Tom Pasatieri’s opera The Seagull will get it’s Canadian Premiere on June 7th with Opera By Request. I interviewed Bill Shookhoff to find out about it.

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Barczablog: Describe the works of Pasatieri: what is his style like? 

Bill Shookhoff: Pasatieri is possibly the most prolific opera composer of the 20^th and early 21st century, having composed over 20 operas, along with several works for solo voice, chorus, chamber music and orchestra.  His work defies categorization.  He exudes a definite contemporary sound, but retains lyricism and a sense of tonality, though the tonality is constantly shifting.  Besides The Seagull, his best-known operas include La Divina, Black Widow, Frau Margot and Signor Deluso.  The latter is probably his most-performed work, as it’s a short comedy, well-suited to university and young artist productions. 

His monodrama Lady Macbeth and settings of Oscar Wilde poems are also frequently performed. 

He also scored several films including Shawshank Redemption, Fried Green Tomatoes, and American Beauty.

BB: Describe the music of The Seagull.

Bill Shookhoff: With his mixture of contemporary atonality and lyricism, Pasatieri captures both the intense conflict and the inner passion of the work.  His subtle use of leitmotifs define the principal characters and the principal themes: love proffered, love unrequited, anxiety, loneliness.

BB: Does the libretto from Kenward Elmslie and Frank Corsaro follow the original Chekhov?

Bill Shookhoff: The work is quite faithful to the original play, though with necessary condensing for operatic purposes. 

The story can best be summarized as Russian families and colleagues thrown together in a country estate, where virtually everyone is in love with the wrong person.  The most central character, Nina, travels the most complex journey:  half-orphan neighbour, happy childhood, then abusive step-parent, aspiring actor, struggling career in Moscow, seduced and abandoned, ultimately resigned to a life as an itinerant player in regional theatre.  Constantin, a writer whose work is not accepted, meets the most tragic end, while Trigorin, a mediocre writer, is always successful and always somehow lands on top. 

The most striking difference is the addition of Arkadina reciting Jocasta’s monologue (which is totally original, not found in any version of the Oedipus plays), as an apparent allusion to her relationship with Constantin.

BB: What are the roles like, what kind of singers are needed?

Bill Shookhoff: The principal roles:  Nina, Arkadina (the aging actress), Constantin, Trigorin, and Masha, the estate manager’s daughter, have extremely demanding roles with extensive range and dramatic demands.  These roles require stamina, as they each have extensive scenes to play, and dramatic capabilities, as their music defines them in all their conflicting characteristics.

BB: Who is in the cast, and where have we seen them (if ever) before?

Bill Shookhoff: Monica Zerbe (Arkadina) was in OBR’s Jenufa and Anna Bolena, and was an Eckhardt-Gramatte winner.  Andrew Tees (Trigorin) sang Wotan in OBR’s Ring Cycle and has a long legacy of performances throughout Canada. 

Michael Robert-Broder (Constantin) is one of Toronto’s busiest baritones, was recently in Janacek’s Makropulos Case (OBR/CICM) and will soon be singing the title role in Nabucco with Calgary Concert Opera. 

Meagan Reimer (Masha) joins us from Manitoba, as she did a year ago to sing Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello.  She was singing extensively throughout Germany when the pandemic hit. 

Jenny Ribeiro, from Michigan, has performed with orchestras and opera companies throughout the US, and is involved with numerous audience-development projects in Michigan and New York. 

She is a devotee of Pasatieri’s work, and was key to making this production a reality.

BB: What is the piano part like? 

Bill Shookhoff: Having just presented Makropulos Case, this piano part seems quite manageable, but is in fact very challenging.  Pasaieri’s orchestration includes a lot of quasi-contrapuntal inner voicing, which is difficult to achieve on the piano.  Parts of the orchestration are quite thick, so one needs to fulfill the orchestral sound without having it sound bombastic.  In many ways, it is comparable to the piano reductions of Carlisle Floyd, but because Floyd was a pianist, his reductions were more pianistic.

BB: How did this opera performance come about? 

Bill Shookhoff: Decades ago I was in New York City shortly before conducting Signor Deluso with Canada Opera Piccola and Pierrette Alarie in Victoria.  I had some questions about the score and arranged a visit with the composer.  He gave me a copy of the score of The Seagull, and shortly thereafter I was working with Patricia Wells, the original Nina, who absolutely loved the work and I’ve been wanting to do it ever since.  However, the work was long, very difficult and very hard to realize on the piano. 

Then, in 2003, a revised version, shorter and more compactly orchestrated, was presented by the San Francisco Opera Centre, with, coincidentally, Canadians Mark Morash (conductor) and Jane Archibald (Masha).  This version seemed eminently doable.  Two years ago I met Jenny Ribeiro at Peter Furlong’s (Siegmund, OBR Ring Cycle) Ring Cycle in One Evening in New Hampshire.  We maintained contact, she is a champion of Pasatieri’s work, we discussed logistics, and now it’s about to become a reality.

On Facebook I saw the following posted by Bill Shookhoff :

Back home and back to work. Really looking forward to the Canadian premiere of Tom Pasatieri’s The Seagull on June 7th and Cilea’s Adrianna Lecouvreur on June 22nd. Guest artists Jenny Ribeiro (Seagull), Whitney Sloan and Alicia Woynarski (Adrianna) will be joined by OBR stalwarts Michael Robert-Broder, Andrew Tees, Monica Zerbe, Meagan Reimer, Ernesto Ramirez among others. Cesar Bello will be making his long overdue OBR debut in Adrianna.