If you can get past the biting cold, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are a tempting haven—though that is a big “if.” A New York reporter in January of 1885 described it as “another Siberia, unfit for human habitation.” The lowest recorded temperature in the state was -60 degrees Fahrenheit in February of 1996, but normally winter temperatures sit at a balmy 13 degrees.
“I talk to people about living there and they say, ‘Well, if this place is 20 degrees warmer it would be the most popular place to live,’” says conductor Michael Christie, who was recently named music director designate of the Minnesota Opera. “There’s such a longstanding tradition of excellence and the feeling I have from people is they all take this really great sense of pride that all of this is happening in spite of cold weather and dark nights. If they’re approaching life by saying, ‘OK, we got this weather thing going on, but we are going to be the best place to live otherwise,’ it just seems fantastic.”
“I think the fact that it’s not coastal and that it’s freezing as often as it is is one of the very things that ensures the balance that it strikes,” says mezzo-soprano and Twin Cities resident Adriana Zabala.
“It’s such an incredibly dynamic arts town—vibrancy and buoyancy everywhere,” says Christie. “People are talking and evaluating and just communing in a really participatory way. And, in turn, it makes you up your game.“
There’s a proud, fortuitous, and resourceful Scandinavian spirit still at work in the North Star State, just waiting to inspire the willing artist. You could, as soprano Kelly Kaduce did, spend your entire childhood growing up in the southern hamlet of Winnebago before spending your undergraduate years at St. Olaf College with its multitude of choral ensembles and occasional world premiere work.
Or you could study at the University of Minnesota, breeding grounds for conductor and organist Philip Brunelle, composers Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus, and maestro David Zinman, many of whom picked up not only a musical education but an entrepreneurial one as well—Brunelle formed the ASCAP/Chorus America Award-winning Minneapolis-based choral ensemble VocalEssence in 1969 and Larsen cofounded the American Composers Forum (originally the Minnesota Composers Forum) in 1973.
“It’s a place not only with a professionally recognized opera company—not to mention two world-class orchestras—but you also have something pretty unique to the States and common to Europe in a market our size,” says Zabala, who runs a collaborative program between the Minnesota Opera and University of Minnesota. That something is an influx of smaller orchestras and opera companies, like the Minnesota Concert Opera, Skylark Opera, and a newcomer in the Mill City Summer Opera which launches this summer (and stemmed directly from relationships forged at the Minnesota Opera), providing fertile ground for honing roles and performance skills.
“The arts community, even though it’s so dynamic and has a lot of depth and breadth, is still relatively small,” adds Zabala. “It’s still a place where you couldn’t do everything if you tried, even in a niche like the vocal scene. And a theater person will tell you the same thing, and so will a visual artist. That’s the stunning part.”
And when you’ve earned all of your requisite sheepskins, the real work is just beginning. Zabala was one of the first alumni of Minnesota Opera’s Resident Artist Program, a season-long gig for singers, coaches, administrators, directors, and conductors that guarantees significant stage time for singers (auditions run between November and December for the following season).
“I think it’s really important that you don’t bring in young artists to be cheap labor [or] to sing in the chorus—not that that’s a bad thing,” says Minnesota Opera’s Artistic Director Dale Johnson. “I really believe that they get their best experience in a safe situation. We don’t have the New York Times breathing down our neck. You can run your scales all you want and sit in your studio as long as you want, but really it’s about getting onstage, producing in a medium-size house like the Ordway, and making sure you know how to do that.”
“The expectations that they have of you are really a nice challenge; they’re very defining,” says Zabala who said that in her year, those expectations separated the participants from those who were serious and those who weren’t. Such a separation is no longer applicable with the level of singers who go into the program. “It was very real and they do quite a bit to nurture you, but they don’t hold your hand. The coolest thing for me was if you leave this program, you absolutely know how to work and behave like a professional.”
Another one of those professionals was a then-22-year-old James Valenti, who auditioned for the RAP after his undergraduate studies and was taken into the program to more or less incubate and grow before heading to the Academy of Vocal Arts for grad school and going on to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Valenti spent that time singing a number of roles like the Emperor in Turandot and Parpignol in La bohème (he recently returned to Minnesota to sing Rodolfo in Puccini’s bohemian rep standard).
