September 2017 - Opera Grand Rapids

How blackmail launched Mark Rucker’s 34-year career in opera

Posted on September 28, 2017 by Opera Grand Rapids

This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.

The legendary baritone shares which musicians he admires most, how tragedy helps shape his characterizations, and why Grand Rapids audiences are so dear to him.

Blackmail. That’s what launched Mark Rucker’s thirty-four-year career in opera.

In High School, Mark played football. He had a music class, but his heart belonged to football. One day, his teacher walked up to him and said, simply, “You’re going to be an opera singer.” Time would prove her correct. Rucker would go on to dazzle audiences with his rich baritone for decades, from Covent Garden to Carnegie Hall. But he didn’t know that yet.

“Leave me alone, you crazy lady,” Mark replied, by his recollection. This was not the response his teacher was looking for.

“She proceeded to fail me in music class,” relates Rucker. “In order to keep me from being able to play football.” His teacher made a proposal: sign up for chorus, get a better grade, and regain eligibility for football. “I thought, ‘this is not something that should be allowed.’” But this was no average teacher. “When they built the new building, they gave her the shovel,” says Rucker. “She had power. I didn’t have any. So, I said, ‘OK, fine. I’ll join chorus.’”

This makes more sense when you learn that his teacher was the legendary Dr. Lena McLin, niece to Tommy Dorsey, and a cultivator of talent who critic Howard Reich called “the woman who launched a thousand careers.” McLin’s roster of famous students includes R. Kelly, Chaka Khan, Da Brat, Mandy Patinkin, and many others, including Rucker.

“When I debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2004, she was in the front row,” says Rucker. It’s clear McLin’s tough-as-nails approach and belief in his potential had a profound effect on his life, as well as his own perspective on teaching music. “If it hadn’t been for this woman, I wouldn’t be talking here,” he says.

As a teacher in MSU’s School of Music, Rucker carries on that tradition of serious tutelage. “But not quite as aggressively,” he says with a smile. “I give as much of myself as I can. I’m somewhat of a conservative teacher, in that I don’t push people to do more than they should do when they should do it.” He’s careful not to damage his students’ voices with overly strident instruction, as this can be a problem in musical academia. “It’s my honor to be able to teach them. They come to me with their hearts, and I give them mine.”

Whether he’s teaching aspiring professional singers, or composition students who must take one vocal performance class, his approach is the same. Even if they never become singers, they still have a role to play, says Rucker. “They might become a lover of the art form. That’s as important as having the singer on the stage. Without having those people in the audience, there is no stage.”

The audience has a special place in the veteran singer’s heart. When reflecting on performing with Opera Grand Rapids, his first and fondest memories are of the people offstage. “I have memories of one of the most fantastic audiences I’ve ever seen. They were so involved in what you were doing. They didn’t see Mark Rucker, they saw a character. And they appreciated it.”

Maestro James Meena,
Opera Grand Rapids Artistic Director

But Rucker does reserve some of his admiration for some of OGR’s most well-known faces. He counts our opera as indescribably lucky to have been helmed by Maestro Robert Lyall, followed by Maestro James Meena. “They’re two of the greatest musicians I’ve ever met in my entire life,” he says. “You will never meet a more exciting conductor than James Meena. They don’t exist. Even if you don’t want to come for the opera, you’ve got to come to see him.”

Rucker can’t say enough about his respect for the nuance and grace his fellow performers bring to every show. For performers, life doesn’t stop its ceaseless march for a production. Tragedy must be taken in stride—it is over and through life’s vicissitudes that performers often forge bonds, and even draw their power. He recalls one such bittersweet memory:

“I was doing Rigoletto, and the young lady who was singing Gilda, her mother was dying. She would go back every weekend to see her. And I was trying to figure out, ‘how do you make yourself do that?’ I remember having to try and stay in the act, because she’s dying in my arms. She was starting to cry, and I couldn’t help myself, but I told myself to stay in it. I remember at the end, we were both just crumbling. And I said to her, ‘you know what? We have to bow. Get up.’” But something crystallized for Rucker. He realized at that moment that the title character himself was enduring a similar tragedy. “Until you’ve experienced something, it’s hard to relate to that kind of pain.”

