Verdi and Bizet Meet at the Beach

Be bewwy, bewwy quiet. Everything you always thought you knew about opera is about to change when you venture across town later this month to hear the Verdi Chorus perform a Verdi/Bizet program.

Two opera upstarts with deep roots in Pasadena are to blame, and their unlikely story began almost four decades ago at Pasadena Community College. 

On election night 2024, we caught up with tenor Todd Wilander via mobile in NYC. Perhaps to deflect the drama of the moment, his remarks seemed especially jaunty.

“Opera gets a bad rap,” he said. “It’s no longer about fat people wearing horns, standing stock-still on the stage screaming at each other.”

For generations of Americans whose first exposures to opera were the brilliant Warner Brothers cartoons of the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, that description summons early Saturday morning pajama memories of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, and laughing so hard our cereal milk spurted out our little noses. The grandeur — or rather the grandiosity — stuck, in spite of the spilled Frosted Flakes, and those cartoons embedded many an aria into the subconscious of many a Boomer. 

Wilander gets it. There is, IYKYK, a world tenor shortage, and Wilander is much in demand, from The Met, New York City Opera, and New York Opera Society to prestigious companies across the USA and around the world. And yet, he seems underwhelmed by his own success.

“Tenor is the weirdest voice type,” he says. “A baritone is much more normal and more common. The tenor is the ultimate end of what the voice can do. You’re pushing and manipulating this tiny fold of muscle — you’re basically asking your body to do the next-to-impossible.”

As for the term oft-used by music reviewers — “effortless” — Wilander snorts.

“They say the same thing about athletes and dancers. Making it look effortless is the goal. But what no one else sees are the hours and hours of studying, homework, practice and repetition.” He adds that in his 30s, his voice “went splat. Everything changed, and so I had to re-train and learn new ways to relax the larynx, find where my breath is again, everything.”

Wilander doesn’t hail from a classical music background, although he sang in church, where his pure pitch and volume immediately got attention.

“I often heard the comment, ‘You’re so loud!’ People began to refer to the choir as Todd and his backup singers.” He comments that he generally doesn’t need a microphone unless performing outdoors.

The Arcadia native also celebrates botanical beauty as part of the Rose Parade team, something he’s done for the past three decades. In the upcoming season, Wilander is working with Artistic Entertainment Services as a supervisor in the floral area, overseeing 15 parade floats this year.

After attending Arcadia High School, he met Anne Marie Ketchum, who was the creative force behind PCC’s opera program. Ketchum taught on the voice faculty of PCC for 34 years, but that was simply the overture to the main event.

“I initially got the job at PCC because I had some experience producing a show choir, and so every semester, we did a musical theatre production, Rogers and Hammerstein, that kind of thing. But my real love had always been classical music,” Ketchum explained when we chatted on the phone.

When a few students asked Ketchum about the possibility of trying out some opera pieces, the classical cat was out of the bag. 

“Students asked me, ‘Why can’t we do opera?’ The school did not support the idea, so I opened it up to the students themselves as a summer workshop. It was an experiment. There was a modest fee attached, but I had persuaded the school to award academic credits to the participants. The administration dismissed the idea as preposterous, but within two weeks, students had signed up to the point where the workshop was at capacity.”  Todd Wilander entered the scene soon thereafter.

From there, the workshop soon expanded into a school year-curriculum offering in 1996, although an opera program was and may still be unusual for a two-year institution. Nevertheless, Ketchum’s program now serves as a model for other colleges.

Ketchum left PCC several years ago to pursue another creative opportunity “…that landed in my lap. I was one of a group of maybe 25 or so classically trained singers who were singing at an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica in 1983 or so. It was called Ristoranti Verdi, they had a little stage there, and one thing led to another. The restaurant closed, but in 1983, the Verdi Chorus came to be.”

Ketchum has now served as Artistic Director for the nonprofit, which incorporated in 1999, for 41 consecutive years. The Verdi Chorus is comprised of 50 talented amateur singers ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s, and the weekly Monday night rehearsal is, in fact, a vocal master class under Ketchum’s inspired direction, crafting a repertoire drawn from more than 80 operas in seven languages. 

