WEST PALM BEACH – The artistic director of the Palm Beach Opera has left the company, officials said Tuesday.
Bruno Aprea, who has led musical aspects of the company’s productions and orchestral concerts since 2005, rejected the contract he was offered for the new season, said the company’s general director, Daniel Biaggi.
The company has been restructuring to a more seasonal model, and has taken steps to improve its fiscal position, including 20 percent pay cuts and four-day workweeks for staffers earlier this year. The company’s budget, now about $4.1 million, is much reduced from years past, and this year, the Opera is beginning its three-production mainstage season in January rather than December.
As a consequence, Biaggi said, new contracts were drawn up this spring for many personnel, Aprea among them.
“We extended a new contract to Aprea for 2013, and he elected not to accept it,” Biaggi said, who added that the refusal came as “a surprise.” “The terms of the contract I can’t disclose, but I can tell you it was a very fair contract considering the fact that all our contracts going forward were looked at again.”
Aprea, 71, was distinguished in his work at the Palm Beach Opera by his energetic, forceful conducting, particularly in the bel canto repertoire of the early 19th century, and has been widely credited with bringing a higher standard of performance to the Opera.
A pianist, he studied with his father at the Saint Cecilia Conservatory in his native Rome and made appearances throughout Europe as a soloist. He then turned to conducting in 1970 when he led a performance of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Medium at the Spoleto Festival. Winner of the prestigious Koussevitzky Prize at the Tanglewood Festival in 1977, he has since pursued a busy international career as a conductor of opera and symphonic performances.
At the Opera, Aprea also created the One Opera in One Hour series at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace, in which the company’s Young Artists present abridged versions of operas with piano accompaniment. The series, which allows the company to try out pieces it might never be able to mount on the mainstage, was inspired, Aprea said, by the Roman custom of late-night diners taking in artistic productions during post-prandial strolls through the city.
Aprea had been scheduled to conduct Verdi’s La Traviata in January and Rossini’s La Cenerentola in February. Biaggi said replacement conductors have been secured for those two shows, and their names will be announced soon.
Aprea’s departure “does allow us to be in contact with major guest conductors to see what we can do. Even when Aprea was here, he would say that it was important to have a guest conductor every season,” Biaggi said. “So we are going to build on that legacy and try to attract some good names.”
La Traviata will star Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury opposite Georgy Vasiliev for two performances, and American soprano Sarah Joy Miller opposite her husband, Il Divo’s David Miller, for one performance. The opera runs Jan. 18-20 at the Kravis Center. Stage direction is by the legendary Italian soprano Renata Scotto.
For ticket information about the company’s upcoming 51st season, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.
Leon Fleisher gives master class at Lynn
BOCA RATON – The renowned American pianist Leon Fleisher will give a master class Monday afternoon at Lynn University.
A native of San Francisco, Fleisher studied with the great German pianist and pedagogue Artur Schnabel as a child and made his national orchestral debut as a teenager in the early 1940s. He won Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Competition in 1952, but his career was interrupted in 1965 by a muscle dystonia that left him unable to use his right hand. He remade his career as a left-hand repertoire specialist, conductor and teacher. Famously, injections of Botox helped restore his right hand to regular function, and he has since recorded several well-received albums, especially Two Hands (2004).
Fleisher, 84, who has been affiliated with Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory for more than 50 years, will coach a student string quartet in a movement from the Mozart String Quartet No. 15 (in D minor, K. 421), and student pianists in movements from sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert, and the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 1 (in B-flat minor, Op. 23) of Tchaikovsky.
After Lynn, Fleisher heads south to open Festival Miami, the University of Miami’s annual monthlong series of classical, jazz and pop concerts. He’ll give a talk Tuesday about his career, and on Thursday will conduct the Frost Symphony Orchestra at UM in the Rachmaninov Second Symphony and Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture.
Monday’s master class begins at 4 p.m. and is open to the public free of charge.