Mark Gresham | 8 DEC 2021
On Tuesday, the esteemed music magazine Musical America released its annual list of “Top 30 Professionals of the Year” for 2021.
Among the honored is Tomer Zvulun, artistic and executive director of The Atlanta Opera.
The annual Musical America Top 30 list singles out individuals in the performing arts deemed most worthy of peer recognition.
This year, the theme for the list was “The Pandemic: Meeting the Moment.” Musical America sought nominations for leaders who helped the performing arts community navigate the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic through creativity, dedication, and resilience.
Tomer Zvulun (courtesy of TAO)
After the cancellation of The Atlanta Opera’s season in March 2020, Zvulun led the company in making a series of bold, innovative decisions about where and how the company could perform safely outside its home venue, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. They came up with the idea of The Big Tent — essentially a giant circus tent. With intensive safety protocols in place, developed with a team of epidemiologists and other health experts, this open-air space allowed the company to perform for limited live audiences and produce videos from them for streaming over the internet to virtual audiences.
During the 2020-21 pandemic-intensive season, Zvulun and The Atlanta Opera kept about 300 crew members, artists, and staff employed, creating four new opera productions plus a handful of concerts, presenting 40 performances in all and many video projects, large and small. These reached 5,000 live audience members, 35,000 remote students, and untold thousands of viewers online.
In his Top 30 article about Zvulun, Musical America writer Zachary Lewis quoted Zvulun as saying how working under these conditions “created a camaraderie and sense of pride in every level of the company” and that “A new ethos was formed. One of grit and perseverance.”
Returning to its main stage at Cobb Energy Centre for the 2021-22 season, Zvulun feels The Atlanta Opera has come back even stronger than it was before the pandemic: “This company [now] feels like it can tackle any challenge and overcome any obstacle.”
Read the complete Musical America entry by Zachary Lewis here.
Musical America is the oldest American magazine on classical music, first appearing in 1898 in print and since 1999 online, at musicalamerica.com. ■
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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