Recounting the incident, Rucker easily brims with the emotion of that evening, trapped on stage between grief and an expectant audience. “That night, I remember gaining so much strength from her. It led me to another place in the character. Even today, I want to find new things about a character. I never want to be the same. That gave me an insight into the character that I use to this day.”

When his own father passed away, Rucker was in a production of La Traviata with James Meena. He left the rehearsal briefly for the funeral, but returned shortly after. He remains grateful to Meena for having faith in him to return and carry his performance forward. “I used the same thing I used when I did Rigoletto.” He channeled the grief into his performance, and stayed in character. It was a difficult era, but the singer let the work be his guide.

This way of working through one’s darkest days has never left Rucker. In great operatic tradition, it will be part of his legacy, as he passes it to his students. When they come to a lesson with personal problems, such as a breakup, Rucker’s approach is a synthesis of all he’s learned on stage, with a dash of his old teacher’s seriousness of purpose: “I’ll say, ‘I don’t care. Right now, we’re working. After the lesson is over, we’ll talk about your girlfriend.’ Right now, we work. Because that’s the one thing an artist needs to be able to do.”

The singer has lived this truth many times. And ultimately, that truth is about more than opera—it’s about cultivating the soul of an artist. “I’m still working that way. I tell my students the same thing. You’ve got to use what you’ve got and work through it.”

OUR FOUNDERS HAD A BOLD PROPOSITION: to build a professional opera company that would put Grand Rapids on the map for a very discerning audience. 50 years later, we are humbled to be the modern bearers of classical standards and modern ingenuity. Learn more.

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As an integral part of our city’s artistic fabric, it’s our responsibility to see to its continual flourishing. Please consider donating to Opera Grand Rapids to ensure our artistic excellence for the next 50 years and beyond. You’ve already made us great. With your support, there’s no limits to the height our voices can reach together. Give today.

OGR’s unflappable veteran stagecrafter knows his fire and explosives

Posted on September 26, 2017 by Opera Grand Rapids

This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.

One of the country’s longest-serving Technical Directors on the fun in opera and the nonsense in rock n’ roll.

The stage is dark, save two broad pools of dim purple-blue light in the center. Even in this light, you can see their beards; the men standing in the dark onstage cut iconic silhouettes. Across a sea of people, Keith Oberfeld stands with a starship’s worth of sliders and dials at his fingertips. There will be music, but the magic here is his job. On cue, Keith’s hands flit over the massive light board just as the room explodes with sound. A lazy, sleazy, searing guitar cuts through the din of the crowd as the stage becomes a wash of swirling psychedelic purple. Keith makes a tiny gesture in the lighting booth, and two spotlights bring the bearded men forth from the haze. Soon, the arena throbs with the sound of Billy Gibbons’ declaration that he’s bad, and also nationwide. The year is 1979 and Keith Oberfeld is doing lights for south Texas rock juggernaut ZZ Top. This pedigree is not what one may imagine for the origin story of a man with three decades of experience inside an opera house.

“Touring rock n’ roll is crazy. All aspects. Everything you’ve heard about it is true,” says Oberfeld.

After running lights for bands like ZZ Top and Blondie for a few years, Oberfeld was ready for something a little calmer. “Opera seemed like a natural place to go after that nonsense,” he says. He had done volunteer work for community theater before and learned a lot about lighting design; his interest in theater and expertise in production landed him a job as master electrician in our very own DeVos Hall. After a few years of keeping the lights on, Oberfeld was ready for a career that combined his technical knowhow with his artistic inclinations. That opportunity came in the form of Opera Grand Rapids’ Technical Director position. He took the job in 1984, and has been the man behind the magic of stagecraft ever since.

As one of the longest-serving Technical Directors in the country, Oberfeld is one of the elder statesmen of the Grand Rapids Opera. He has seen administrations come and go, weathered renovations, and worked with countless performers and conductors over the course of some one hundred operas.

For each of these shows, Keith is at the helm of all things technical. “I work on figuring out where the scenery is going to hang, how it’s going to get loaded in and assembled, where the lighting is going to go in reference to the scenery, work with the lighting designer to make all that work together, work with the director to discuss scene changes, work with the costume people to see how costumes will integrate, and coordinate sound and special effects. I put everything together. All the design and practical aspects of the production.”

