Mark Gresham | 3 MAR 2022
Mark Gresham: The upcoming 2022-23 season is significant for The Atlanta Opera and you as its General and Artistic Director. How would you characterize the new season’s overall theme?
Tomer Zvulun: I view the season’s theme as “stubborn optimism.” If you look at the world, it feels upside-down and has been upside down for the past two years and continues to be so.
For a good reason, Candide is the jewel in the crown for next season as we enter this third year of the pandemic with a world full of challenges.
I often think about the story of Candide because if you look at all the characters in Candide, they struggle to preserve their optimism through some of the most hair-raising sequences of war and disease and famine and slavery. It’s just a nightmarish world for them, yet they’re thinking, “How do we get through this together?”
The author Voltaire is famous for saying that the most important decision we can make is to be in a good mood. Now I know you probably think that’s a very ironic and sarcastic way to look at optimism, but that’s how Voltaire looked at it. It was a criticism of Leibniz’s idea that if we believe in a creator, that creator of the world must be good, so this must be the best of all possible worlds. But at the same time, I believe that the sarcasm reveals warmth, humanity, and love for life despite all the challenges. And that’s what’s so brilliant about Bernstein’s opera.
Voltaire wrote his book Candide after that horrible earthquake that wiped out three-quarters of Lisbon in 1755. Bernstein wrote this opera Candide shortly after the Holocaust. Those two geniuses finding a way to find humor and perseverance in challenging times is something that strongly reverberates with me when I look at our times.
That’s why the whole season is about adventure. It’s about being able to go from Japan, to Spain, to Norse mythology with Wagner, and to all the different places in Candide. It feels almost like a picaresque novel, this whole season, with adventure and mythology in a world full of gods and dwarves and dragons and gold. We were stuck at home for two years, and we may be stuck at home even longer. So let’s find a way to escape.
Gresham: You spoke about the overcoming of difficulties. Madama Butterfly was rescheduled more than once because of the pandemic. I see that it’s finally coming to the stage in this new season.
Zvulun: Yes, and as a fanatic when it comes to stoic philosophy, I believe that “the obstacle is the way.” I’ve been saying it for years now, and that was why we came up with the Big Tent. We found a way to take this obstacle of the pandemic and use it as fuel for creativity. Whenever we encounter obstacles in this company, our attitude is that it’s going to allow us to be even more creative than before. So yes, we’re programming some of the postponed shows, specifically Madama Butterfly and Das Rheingold. But we feel that we are now even more capable than before in tackling them because we’re a stronger company.
Gresham: Let’s touch on the production of Don Giovanni and the fact that it is inspired by film noir. Can you speak to that? It makes me think of cynical crime mysteries and shadowy atmosphere. How does film noir play into Mozart?
Zvulun: One of the aesthetic qualities of our vision is that it’s very cinematic. It’s always been that since I arrived here. That’s my style as a director. I’m attracted to cinema and what is visual in addition to the sonic and audible. Doing a show inspired by film noir fits very well with our aesthetic, which movies have always informed. Our performances in the past used a lot of cinematic vocabularies like projections, special effects, and storytelling that is rapid in terms of how it progresses. This production of Don Giovanni fits perfectly. Kristine McIntyre, the director, is a big film noir fan, so she imagined the opera as having a 1930s kind of film noir world.
Gresham: This cinematic element would also apply to Das Rheingold, which you are directing, but much differently than Don Giovanni, I would suppose.
Zvulun: Yes. Das Rheingold has the same team responsible for other cinematic productions we’ve done here, from Silent Night and Madama Butterfly to Salome and Eugene Onegin. I’m directing, and my colleagues, Erhard Rom and Robert Wierzel, are going to design. It’s going to be a spectacular cinematic version of Rheingold.
A design image for The Atlanta Opera’s production of Das Rheingold (credit: Erhard Rom)
Gresham: Is Rheingold a big challenge or for the company?
Zvulun: It absolutely is a big challenge, and we’ve been building for it for years. That’s why we’ve done a big Wagnerian show like The Flying Dutchman in 2017, and while Strauss is not exactly Wagner (though he tried really hard to be), we did Salome.
