Innovative director Roman Hurko expands horizons with Salomé production (11/17/96)

Innovative director Roman Hurko expands horizons with Salomé production

September 27 was the opening night of an innovative staging of Richard Strauss's one-act opera, "Salomé," by the Toronto-based Canadian Opera Company (COC). In April, Roman Hurko, 34, a Toronto-born Ukrainian Canadian musician with considerable experience as assistant stage director at the COC, had been asked to help a fellow Torontonian, Armenian Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan (director of the Cannes-acclaimed feature "Exotica"), adapt his vision of the work to the operatic stage.

Mr. Hurko graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in music history and theory in 1987, completed an internship as apprentice stage director at the U of T's opera division that year, and in 1988 was accepted as apprentice stage director by the COC, joining the COC's staff for five years thereafter, working on 15 productions.

Since 1993, Mr. Hurko has worked as an assistant stage director on works produced by the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center, the Salzburg Festival, the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden) in London, L'Opéra de Monte Carlo, the Teatro de Zarzuela in Madrid, and celebrated his directorial debut at the Spoleto Festival in June, overseeing the production of Handel's "Semele." He has worked closely (particularly in Washington) with Ukrainian American stage director Roman Terleckyj.

The Egoyan-Hurko staging of "Salomé" ran for three weeks until October 19 at the COC's home base at Toronto's O'Keefe Center, and will be remounted in Houston in January 1997, and then in Vancouver in October 1997. The interview was conducted by Andrij Wynnyckyj.

PART I

Q: How did you come to be associate director in the Canadian Opera Company's staging of Richard Strauss's "Salomé" this season?

A: I was working on a production of Mozart's "Cosí fan Tutte" at the Kennedy Center in Washington this spring when I got a call from Richard Bradshaw, the COC's artistic director. He asked me if I had a day off and said he wanted me to talk with Atom Egoyan to see if we get along, and if I would work with him as associate director.

We went for lunch, we discussed our ideas. Then, with [Mr. Egoyan's] designer we talked about some of the things they wanted to try in terms of stage design. We went back and forth, and found common ground, so began working on it.

Q: In a recent Globe and Mail article previewing this staging of "Salomé," Mr. Egoyan mentions that opera is uncharted territory for him. Was that one of your tasks with this production, to serve as a guide?

A: Yes, in part, to chart the territory. He was new to the medium, new to the mechanics of opera staging.

Q: At one point, Mr. Egoyan mentions that he feared "dramatic contrivance" in the staging. Isn't that what opera's all about - musical beauty transcending stuff that's somewhat contrived?

A: Actually, I think he meant that many people new to opera who've been asked to do one conceive a dramatic idea for the staging of a particular work, and then bolt it onto the opera without it really fitting.

Say, staging [Giuseppe Verdi's] "La Traviata" in a Nazi concentration camp. [Mr. Egoyan] updated "Salomé," setting it in a futuristic, decadent health spa, but he was afraid that it might be off base.

Q: Were there any points where you had to pull him away from "filmic" thinking toward the "operatic"?

A: Not really. He did introduce some filmed elements to screen during the staging, but he didn't confuse one medium with the other.

He told me he's not used to working with large groups of people, and prefers focusing in on individual actors. There's a scene in which five of Herod's courtiers go nuts, erupt into quarreling, known as Strauss's "Five Jews" scene - Egoyan didn't want to touch that, and asked me to take care of it.

Q: What's the most interesting aspect of "Salomé" for you?

A: The clash of moral systems, and the tragic consequences of the clash. Salomé comes up against Jokanaan's [John the Baptist's] rigid system. She's living in the midst of a system in which sensuality is not evil the way it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As I saw the story, Salomé lives in an abusive environment. Her father has been murdered by her uncle, Herod, who has married her mother and yet lusts after her, Salomé. Upon her first entrance, she expresses disgust at the way Herod is constantly leering at her. She's looking to escape from her predicament.

In the early going in the opera, she's looking for something cool and chaste, as she looks up at the moon shining above, and hears John the Baptist's voice. She hears something pure and strong there. She's drawn to its integrity.

Salomé hears a condemnation of the king's and queen's ways, while all around her, the court teems with cowards. So she has Jokanaan brought out of the cistern where he's being held and, in my view, as a token of love, offers him what is most precious to her - her body. Jokanaan curses her as the daughter of Babylon and Sodom and so on, and then tops it off with some classic misogyny. "Through woman came all evil into the world," he tells her.

That's the tragedy of it for me, Salomé wants to offer herself to this pure man, this Man of God, and he rejects her. She's hemmed in by both sides - by the leering, lecherous Herod, and by the thundering, condemning Jokanaan, and she snaps.

...we held true to the direction given by Strauss, who insisted that Salomé is a sympathetic figure, that the audience should feel sympathy for her. Her predicament is entirely tragic - she's a young girl, 16 years old, looking for a way out of her assaultive environment, looking for help from this prophet, and he simply spews venom all over her.

