Houston Grand Opera’s digital dreams.
A year ago, Houston Grand Opera’s immediate future was bleak. The pandemic had forced the cancellation of its main spring operas, “Salome” and “The Magic Flute,” and thrust a cloud of uncertainty over anything beyond that.
An organization accustomed to planning its seasons years in advance suddenly had to make sense of a world where live performances were now off the table. However, the massive disruption also opened the door for HGO to greatly increase its online footprint, a strategy that is increasingly crucial to performingarts organizations that want to remain competitive in today’s crowded cultural marketplace.
Under its HGO Digital banner, the company has since released more than a dozen productions, at a reliable clip of two per month. Its latest, “Marian’s Song,” premieres April 30.
“It’s been sort of an amazing year of learning new things,” says producing director Molly Dill, who oversees HGO Digital’s content. “I think we all feel like the learning curve was definitely pushed quite hard, but in a really interesting and exciting way.”
Presented free to the public, HGO Digital debuted last September with a filmed recital by soprano Tamara Wilson, a frequent HGO lead who had appeared in the title role of “Aida” that January. Several other singers — many with close Houston ties — helped fill out its Live From the Cullen performance series, including Nicole Heaston, Sasha Cooke, Arturo Chacon-Cruz and Reginald Smith Jr.
Going digital allowed a number of HGO’s annual events, such as the Concert of Arias competition and “Giving Voice” concert, to proceed more or less normally. (Some performers found the lack of a live audience took some getting used to.) It also provided HGO with license to stretch be “Suite yond what is known as a “capture” — as in performance capture — with “Vinkensport,” a modern opera about a bizarre birding competition, filmed on location in a Meyerland backyard. Mozart’s “The Impresario,” meanwhile, got a timely makeover that found its dueling divas auditioning over Zoom.
The season’s final production, next month’s “Hansel and Gretel,” utilizes green-screen technology. Others, such as last month’s Espanola,” split the difference, combining a recital by HGO artistic adviser Ana Maria Martinez with projections, video and dance.
“These are things that we wouldn’t have necessarily considered if we weren’t having to make really creative decisions very quickly on a very tight timeline in order to keep moving forward with our projects,” says Dill.
During the pandemic, HGO had to turn away from large-scale works in favor of productions more suited to a smaller screen. Ironically, due in part to its partnership with arts-oriented streaming platform Marquee TV, it’s been able to reach a much bigger audience than would ever be able to fit in the Wortham Center’s Brown Auditorium at one time. According to Dill, HGO Digital’s offerings have reached more than 120,000 people and counting.
“I’m hoping that it has really opened some minds and eyes to what opera can be,” she says. “And I will say that live performance is always going to be our specialty, and that’s what we will get back to doing and what we love doing. But I think the opportunity to reach a broader audience with our digital offerings has been great.”
As HGO Digital’s season begins to wind down, the company has already begun creeping back toward the stage. Besides premiering online this weekend, a new production of “Marian’s Song,” Damien Sneed and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton’s tribute to legendary American contralto Marian Anderson, is scheduled for May 14-15 at Miller Outdoor Theatre. Combining opera, pop music and spoken-word poetry, it was HGO’s last onstage production before everything shut down.
“We had such an amazing response when we performed it last February,” Dill says. “The ability to be able to bring it back and to be able to invite a much broader audience in to experience it was really exciting.”
Though it was born of necessity, HGO’s digital experiment is already paying dividends for future seasons. Dill says the upcoming 2021-22 campaign will include complementary digital content to the main live operas, because “we don’t want to lose the thread of what we started.”
“The amount of creative energy that has come through in what is such a devastatingly challenging season for all the performing arts has been really exciting,” she adds. “I think that’s definitely the positive thing that’s come out of all of this, is that burst of creativity.”