Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Wednesday December 7, 2011
Chicago Opera Theater jumps into the talent pool
Viennese Andreas Mitisek, coming via Long Beach, to succeed Brian Dickie
BY ANDREW PATNER
Andreas Mitisek, who has made creative waves by staging operas in offbeat venues such as swimming pools, ship hulls, and parking garages, has been named as the incoming general director of Chicago Opera Theater. He succeeds Brian Dickie, who raised COT’s international profile during his 12-year tenure.
His appointment is to be announced Wednesday at a press conference by Chicago Opera Theater board president Gregory O’Leary. Mitisek, artistic and general director of Long Beach (California) Opera, will start September 1 after becoming general director-designate on January 1. He has signed a five-year contract.
In an unusual and intriguing move, Mitisek will continue to run Long Beach Opera along with COT. “There is a real symmetry between the two,” he said.
Dickie once set Don Giovanni in a staged Vegas nightclub. At Long Beach, where Mitisek has presented one site-specific production per season since 2007, he brought singers and audience members to an actual swimming pool for Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus & Euridice.Other off-site productions included Grigori Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank in a parking garage and Cherubini’s Medea in a warehouse. Next fall, the company will present an ocean-themed cantata by Gavin Bryars at the city’s aquarium.
These and other innovative moves helped him boost Long Beach ticket sales and attendance by 500 percent and nearly tripled the company’s budget and fund-raising over the past three years.
It’s fitting that Mitisek appreciates and admires the Dickie era, which revitalized COT and its repertoire, raised its worldwide reputation and exposure, and moved the group from a century-old North Side auditorium to a new home base at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Following the Dickie model, Mitisek wants to take the COT to another level in terms of its connection to the city, its engagement with American singers, and even the location of its performances.
“As I am getting to know Chicago,” Mitisek said Sunday by phone from California, “I am already seeing so many places and thinking, ‘We could do something there!’ Or ‘What about a collaboration with this organization?’” He’s already thinking, too, about a film series similar to the one he developed in Long Beach that parallels the performance season. “You want to take the work to new places and also connect to new people through other media.”
COT board president O’Leary, who heads a downtown boutique investment management firm, said that Mitisek “stood out from our first meeting with him due to his artistic vision but also because of his tremendous energy and efficiency. The idea of sharing some productions, costs, and leadership with a very similar company in a very different geographic area could become a model for smaller groups in this economy.”
Mitisek will join a growing roster of European and English artistic leaders in Chicago who have been implementing ambitious community engagement goals. British-born Anthony Freud, new head at Lyric Opera of Chicago, transformed Houston Grand Opera to connect it with new audiences, and he has similar efforts under way here. As music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti has worked with incarcerated young women and opened his seasons with free concerts at Millennium Park and a South Side church.
Born and raised in Vienna, Mitisek, 48, started playing keyboard instruments as a child; he has two grand pianos, a harpsichord, and an organ in his Long Beach home. His musical ambitions were encouraged by his grandparents, who largely raised him. He studied organ and conducting at Vienna’s famous conservatory, then still known as the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst (High School for Music and the Performing Arts), and had started his own opera company in his native city at age 27.
“When I was at music school, I could still stop on my way home at the Vienna State Opera and get a standing room ticket for the equivalent of $1.50 U.S.,” he recalled. These opportunities excited him and yet left him frustrated at the lack of creativity and energy in many of the productions. “I’m the kind of person that if something is disappointing, then I just become more passionate about finding a way to do it right.”
Coming to Long Beach in the 1990s originally as a conductor, Mitisek succeeded LBO founder Michael Milenski as artistic and general director in 2003. As a guest conductor, Mitisek has performed at Berlin’s Komische Oper, Vienna Volksoper, Seattle Opera, Philadelphia Opera Company, Austin (Texas) Lyric Opera, Vancouver Opera, and Opera Theater of St. Louis, among others.
A tireless polymath, Mitisek not only conducts many LBO productions (“I don’t know that I will be doing so much of that in Chicago”), he also directs and designs sets and lights.
Some observers have questioned whether the lighting venture might not have taken him too far. “You are always learning,” Mitisek said, laughing.
“While I expect both [companies] to expand their seasons, four or five productions in Long Beach and three or four in Chicago don’t require year-round on-site direction.”
Dickie, 71, who months ago announced his plans to retire from COT in 2012 and return to England, spends much of each year as a highly sought after juror for international singing competitions, using this role as well to scout talent for COT.
Dickie stayed out of the search process and was to have his first serious sit-down session Tuesday with Mitisek. While serving as general director-designate, Mitisek will observe COT and work with Dickie in planning the 2013 season.
Dickie is as curious as anyone to see how Mitisek’s ideas and experiments will play out. “He’s very excited, very thoughtful, and very persuasive, and these things are all needed to raise the money and sell the tickets, that’s for sure,” he said.
“There are certainly many works that we have both done that many others haven’t,” including John Adams’s Nixon in China, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Shostakovich’s musical theatre piece Moscow, Cherrytown Block,which Long Beach staged this year and is on COT’s 2012 lineup. Both companies also were recently able to secure highly competitive multiyear, six-figure artistic grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
COT’s 2012 season opens April 14 at the Harris Theater and runs through September 23, with Moscow, Cheryomushki, Handel’s Teseo winding up a three-year project of early operas on the Jason theme, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute in a new production.
Expect the athletic, smiling, soft-eyed Mitisek to make his presence in Chicago felt soon. “I have a lot of curiosity," he said. "And I hate to waste time.”
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