LIVING OPERA

Fort Worth Opera’s Darren K. Woods on setting a new festival agenda

Iguess you could say that opera festivals are in my blood. My first opera job as a  professional singer was as an apprentice artist for Santa Fe Opera. I worked at Santa Fe most  summers for  the  next  14  years,  along with  the  festivals  in  Saint  Louis,  Chautauqua, Glimmerglass, Sarasota and several others, but eventually I retired from singing and became a general director. When I came to Fort Worth, the board charged me with  breathing  new  life  into  our  60-year-old  stagione  company,  and  the  idea  of changing  into  a  festival  format  was  a  natural  leap  for  me—albeit  an  exciting  and  frightening one. It would necessitate altering our business model completely, trying something that had never been done in North Texas, and risking a patron base that was comfortable attending operas spaced out over the year. However, facing stiff competition from the hundreds of other arts organizations serving a population of over six million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, it was a matter of change or die.

Prior to my arrival, Fort Worth Opera’s programming had always been pretty standard. Once in a great while, it would delve into the ‘modern’ repertoire by doing Carlisle Floyd’s  Susannah or  even  Stewart  Copeland’s Holy Blood and Crescent Moon, but mostly it was your standard ‘Bohème, Butterfly and Traviata’ company. Before I was hired  as  general  and  artistic  director  in  2001,  I  told  the  board  at  my  interview  that

■ Darren K. Woods, General Director of Fort Worth Opera exploring more adventurous fare would be at  the heart of my mission at Fort Worth Opera,  and  if  they  didn’t  want  that  for their  company,  then  I  was  not  the  right candidate  for  the  job.  I  have  been extremely fortunate to have a board that shares and supports my vision.

Knowing we needed to lead the audience gently to more contemporary works, rather than drop them into the thick of it, we began in  2003  with  our  first  production  of  a  Benjamin  Britten  opera,  The Turn of the Screw. It may seem odd that this could be aggressive fare in 2003! After all, the opera had been premiered almost 50 years earlier and, while not exactly standard repertoire, it  was  a  least  a  fairly  regularly  produced work.  We  planned  to  spend  additional money marketing the piece and educating the  audience.  We  also  knew  we  should  consider it wildly successful if we sold half of our tickets. The production turned out to be  a  real  game-changer for  the  company. Ken  Cazan’s  wonderfully  urgent  staging

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Opera, Festivals 2012