Considering how many moving parts are involved in just one show, dealing with problems that arise is a large part of Keith’s role. Sometimes these hurdles are as simple as replacing a burnt-out lightbulb. Other times they involve fire. Sometimes intentionally, other times, less so.

In the eighties, Opera Grand Rapids staged a massive production of The Flying Dutchman. OGR had rented a set from San Diego Opera—a grandiose background to represent the titular Dutchman’s ship. During rehearsal one day, a piece of this scrim caught fire. (This was not in the script, if you’ve never seen the show.)

Moments later, four Grand Rapids fire companies and presumably some concerned stagehands with fire extinguishers were fighting a blaze inside DeVos Hall. Luckily, the fire was under control within minutes. True to the show business cliché, rehearsal continued as the fire trucks drove away.

Most of the time fire finds its way into a production, it is by design. When, for instance, Don Giovanni goes to hell (we apologize for the spoiler), it’s Keith’s job to get things looking and sounding properly infernal. “We have a lot of fog, special lighting, explosives. Any time you can do a lot of special effects on stage, it’s always a lot of fun,” he says. To bring hell to the theater, Opera Grand Rapids must submit a plan to the fire marshal months in advance, containing exact specifications of the pyrotechnic devices to be used. When it’s time to bring the heat, a local licensed professional actually runs the pyrotechnics. “It adds quite a bang to the production,” deadpans Oberfeld.

Even after a professional lifetime doing an often arduous job, it’s clear that Keith still loves what he does. “One of the great things about working in opera is you get to stretch across all of the disciplines. You get to work with large orchestras with great conductors and beautiful music, you get to use projections and lighting to more effect than a standard production. You get to use sound effects and large scenery. Opera is a challenge in that it stretches every department in the theater, and that makes it particularly fun.”

Keith is an essential part of Opera Grand Rapids. One can’t overstate the value of an unflappable veteran of the stage who knows his lights and explosives. And for those who mistakenly think opera is entirely the purview of high society types—flag down Keith sometime and extract a tale of that infamous rock n’ roll excess we occasionally hear about. Provided he’s not busy putting out a fire, he won’t disappoint.

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The unequivocally epic spectacle of a community-built “Aida”

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Opera Grand Rapids

This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.

10,000 patrons, 350 choristers, 16 horses, four elephants, and one unequivocally epic spectacle.

The Opera Grand Rapids production of Aida was a spectacle in the spirit of the ancient Egyptian court it portrayed. The production will stand forever as a testament to what’s possible when an entire community of strangers and friends comes together to create something beautiful.

The Opera Grand Rapids production of Aida was a spectacle in the spirit of the ancient Egyptian court it portrayed. Much like the grandest celebrations of the Old World, 1997’s Aida featured hundreds of singers, lavish costumes, a tiger, elephants, and a colossal audience. It remains the most ambitious production ever staged by the Opera company. With so many moving parts, every facet was bound to be epic—even the production’s hiccups. Before the evening was over, a wide cast of characters—some of whom were not part of the company—would play their parts, including a police escort and a stubborn tiger that wouldn’t come out of its cage.

To give the uninitiated an idea of the sheer scale on display that September night: the Opera’s normal chorus was supplemented with five extra choruses from other organizations, according to Kyle Irwin, who was chair of the Board of Directors of Opera Grand Rapids during the staging of Aida. “Doing Aida was about four years of preparation, and I think our end product showed it. We had to find people who had elephants. We had a friesian horse troupe. [Sixteen horses, to be precise—more horses than many performances have performers.] We had something for everybody.”

Imagine it: Before the sold-out crowd of ten thousand arrived that night, thirty wig and makeup assistants attend to eight principal singers and one hundred fifty extras. Weaving through the organized chaos of the dressing rooms are twelve wardrobe assistants and three stitchers. Golf carts ferry around personnel, speaker cabinets, microphones, and spools of wiring, pulling up alongside chariots parked in the wings. Three lighting supervisors stand in a nervous cluster over an expanse of dimmers and switches; they put hundreds of luminaries through their paces, creating brief, bright blooms of color on the stage. Bits of sound bubble from the fifty-four speaker cabinets stowed in every conceivable space. The eight subwoofers mumble thunderously. The scene is a storm of chatter, floating clouds of makeup powder, flashing lights, and fragments of sound coming from every direction. Yet everyone knows their places. By showtime, the maelstrom has been bridled, and eager thousands are transported to a King’s hall in ancient Memphis.

