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Opera

With an ambitious 10-year plan, the Dallas Opera is ready to make us forget the Met.
By Wayne Lee Gay |

plato Karayanis smokes cigars and smiles a lot. These days his smiles come easily, because, as general manager of the Dallas Opera, he presides over one of the most promising operatic companies in America.

In an age when cutbacks and narrowed visions are the rule in American opera, the Dallas Opera has not only expanded its season, but has proudly declared that more growth is on the way. If Karayanis’ troupe can quiet critics who say that some productions in recent years have been less than electrifying, the company could become a model for aspiring civic operas in the next decade.

For a quarter of a century, the Dallas Opera was boxed in- to a four-production (give or take one in either direction) season running from the first of November to mid-December. The limited availability of Fair Park Music Hall, the schedule of the Dallas Symphony (which traditionally served as the pit orchestra for the opera) and competition with the Dallas Grand Opera Association (the group that brought the Met to Dallas every spring) made the Dallas Opera a no-growth company. Though it owned a national reputation dating back to legendary appearances of Maria Callas during its earliest seasons in the late Fifties, the Dallas Opera simply had no room for expansion.

With the Eighties, all that changed. The increasingly anachronistic Met tour finally creaked to a halt in 1985, having already dropped Dallas from its agenda in 1984. Though the organizational structure of the Dallas Grand Opera Association continued to exist, occasionally throwing out hints that it might bring major operatic artists or touring companies to Dallas, there can no longer be any doubt that the Dallas Opera is the big kid on the block, first in line for financial support among area operatic ventures.

At the same time the Met ended its late-spring visits to Dallas, the Dallas Symphony began laying plans for its new concert hall. Though the new concert hall will not be available as a performance venue for operas by virtue of its design, its mere existence affects the Dallas Opera in two ways. By removing the Dallas Symphony from Fair Park Music Hall, it allows more available time for the Dallas Opera. But by allowing the Dallas Symphony uninterrupted year-round access to an orchestra hall-something the symphony intends to use to full advantage-it deprives the Dallas Opera of its pit orchestra. Still, the opera will be gaining greater flexibility of scheduling and easier access to Fair Park Music Hall.

The combination of the demise of the Met tour and the anticipated amicable divorce of the Dallas Opera and Dallas Symphony provides the Dallas Opera with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The company now has the chance to fill the niche left by the Met and to capture some of the funding and support that previously went to the Dallas Grand Opera Association. At the same time, the Dallas Opera now has the obligation to fill both the commercial and artistic void left by the Met. That means providing the operatic experience for both the locals and music lovers from around the Southwest who used to come to Dallas every spring for the Met-an affluent group with money to spend in Dallas stores, hotels and restaurants between performances and before heading back to Tulsa or Shreveport or Waco.

The end of the longstanding association between the Dallas Opera and Dallas Symphony provides an equally daunting musical challenge. Having a full-time major symphony orchestra in the pit has provided the Dallas Opera with a consistent advantage over the years-one that few opera companies enjoy. With the Dallas Symphony on hand, the Dallas Opera has been able to present some of the more difficult works in the repertoire without having to worry about the orchestra’s ability. In the past, the Dallas Opera could produce blockbusters like Tristan und Isolde or unknown works like Vivaldi’s Rinaldo, confident that the Dallas Symphony could handle anything in the way of opera accompaniments. In the future, the question, “Can the orchestra handle it?” will have to be answered when the opera plans its schedule.

The good news for local opera lovers is that the Dallas Opera was well-prepared for all these challenges. The annual spring season at the Majestic Theatre, instituted in 1984 with a double bill of contemporary opera, moved the Dallas Opera out of its fall slot for the first time. The success of that first spring season prompted an expanded offering of two complete productions at the Majestic in the spring of 1985, which in turn was successful enough for the company to announce a spring season of three productions, each to be presented three times, for 1986.

The spring season has given the Dallas Opera a chance to start meeting all these challenges. Though it doesn’t offer anything to match the Met’s marathon of four operas in three days at the Music Hall, it already offers, because of overlapping productions, the opportunity for the out-of-towner to catch two different operas in one weekend-one Saturday night and one Sunday afternoon. Because the spring season falls in the middle of the Dallas Symphony’s main subscription series, the Dallas Opera has been building its own orchestra especially for the spring season, with the idea that this new ensemble will eventually replace the Dallas Symphony in the pit at Fair Park Music Hall during the main season.

