistic prospect of any regular employment in their chosen field of singing.  This is not because of lack of jobs - it is because they are so singularly lacking any of the basic requirements of an opera company - vocal and musical talent to name just two.

Do any of these students "fail" their examinations or do they just get the degrees anyway?  I assume that the problem lies in the admissions process and requirements (or lack thereof) rather than in the quality of the teaching.  Are the people responsible for the admission decisions incompetent or ignorant of the requirements of the real world?  Or are these schools so desperate to keep their enrollments up that the poverty stricken nature of the material is irrelevant? 

I take it that the same apparent lack of rigor is not to be found in the admissions process for the medical or engineering departments.  Why then for music?   False hopes are given to passionate young men and women who wish to be singers and then these no-hopers are relieved of $30,000 a year for the duration of their "studies". 

What becomes of them?  I guess they go off to teach the little that they know to another generation of hopefuls. 

So you have by now realised that I had a bad day!  But this is not an isolated incident - rather the last straw.  I am however hoping that my visit to Toronto tomorrow may restore my faith.  Watch this space.

Meanwhile we have this evening the last performance of Dream and so the last night of our season. 

Home!

I made it OK.  Home by 11pm last night thanks to the excellent Continental Airlines who did not have a problem with the weather..........

It will be good to see Dream again this evening.  The Lyric is sending a delegation - Andrew Davis and Bill Mason.  I am sure they will be delighted to see their LOCAA alum, Patrick Miller, as Lysander.  And we also have the Director of next year's Entfuehrung, Justin Way here from London.  He worked with Baz Luhrman on that famous production of the Dream which took the Edinburgh Festival by storm in 1994.

So lots of work going on here for next year.

Stranded

Here I am stranded at Newark Airport, my American Airlines flight cancelled, transferred to Continental with an uncertain take off time.  Maybe I will be home by midnight or maybe I will be here all night!

Had a better day of auditions and managed to fill some small gaps in our 2006 season and find a few promising ones for the future.  Had lunch with James Robinson, Artistic Director of Opera Colorado in Denver, and also director of our production of Nixon in China which is the final production of our 2006 season.  We tidied up a few casting details, went over the schedule which he is delighted with, and had a mutual moan about the desperate lack of understanding generally of the importance and value of good rehearsal conditions.  I think that he will be happy working with COT.

My day started with a splendid breakfast with Matthew Epstein who seems extremely exuberant about his new job at CAMI, and thrilled with the move to new offices in July. I joined him at the Trump Hotel on Columbus Circle.

I did not see any budding Apprentices, disappointingly.  It was a wet miserable morning but Matthew’s warmth was a good start to the day.  He loves New York, it is his natural habitat – and a happy Matthew is good for us all!

Gloomy Tuesday

Altogether a pretty miserable day in NY - cold and damp.  But I started out with a nice encounter with the good people of Sony-BMG.  They seem to be on to a good thing with the prospect of I-Pod watering downloads of the treasures from the catalogues of RCA, CBS etc.  Old timers may go weak at the knees as they contemplate the best of Szell, Toscanini and Walter. Meanwhile we will also be delighted to find more recent classics (circa 1979) such as Monteverdi's Ulisse from von Stade, Stilwell and Leppard, long since unavailable.

Another rather glum day of auditions but the evening enhanced by dinner with one of the most eminent of artists' agents who has adorned the NY scene immeasurably since her arrival here from London not so recently. 

It was very good to find a review of our Dream in the Wall Street Journal in a prominent position and with a nice color picture - something that the WSJ can do now!  It was headlined " A Gripping Night at the Opera" which is eye catching enough.  But the WSJ is subscription only so I can not let you know more.  But it was more than just fine.

A propos my posting of this morning my elder son wrote as follows: " re: today's blog, you should be looking for 'unique users/hits' rather than page impressions, as someone like me can scroll through lots of entries at various times of day and be counted each time we do it -still pretty impressive..."

So that puts me firmly in my place!