“I got my feet wet with what it was to be a part of a professional opera company, the level that was expected,” Valenti says of his time as a Minnesota Opera Resident Artist. It was an experience that he largely credits with instilling in him a sense of how a company works and how life as a professional singer works. “I had already [had] two years of that intensive work going into AVA, so I was really prepared when I went in to get the most out of that program.”
Valenti’s costar in Werther, Romanian mezzo-soprano Roxana Constantinescu, is also a Minnesota Opera success story of sorts, having made her American opera house debut with the company as Angelina in La Cenerentola in 2010. She had sung the role previously in Europe, but coming back to the Twin Cities for Werther was a role debut as Charlotte. There was no other place she would have wanted to make such a major maiden voyage.
“I think this is a place where young artists and singers who want to try and debut in roles, this is the place to be. They are interested in giving you the hand to do that,” says Constantinescu from her temporary home on the Mississippi River. “I was working with the right people, and this gives you a self-confidence. There was not one moment where I felt alone.”
The welcoming environment of the company—from all-staff welcome sessions that kick off rehearsals for each opera to an audience that is fully invested in its local flavor—has also primed it to be a nexus for new works. The Minnesota Opera, (née Center Opera Company, with an original motto of “Opera without Elephants”) opened in 1963 with cofounder Dominick Argento’s The Masque of Angels in a season that also included Blow’s The Masque of Venus and Adonis and Britten’s Albert Herring. It wasn’t until the 1972-3 season that they produced The Barber of Seville, the company was nearly in the ’80s when it first mounted a La traviata, and it was practically the new millennium when they saw their first Aida.
With Minneapolis-St. Paul as a major tour destination for the Met, the company had an opportunity to do feistier work to offset the company’s Zeffirellian spectaculars, something which audiences have latched onto since its inception. More popular than Rigoletto are works like the 2011 world premiere of Kevin Puts’ Silent Night (based on the French film Joyeux Noël), the first fully staged production of Bernard Herrmann’s neglected Wuthering Heights, or the American premiere of Jonathan Dove’s The Adventures of Pinocchio.
“It’s always been in the DNA of this company to have a forward-thinking process for creating an opera,” says Johnson, who also credits the success of the opera company with local philanthropy, including an inordinate number of Fortune 500 companies. “It was part of the Scandinavian genes. There was this sense of duty on the part of Dayton’s Department Store and 3M and all of those corporate organizations that were here. There was the sense in the ’60s that you make a better community if you have a strong corporate philanthropic thrust.”
It’s no surprise that established singers choose Minnesota as a grounds to experiment on new, perhaps career-defining, roles (bass-baritone John Relyea comes to town for the opera company’s 50th anniversary season this fall to sing Nabucco, Denyce Graves adds another world premiere to her résumé with Douglas J. Cuomo’s Doubt).
“I love singers,” says Christie. “If the Minnesota Opera under my leadership can be known as a place where great singers can do great work because they’re really well supported and part of the music-making process in a very profound way, I’ll just be tickled. When a singer feels really well supported, they can just do the world up there.”
Singers can also delve into the world beyond the Minnesota Opera’s Ordway Center in St. Paul. “It was a wonderful experience singing with [Osmo] Vänskä, who gave the Verdi such a spark of life and color,” says soprano Christine Brewer, who recently sang the composer’s Requiem with the Minnesota Orchestra. “He brought excitement and inspired the orchestra and chorus to really say something meaningful.”
The new work isn’t limited to the opera companies, either. It’s a huge component of Vänskä’s programming at the Minnesota Orchestra. “I was really struck at intermission seeing the way that audience members were interacting with each other. It felt like being in a church or synagogue where people were saying ‘Hi’ to old friends,” says Minnesota Orchestra-commissioned composer Judd Greenstein. “It was very clear that it was a community of people who were centered around the arts—which doesn’t sound so remarkable, but I think it’s not something that we necessarily see that often anymore.”
That work continues on with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and in a vocal music scene that has often been regarded as the choral center of the United States. Valued ensembles like the Dale Warland Singers, The Singers, and the aforementioned VocalEssence unapologetically champion living composers. There are specialists in the early music genre like The Rose Ensemble and all-male outfit Cantus. To add to the plate is Kantorei with its big-scale works including Britten’s War Requiem.
“There’s so much energy going on about new work but also a variety of work in opera that’s surprising in the performing arts,” says Christie. “As more companies get involved with courageously mapping their own course, it’s helpful to see a company that’s already taken those steps.”
It may be cold outside, but the cultural blood of the city runs red hot.
