San Diego’s Operatic Voice Is Still Strong

When former San Diego Opera general director Tito Capobianco was hyping his nascent summer Verdi Festival, he predicted that San Diego would become the Verdi capital of the world, the equivalent of Bayreuth, Bavaria, for Wagner-lovers. Ten years after his overly optimistic prediction, both Capobianco and his Verdi Festival are long gone, but the local opera scene has survived without the flamboyant Argentine impresario.

If the state of opera in San Diego can be judged by performances across town this weekend, the Capobianco legacy still hovers in the wings. Saturday at the Civic Theatre, San Diego Opera opens Puccini’s unsinkable “Madama Butterfly,” the final production of the current four-opera season. After Capobianco left San Diego Opera in 1983, the company scaled down the number of operas it produced in order to contain its debt, and resorted to conservative programming--familiar operas such as “Butterfly,” “Tosca,” “Faust” and “Il Trovatore”--to rebuild its subscription base.

Although it has taken the company six seasons to rebuild, according to general director Ian Campbell, the formula has worked. Campbell announced a more ambitious and expanded 1989-90 season earlier this week, and was able to add a performance of “Madama Butterfly” because of high ticket demand.

Tonight, San Diego State University’s opera workshop presents a bill of four one-act operas at Smith Recital Hall. Like the opera company, the university’s opera program has also gone through a recovery period since its association with Capobianco. From 1981 to ‘83, Capobianco’s Opera Center, at that time the local company’s educational program, joined forces with the SDSU music department to offer opera courses and produce operas on campus.

“I’m trying to get opera back on the boards here,” explained Martin Chambers, recently appointed chairman of the music department. “After Capobianco left, the program here was fallow several years. When I came here in the fall of 1986, the department decided to resurrect the program.”

Chambers has been rebuilding the university opera program slowly, relying on students and faculty who would have a continuing commitment to the program, rather than a few experts brought in for a short-term stint, the premise of the former program.

Chambers has the right background to head a university opera program. The Canadian tenor sang in European opera houses for seven years before he returned to North America to assume a university position. He continued to sing roles with Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company under Lotfi Mansouri, that company’s general director until his recent appointment as head of the San Francisco Opera.

At this stage of the SDSU opera workshop, Chambers is not attempting to vie with the downtown company for production values.

“I’m not interested in producing the best stage product,” he said, “but in training students how to act, sing and put an opera together. We are not only interested in singers, but see potential designers and directors coming out of this program.”

In tonight’s Smith Hall program, Chambers will conduct his cast and the SDSU opera orchestra in Douglas Moore’s 1958 one-act comic opera “Gallantry.” The rest of the program features Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Riders to the Sea,” based on the William Synge play; “Bastien and Bastienne,” Mozart’s first Singspiel , and Hugo Weisgall’s monodrama “The Stranger,” based on a Strindberg play.

Chambers does not see the performances of his opera workshop transforming the campus consciousness about opera.

“We invite students, especially music appreciation students, to the open dress rehearsals, and the responses are pretty positive, but we have to struggle to get audiences.”

Chambers does not predict a second attempt at making an alliance between San Diego Opera and the SDSU music department, even though he has good relations with Campbell. Earlier this season, Chambers made his local opera debut in San Diego Opera’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” production, and he will appear in next season’s production of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmelites.”

“I think Campbell is doing a fine job with his education program, and we are both concerned about spreading our available resources too thin. He has generously helped us out with the loan of some props and set, however.”