It’s a major undertaking. Luckily, the way Wagner wrote the Ring cycle, Das Rheingold is easier than Die Walkure, and Die Walkure is easier than and easier than Siegfried, Siegfried is easier than Götterdämmerung. But right now, we’re just focusing on Rheingold and seeing how that will play. We believe that we’re ready for the challenge.
It’s a most exciting season for sure. It doesn’t get better than Puccini, Mozart, Wagner, and Bernstein. And we have some phenomenal artists lined up: the amazing voices of Deanna Breiwick and Yasko Sato, Greer Grimsley and Jack Swanson, and returns of Gianluca Terranova and Kristinn Sigmunsson. And conductor Patrick Summers.
Gresham: You mentioned the Discoveries Series, but is the company not yet announcing those two productions?.
Zvulun: Traditionally, we announce the Mainstage productions in the spring and the Discoveries Series in the summer. We’re trying to expedite that this year.
We’re interested in doing two innovative projects: the American premiere of a new, smaller version of Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók in a production from Theatre of Sound in London, and a brand-new opera, A Snowy Day by Atlanta-based American composer Joel Thompson, that just had its premiere in Houston in December and that we will present at Morehouse College.
Plans for these are in the works, but we still have to finalize and confirm them. We hope to release the complete details soon.
Gresham: On top of everything else, 2022-23 is your 10th anniversary season with the company and includes the 50th production you have overseen as The Atlanta Opera’s general and executive director. From today’s vantage point, how have your initial expectations for The Atlanta Opera and the city played out over time?
Zvulun: When I arrived here, I was a thirty-seven-year-old kid, and I had a five-year plan. I wasn’t convinced that Atlanta was my final destination. I was a young man, and everything is open, and everything is still open, but what I discovered in the past ten years is Atlanta is really my home. My kids were born here and go to school here, and that’s a big deal. I feel very connected to this community and that it supports me in the most profound ways. There is an enthusiasm about this relationship. I have stuck around because I genuinely believe in this city, its feeling of entrepreneurship, and its hunger for the arts and new thinking. Personally, the big thing for me is that I’m truly committed to this community.
From the company’s standpoint, we are a very different company than in 2013. Look at the size of the company. We went from three productions that we’re not really on the map back in the day, twelve evenings of performances. We now do six productions: four major operas plus two Discoveries Series productions that are sometimes humongous, like the shows we have done in the Big Tent.
There is a completely different way of thinking and ethos to the company. We have more than doubled the budget in the past ten years, and we are much more secure financially. It was very precarious back in 2013. And now it’s much more solid. As the company evolves, there are growing pains, of course, and it’s difficult, but because of the challenges that we encountered, we are stronger in all the broken places. So I feel that we’re continuing to move forward with great energy. ■
The Atlanta Opera’s 2022-23 Mainstage Season
- Madama Butterfly
Composer: Giacomo Puccini
Libretto: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa
Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
November 5, 8, 11, and 13, 2022
Conductor: Timothy Myers
Director: Tomer Zvulun
Set design: Erhard Rom
Costume design: Jonathan Knipscher & Lauren Gaston
Lighting design: Robert Wierzel - Don Giovanni
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto: Lorenzo Da Ponte
Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center
January 21, 24, 27, and 29, 2023
Conductor: Arthur Fagen
Director: Kristine McIntyre
Set design: R. Keith Brumley
Costume design: Mary Traylor - Candide
Composer: Leonard Bernstein
Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
March 4, 7, 10, and 12, 2023
Conductor: Jim Lowe
Director: Allison Moritz - Das Rheingold
Composer: Richard Wagner
Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre
April 29, May 2, 5, and 7, 2023
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: Tomer Zvulun
Set design: Erhard Rom
Costume design: Mattie Ullrich
Projection design: Robert Wierzel
Details about the two Discoveries Series productions are anticipated to be released soon.
External links:
- Tomer Zvulun: .tomerzvulun.com
- The Atlanta Opera: atlantaopera.org
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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