“If you look at the Occupy movement, a lot of people are hungering for more direct interaction with the decisions being made in their lives, and I think that’s affecting arts as well,” says Eric Reda, artistic director of Chicago Opera Vanguard. “Artists are saying, ‘I want to be involved in creating and building and supporting the company that makes my art.’ But I think also audiences are hungering for a more direct interaction with the art, feeling invested rather than being a passive observer.”
While many companies large and small have been struggling in light of the cyclical recession and a dearth of arts funding, what companies that are not 112 people strong have as an advantage is the fact that it’s easier to turn around a rowboat than an ocean liner. In New York, this has led to an influx of feisty, independent ensembles—vocal and otherwise—along with concert series and record labels. DIY is de rigueur, and it’s helping to redefine how we create and consume music in this brave new world.
Chicago has had its own stalwarts in this genre, such as the International Contemporary Ensemble and eighth blackbird, but has recently risen to indie all-star status. Even the city’s (and one of the nation’s) largest orchestras—the Riccardo Muti-led Chicago Symphony Orchestra—has embraced the allure of full control with its in-house label, CSO Resound. Such efforts have paid off. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra netted a Grammy in 2011 for a Muti-conducted Verdi Requiem that featured soprano Barbara Frittoli, mezzo Olga Borodina, tenor Mario Zeffiri and bass Ildar Abdrazakov. Eighth blackbird did the same this year with Lonely Motel, music from Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert’s Slide, a concert-length music theater work that includes Eckert’s singular vocal talents.
“The scene here is shifting toward intrepid ensembles performing scores by decidedly not-dead composers,” says Doyle Armbrust, violist with Chicago’s Spektral Quartet and a regular contributor to Time Out Chicago’s classical and opera section. “This is not to say we don’t love our Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera, or that new music groups are pilfering these institutions’ audiences. It’s less of a ‘shift’ than an ‘emergence.’”
It all begs the question: What has predicated these winds of change in the Windy City?
Many, including The Opera Company founder and tenor Oliver Camacho, trace the explosion of Chicago’s indie classical companies to the original independent opera company, Chicago Opera Theater.
“Chicago Opera Theater, back in the day, used to be the sweet, little chamber opera company that performed in this space that was perfect for chamber opera,” explains Camacho, who then adds that Dickie’s leadership of the theater (assumed in 1999) turned it into a top-tier ensemble. It may still be “opera less ordinary” (this season includes Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki and Handel’s Teseo) but it’s operating with a budget more commonplace for the extravagant art form.
Chicago Opera Theater’s rise to prominence meant an influx of world-class singers filling roles normally performed by local talent. “The place for that Chicago singer who’s at the professional level really is not clear anymore,” says Camacho. “So all these people who used to sing for places like Chicago Opera Theater are now doing their own companies.”
“One of the things that characterizes the area and the city is this idealistic pragmatism,” adds Brian von Rueden, artistic director of Chicago’s VOX 3 Collective, a vocal ensemble devoted to ensemble work that saves money on sets and costumes while contributing to the city’s lacuna of rich art song and recital opportunities. “Everybody wants to see things happen and they want to do whatever it takes and work together to make it happen. There’s a sense of friendliness and this can-do attitude to everything.”
“Chicago has a reputation for being a friendly city, an estimation with which I agree, and I believe this filters by default into the musical landscape,” adds Armbrust. “We attend each others’ concerts, clap and cheer like escaped lunatics, retweet and repost the bejesus out of each others’ concert notices, and find excuses to perform together.”
It helps that Chicago, though smaller than New York, is home to an equally auspicious number of universities with theater and music programs. Students go to Northwestern, DePaul, and Roosevelt Universities and stay after graduation to dig their heels into the local art scene. And others migrate to the Second City in lieu of its larger competitors.
“When we were leaving grad school in Cincinnati, we made a very conscious decision to move to Chicago,” says Lisa Kaplan, pianist of eighth blackbird. “It was a real toss-up between Chicago and New York, but we felt if we moved to New York we’d go broke right away just with the logistical costs of running our own ensemble. It’s still expensive [in Chicago], but it’s nothing like New York, or even L.A. Your dollar goes farther, and I definitely think that’s connected to people’s ideas being able to go farther.”
Kaplan attributes the fact that the blackbirds set up home base in Chicago as one of the main contributing factors to their success, even going so far as to say that the ensemble probably would have failed long before they started producing Grammy-worthy recordings, a telling and ringing endorsement for the Midwestern metropolis.
“You can be a big fish in a small pond as opposed to what it feels like in New York because it’s just so huge,” Kaplan adds. “Chicago has such a Midwestern mentality in a really good way. It’s a friendlier city. It’s very diverse, but it’s much smaller in terms of navigating. It’s very neighborhood oriented, and each of the neighborhoods has a different feel to it. That is a huge asset as a city; it’s more manageable. It’s big enough that things are happening there, but it’s small enough to be entrepreneurial and make an impact.”
Perhaps it’s thanks to Chicago’s major business centers that the entrepreneurial spirit has also rubbed off onto local artists. “You’ve got lots of people who learned a second craft in addition to composing or singing or whatever,” explains von Rueden, a tenor first and foremost but also one such professional twofer with his leadership of VOX 3. “You’ve got people with MBAs and graphic design degrees or a marketing background who realize they have to have these skills to do these artistic things.”