Amazing

The log says that there are already 3000 hits on this web log and over a hundred today; its only 10am New York time!

Who are you all?  No, please don't tell me - I can't handle it!

Monday in NYC

I had an early start with an 8am expedition to SoHo to see a potential designer for 2007.  Took the subway 1/9 to Houston then a short walk south on Varick.  Lovely morning and an invigorating encounter.  There may be something remarkable in store for our next Monteverdi.

Then back to 57th street for a day of auditions at CAMI Hall. I have been an annual visitor to this venerable but battered old hall for 30 years.  George Christie and I spent days and days there during our annual visits to NY to find each new generation of American singer to introduce at Glyndebourne in the 70s and 80s.  Now CAMI has sold the building and in June will be moving from 57th street, which has been synonymous with the classical music business for as long as anyone can remember.  And the dear old hall will presumably be no more. Sic transit gloria mundi.........

Of course CAMI is not quite the monopoly that it was even ten years ago.  In particular IMG and ICM, led to a great extent by former CAMI senior managers, have grown splendidly and are extremely effective forces now.  As far as opera is concerned however, CAMI may be on the rebound as the redoubtable Matthew Epstein rejoins them this month following his departure from Chicago's Lyric Opera.  He will make a difference - he always does!

My auditions were a mixed bag - I have to select around 40 singers for the finals of Neue Stimmen from the 800+ plus I will hear over the coming months.  So if there are three from these two days in New York that will be about the average strike rate required.  I have with me my friend and colleague Christopher Hunt who was an outstanding artists manager in the 60s and 70s, then at Wolf Trap, the San Francisco Opera, and became Director of PepsiCo Summerfare at Purchase NY where he introduced amongst many other things Peter Sellars to astonished Mozart opera lovers and produced a memorable Handel season to mark the composer's 200th birthday in 1985.  He was also a remarkable Director of the Adelaide Festival and for my money is one of the most civilized men working in our business.  A fine ear, a fine eye, and a fine mind.

Neue Stimmen is of course part of the Bertelsmann organization, through its Foundation.  So I will be meeting tomorrow with some of the new people leading the BMG/Sony merged company.  The future of the recording business remains a challenge it is clear.  This new force will have to find some answers. 

Then a full day of auditions.

to New York

I am writing this on a flight to New York on this Sunday evening.  I will be there for three days, back in Chicago on Wednesday evening.  This is the first leg of a long Summer of auditions for Neue Stimmen.  Next week I do Chicago, and Memorial Day weekend Toronto.  June is largely Europe;  Australia, South Africa and South America come in July and August.  Watch the Blog for hotel and restaurant tips from exotic places!

My flight is two hours late in spite of divine weather in Chicago today…….I left the Harris after curtain up on our third performance of Dream.  Looked like a virtually full house – hooray!

Eventually got to my hotel by Carnegie Hall at midnight.  New York of course wide awake as always.  So three days of stress and excitement to come.

Getting an audience

Chicago is an enormous city with an outstanding Symphony Orchestra generally regarded as one of the top dozen in the world; the Art Institute of Chicago with one of the finest collections in the US; the Field Museum, one of the world's great natural history museums; the Lyric Opera second only to the Met amongst US companies; a wide range of theater and dance companies.

There is a huge range of places of learning - the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, UIC,  as well as a number of excellent smaller colleges. .....I am only scratching the surface here.  Yet with all this top class intellectual activity and an enormous professional community, it remains extraordinarily difficult for us all, not just COT, to secure the full houses that one would find in New York, London or Paris for work of the quality that we do.  However I believe that there must be a way.

We at COT are looking for a new Director of Sales, Marketing and PR who is as clever in dealing with limited resources in that area as we have been in getting terrific performances on stage with tiny budgets.  We will be posting this position in the usual places by the end of this month - meanwhile maybe some smart Blog reader might have the perfect combination of skills, imagination, and enthusiasm for this most wonderful of performing art forms, to be the ideal candidate! Hats in the ring to my email please - the link is on the left!