Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The reverberations in the New York State Theater Tuesday night were loud and clear. The performers expressed it in words and song, and the audience members expressed it in their knowing laughs and applause: There is a great opera company in New York called New York City Opera, and it is so because of its innovation and success in launching young American talent.
“I won’t be singing, but I will be loudly applauding,” Mayor Bloomberg said at the top of the gala program, a tour de force consisting of excerpts and reminiscences.
“I am only the latest in a string of opera-loving mayors,” he added. “We all have a soft spot for City Opera because it feels so New York and we love companies presenting American work.”
The concert brought two former general directors back to the stage, Beverly Sills and Julius Rudel. Mr. Rudel, who had the longest-running tenure as director, from 1957 to 1999, expressed himself musically by conducting the orchestra in an excerpt from “Don Giovanni,” featuring performers Carol Vaness and Vinson Cole, and an excerpt from “Mefistofele,” with Samuel Ramey.
Ms. Sills expressed herself in words — fighting words, in an appearance whose timing was most appreciated, as her husband, Peter Greenough, died two weeks ago. “On this stage, there was no special space, every place was special. It was a golden era here, until some idiot decided it was a ballet house,” Ms. Sills said, weighing in on the question of City Opera’s future at the New York State Theater. It has been looking for a new home for several years. “This is not the other company at Lincoln Center and it is not the company with the cheaper seats,” she added. “It is not the company that plays in an acoustically poor hall. We take young singers and polish them and send them out. We are a theater company that makes the superstars and enables the other companies to present them as their own. Nothing must ever happen to this company except that it flourishes.”
Of course, it is up to the current leadership of City Opera — chairman Susan Baker, president Mark Newhouse, executive director Jane Gullong, and general manager and artistic director Paul Kellogg, who is retiring in the spring — to make sure the company flourishes, at a time when another opera company, the Metropolitan Opera, is shining its lights brightly under its new general manager, Peter Gelb.
The concert format showed that some of City Opera’s best spokespeople are the men and women who got their start there. As Carol Vaness said, “I am coming home to the stage where I grew up.” She not only performed, but also served as an entertaining and informative emcee of the program. “This is the place that jumpstarted the current Handel opera boom and pioneered the use of subtitles — over no one’s dead body,” Ms. Vaness said with spot-on comic timing.
Ms. Sills — City Opera’s greatest star-turned-arts administrator, going on to serve as chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center — recalled the night she made her City Opera debut as Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus, in 1955. “This October will be the 51st anniversary of my debut, at the theater on 55th Street. Tickets were $1.53. And we were worth every penny,” Ms. Sills said. On stage, she wore a costume her mother made, and her mother, sitting in the audience, wore a white fox stole from a pawnshop.
On the way home to the apartment they shared in Stuyvesant Town, her mother said, “Something very special has started for you tonight.” Indeed it was true, and it is a statement that seemed just as apropos for City Opera and its future on its gala night.
