Houston Grand Opera Singing Aria of Success

Forget the flamenco dress and Spanish gypsy look of the 1870s. David Gockley’s “Carmen” lived in the 1950s and wore skintight, leopard-print leggings.

Gockley’s risque version of Georges Bizet’s masterpiece last year admittedly put off some traditional opera-goers.

But the undaunted Gockley’s practice of freshening old works has helped his Houston Grand Opera join the ranks of the most prominent of the nation’s more than 200 opera companies.

“In order to obtain a wider, more diverse, younger audience, you risk losing your old-time corps of support,” said the 55-year-old general director of the opera. “My wish all along is that we can diversify, we can be artistically interesting. . . . We can stretch the rubber band but not break it.”

Stretch it he does when it comes to new pieces.

“Harvey Milk,” an opera about the life and slaying of San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official, premiered in Houston last year. “Nixon in China,” one of the first among a list of contemporary operas about real people, opened at the HGO in 1987.

Those are just two of the 16 world premieres presented by the Houston company since 1974. Fourteen were written by American composers.

Next up is “Jackie O,” a smaller opera for pop-culture junkies about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. It’s set to hit the stage in spring 1997.

With a score by University of Michigan professor and first-time opera composer Michael Daugherty, and a libretto by Wayne Koestenbaum, author of “Jackie Under My Skin,” the opera peeks into such events as the 1968 Andy Warhol happening where Jackie meets Aristotle Onassis.

“David’s commitment to new works and to new composers has been without equal in this country,” said Matthew Epstein, vice president of Columbia Artists Management Inc.

The idea may not be popular among subscribers who want to hear familiar works sung by great voices, but Gockley has made sure to introduce a new work almost every year since 1985.

“I think he convinces his donors that this is one reason the Houston Grand Opera has a reputation outside of Texas,” said “Nixon in China” composer John Adams.

Another is Gockley’s resurrection of neglected pieces. For his current project, he dusted off Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s “Four Saints in Three Acts,” a 1934 opera absent from major production for decades.

It follows Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha,” Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat” and George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” in restoration at the HGO.

Directed by avant-garde icon Robert Wilson, the new “Four Saints” was co-commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and the Lincoln Center Festival ’96. No company had taken a chance on it in years because it is a “verbal mosaic . . . a playful use of words with hidden meanings” and has no plot, Gockley said.

To fill the theater, he reduced ticket prices and arranged a series of public presentations examining the work. Gockley knew that Wilson, whom he calls “the toast of Europe,” would draw a crowd of his own.

“My direction for ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ is to think of it as a dance,” the Texas-born Wilson said. “I’m interested in what I’m seeing and how it can help me hear.”

Gockley also wants to open eyes, which is why he set up a 30-by-22-foot screen in a plaza outside Houston’s Wortham Theater Center in November.

More than 2,000 people with blankets and coolers in tow watched a simulcast of Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli in Rossini’s “Cinderella,” a sold-out performance.

The screen fused early 19th century music with the technology of a rock concert. Inspiration came from Covent Garden in London, which has shown outdoor telecasts of live performances. It never had been done in the United States.

Pursuing his goal to make opera more accessible, Gockley plans to stage well known repertoire at two or more summer pavilions in 1997--another novelty. At Miller Outdoor Theater, presentations will be free. In other locations, ticket prices will be cut drastically from the $125 top during the regular season.

Gockley hopes that such events will break opera’s identification with the white elite, in Houston at least, and improve HGO’s relationship with the nation’s fourth-largest city.

The first opera in Spanish that he has commissioned, Mexican composer Daniel Catan’s “Florencia En El Amazonas,” will premiere this fall.

“We are fast becoming a white minority city. We therefore as an opera company must take that into account and make sure that the opera company is the way the city as a whole would have it,” Gockley said.

He believes that Houston is a vision of the future when it comes to audience habits and cultural trends because of the city’s relatively short history and lack of tradition.

The audience is buying. The eight productions in 1995, totaling 57 performances, drew 105,000 people, or 93% of capacity.

“Hopefully our experiments, successes, failures will help to define what an opera company has got to be in the 21st century in order to continue to thrive culturally and economically,” he said.