She wants to touch Jokanaan, to love him and express it in a sacred sensual way, but any sensuality for him is anathema. That's the tragedy. If only he had kissed her back, they might have gone off into the sunset, into a loving life. The hatred that he spews at her, in some sense, comes back and strikes him.

The tragedy of it is that he feels sensuality, the Earth, is evil. And that's the clash of the two systems. They're both convinced they're doing the right thing.

Q: Have you often worked as an associate director?

A: Actually, being an associate director is very rare, and it's the first time I've done it. It's a position that becomes necessary when the director, the person who has been asked to provide the primary concepts for the production, can't be there every day to guide it along.

[Mr. Egoyan] was originally supposed to have been making his first big-budget Hollywood movie this year, and right about this time he would have been in the editing studios in California.

The Canadian Opera Company still wanted him to be the director for this production, but needed someone who would be able to execute his ideas for the staging, with him flying in once in awhile, or talking by video-phone.

They probably asked me because I'm a known quantity, because I spent five years as the COC's staff assistant director from 1988 to 1993.

As it turns out, Egoyan wanted Susan Sarandon for his movie, but after she won the Oscar [for her performance in "Dead Man Walking"], she demanded more money. His producers said they couldn't afford it, so his whole project got canned.

As a result, he was able to spend much more time on "Salomé," so our work turned into much more of a day-to-day collaboration.

Q: Have you already established yourself in Europe, or is this your big break, working with a big cultural name?

A: Actually, my big break came this summer, in June, when I was stage director for a performance of Handel's "Semele" at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

"Semele" is a baroque opera, a profane [secular] oratorio based on a Greek myth. People have recently started staging it as an opera. There was a staging at Aix-en-Provence [in France], there was one in Washington a couple of years ago.

For me, this was actually a classic big break. After working as assistant director on the world premiere of "Dorian Gray," an opera by Lowell Lieberman, in Monte Carlo in May, I had about four weeks off, before I was supposed to assist in staging a performance of [Tchaikovsky's] "Evgen Onegin" with Giancarlo Menotti in Spoleto.

Spoleto is a beautiful town in the hills of Umbria, it's older than Rome, about 80 miles out, and as I had some free time, I decided to spend a month in the big city. Not a bad way to spend spring, I figured. At any rate, one day I wandered into the Rome-based offices of the Spoleto Festival and start talking to people about the cuts in Onegin, this and that.

Menotti blows in and says, "I need to take you off 'Onegin,' because I need to you to direct 'Semele.' "

Q: To direct it.

A: To direct it myself, yeah. He asks me: "Do you know the score?" And I said, "Well, let's have a look at it." Then: "Rehearsals start in two weeks." So it was, Bang! Go!

That's what has brought me closest to what I want to do: to direct. Then again, working on "Salomé" is quite interesting, even though I don't really know where it might lead.

In terms of "big names," another interesting project I'll be working on will be "Il Guarani," with [German filmmaker] Werner Herzog that's to open next year's [1997-1998] season at the Kennedy Center. I briefly met Herzog last year in Washington.

[Metropolitan Opera superstar] Placido Domingo will be singing in the cast. Domingo just took over as general director of the Washington Opera Company recently.

"Il Guarani" is set in the 16th century and it's about a tribe in the Brazilian jungle, their first contacts with Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and so on.

Q: You seem to be dealing with filmmakers quite a lot. Have you considered getting into film?

A: I'd love to. I've thought about it quite a lot recently.

Q: Now that Egoyan brought you into it?

A: Well, he didn't. He actually came into my medium, but I started looking into it last year, even before I started working with him. Somehow I noticed that my strongest emotional experiences were in the cinema as opposed to the opera theater. I thought to myself, "why am I working in opera?"

Q: That's strange, given that opera is live, visual, real sound, real people, so on...

A: Maybe it's because some of the things I've worked on are round, fluffy, light things that haven't resonated enough with me.

Then again, when opera is right on, there's no question that it's better than film. It's just that... Well, of course, you get a lot of bad films too, it just happened that I went to a series of very good, very satisfying movies - Billy August's movie about Bergman's parents, Bergman's "Persona," I just watched Abuladze's "Repentance"...

Q: It could also be that opera's your job, so all you need to even things out is to work on a film.

A: Sure, work on a couple of "B" films, and I'll be out of there.

Q: Are you going to do anything about it?

A: Yeah, I'm going to start off by writing a script. I'm a bit scared by the technological aspects of it, which I don't know enough about, but I've been assured that "you have people to do that for you."

Q: But you're a stage manager, you'll want to know what all those techies are doing.

A: That's true. I'm not sure what I have to do yet, but probably I have to get involved in making a film, and just look around. As Woody Allen says, "Ninety percent of life is just showing up."

CONCLUSION