This isn’t to say everything went off without a hitch. For better or worse, Aida brought a measure of the suspense and courtly intrigue of its source material to Van Andel Arena that night. “As with anything in opera, there’s always drama,” said Irwin. “The evening of the performance, there was a gala dinner. Someone came up, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘we don’t know where the programs are…’ That was close to seventy-five hundred programs. The sponsors and chorus and everyone wanted their acknowledgement.” A forgotten hero spent the first Act tracking down said programs, and during the intermission, they were finally delivered—alongside an escort by the police and fire departments. The programs’ return was even announced by the mayor. “I’m pleased to say there wasn’t a program left in the arena after the event, so all’s well that ends well,” said Irwin.

The buzz and pageantry surrounding Aida spread its magic far beyond Van Andel Arena itself. The Celebration on the Grand parade, which takes place the first weekend of September, featured a dose of ancient Egyptian splendor that year. Elephants, horses, and scores of chorus members in their costumes transformed Monroe Avenue into the Nile for a few hours that afternoon. And far beyond those shores, Aida was mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, and many other national publications. Irwin is rightfully proud of the reputational boost the performance gave the opera company, and even Grand Rapids as a whole. “It brought us into the limelight. We finally got top billing.”

Aida is one of grand opera’s most beloved and oft-performed productions. It is performed all over the world with incredible frequency. Between 2009 and 2014, Aida was performed three hundred four times. By staging such a classic of the form, Opera Grand Rapids joined the ranks of the world’s foremost companies. In doing so at such a scale, the company honored the spirit of Aida’s composer, Giuseppe Verdi.

After completing Aida, Verdi desperately wanted its first performance to be open to anyone who wished to attend. Instead, the debut was staged in Cairo, an invitation-only affair for politicians, critics, and dignitaries. Verdi declined to attend; he reserved his energy and enthusiasm for the opera’s public debut in Milan. Staging Aida for eleven thousand people in the audience, from opera aficionados to those simply drawn by the grandeur, was a fitting tribute to the legendary maestro’s love of the people.

The thousands who were there that night, the hundreds of performers, and the dozens who planned for years to realize a nearly impossible scale of vision will never forget it. Aida will stand forever as a testament to what’s possible when an entire community of strangers and friends comes together to create something beautiful.

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Maestro Robert Lyall reflects on OGR’s legendary artists

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Opera Grand Rapids

This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.

What makes a great opera singer? Verdi was only half right.

What makes a phenomenal opera singer? Answering this question correctly is crucial for an opera company. The answer is an axis around which revolve a cast, a business, a symphony, even a wider community. At the center of the publicity, the construction projects, and the audience is the core from which the rest is built: an exquisite human instrument. People come to be dazzled by the voice. For over twenty-five years, the task of answering opera’s crucial question—what makes a phenomenal opera singer?—belonged to Opera Grand Rapids’ Maestro Robert Lyall.

When asked this very same question, Lyall is quick to invoke immortal composer Giuseppe Verdi. “The classic response is to quote Verdi himself. He was asked the three most important characteristics of a great opera singer. He said, ‘Voce, voce, e voce.’ It’s voice. It’s what, in opera, we would call ‘the gift.’ A person can be a wonderful performer in so many ways, but a truly great opera performer must have a magnificent instrument that is properly trained to project over full orchestral sounds and fill a hall.”

But here Lyall expands on Verdi’s pithy answer. While being a singer of surpassing quality is necessary, the maestro says a performer must also have theater skills. “There used to be an old joke that said the term ‘operatic acting’ is an oxymoron.’ Well I can assure you that in today’s world, it is not. Opera singers now train in all aspects of theater arts and physical conditioning to make themselves complete participants in the drama.”

Maestro Lyall is an expert on the ingredients of that operatic drama. He joined Opera Grand Rapids in the autumn of 1989, and served as Artistic Director and General Director for twenty-six years. During his tenure, he had the pleasure of knowing a great many phenomenal opera singers, at many different chapters in their respective careers.

