Courtesy of the Commonwealth Opera

Joshua Kohl (Ferrando) and Mary Ellen Assue (Despina) in Commonwealth Opera's modernized staging of Cosi fan tutte

In times of economic hardship it is a sad truth that the arts are often the first to bear the brunt of financial cutbacks. The Commonwealth Opera of Northampton last spring made a counterintuitive decision to buck that trend by changing its status from regional opera group to professional company. 

The organization announced its move on June 22, and a few weeks later its newly appointed executive director, opera composer and founder of The Shakespeare Concerts Joseph Summer, announced that the company was planning to modernize and to expand its audience to include a younger crowd. Part of the strategy to accomplish these tasks was the staging of more "relatable" productions. The company's first scheduled show of the new season was Mozart's Così fan tutte, a risqué opera that tackles such hot-button subjects as lust, infidelity and greed. 

On opening night November 20, the company offered a sparkling version of the opera that married elegant singing in classic style with a smart modern set to a small but enthusiastic audience. Earlier, Preview spoke with Summer about the bold decision that has given the area a professional opera company.

"I saw an opportunity to create a new regional opera company in New England," Summer explained. "I thought, this is a perfect starting place, an opera company that exists enough to build upon. I [saw] it as being a very plausible financial scenario in which you save an enormous amount of money by taking Commonwealth, moving it to a level of professionalism and being able to take a production from city to city."

Since its beginning thirty-three years ago, Commonwealth Opera has been supported by the efforts of well-organized volunteers, and Summer emphasized that the change to professional company in no way spells the end of volunteer involvement. "I will encourage people to volunteer in a number of capacities," he assured Preview. "Volunteers I hope will participate in our opera world, but the product itself will be at a professional level."

In an unfriendly economy, the central problem of financing opera on a lesser scale than that of the major institutions such as the Metropolitan has generated varied solutions. Models for a regional opera company that tours are not easy to find, Summer said, though some companies (the Boston Lyric Opera and the St. Louis Opera, for example) create shared productions in order to save expenses. Open-mindedness and inventiveness are key to the new venture; even more demanding than putting on a production, said Summer, is "working with the board and helping move us all to a new vision of the way we do opera. ... The board appreciates that they are going to put out a more polished product. The end result is still opera, but yet it is opera at a different level of performance and quality. So that requires some changes in attitude amongst everyone, and we're working through that, we're moving forward."

As entrepreneurs in other fields have learned, the Valley is long on enthusiasm for culture but not so long on capital. The question is not whether the public here will welcome a professional opera company, but how far ticket sales, performance after performance, will go toward paying the bills. The company also has foundation support—for the November production, from the Mattina R. Proctor Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council—and some business support (helping out with Così fan tutte were Cooley Dickinson Hospital and Herrell's Development Corporation). It also has a few private donors.

Can Commonwealth Opera offer a quality of production that will induce Valley residents who go to New York or Boston for opera to stay closer to home? The verve and polish of the fall's Così fan tutte suggests a hopeful answer and whets the appetite for the production of Lucia di Lammermoor scheduled for May 7 and 9 at the Academy of Music. Of course, the other part of the equation is price.

"I know that we're having much higher expenses, but I'm going to try to defray those expenses with our outlying performances and some fundraising," Summer told Preview. "I think that I'm going to be able to keep the ticket prices at pretty much where they were before—under fifty dollars for the front seats. (That) allows me to make opera accessible to people who don't think they want to spend seventy-five dollars on a ticket."

Obviously a man with a well-developed ability to see beyond the worrisome demands of fundraising, Summer has a special dream for Commonwealth Opera. "One of the things that I'm looking to do is bring some Wagner to Massachusetts," he says. "No one has produced a Wagner opera in Massachusetts in over twenty years. That's just stunning to me. It's a drought that is nearly as appalling as the Boston Red Sox drought in the World Series. So that's one of the kinds of things, I think, that will be appreciated by opera lovers. I think we should be able to do a Wagner opera in the 2010/ 2011 season."