When Nathaniel Merrill founded Opera Colorado nearly a quarter-century ago, the noted stage director wasn’t interested in starting small and gradually building the fledging company’s artistic quality.
A regular at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, he was used to working with top-level singers. And he managed to import some of the most celebrated performers, including Pilar Lorengar, Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas, for the fledgling company’s debut season in 1983.
If they haven’t always been able to match such star power, Merrill and his current successorsÑartistic director James Robinson and general director Peter RussellÑhave managed to maintain consistently high standards in the seasons since.
But no matter how strong the singers, stage directors and conductors the company hired, its artistic quality has always been hobbled by the lack of an appropriate performance venue.
In the Buell Theatre, where the company has presented one production a year since 1992, Opera Colorado has been forced to amplify its singers, because the building does not have opera-worthy acoustics.
Even more problematic has been its principal venue, Boettcher Concert Hall, where the company has had to spend a great deal of money before each production just making it usable as a theater.
“It’s nice to look back fondly on certain theatrical events, but let’s not fool ourselves: We tried to put a first-rate product into a third-rate facility, and that’s very difficult,” Robinson said. “I think we succeeded most of the time, but it was all about compromise, and it was very expensive.”
Opera Colorado leaders expect the Ellie Caulkins Opera House to change all that. The new venue should propel the company to previously unattainable artistic heights, helping it gain greater national attention and attracting new audiences and donors.
“In any community, a new facility will help focus a community on that company,” said Stephen Lord, artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera and a frequent guest conductor with Opera Colorado.
“As wonderful as Opera Colorado is, I’m sure there are a lot of people in the Denver area or within 100 miles who don’t really know there is an Opera Colorado and have not yet experienced it.”
That appears to be the case. Subscription sales for Opera Colorado’s 2005Ð06 season, which begins Nov. 3Ð13 with “Carmen,” surpassed those for 2004Ð05 more than a month ago, and the calls are still coming.
And for the first time in the company’s history, certain price classes of tickets for some performances are expected to sell out before single tickets even go on sale later this month.
A similar story surrounds the company’s contributions. The number of donors has increased 73 percent from 714 at this point in the season in 2004 to 1,234 this year. The size of the average gift has risen 58 percent.
“It isn’t that the base of opera interest in Denver is flat,” Russell said. “It’s that there has been a huge base that has been dormant, that have either been on our periphery or we just haven’t been aware of because they have been waiting for something to make their opera going experience more ‘real’ relative to what they’ve encountered in other capitals where they’ve gone to the opera.”
Merrill served as Opera Colorado’s general director for 15 years and directed nearly all of company’s productions. He stepped down in 1998 after the death of his wife, Louise Sherman, who had been the company’s music director.
He first visited Denver in 1980 and was fascinated by the possibilities of presenting opera in the round in Boettcher.
“Nat Merrill was the real genius who knew what this could become,” said Ellie Caulkins, the company’s honorary lifetime board chairwoman and the opera house’s namesake.
“While he didn’t have any other options besides Boettcher (Concert) Hall at the time and then the Buell Theatre neither was a satisfactory venue for opera he did some incredibly great work in those two places.”
Since Robinson, also a respected stage director, took over as artistic director in 2000, he has strived to vary the company’s productions, mixing traditional presentations with adventuresome, sometimes controversial approaches.
At the same time, he and Russell, the former head of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, have worked to make Opera Colorado a launching pad for promising young talent.
With the momentum generated by the Caulkins Opera House, Robinson said Opera Colorado hopes to expand and add a fourth production to its annual offerings, but probably not before the 2007Ð08 season when the company has gotten used to its new home.
“It gives us time to continue to build up audience base and figure out what the theater is all about get our ducks in a row,” he said.
“It would be imprudent of us to say, OK, we’re in a new theater. Now, we’re going to go to do four productions, then five and then six.’ It’s better to be cautious.”
