Today we’d like to introduce you to Isaac Selya.
Hi Isaac, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
When I was finishing a doctorate in conducting at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, I noticed something about the classical music career path. I saw all these incredibly talented students around me who would do amazing projects as students, and then would graduate and tread water in their careers. It is very hard to launch a career in any field, but especially si in classical music. There are very few entry-level positions, and many employers want to see prior professional experience beyond student work. Luckily, Cincinnati has a great arts scene and the cost of living is low, so there are lots of incredibly talented students who graduate and then stick around, but they often end up in a Catch-22 of needing a professional track record in order to start generating a reliable income in classical music, and without that reliable income, they need to take on work in other fields to support themselves, which takes away time from sharpening their musical skills, which makes it harder to get those first professional engagements.
In 2012, I put together a project to try to disrupt that cycle: I organized a performance of two early Mozart operas at the Hoffner Lodge in Northside, raising money through Kickstarter, to give some compensated independent performance engagements to some recent graduates and talented students. We chose opera as our medium because it is the ultimate collaboration, requiring singers, instrumentalists, designers, dancers, and directors. It took a lot of work and involved plenty of skills that I didn’t learn while doing my doctoral studies. Suddenly I was tangling with things like scheduling, contracting, communications, marketing, insurance, rentals, and the like. The project went well in the end, so we just kept doing them.
Ten years later, we have grown a lot and learned how to put together more ambitious projects. We have also refined our mission. Because we work with emerging artists, we have to ask what energizes them, and what they want from performances. So, for each of our productions, we partner with a non-musical organization whose work resonates with the themes and story of the opera we are performing. We use classical music to spark community conversations. Our recent projects include the following:
• Beethoven’s Fidelio, an opera about a political prisoner, in collaboration with Amnesty International Group 86 focuses on wrongful imprisonment.
• Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, an opera about a blind princess, in collaboration with the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
• Weber’s The Magic Bullets, in collaboration with a consortium of community organizations focusing on science-based approaches to preventing gun violence.
• Mozart’s Don Giovanni, about a nobleman who uses his wealth to rape women, in collaboration with Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio, including a series of workshops on sexual assault and consent.
In October 2022 we are taking on our biggest project yet: Verdi’s Defiant Requiem, in collaboration with the Holocaust and Humanity Center, performed in the Rotunda of the Cincinnati Museum Center. The production commemorates the Jewish musician of the Terezín Concentration Camp, who organized a choir and rehearsed in a cellar after hours of daily forced labor, using a single copy of the score of Verdi’s Requiem. They performed this piece 14 times as an act of defiance against the Nazis.
Over the last ten years, we have developed an international fan base for our recordings on YouTube, and have helped dozens of emerging artists launch careers.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
There has been a steep learning curve for many of the non-musical components of our work. Every year we have to figure out how to fund our projects, how to reserve spaces for performances, and how spread the word about our work. Cincinnati has such a robust arts ecosystem, which is an amazing resource, but it can also be challenging to try to get attention in a saturated field with some major established players. We joke about the irony that we have loyal fans in Germany and Japan who love our recordings on YouTube, but many people who regularly attend the Cincinnati Symphony or Cincinnati Opera still don’t know we exist.
We are very grateful for the support of the Cincinnati arts scene. The overall vibe is very supportive, and we have had amazing help from big organizations like Arts Wave and Cincinnati Opera.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We present professional performances of classical operas, featuring emerging artists in the orchestra pit, on stage, and in design roles.
Here are the two projects we are most proud of:
1) The Ohio premiere of Tchaikovsky’s final opera, Iolanta. The work premiered as a double bill alongside his well-known Nutcracker, and tells the story of a princess who is born blind, and knows nothing about light or about her own blindness until a knight wanders into her garden and asks her for a red rose. We had to work on the Russian text for several months, and we presented the opera in collaboration with the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Recording here: https://youtu.be/rpwlkZP063c?t=4003
2) The world premiere of a new critical edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Frei Schutz. Weber was Mozart’s cousin, and in the early 19th century, his opera Der Frei Schutz was by far the most famous work in Europe. It’s a story about a hunter who needs to succeed in a shooting contest in order to marry his fiancée, and the pressure makes him lose his nerve, driving him to make a deal with the devil for seven bullets that never miss their mark. We presented in collaboration with a consortium of community organizations focusing on evidence-based approaches to preventing gun violence. Recording here: https://youtu.be/sjoxXY62jq4?t=3895
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Subscribe on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/c/QueenCityOperaQCO
Follow us on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/QueenCityOpera
Check out our website for information on upcoming performances.
If you love what we do, you can make a tax-deductible gift through our site:
https://queencityopera.org/support/
Contact Info:
- Website: https://queencityopera.org/support/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queencityopera/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/QueenCityOpera
Image Credits
Tina Gutierrez
Arts Photography