According to Lyall, courting and featuring emerging artists is intrinsic to the role of the regional opera house. The world stages have their roles to play, certainly, but a regional company of great repute functions differently. “Hiring famous singers is often a question of funds, but to identify burgeoning, emerging talent, and looking at their potential, is a special path opera companies should follow, particularly with our native artists.”

Opera Grand Rapids has indeed hosted its share of famous performers. 1997’s Aida at Van Andel Arena featured Piero Giuliacci in the role of Radames. Giuliacci regularly performs all over the world, bringing classics like Tosca, La bohème, and Turandot to Shanghai, Rome, and, of course, Grand Rapids. “But accompanying him were many emerging talents who were singing at regional companies, and eventually ended up at the Metropolitan Opera.” It’s important to Lyall that the highly-visible principal singers are surrounded by gifted hopefuls who may one day become stars in their own right.

Lise Lindstrom is another singer to grace the OGR stage during her rise to operatic prominence. Known as one of the world’s leading performers of both Salome and Turandot, Lindstrom has captivated audiences by bringing delicate shading and grace to some of opera’s most bombastic roles—something she did early on at OGR.

Some artists who perform at Opera Grand Rapids are truly just beginning their careers, and go on to feature in opera’s legendary arenas. A young Brian Hymell had only performed one professional production when he sang Tamino in Die Zauberflöte at OGR. His career arc is a perfect encapsulation of Lyall’s philosophy—cultivate potential, and become part of the rising star’s story. “Look at him now,” says Lyall. “He graces the world stages, singing the major repertory at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, and Vienna State Opera.”

The pantheon of great singers who have taken our stage is a source of pride for the maestro. Says Lyall, “There is a long list of distinguished artists that were featured in the earlier phases of their career by Opera Grand Rapids. I’m probably more proud of that than if I had been able to hire the world’s leading celebrities. Celebrities have already arrived at their level of distinction. We wanted to have some ownership of the development of great talent.”

In reflecting on his career, Lyall’s pride is always collective, spread around those who helped him sculpt a host of cherished memories. A clear sense of community and fellowship permeates his reflections. His pride in the Opera is matched by his love for the city itself. “[Having distinguished performers] is very special for establishing the role of Opera Grand Rapids in this city. This is a wealthy city in its intellectual promise, in its industrial promise, and we felt we had a very specific role to play in contributing that element to the quality of life that great arts can do,” says Lyall.

The maestro is adamant that no discussion of his career is complete without mentioning the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. Says Lyall, “This is one of the finest professional symphony orchestras in the country. My artistic partnership with them was one of the most gratifying parts of my work in Grand Rapids. We made great music together. We like to tout them as a partner in our ventures with great pride.”

It’s clear that Verdi wasn’t wrong with his somewhat reductive take on what makes a great opera singer, but Maestro Lyall’s career suggests the quip may have been incomplete. Opera will always revolve around the voice. But that voice must be trained, recognized, and allowed to flourish. Directors must take chances on unproven artists in supporting roles, balancing the need to cultivate local and emerging talent with the public’s demand for exquisite performance. Dozens of musicians must play in perfect harmony, and the totality of the spectacle must form a moving story. The voice at the center must be sublime, but the voice alone is not opera. Perhaps a better question for the multimedia age is not “What makes a great opera singer?” but rather, “What makes a great opera?”

Lyall himself explains it perfectly: “Opera is music, it is theater, it is art. When you’re working in opera, there is a unique set of challenges. Because of the lighting, the set design, the individualized personalities, as well as the glories of the sound of the full symphony orchestra, and the grand choral works that animate it. To me, it is truly the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk concept—Opera is the total artwork.”

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A Look Through Opera’s Fashion Runway

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Opera Grand Rapids

This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.

With New York Fashion Week upon us, we revisit some of the most stylish patrons of New York’s venerable opera house.

The Metropolitan Opera is known for its elaborate costume design on the stage, but for celebrity and elite patrons attending the opera, what’s worn to the performance is just as important. The opera house understands this well, and has taken the initiative of featuring the fashions of its opera attendees through “Last Night at the Met” social media platforms.

Browse the entire gallery here.