 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
OC Register Preview
February 24, 2002
Lord of the Opera
A guest conductor takes the reins for Opera Pacific's first Russian opera, Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin."
By TIMOTHY MANGAN, The Orange County Register
Stephen Lord is the kind of guy who greets you by looking straight into your eyes and shaking your hand with a noticeable firmness. He begins talking immediately, in quick time. He'd be a good man to have at a party to break the ice and keep things going.
The world of opera - the closest thing to a party in the arts - is the perfect home for him. He seems to thrive on its atmosphere, its familial camaraderie and problem-a-minute demands.
During an interview in a rehearsal room at Opera Pacific's Santa Ana headquarters, he talks a lot about "chemistry," between conductor and orchestra, between conductor and singers and between the singers themselves.
A couple of times he is interrupted by performers begging him to come to rehearsal, which has already begun. He dismisses them like a mother hen scolding pesky chicks, encouraging them to go on without him. But you can see he enjoys being the mother hen.
Though he had nothing to do with the casting of the current production of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," which he conducts this week in his debut with Opera Pacific, the principal singers are all old friends. As artistic adviser to the Opera Theatre of St. Louis since 1981, then music director there and at Boston Lyric Opera since 1991, he has nurtured a number of young singers at the start of their careers, sometimes discovering them in the chorus.
For many years, Lord made his living as a private coach to singers such as Renata Scotto, Evelyn Lear and Neil Schicoff. He taught them repertoire, honed their interpretations.
"I traveled everywhere and helped them make recordings and had a really good coaching career," he said. "But it wasn't enough. I was doing everything for them to go and work with maestro somebody or other and that wasn't fulfilling emotionally. Not that I thought I could do better. It's just that I was giving away my ideas."
The natural solution would have been to become a conductor himself, but he resisted the idea for a long time, despite the encouragement of colleagues. "I didn't want to, I was always afraid of it," he said. Finally, it took an emergency.
When another conductor couldn't learn the music for a production he was working on, stage director Colin Graham (who reunites with Lord this week for "Onegin") insisted that Lord take the baton. "He said 'You have to conduct it, here conduct.' He said 'That's how (composer Benjamin) Britten started conducting. Just start.' " It worked out fine.
"I was never nervous for a second and I haven't been nervous for a second since." That was 20 years ago.
CARUSO MADE HIM CRAZY
Born in 1949 in Concord, Mass., Lord grew up in what he considers a non-musical household. "My family is a farming family and so we didn't have music, no. My grandmother was a pianist for silent movies, and mother's sister went to Eastman School but left after one year." Lord says that he basically taught himself to play the piano.
He remembers clearly the moment in his childhood when music beckoned.
"There was a record when I was a kid called '60 Years of Music America Loves Best.' And it was RCA and they just put it out and the first cut was Caruso singing 'Vesti la giubba.' On that side was Rachmaninoff playing the C-sharp minor Prelude, Paderewski playing the little minuet. On the other side was Mario Lanza singing 'Be My Love,' and 'Indian Love Call' (sung by) Jeanette MacDonald." He had never heard anything like it before.
" 'Vesti la giubba' with Caruso made me crazy, (as did) Rachmaninoff playing the C-sharp minor Prelude. I remember saying to my mother, 'What is that?' " Soon he was buying records of Caruso and Lanza. "Singing was always my passion. If only I had a voice."
In high school he was drafted as an accompanist for a girls choir, his first experience working directly with singers. At Oberlin College he continued to accompany vocalists, earning credit toward a performance degree.
Back in Concord, he taught piano lessons to children, hated it and sought a way out. He had an offer to study with legendary accompanist Gerald Moore in England, but couldn't afford it. He had an opportunity to study with John Wustman (Birgit Nilsson's accompanist) at the University of Illinois, but a job offer - as the pianist for a touring production of "The Barber of Seville" for Michigan Opera Theatre - intervened. Wustman advised him to take the job, since musical work was hard to come by. He could always go back to school later.
"And I got (the job) and it worked and I never stopped working," Lord says. "So here I am almost 28 years later and working and booked for the next five."
HEIGHT OF PASSION
"Eugene Onegin" presents its own challenges.
"It's damn hard to play I'll tell you," Lord says. "There a lot of fast notes and lots of fast passages to play and almost every other phrase is in another tempo."
Based on Pushkin's novel in verse, the opera was a particularly personal creation for Tchaikovsky, who identified with the tormented love of the central characters. It was during this period that the homosexual composer received a letter from a female admirer, whom he eventually married with disastrous results.
"What's really difficult about the piece," Lord says, "is that every scene starts here and goes to a huge emotional climax" - Lord makes a sweeping gesture - "and then comes down and then the scene changes. Then you start again someplace and go all the way up and all the way down. So seven times in the evening (there are seven scenes) you've been taken from the beginning to the height of what's passionate and painful and then brought back down again. ... And it's tough. You're tired at the end."
Though he's only in the early stages of rehearsal, he's confident that the singing will be first rate. "Because the cast is very friendly - we all know each other either from various incarnations or whatever all else. It'll have a good ensemble feeling, that I can tell you right now. There will be nice things between everybody in the show."
He points out that Tchaikovsky wanted student singers for the work, and Lord's young cast should be a good match. "Because young people have a certain kind of chemistry," he says. "And I think we'll have it."
Lord's whole life seems driven by singing and singers - he rattles off no fewer than eight operas he'll conduct more or less back to back after he's done with "Onegin." But he welcomes time away.
He's done a little bit of symphonic conducting, and he would like to do more. It's a different challenge altogether, and a different repertoire. What's more, it has at least one advantage over opera conducting.
"I always think it's wonderful and liberating to do symphony concerts, because you don't have to worry about phlegm," he says with a smile.
|
|
|
|
|