A little serendipity with a side of garlic bread later, The Verdi Chorus kicks off its 41^st season with its Fall 2024 concert “We are Verdi Bizet.” The program will feature selections from Verdi’s I Lombardi, Don Carlo and Rigoletto, and from Bizet’s Carmen and The Pearl Fishers, a line-up which Wilander describes as “…sort of a Top Ten greatest hits. A lot of these will be familiar to people, even people who aren’t regular opera-goers.”

The selections, many set in 4/4 and lilting, waltzy 3/4 time, do invite sing-alongs. The Verdi Chorus performs with a piano versus a full orchestra, making the experience that much more intimate; just add PJs and soggy Cheerios.

The pairing of Verdi and Bizet has nothing to do with Quine’s counterfactuals unless you happen to be a Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences or something equally heady.

Both composers lived and worked during the same time period. And although it’s tempting to imagine that they met and shmoozed over cocktails, there’s no evidence to suggest that they did.

“Their subject matter differs,” says Ketchum. “Verdi loved Shakespeare and often wrote about topical issues. Verdi dominated his era and was extremely prolific as the leading Italian musical dramatist of his time. Bizet’s life was much more brief. But Bizet is, in a sense, more contemporary and more original, writing with more orchestral color.”

“Carmen,” the opera for which Bizet is best known, did not open to bouquets. The lead character was not a historical figure, unlike those often chosen by Verdi. Carmen — her name, after all, means “song” in Latin — strikes modern sensibilities as a fantasy character in a fantasy setting, a hot-blooded Romani woman who works in a cigarette factory, caught in an equally combustible love triangle with a solider and (what else?) a bullfighter. But to Bizet and his audience, this scenario was a brush with reality —albeit an imagined reality — at its most thrilling and raunchy.

The Opèra-Comique circa 1874 wasn’t having it. The orchestra struggled with the score. The chorus likewise claimed that some of the passages were literally impossible to sing and also objected to having to move around the stage, smoking and fighting, rather than simply standing in a row to blast out those high notes. Bizet’s life ended when he was just 36 of a reported heart attack, although throat ulcers and despair no doubt contributed to his premature demise.

Verdi occupied the opposite end of the spectrum, producing one massive, generally successful production after another. From Nabucco, written in 1841 and rather whimsically adapted from a Bible story, “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” endures as a slightly-too-bouncy anthem of protest against religious persecution. Rigoletto,written in 1851, yields one of the best-known arias on earth, the lusty “La Donna è Mobile.” And in 1853, Verdi completed and produced both Il Trovatore and La Traviata. The composer was sly, often putting water on the trail and eluding censorship by setting his operas dealing with social injustice and other controversial themes in other countries and centuries.

Times are tough for opera these days. Wilander calls it the “world’s most expensive art form,” adding that in much of Europe, most orchestras are subsidized by the government. Post-COVID, “…there’s 20 to 30 percent less work for singers,” he says. “These days, the B-houses often don’t pay the singers. The orchestras are generally union, so they are paid, but the singers are expendable.”

These performances are made possible, in part, through the generous support of the Sahm Family Foundation, the Colburn Foundation, grant funding from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the Creative Recovery LA Initiative through the Federal American Rescue Plan Act, and the City of Santa Monica through the Santa Monica Arts Commission.

And although venues and opportunities may be fewer and farther between than ever, Ketchum reports that there is no shortage of young performers who want to sing the classics.

“Tough times notwithstanding, certain people will always go for beauty, for high art, and for creative challenges.”

The Chorus supports several youth-based initiatives, including the Sahm Foundation Apprentice Singers program, which provides scholarships and performance opportunities to college students.

Ketchum says, “There’s this persistent notion that opera is only for the white, the old, the rich, and this is hands-down incorrect. Young singers are drawn to the intensity of this art, and they’re looking for more ways to perform. When we’re taking auditions, sometimes I find myself literally, unprofessionally in tears when I witness the passion that they bring to the voice and the story.”

DEETS

• The Verdi Chorus Fall 2024 Concert
• “We Are Verdi Bizet”
• Artistic Director Anne Marie Ketchum
• Guest soloists include soprano Shana Blake Hill, mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock, tenor Todd Wilander, baritone Malcolm MacKenzie
• Saturday, November 16, 7:30 PM 
• Sunday, November 17, 4:00 PM
• First Presbyterian Church
• 1220 2^nd Street, Santa Monica 90401
• Tickets