Innovative stage director Roman Hurko expands horizons (11/24/96)

Innovative stage director Roman Hurko expands horizons

In the late summer and early fall, Roman Hurko, 34, a Toronto-born Ukrainian Canadian musician was back in his native city, working on a collaborative adaptation of Richard Strauss's opera "Salomé" with Armenian Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan (director of the Cannes-acclaimed feature "Exotica"), for a staging produced by the Canadian Opera Company.

This graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A., music history and theory, 1987) and veteran assistant director at the COC (on staff from 1988 to 1993), has since worked as an assistant stage director on 13 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 Italy in June, overseeing the production of Handel's "Semele."

Mr. Hurko has also shared duties as conductor of the St. Evtymiy Church Choir at the St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Toronto, an ensemble he was instrumental in founding in 1985.

CONCLUSION

Q: How was your transition from school to the working world?

A: Fairly smooth. After a year as apprentice director at the University of Toronto Opera School [in 1987], I did an audition for the Canadian Opera Company, and they picked me for their apprentice program.

Q: You had a possibility of going to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, right?

A: I was trying to set things up there, but then I was working in the real thing, with people who actually do it, so why stay in a school situation?

Q: What did you do after your stint as staff assistant director at the COC?

A: I've been travelling for the past three years, working at Covent Garden in London, in Madrid, Monte Carlo, the Salzburg Festival, the Spoleto Festival. I've also been in the U.S. often - Washington, Costa Mesa in California, and Detroit.

Q: You were going to do some work in Ukraine, weren't you?

A: I was supposed to direct [Richard Strauss's] "Elektra" at the Lviv Opera, but that fell through. They had considerable internal problems. I wanted to bring in a surtitle screen and all sorts of new technology, just so they could be exposed to it. I managed to get a $10,000 grant from CBIE [the Canadian Bureau for International Education], but they folded on me.

Q: Because of internal politics?

A: Some of that, and a lack of resources. It's probably too ambitious for them.

Q: Would it have been easier to do in Kyiv?

A: Potentially, because they do have more resources at the Kyiv Opera, but unfortunately it isn't run by forward-looking people. [Baritone Anatoliy] Mokrenko and [baritone Dmytro] Hnatiuk are miscast in their positions. For example, Hnatiuk might be a great singer, but he's now head of directing and he seems not to have a very good grasp of the tasks he faces. It's frustrating.

It seems that they're more interested in touring and earning hard currency than developing their own art and have the country's musical scene progress.

Q: The heavyweights could tour, couldn't they, and simply let somebody else take over things back home?

A: Sure, that would be the best of both worlds. Of course, I don't want to be too harsh, because they do have to contend with very difficult times economically. But then I look at the opera in St. Petersburg, and I see a director with vision there.

Q: Isn't it because, under the Soviet regime, the best were drawn from throughout the USSR, then were gathered in Moscow and Leningrad in order to be paraded before the West?

A: True, but the current director of the St. Petersburg opera [the Kirov] is exposed to the West because he's got something to show. What are we doing? Old Italian operas. And going out on tour to make money, practically begging for it.

In classical music, there are many Ukrainian composers right at the forefront of the modern repertoire, so why not work at what we've got? Put it to use in opera, find our own niche and build up our own art.

In St. Petersburg, they do travel to the West, but then they come back because they feel they have a stake in what goes on at home. I went out to a hard currency bar after a show with a director there, Valeriy Giorgiev, and after two beers he said, "Well, there goes my fee for the night." So he also gets paid a pittance when he's in Russia.

But he's making $10,000 a night conducting at the Met in New York, so he doesn't care. He comes home and works basically for free, but he does it because he feels a sense of responsibility for the culture.

Q: You were also in Odesa, right?

A: Well, yes. Together with Roman Terleckyj, a director with the Washington Opera. We were invited a few years ago, about three now. We went there, and it was in such disarray.

We had an interview with the head of the company, and he was terribly ill with cancer. It was sad. But it was also a cruel metaphor for the state of things. We saw a performance of [Giaccomo Puccini's] "La Bohème" - no chorus, no children, a puny little set, the orchestra sounded terrible.

The man who sang Marcello, one of the leads, he took me to a restaurant where he had to sing until three in the morning, first dressed as a cowboy, then in some sort of Jewish outfit - a bizarre cabaret act.

Imagine having to sing an entire performance of "La Bohème," then having to go sing in a restaurant, just to make a living. That's the situation I saw in Odesa. As far as I know, everybody who could, left.

In St. Petersburg, there are people like Vasyl Gerelo, who is from around Ivano-Frankivsk. He sang "Onegin" here [in Canada] last year. He speaks Ukrainian beautifully, but he's gone, as far as Ukraine is concerned.

