Top 10 Pandemic Pivot No. 5:
Long Beach Opera's 'Ungala' Yields 20 World Premieres

The catalyst for Long Beach Opera’s inventive pandemic pivot was the need to raise funds. "We’ve always been an unconventional company, but until last year we had been doing very conventional galas, where you ask people to purchase a table for a dinner, and then after the expenses are covered, there’s a donation,” said Jennifer Rivera, executive director and CEO since 2018. “So we started calling [this year’s] an ‘ungala.’ We’ve done one at a drag bar with drag queens and opera singers performing side by side. Another was at the California African American Museum and featured a performance of music by Black composers through history.”

Last July, with Southern California shut down and in-person gatherings banned for the foreseeable future, the board of directors was pondering how LBO could do a fundraiser online. “We have this board member, Raulee Marcus, who commissions a lot of pieces, and she suggested, why not instead of asking people to purchase a table, we ask them to commission a piece of opera music,” Rivera said. “Everyone loved the idea of switching out gala sponsorships for commissioning. Not only would it allow us to contribute to the artistic economy and fundraise to support next season, but we could do it by embracing the digital world that we’re all in now.”

LBO’s 2020 Songbook was streamed on Nov. 15, hosted by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, with appeals for donations incorporated into the almost three-hour presentation. Commissioned by company supporters, 20 short videos of vocal works by 20 emerging composers received their premieres.Composers had been chosen and mentored by five of their more seasoned, illustrious contemporaries: Anthony Davis, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five was premiered by the company in 2019, Annie Gosfield, David Lang, George Lewis, and Du Yun.

The premiere of Songbook was a tour de force. Each composer was asked to create a piece that reflected something about 2020 – an experience, a feeling, an event – and the result was a wide array of intense, often experimental music and video. The pandemic was a predominant theme, but the composers also drew inspiration from Black Lives Matter protests, climate change, divisive American politics, and immigration.

Highlights

Among the impressive works were Without Us, featuring composer Carla Kihlstedt on violin and voice, along with an ethereal vocal quintet, in “a meditation on the many kinds of silence we’ve all been tangling with since Covid-19 hit the world”; Marcus Norris’ upbeat Block Party, given a delightful reading by soprano Darshaya Oden; Theresa Wong’s song As We Breathe, “an elegy dedicated to those whose lives and dreams have been cut short in this traumatic year” that made inventive use of video; Tomeka Reid’s Somewhere in this Global Garden, given a strong performance by mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran; and Aida Shirazi’s self-produced Orbis, with the composer handling voice (including Persian poetry), electronics, and computer-generated images.

The composers, all of whom have studied or worked in the U.S., are a diverse group. A good portion of them and the performers are people of color, and a dozen of the 20 composers are women, including the three out of the five Iranian composers.

“We wanted to focus on diversity, and the Songbook was really successful in highlighting new voices that are underrepresented in classical music,” said Rivera, a mezzo-soprano who performed leading roles at opera houses around the world during her 20-year singing career. “I went from singing into administration to help crack this conundrum that opera is mired in as it tries to be relevant to the audiences of today. One of the things about the digital arena that I find exciting is that it removes the stigma that prevents people from going to the opera. It reaches a more diverse, younger audience.”

David Castillo as a fragmented singing head in Theresa Wong's As We Breathe

Long Beach Opera is a small company, with an annual budget that has averaged about $1.5 million in the past several years, though 2020 is down to about $1.2 million, because three operas were canceled in the pandemic. With four productions scheduled for 2021, the budget is projected to be $1.6 million.

Songbook cost about $25,000 to mount, with each of the 20 composers paid the same commissioning fee, with additional fees paid to the performers. The videos were either self-produced by the composers or LBO provided them with the help of a videographer.

“This was very typical for us,” Rivera said. “We tend to produce things that are very impactful for very little money. We have seven people on staff, along with three interns, and everyone was involved, all working from home. It was a team effort.”

Successful results

Fundraising for the “ungala” Songbook was frontloaded in part since the commissioning fees for the composers were donated in advance. The sale of tickets ($25 and $75) generated revenue, with about 350 tickets purchased by a sponsor for distribution to students. There have been about 900 views of the stream since it was premiered, and it continues to be available on the LBO website for a donation. In December, one video a day is going up on the website until all 20 will be posted at the end of the month.

“We netted over $125,000 from the fundraiser, including all the commissions, sponsorships, etc.,” Rivera said in an email. “We did spend more than other fundraisers (almost 100 percent of the money went directly to artists, with other costs being pretty minimal), but it still earned significantly more overall than the prior year’s equivalent major fundraisers. All proceeds will go toward producing the 2021 operas, which will mean paying more artists during a time when they aren’t earning much anywhere else.”

LBO, whose interim artistic advisor is Yuval Sharon, plans to open its 2021 season on March 26-28 with James Darrah’s staging of the Phillip Glass dance opera Les Enfants Terribles. “It’s slated to be an immersive experience,” Rivera said. “We’re hoping to livestream it. Having seen how Songbook worked so well online, we’d like to make something conceived for the stage and a live audience also be able to be passionately experienced simultaneously in a digital format.”

Top:Alicia Hall Moran in Tomeka Reid's Somewhere in This Global Garden