We have also been in contact with members of the AFM and other "protesting groups" but still await a response.
Could you tell us a little about yourself.
Well, I grew up in
Baltimore and started my musical training at Peabody at age 5 with
piano, then added theory and ear training. I continued through HS at
Peabody while adding voice lessons as well. From there I went to college in Virginia
and earned a BA in Music. I then returned to Baltimore and did the Peabody
Graduate program in Opera Performance and also conducting.
After this, I went onto attend the
Aspen Festival in 1974 and was cast in the world premiere of
Thomas Pasatieri’s “The Penitentes.” Moving to NYC in 1979 I was accepted to
the American Opera Center at Juilliard (with Greer Grimsley by the way) and was there for two years. I then went on to sing for David Stivender and was hired
as Met Extra Chorus doing mostly Wagner there with some Verdi,
Stravinsky and Britten thrown in. I'd like to add I always a lover of Wagner since I
first heard Meistersinger in 1968.
Tell us a little about the Hartford Wagner Festival.
Das Rheingold" has been postponed until next year due to the vicious and coordinated attacks on the Hartford Wagner Festival by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) which have forced the resignations of our Music Director and two of our performers with threats of loss of future work.
I found the
perfect small theater for the Festival right near where I live. The
Roberts Theater was beautifully designed with a great stage and fly
space, a hydraulic pit, modern lighting control, good dressing rooms and
an excellent shop. The theater seated about 600 and I thought it was
just the right size for the project. Here was the right place at the
right time for me to move my project into reality.
I wanted to do a
smaller production of “Rheingold” which would put the emphasis back on
the characters rather than on huge stage machinery which draws attention
away from the story. It also would provide younger singers the chance
to try these roles in a smaller house, like they do in Europe, before
auditioning for the Met, Bayreuth etc. I have always supported the
efforts of young professional singers anywhere I could, having been
through that process myself.
Why Wagner and why the Ring?
I conceived this plan in 2005 when I
started using the VSL sounds in my home studio. I realized that the
D.O. concept really does not work for the standard repertoire because of
too many liberties taken by the singers and also it doesn't work well
with recitatives. I had already entered Boheme, Butterfly, Traviata,
Cav/Pag, Schicchi, Tabarro, Hansel (although Hansel was actually okay to
do since I used an early synthesized version to do a school production
in 2001), Tosca and found the results to be unworkable. I then decided
that Wagner was really the best composer to use for this project as his
scores basically “begin, continue and end.” There is not a lot of a
two-way street in the Ring as the conductor basically controls the
entire performance. If you could only ask that question to Solti,
Szell, Furtwangler, E. Kleiber etc.!
I used my collection of reference
recordings of both live and studio versions to set the performance at
the tempos I found to be most dramatically correct for the performance I
wanted. Just as would happen in a regular rehearsal, I asked my
singers for any suggestions they might have for their parts for me to
evaluate for inclusion in my final version for this season.
I hired a
Music Director for the Festival, Paul Polivnick, and then turned over
the musical creativity to him so that the performance would show his
concept for “Rheingold.” Unfortunately, the attack on him by the AFM
and the threats he received telling him he would be blackballed forced
him to resign, so I continued and finished the work on the score myself.
Why did you decide to use a digital Orchestra rather than a “real”
one?
I have said this many times and people just seem to think it is
only about the money. There was never any intention of using
anything other than the digital orchestra that I had created. After all
the years of entering notes and editing instrument sounds by the
thousands it was time to bring out the project and put it in a theater.
Just ask my wife and friends who had to pry me out of my studio and be
sociable and have a glass of wine with them! If people think it is just
about not having to pay for a live orchestra they are totally wrong. I
had a discussion with Mr. Messina of the AFM early into the HWF project
and told him that we supported the Hartford Symphony unconditionally and
would gladly put any events his players were involved in on our website
to help promote them, but I never received even one item from him.
What are the main benefits to you of using this technology? And are there any drawbacks?
The obvious benefit of the technology is the ability to control every nuance of every note played. In a recent interview with Paul Henry Smith he talked about the problem he had encountered with crescendos and yet I have not found this to be a problem using volume automation in Logic Studio. Granted Mr. Smith is one of the leading experts in the field and maybe I misinterpreted his point, but I would welcome the opportunity to talk with him as he has apparently worked on a method of “conducting” a performance using a controller in place of a baton. And that is the main drawback of the technology I use. There is no way in performance to control the tempo which is why the collaboration between the conductor and singers
beforehand is so important.
The purists that have attacked me have the ultimate power to comment by not attending. But they should let those that do want to attend make up their own minds
Going back to the, highly coordinated, reaction against your production, what are your feelings about this and how would you answer your critics?
First and foremost is the fact that everyone is entitled to their opinion, as long as it is respectfully stated. I was totally surprised at the number of vulgar and obscene comments I received from people that hid behind false email addresses.
My first thought to all the people that commented negatively is how can you tell if it is good or bad if you have not heard it? Yes, I did post a short clip on a Kickstarter page of a rehearsal which was probably a mistake as it was intended only to show work in progress. It did not, and could not, represent how the digital orchestra actually sounds in the theater! The only people that have actually heard the full D.O. are my sound technician and myself and a few people that hung around after that rehearsal.
The purists that have attacked me have the ultimate power to comment by not attending. But they should let those that do want to attend make up their own minds.
I am grateful to the many people that have kept an open mind and said that while they might not agree with what I am trying to do, that they will reserve their judgment until they experience the performance.
I am also very grateful to some very enthusiastic supporters who have expressed their opinions online in a decent conversational manner. I also find that there is a continuing thread of commentary in many of the statements along the lines of “singers are not musicians.” That is very disconcerting to me as I have heard that comment from instrumentalists all the way back to when I first moved to NY in 1979.
Has this reaction had any impact on the festival and you personally?
Well, of course one does not like to have their work attacked by a seemingly coordinated mob of AFM members, but really I’m more interested in the end result than spending my time reading all the negative opinions. I still have a lot of work to do readying the D.O. and coordinating the production with our Stage Director, Jonathon Field.
A Statement from the Hartford Wagner Festival
While it may seem a little off topic, there are certainly things here of interest to those with an interest in Wagner. We recently discovered that the Open University offers a number of distance learning course on-line and for free. While nodoubt intended to offer "tasters" to their full graduate and undergraduate course many of the modules themselves - for that is what they appear to be - would seem to offer something of interest for more than a few people. We have gone through the list available under "Arts and History" and have selected a few we thought general readers might find of use or to be of interest. Click the header to be taken to the course overview. Expected study time anywhere between 10 to 24 hours. If its a tad "basic" for yourself perhaps you might want top pass this on? The Music Theory introduction seems especially useful.
"Wagner always considered himself a spiritual revolutionary whose concern was the liberation of human beings, including the Jews, from their so-called 'curse'. Joachim Köhler. The Wagner Journal
Richard Wagner's Der
Ring des Nibelungen Medieval,
Pagan, Modern.
The most obvious difficulty in pursuing research about Der Ring des Nibelungen is the sheer size of the work itself. The four operas span sixteen to seventeen hours of stage time, and historically the writing of the work took up the larger part of Wagner's professional life. To facilitate understanding I suggest reading one of the published synopses of the Ring. Wagner wrote the poem Siegfried's Tod (what we now think of as Gotterddmmerung) first and expanded the poem backwards to create the other three operas. The music, in contrast, was written in performance order. This fact makes the identification of style and period more difficult than in other composers' works.
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