People don’t have $250 to drop on choir memberships these days? And even if you’re taking tenors in for free, it’s kind of like putting a band-aid on a concussion?
But what they really need to work on first is their signage. I’m still not sure what they’re supposed to mean. Or maybe it’s time to find a different recruiting route entirely…time to review segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
Opera Australia: what the hell are they doing?
IN ONE of its best box office results in recent years Opera Australia has posted an operating surplus of $848,000 for 2008, a year also marked by the death in November of its music director, Richard Hickox.
La Cieca over at Parterre posted this clip of Rufus Wainwright doing Berlioz at the Verbier festival. Rufus’s love for opera is no secret, and his album “Release the Stars” was VERY operatically/orchestrally inclined. The Met’s tossing of his opera off the roster may be a big loss for them in the future should another company appropriate his talents (he was pretty great with New York City Opera in ’05).
And one from my own favorite collection is Chris Thile playing Bach on the mandolin (from a 10/2006 concert at Housing Works with Hilary Hahn, which I was fortunate enough to catch). Both Thile and Wainwright are folkier than most pop singers, but their fan bases could become easy opera converts when you look at the innate passion for music both types of listeners share.
And Look at the Advertising They Get in Tampa
The latest company to be facing financial fiasco, Orlando Opera, is short $500,000 to keep up the company. While no 7-11s are being tossed around (yet), the company is unsure at where it will go should it fall flat of its fundraising goal. According to the Orlando Sentinel, current ideas on the drawing board are combining forces with another arts organization, focusing on training, or the ominous “dot-dot-dot…”. Opera President Jim Ireland is quoted/paraphrased in the same article:
“Orlando Opera will not shut down, Ireland said, but without the $500,000 he doesn’t know in what form it could keep going.
And without a homegrown opera company, Ireland said, Orlandoans would have to do without opera completely because there is no touring opera the way there is classical music or dance.”
The problem with Orlando is that it’s most commonly associated with the Disney family of parks and products (which, granted, is nowhere near the city’s center). They can either latch onto that and piggyback onto the amount of tourism the area gets (offering tons of family-friendly programming, doing some cross promotion with the Walt Disney World resorts, etc.), OR they need to back off entirely and focus on the locals.
What’s interesting is that Orlando, Florida’s third largest metropolitan area, is about an hour northeast of Tampa, Florida’s second largest metropolitan area. What’s more, it’s a straight shot off the 4. What could save the companies is if they were to pull an Arizona Opera (which services both Phoenix and Tuscon) and join forces to serve mid/northern Florida with an elite opera/orchestra company. Like Arizona, there is also a great deal of retirees in Florida who live near these cities and probably have a couple of bucks to spend on tickets–or donations.
New York Magazine’s cover asks the obvious, but the issue’s themes permeate through most aspects of the economy. So it’s only natural that Justin Davidson profile New York City Opera’s new general manager, George Steel.
“In his new job, Steel has four times as many seats to fill and ten times the budget he did at Miller Theatre, plus a company that has faced a perfect storm of misfortune. Renovations to the New York State Theater—now the David H. Koch Theater—forced City Opera into a nearly fallow year. Gérard Mortier, the executive who was to take over this fall, backed out, leaving the company without a leader, a 2009–10 season, a realistic fiscal strategy, and a clear identity. Hiring Steel could be a brilliant one-stroke solution to all these needs, but it also represents an unnerving leap of faith. For one thing, he is new to opera. Like President Obama, Steel is plunging into a crisis with a record that is promising but thin.”
If the Metropolitan Opera was founded to be a society playground (which it was), then New York City Opera was the people’s opera (which it also was). Endowments are not as quick to come to La Guardia’s brainchild as they are to the Astors’ prodigy, which is why NYCO needs a leader who’ll say “bring it” to the numerous challenges currently facing the company (which Steel is). If anything else, it’s going to be a spectacularly fascinating ride.
NY Mag’s Party Lines from the Met’s 125th Gala; I only wish they’d gotten more sound bytes like this from non-opera folks.
Chris Brogan Wants You to Think Outside the Box
Rockstar social networker Chris Brogan wrote a post the other day on blogger’s block. Just because the season’s over isn’t any excuse for companies to put their blogs on hiatus, but without upcoming productions and events, it can seem like dry season. Fortunately, Brogan has 20 blog topics to get you unstuck: 10 straightforward prompts and 10 fill-in-the-blanks. Link worth bookmarking.
I’m a fan of Chris’s work in general; he has a ton of great resources on his website perfectly targeted to pre-existing companies looking to expand into the realms of new media. And he’s probably been social networking longer than your Facebook-addicted tween cousin has been alive. He’s also the co-founder of PodCamp, which is a killer (free!) new media UnConference. And if you’re not around for the scheduled upcoming Camps, you can check out content from past Camps.
While the validity is no doubt uber-questionnable, the idea that classical music can help you burn more calories at the gym is an interesting angle for opera administrators to take in this health-crazed society.
“Exercising while listening to the classical music help you lose weight a lot faster than listening to loud fitness pop music. Why? Maybe because during the experiment a first group of people listening to Vivaldi music worked out on a stationary bike a half an hour longer than the group who was listening to the pop music.”
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been able to work opera/classical into my workouts, which I usually reserved for rock and the occasional pop number. I accidentally switched on Rigoletto while on the treadmill and was hit with the Merrill/Peters recording of “Si, vendetta, tremenda vendetta.” The underlying tempo dropped my mile time by 15 seconds and I was onto something. My current mix includes “Gira la cote! Gira” from Turandot, “Mi par d’essere con la testa” from Barbiere, and several Offenbachs from Orphee aux Enfers and La Belle Helene. And don’t get me started on downtempo yoga tracks. The playlist concept is something opera companies and orchestras should be latching onto already; the opera workout is a solid jumping off point.
Also a Regie Concept
Barack and Michelle Obama at the Kennedy Center Last Month
Poets & Writers has some more info about Kareem Dale here as the arts world waits for the official announcement with bated breath:
“Bill Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) who served on the president’s transition team for the arts and humanities, told the New York Times that he expects Dale will be involved in coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) as they relate to the White House. “It’s a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy,” the Times quoted Ivey as saying. He added that former White House staff members assigned to culture usually served in the office of the first lady.”
Stan Katz writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“If President Obama were genuinely to develop and implement a broad cultural policy for all the federal cultural programs, he could accomplish something quite unusual and important. We’ll have to see how this develops, and what sorts of relationships the new heads of the Endowments develop with Dale and the White House.”
