INTIMATE AND SEXY | August 12th 2008

George Mott

"Because you're so close you have no choice but to feel a part of it" explains the founder of Gotham Chamber Opera. "It's really visceral." After an evening with the troupe, Kara Oppenheim agrees: the magic is in the nearness ...

The singing comes from behind you, when you least expect it.

At a polite cocktail party, with some wine and cheese and friends chatting about the stockmarket, you would hardly expect to hear a woman suddenly belt out a tune. Especially with much emotion and nary a karaoke machine in sight. Certainly not so early in the evening. And then a man chimes in, louder. He chases her through the crowd. A young-looking fellow, in jacket and jeans, with a clear, booming voice. A romance at top volume, after a day's work in Manhattan. It would all be surprising if you hadn't known you were experiencing a musicale from the Gotham Chamber Opera.

The company, founded in 2001, was conceived by Neal Goren, who noticed a dearth of chamber operas in New York City. "It's counterintuitive," says Goren, "because when you think of opera, you think big. But we do it small. It's intimate and it's sexy."

The group defines chamber opera as "intended for a small setting whose intimacy is mirrored in the economy of means employed, both musically and theatrically." The phrase is vague enough to encompass everything from two-person, piano-accompanied musicales in private homes (which is what I attended) to larger staged pieces with a chamber orchestra. Gotham produces up to three operas a year with very limited runs (five performances, typically). And several times a year, the not-for-profit troupe performs at small private gatherings to cultivate donors and audiences.

Before the 19th century, much opera was composed for private or small-scale performances. Chamber opera enjoyed a minor renaissance in the early 20th century, when composers began experimenting more with the medium. Today its nexus may be Gotham Chamber Opera's home at the Henry Street Settlement's Abrons Arts Centre, a 350-seat theatre on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the "nose-bleed" section is about as far from the stage as the third row at Lincoln Centre. The magic is in the nearness. "The power of the music is concentrated and the audience is directly involved," Goren explains. "Because you're so close you have no choice but to feel a part of it. It's really visceral."

Two world-class opera companies already exist in New York. Goren knew he wanted to find a niche. And find it he did, staging little-known and genre-bending pieces that would have no place at the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera or any other big-budget venue. A smattering of other chamber opera companies also work in America, and there are other New York opera companies that perform in small spaces. But "we are the only company that exclusively presents work intended for intimate venues," explains David Bennett, the managing director. "We hone to our mission. We don't take things made for bigger spaces and cut them down. That gives us a huge, wide berth of repertoire that no one else is doing."

Unusual pieces and unconventional practices attract both opera-lovers and novices who rarely seek out the genre. "A lot of [audience members] say they're not opera people," recounts Goren, "and I say, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you are because that's what we're doing'."

Gotham Chamber Opera's first performance, the American premiere of Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione in April 2001, was lauded as "one of the most promising new ventures around" by Charles Michener at the New York Observer. He noted that "so much beauty of sound and intensity of projection brought opening night's largely uptown, opera-jaded audience to its feet, and sent me out into wherever I was, impatient to hear what else this intrepid little company has up its sleeve."

The performances are refreshingly modern, regardless of when the opera was written. "I don't think we've ever had what you could call a traditional staging," admits Goren. The musicales are more experimental, mixing composers and genres. For the Henry Street Settlement productions the audience is seated, but the productions are still obscure and innovative, with sets designed by leading artists, sometimes overlaid with video.

Players are cast with an eye for what looks good up close. There are no fat ladies or old men, but rather attractive, youthful singers who offer nuanced performances. Don't expect melodramatically painted faces, either. "I want them to look like their characters. You can't have a 45-year-old play a 20-year-old. In a small space you can't fudge it a lot," Goren says. At the musicale I witnessed, the performers could have been guests at the party.

Goren and company will continue to charm audiences. There are a couple of productions to celebrate the bicentennial of Haydn's death. The first is L'isola disabitata ("The Uninhabited Island"), said to be Haydn's personal favourite, for March 2009. Then Gotham Chamber Opera will perform Haydn's Il mondo della Luna ("The World in the Moon") at the Museum of Natural History's (aptly named) Hayden Planetarium in autumn 2009. The company will also collaborate once again with Basil Twist, an edgy puppeteer, for El gato con botas ("Puss in Boots") in 2010, in both Spanish and English. And there are big plans to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2011; Nico Muhly, a wunderkind composer, is creating a new piece for the occasion. 

But perhaps the most exciting aspect of a Gotham Chamber Opera production is that, after the drama, its impact is still with you. It opens one's mind to endless possibilities. When an ordinary cocktail party is laced with the beauty of opera, everything is elevated. It is like looking at a typical American Main Street after discovering the photographs of  William Eggleston. The potential for art is everywhere.

"What I want to do is get people really turned on to the arts and to go out and explore," Goren confides. The experience led me to wonder what other art is hiding within the crevices of this city. If what I presumed was opera was really only a kind of opera, then what else is out there?

(Kara Oppenheim is a writer based in New York.)