“What I’m seeing [is] this trend happening with smaller companies, they’re becoming much more lateral,” adds Reda. “They’re becoming much more democratic, and they’re becoming much more akin to a design firm or Google where it thrives on the experimentation and it thrives on the collaboration as opposed to being a top-down sort of structure. We’re really pushing towards producing on that sort of model.”
Much in the way that the 20th century pushed singers to become actors as well as musicians, the 21st century may be the era to encourage solid business acumen within artists whose closest exposure to economics beforehand may have been figuring out how to live on a conservatory student’s budget. “I keep finding the singers that I’m attracted to are not only solid actors first and amazing singers next, but they have that entrepreneurial spirit, very much so. It brings something to the craft when you’re in that place,” notes Reda. “It really sharpens and hones it.”
As exhibit A, von Rueden treated VOX 3 as a business from the get-go, launching in 2007 with several colleagues from the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University after a partnership with the Millennium Chamber Players (which in and of itself yielded six operas in eight months, including the U.S. premiere of Cimarosa’s L’infedeltà fedele).
They segmented the market, targeted the vacant niches in Chicago’s music scene—the CSO had just cut its recital series—and positioned themselves as an ensemble to fill that gap. Economically, it made sense—performing as recitalists cut many production expenses down to nothing, the repertoire was intellectually and vocally challenging, and there was a sense of community that built within a consort that essentially paid its members in stock options in the early years. And in some ways it’s paid off big.
“We have exactly the audience the big companies are aspiring to get—that young professional culturally curious person. These are the people who don’t have a lot of money to invest in a subscription model,” says von Rueden (ironically, this coming season at Lyric Opera of Chicago will feature one work, Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire starring Renée Fleming, available to subscribers only).
“But there’s an intellectual curiosity,” adds von Rueden. “They’ve got friends who are out there making music. So when one of them says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a show, it’s free, it’s $5, it’s $10, whatever, come out and see it,’ they’ll check it out. And if they like what they see, they’ll go back. For us, that’s about 50, 60, maybe even 70 percent of our audience. The rest are these people who’ve studied music, who are very interested in the thoughts behind programs.”
It’s a holy grail of demographics, and lower price points and more intimate performance spaces help to bring them into concerts by VOX 3 far more than a multi-million-dollar technological production or glossy marketing. “To make something beautiful, you don’t necessarily have to have a ton of money. You just have to have a lot of great people working on it,” says Craig Trompeter, music director of the Haymarket Opera, one of the newest additions to Chicago’s indie opera scene, dedicated to period performances of 17th- and 18th-century works.
The idea started, like most good ideas, over bacon. “There’s probably never a good time to start an opera company,” laughs Trompeter, a baroque cellist and gambist who has performed in Chicago’s big houses and also serves as the principal cellist of the city’s Baroque Band. But putting his professional connections to good use resulted in some high-ranking names: Haymarket’s stage director in residence is Ellen Hargis, of Chicago’s Newberry Consort, and in its recent performance of Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, the title role was sung by Grammy-nominated tenor Marc Molomot, who can be heard on recordings by the Boston Early Music Festival and Les Arts Florissants. They may not have the budget to compare with the city’s main operatic artery, but there are more connections than disparities that can be drawn between exciting upstarts like Haymarket and Lyric Opera productions, such as their recent Rinaldo, featuring the talents of Baroque specialists like David Daniels, Luca Pisaroni, and Iestyn Davies.
And sometimes manifold disciplines collide to form one cohesive company. Camacho’s The Opera Company grew out of the tenor’s desire to explore early Baroque and early 17th-century music, as well as art song from across generations, within the context of interdisciplinary performance.
“I’m very into interdisciplinary performance, like circus skills, clown, masque work, dance, and stuff like that,” says Camacho. “I felt that there is a possibility with the type of repertoire that I’m doing—especially the Baroque, but also I’ve staged song cycles like Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été and Schumann’s Liederkreis—that if we as performers learn these other skills and we bring that visual element to our singing, then we can actually capture new audiences. Audiences that wouldn’t necessarily go to see something like this could accidentally be exposed to Schumann’s song cycles, and it ends up being something that completely blows their mind.”
The fact that Chicago is a theater town has allowed its unique concept of storefront theater to rub off on opera companies (Camacho’s is no exception) and also provides a great deal of resources, whether it’s a lighting student from DePaul or a discount costume supplier. It also allows for more innovative thinking. A project that Camacho has cooking involves staging an all-male Dido and Aeneas in collaboration with a stage director and choreographer who was a protégée of dance legend Pina Bausch. The performance will bring Purcell’s work to Chicago’s gay community and making it, in Camacho’s words, “a story about sexual promiscuity in the 80s on the verge of the AIDS crisis, a coming out story that ends in complete disaster and shame.”
That Chicago’s audiences are receptive to such work is testament to the dialogue that exists between performers, administrators, and concertgoers. And perhaps that in and of itself is the greatest asset to Chicago’s indie classical scene. When so many companies can coexist happily (von Rueden laughs that three artistic directors of small companies sang in VOX 3’s holiday concert), it signifies both a committed core audience and a diverse audience, just as happy to watch a 17th-century opera performed with traditional costumes and stage mannerisms as they are to see a vanguard performance, which generally leans more toward fringe theater than “traditional opera.”
“That’s a very Chicago thing,” says Reda. “That’s one of the things that really drew me here: the amount of theater that was really willing to question the paradigm of the proscenium, question the paradigm of audience interaction, and to really explore new ways of connecting with an audience.”
And once the questions are asked, the real fun begins.