With a good deal of healthy optimism, the Dallas Opera announced a ten-year plan last winter that, if it succeeds, may move the company into the front ranks of American opera by 1995. Like football games, operas have to be scheduled several years in advance, and the Dallas Opera is committed to expanding from four performances of each production in the fall season this year to five in 1986. When ticket sales warrant it and the time is available at Fair Park Music Hall, the company will add a fifth production to the fall season (which, at that point, would stretch into January to become a fall-winter season).

For the opera’s ten-year plan to work, several things must go right. Downturns in the local or national economy could pinch the flow of available funds from public and private sources. And the opera’s well-oiled marketing machine must continue to seduce potential ticket-buyers. But if all goes as planned during the next decade, by 1995 the Dallas Opera will present seven fall productions at the Music Hall and four spring productions at the Majestic, each performed six times.

With that kind of schedule, the opera will be able to attract the sort of orchestra talent it will need to continue exploring Wagner and Strauss and late Puccini. With 11 productions a year, opera lovers from outlying regions will again flock to Dallas for opera weekends-and no one will even miss the Met.



but amid its plans for growth, the Dallas Opera must not ignore quality control. Traditionally, the opera’s performances have drawn standing ovations from enthusiastic crowds. For the last several years, however, the company has put on thoroughly competent productions but has raised precious few goose-bumps.

It’s been a while since the Dallas Opera has put on a genuine barn-burning hit. For now, opera is still “hot” in Dallas, and people are certainly buying tickets. But until the company rediscovers that special combination of drama, vocal virtuosity, spectacle and charisma that makes good opera, those ambitious plans for the future rest on shaky ground.

The 1985-86 Dallas Opera season offers four productions at the Music Hall from late October to middle December, followed by three productions at the Majestic Theatre in April and May. Any of the productions might transcend mere competence and rise to greatness, beginning with Verdi’s Otello (directed by John Houseman) and continuing with Puccini’s La Boheme, Wagner’s Gotterdammerung and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the Music Hall in the fall. The spring season, though smaller in scale, is even more exciting, including Monteverdi’s La Favola D’Orfeo, Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All and Mozart’s Die Ent-fuhrung aus dem Serail at the Majestic Theatre.

Dallas Opera is not, of course, the only opera company in town, though it is the largest. The financially troubled Fort Worth Opera, having retreated from a promising two years under former general manager Dwight Bowes, is, as of press time, planning on following up an October double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci with Hansel and Gretel in November and La Traviata in February.

The Public Opera of Dallas, an ambitious undertaking that has managed to win a foothold at the Plaza Theatre over the past two years, has announced its third summer season, which will include intimate productions, in English, of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

On the pre-professional level, the regionaloperatic scene continues to offer active collegiate opera theater at SMU under thedirection of composer-conductor SimonSargon and an interesting and talent-richprogram at North Texas State University inDenton. Both of these collegiate companiespresent at least one major, often ambitious,production every year.

HOT

TICKET



●La boheme, by giacomopuccini, DALLAS opera, music HALL, NOV. 14, 17, 19, 23, (871-0090). Critics say this is the one if you ’re looking for an old favorite,

●La traviata, by giuseppe verdi,fort worth opera, tarrantcounty convention centertheatre, feb. 7, 9, (817-737-0775). Tins one will be conducted by a rising new star, Richard Buckley.

●LA FAVOLA D’ORFEO, BY CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI, DALLAS OPERA, MAJESTIC THEATRE, APR. 10, 13, 19, (871-0090). For early music lovers and connoisseurs of antiques.

●The mother of us all, byvirgil thomson, DALLASopera, majestic theatre, APRIL 17, 20, 26, (871-0090). Critics suggest this one for the adventuresome.

●H.M.S. PINAFORE, BY W.S.GILBERT AND ARTHUR SULLIVAN.PUBLIC OPERA OF DALLAS, PLAZATHEATRE, DATE NOT SET,(231-6566). Expected to draw thelargest crowd of the season forthe Public Opera.

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