Another guy, this big bass "from Moscow," named Motorin. I was working with him in Madrid last year. During a break, we were walking around town and he breaks into a Ukrainian folk song, and I said, "Oh so you know that," and he answered, "Sure, half of our theater is made up of Ukrainians."

Then again, it's very easy for me, who is quite comfortable materially, to go to Ukraine, and say, "Why aren't you going forward artistically?"

There are people in Ukraine who face the basic questions of how to live, how they are going to get something to eat. So if that means staging a traditional Italian opera and touring with it, well, I guess that's what they have to do to survive.

On the other hand, if I hadn't seen St. Petersburg where people are doing something new, it would trouble me less. Of course, the Russians had more of a reputation already, which allows them to push the envelope.

Q: Then again, how are Ukrainians going to establish a reputation? By doing traditional stuff, or by staking out new ground?

A: Exactly. The opera tradition isn't really ours, to the same extent that it's Italian and French and Russian and German; we have no Verdi, Wagner or Mozart, but let's go and make it. Maybe now is our time. Maybe now the great star of Ukrainian opera culture is waiting, so let's go forward, create something that is in our style, rather than trotting out pale provincial imitations of what other people do.

Then again, let's keep in mind that my comments are based on observations from 1993, so maybe the situation has changed dramatically for the better, and modern opera is being staged in Ukraine, in a new style. I don't simply want to stand smugly to one side and pass judgement.

Q: In the late 1980s, you helped set up a youth church choir in Toronto, right?

A: At St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, right, although now it's mostly run by Adrian Iwachiw. I love it. That's one of the things I really like - our liturgical music. I'm actually collecting it these days. Scores and arrangements.

Q: When you were in Ukraine, were you collecting arrangements?

A: No, not at that point. I looked around for choirs. I lived in Kyiv for a bit, in 1993, trying to get things happening at the Kyiv Opera. No success there, unfortunately, but I'd sing at the Vydubychi Monastery, with a a group of excellent singers. Some were professionals, some just came out of a love of their ritual. There was also bunch of expatriate North Americans, including my cousins, the Deychakiwskys from the U.S., and Boris Balan from Toronto, people like that.

Q: Did this choir look for "napivy" and other liturgical material that might have been lost, or sift through the canon?

A: Not really, they would simply sit atop their mountain of culture, metaphorically speaking, and pick flowers. There's quite a lot to draw on, both from the recent and the distant past, so you don't really have to go digging.

At the moment, it's more of a hobby of mine, but I would very much like to study to be a "diak" (cantor). Not so much to hold the position, but to know the meaning of all the elements in the liturgical dialogue between the priest and the choir. To learn the meanings of all the icons in the church.

There's one fresco in the St. Nicholas Church, right behind where the choir stands, and there's someone cutting off a man's hand. I always think of him as "the bad conductor" being punished. It would be great to learn what all that means.

Then, the next step would be to expand outward, not just sing on Sundays, but do vespers and all the other things for which music exists.

For me, without singing, it's not prayer. There's an entirely different atmosphere when there's someone singing beside you. Not just singing, but singing beautifully. That affected me powerfully in my childhood.

When the singing is beautiful, you really want to be there. It's "Vidlozhim Pechal" (Let Us Cast Off Our Daily Cares) and just concentrate, or just be.

I wish that the Church would put more resources into our choirs. All the other choirs in the city, in all shrines, synagogues included, they have musicians on the payroll who serve as anchors, section leaders.

Many of them have people from various faculties of music, so you have somebody very strong to hold it together. When I went to school in Toronto's faculty of music, many of my friends worked for church ensembles, and that's an example I think Ukrainian churches could learn from.

It's not a matter of support for the conductor. When I do it, they pay me well enough. It would be great if there were a few people who were aspiring professional singers in the choir, holding it together.

It shouldn't even be a matter, strictly speaking, of having Ukrainian-speaking anchors. Because after all, if you sing opera, you learn languages, or at least the phonetics.

Q: In a sense, it would be a sacred concert that happend every week, on Sunday.

A: Sure. Many churches do that. It would be a great draw, particularly now that many of our churches are emptying out, the congregations seem to be getting thin.

Some people love it when the entire congregation sings. That's lovely, too, but for me, when there's a beautiful choir, it takes the music, the feeling of the rite, and elevates it to a higher level.

Q: When you do opera, do you have a sense of communing with a higher level of beauty?

A: Oh yes. Sometimes I'm in rehearsal and I just have to close my eyes. It's just so beautiful, and I close my eyes and think, "Wow, they're paying me to do this."

This summer, when I was directing the Handel piece [the "Semele" oratorio at the Spoleto Festival in Italy], in a beautiful little baroque theater, with all this wonderful music spilling over me. I couldn't believe my luck that I ended up in this job.

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