Along time ago the Santa Fe Opera found an elixir that enabled it to survive more than thirty years in the windswept desert highlands of northern New Mexico. Its formula combines frugality and fearlessness, tradition and trailblazing. Survival, the Santa Fe Experience suggests, demands a repertoire with a precise balance between the popular classis and more challenging, lesser-known new works. Thus a typical season includes standard selections - Puccini, Verdi, Mozart - plus and obligatory music drama by Richard Strauss, and finally, a premiere of major new twentiteth-centurey work. Santa Fe's 1990 repertoire was no exception: Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Puccini's La Boheme packed the house while Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos and the American premier of siegfried Mathhus' 1988 Judith brought out the hard core. This fine-tuned programming not only works financially, but it has kept Santa Fe in the forefront of major opera companies, giving it an international reputation for business acumen and intelligent, through-provoking productions.
The Santa Fe Opera is the brainchild of its founder and general director, Johan Crosby. Opened in 1957, the opera was then a small, upstart summer company with a 480-seat theater and an ensemble of less than seventy members. It nevertheless attracted the attention of the music world's luminaries and a within a year it had presented this country's first professional performance of Strauss' Capriccio and the world premiere of Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights. Stravinsky and Hindemith both visited in the early years, assisting with productions of their works. And, perhaps most importantly, the oper began an apprentice artists program that continues to this day. Offering young singers, technicians, and scenic artists practical hands-on experience, the program is still a prestigious step in the career of many up-and-coming artists; some of its more notable graduates include Leona Mitchell, Samuel Ramey Ashley Putnam, Faith Esham, and Brent Ellis.
Fickle Desert Skies
Ten years after it opened, during the 1967 season, the redwood opera house burned down. A new house was ready for the next season, built of stone and cement. The new structure was a large, sweeping amphitheater partially open to the fickle desert skies. It was also nearly four times the size of the old one, and in the next two decades the company increased in size and prestige to match its new theater. Now with more than five hundred members and a hundred different operas to its credit, the Santa Fe Opera is an established institution that attracts opera lovers throughout the western sates as well as from both coasts.
Years of experience and a solid reputation allow Santa Fe to undertake works such as Matthu's Judith, a difficult a new opera that harkens back to the Expressionist sounds of Alban Berg and the early Richard Strauss. Matthus' score requires a full, expert orchestra, a sizable chorus, and no less than three strong principle singers possessed of Wagnerian-sized voices. But more important, it takes guts: Judith makes dramatic demands that can only be realized if the work is taken on with a straightforward, unflinching, and sincere devotion. For the most part, this dedication was apparent. Judith won over its audience despite a bloody, harrowing and dramatically excessive libretto.
Matthus is an intriguing figure these days. Not only is it fashionable to be East German in post-Berlin Wall
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