REHEARSING BOHÈME How our Festival Orchestra and music staff prepare a masterpiece

BY NICK RICHARDSON

There is something enchanting about Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa’s depiction of artist life in Paris’s Latin Quarter that keeps Americans coming back for more. According to data from Opera America, La bohème was the most produced and the most performed opera in the United States for the past three decades, playing for a combined total of 2,431 performances across 499 different productions by Opera America Member Companies. La bohème also holds the distinction of being the only Puccini opera with a recording featuring its original conductor, the famed Arturo Toscanini. The opera’s discography goes back over 100 years and includes some of the most celebrated opera singers ever, such as Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Montserrat Caballé, José Carreras— and many more.

This rich and deep history presents a challenge for opera companies today: How can we make a familiar and beloved opera feel fresh? Though Puccini’s music remains the same, we will hear it anew this summer thanks to the astounding work of our Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra and music staff. Here is an overview of how our musicians move from the page to the stage.

Before The Music

Preparing the music starts long before the summer. The Festival assembles the creative teams for productions—including the directors, designers, and conductors—at least one year in advance. For this year’s remount of La bohème, Egyptian conductor Nader Abbassi will lead our Festival Orchestra and singers. Our Music Director Joseph Colaneri conducted the Festival’s original production in 2015.

Maestro Colaneri’s process begins with intense study—not just the scores of the operas, but their libretti, source materials, and even previous versions or drafts of the pieces. “It’s sort of like composing the piece again,” he says. “You look at it and think, ‘Why did the composer make this choice?’” A lecturer on opera, Colaneri will also reference his own previous research.

Production meetings—in which the creative team meets to decide the concept of this specific iteration of the opera—also start the year before. Here, Colaneri works with the director on the music choices for the production, ranging from cuts to make in the score to where to place singers on stage for the best acoustics. After he and the director craft their own “version” of the opera, Colaneri collaborates with our Music Librarian, Kristen Butcher, to source the different instrumental parts, assemble the score, and distribute the score to the musicians. This begins the “nitty gritty” work of our music staff.

“Sometimes there are discrepancies between what might be in the full score and what might be the vocal score. We have to decide how to deal with those. Which one is correct? Which one do we choose?” says Colaneri. But even with those inconsistencies ironed out, the score isn’t quite yet ready for our musicians to perform.

Go With The Bow

The printed music from the publisher tells the musicians what to play, but not necessarily how to physically play it. Bowings are added to the score in order to achieve the desired articulations and to ensure uniformity within each section. This is the job of our Concertmaster, violinist Ruotao Mao, who has played in the Festival Orchestra since 2010. Mao will write all the bowings in the Violin I part, then pass that on to the other principal musicians (the leaders of each string section), who apply his notes to their respective parts. It takes Mao about 10 hours to bow the complete score. He finishes his work around the end of January. “At that time, I know the pieces pretty well. Then, after a few months, when I look at the music again in May, I have to re-learn it,” he admits.

Many of our orchestra members have other professional obligations outside of the Festival, learning and performing repertoire for other concerts and gigs in addition to the Festival’s program. Mao, for example, serves as concertmaster for three other orchestras in the Mid-Atlantic, leads his own string quartet, and maintains a private studio of violin students. For these busy musicians, bowings help jump-start the rehearsal process, which is crucial on the Festival’s tight schedule.

Come Together

Our orchestra receives all the music for the season—with bowings—in May. They are expected to know their individual parts by the time they arrive in June. Once the full orchestra comes together, they have only six rehearsals per production to prepare for opening night.

The first two or three rehearsals are solely with the conductor. As Colaneri explains, “The conductor brings a whole new sense of structure to the piece. Architecture in music is defined by tempo, dynamics, and pace—what you’re moving toward and what you’re moving away from. Climax and denouement, for example, in theatrical terms.” He expects Maestro Abbassi will have his own interpretations to help shape the music.

Bringing all of the musicians together—the orchestra, the conductor, and then the singers— is when the music-making truly begins. “When the singers start coming in, suddenly it becomes alive, and then what we do makes more sense,” says Mao. “Sometimes we’re accompanying, sometimes we’re supporting, something we’re doubling. Depending on the singer, we adjust our color because we now have first-hand experience with the singer.”

Adding singers also means adding more cooks to the kitchen, and our production of Bohème already has some 40 instrumentalists in the pit alone. “When I’m at the piano studying, the piece goes exactly the way I want it to go. Everybody does it at my tempo, and it’s easily done,” says Colaneri. “But when you get with the forces, especially not only with singers, but also with the orchestra, now you encounter other people that have also been thinking about the music and playing it. You have to come to that point where you communicate your concept to the orchestra to get everyone on the same page. And that’s really the great part of it, that collaboration. A conductor needs to be a communicator, and you need to communicate what the idea of the piece is and how you want to interpret it.”

That’s not to say the conductor makes all the artistic choices alone. The orchestra, singers, and even stage directors bring ideas to the piece that can enhance the storytelling. Colaneri welcomes this variety in the rehearsal room: “If you were to come to my working rehearsals, you will hear two words that I use quite a bit. One is the word

‘imagination.’ I want everybody to play with imagination, to think it’s not just a quarter note, but what that quarter note means in theatrical terms. Is it an exclamation point? Is it a question mark? Is it a reaction of horror? Or is it an exuberant reaction? Or is it a sigh? There are so many ways you can think about one note."

“The other word that I use a lot is the Italian word coraggio. ‘Have courage.’ In a rehearsal, we can do whatever we want. Don’t hold back—use the rehearsal to push the envelope and see how far we can take something. We might discover something that if we were cautious, we might not have discovered. For me, there is always a sense of discovery and imagination in everything, especially in the theater, because without that, why bother?”

Of course, the composer also shares ideas worth heeding. “Puccini was a theatrical genius!” states Colaneri. “He knew how to write curtain up and curtain down music. He actually gives you places in the score where the curtain goes up and where the curtain goes down, or if it should be slow or fast. Even the use of the curtain became a musical entity for Puccini.”

THE FINAL PIECE

Though the artists make the most of their rehearsal time, there is still one unpredictable variable in the mix: the audience. For Colaneri, the audience is another key player in the production.

“I’m a big believer in removing the proverbial ‘fourth wall’ that separates the audience from the stage,” says Colaneri. “My own impression is that the fourth wall disappears so that we pull the audience in as an element. They participate in a more or less passive way by listening, but nonetheless, their emotions are engaged. They’re going to react with applause, or tears, or something emotional. If we think about the fourth wall as being down, it draws them in. It’s as if we’re all in a big circle, rather than a half circle divided by that wall. I like to think of it as one big sort of performing organism, if you will.”

Though the artists have plenty to coordinate amongst themselves, the audience is still at the forefront of Colaneri’s mind. “Certainly when I’m on the podium, if it’s a piece the audience has heard many times before, I’m thinking, ‘How can I make them hear it as if it were new, as if it were fresh?’” This could mean changing the tempo or even bringing out a countermelody from a specific instrument. “I bring that into the rehearsal process and then into the performance process as well.”

Whether you’re experiencing your first Bohème or revisiting an old friend, we’re sure you’ll hear something exciting from The Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra this season.