Scrappy opera company Heartbeat thrives by reimagining the classics

NEW YORK -- Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance — in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people.

“We did Kurt Weill’s ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,” recalled Schlosberg, the company’s music director and one of its founders.

They named their company Heartbeat Opera, “from the idea that singers would be feet away from you,” Schlosberg said. “And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm’s length and that would make a resonance in your heart.”

Today, in an era when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed $1 million.

But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200.

“Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,” said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat’s artistic director. “We don’t do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.”

And despite its success with critics and audiences — performances regularly sell out — the company has deliberately maintained a modest schedule.

There’s typically an opera-themed drag show around Halloween and then two operas staged in New York City performance spaces in the winter and spring. Each work is condensed to 90-100 intermission-less minutes with new orchestrations that require just a few musicians.

Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, thinks Heartbeat is smart not to expand too quickly — a mistake that has caused some small companies to collapse.

“Growth itself shouldn’t be a goal. Excellence should be a goal,” he said. “I always prefer companies to plan their trajectory as slow as possible so they don’t overstretch and overstep.”

Unlike some small companies, Heartbeat doesn’t focus on new work or on bringing to light neglected old rarities. Instead, its website promises “incisive adaptations and revelatory arrangements of classics, reimagining them for the here and now.”

It’s that reimagining that attracted Sara Holdren, a director, writer and teacher who first worked with the company on Bizet’s “Carmen” in 2017.

“Their approaches to the storytelling feel extremely of our world and about our world,” she said, “without falling across that line into a sort of trite topicality where you say, ‘Oh yes, I understand a relevant-with-a-capital-R political point is being made here’.”

For Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Heartbeat went to prisons and recorded the voices of incarcerated people, who appeared on video singing the Prisoners Chorus. For Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” the two main male characters became lovers, reflecting the composer’s own sexuality.

And for Richard Strauss’ “Salome” this season, the teenage title character was dressed in a frilly pink skirt and sneakers; John the Baptist was imprisoned on stage in a cage with transparent sides instead of in an underground cistern; and during the Dance of the Seven Veils, it was a lascivious Herod who stripped off his clothes, not Salome.

Heartbeat’s casting for “Salome” reflected the premium it places on theatrical values in addition to vocal ability.

Baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, who portrayed John the Baptist, recalled that “a big part of the audition was just straight acting. And in the rehearsals, there was a real focus on the storytelling.

“I haven’t experienced that in a lot of other opera companies to that extent,” he said.

Soprano Summer Hassan, who was cast as Salome, admits she was nervous at first “because I had never done a role like this where I am the title character.

“I was really doubting myself, thinking how do I make this girl look so young?” she said. “And they said, your physicality will do that on your own. Make her look confident and you will make her look like a confident child. They gave me the tools to figure out it was within me.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this “Salome” was the re-orchestration by Schlosberg. Instead of more than 100 players as called for in the original, he took a cue from the opening notes on a clarinet and scored the piece for eight clarinetists (who also played other instruments) and two percussionists.

Heartbeat’s final local offering of the season will be Gounod’s “Faust,” to run at the Baruch Performing Arts Center from May 13-25.

“I had mentioned to Jacob that I really love devil stories,” said Holdren, who is directing the production. “And I was fascinated with the idea of taking something so big and so weighed down with history and assumptions and seeing how much we could crack it open and blow the dust off.”

She sees Mephistopheles less as a ”mustache-twirling villain” and more as “a figure of hunger and loneliness slipping into the vacuums that human beings create when they are so desperate or disgusted with life that there’s an opening for him.”

Her production will be set in contemporary times, sung in French but with new English-language dialogue, and it will make heavy use of shadow puppetry. It’s the first Heartbeat offering for which Schlosberg has not done the re-orchestration.

That task fell to Francisco Ladrón de Guevara, a Mexican violinist and composer who has scored the opera for seven musicians, most of whom play two instruments, including Ashworth, who will play violin and mandolin and also conduct.

Schlosberg will be back doing the arranging for a rare Heartbeat foray outside the city this summer. The company has been invited to stage a revised version of Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts.

“I’m really excited by what they’ve been doing, particularly in reimagining the classics for contemporary times," said Raphael Picciarelli, co-managing director of the festival.

For Heartbeat’s debut in Williamstown, the festival is setting up a new performance space that should make the company feel right at home. It’s in an abandoned grocery store, and there will be seats for just over 200 people.