Articles and Reviews
American Accent
'Steven Mercurio is Poised to Become Our Next Star Composer-Conductor'
by Brian Kellow
Opera News, June 1994
Full Article
'Mercurio Rising'
The Orange County Register, January 16, 1996
Full Article
Selected Reviews
Turandot (Opera Company of Philadelphia)
Since its world premier at La Scala in 1926, Turandot has been performed with the blunt second ending by Franco Alfano, tacked onto Puccini’s score by Arturo Toscanini. The conductor rejected Alfano’s first and more expansive reconstruction of sketched left by Puccini. Toscanini, it seems, was more interested in getting through Alfano’s music as quickly as possible than in finding an ending for Turandot that makes musical and dramatic sense.
Now the Opera Company of Philadelphia is finally presenting another version of the Turandot finale. Steven Mercurio has combined the best material from both Alfano endings with some new music based on one of Puccini’s unused sketches.
At last, we can hear Turandot close to what Puccini envisioned! Containing more than 20 minutes of music, Mercurio’s new revision may not be musically seamless but it makes convincing Turandot’s capitulation to love. And it ends the opera in a blaze of high notes for the soprano and tenor and a blaze of trumpet fanfares from high up in the amphitheatre in the Academy of Music.
At the end of the performance, the usually staid Monday night audience stood and cheered. They cheered for more than Puccini. . . .Mercurio provides superb support for this fabulous new Turandot. Pacing the music with a sure dramatic sense, the conductor luxuriates in Puccini's silken melodies and savors the score's rich orchestral fabric.
He shapes a riveting performance that sweeps inexorably to the big climaxes. Mercurio draws burnished playing from the orchestra and polished, expressive singing from the chorus.
-- Robert Baxter, Courier Post. April 23, 1992
The melting of the ice princess can not be believed on grounds of plot, character or logic, but in this production it does work because the music at the climactic moments tells you it is happening. From this point of view, Mercurio's research on the score and revision of the final scene is one of the most important parts of this "Turandot." Puccini died before giving the opera its final touches, and the work of completing it for performance was entrusted to Franco Alfano, who produced two performing versions of the final duet. Mercurio has taken the best elements from both versions, made some alterations at key moments (with the help of Puccini's sketches) and adjusted the orchestration with audibly superior results. In more than three decades of seeing and hearing "Turandot," this is the first time I was fully convinced by its ending.
-- Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, February 22, 1993
Otello (Opera Pacific)
An even bigger reason Opera Pacific’s "Otello" ultimately works was Steven Mercurio’s conducting in the pit . . . . Verdi’s seething, roiling and often suddenly tender score – one of the best in opera – was magnificently drawn by Mercurio and his musicians. It was an invisible character on stage: cackling with evil during Iago’s Credo; angrily intensifying Otello’s jealous rage; weaving sensual, voluptuous textures for the love duet and death scene.
-- Scott Duncan, The Orange County Register. Jan.22, 1996
The conductor on duty in Costa Mesa was Steven Mercurio. He suggested intimate knowledge of the Toscanini recording, a splendid model in matters of tautness and momentum, bravado and balance. Living up to the implications of his name, Mercurio sustained excitement without hysteria, and he gave the lyricism its due in the process. He also accompanied his singers tactfully. Clearly, this is a major talent.
-- Martin Bernheimer, Los Angeles Times. Jan. 22, 1996
Rossini, "La Gazza Ladra"
Rossini’s "La Gazza Ladra" -- Mozartian in its mingling of the comic and the serious – holds the stage. It was exceptionally well conducted, by Steven Mercurio: alert as Abbado, but wittier; meticulous as Muti, but merrier. His tempi were ideal, his rhythms buoyant. No instrumental detail was scamped, and all was rendered with lightness and grace.
-- Andrew Porter, The New Yorker. June 11, 1990
"For Lost Loved Ones" (New York Philharmonic)
Mercurio’s symphonic poem "For Lost Loved Ones" is very tonal in outlook, and poses no problems in accessibility for the listener. . . . "For Lost Loved Ones" makes its own strong points through its absolute sincerity of expression, its elevation of purpose (despite the subject, this is definitely an upbeat piece), and its overriding eloquence.
-- Bill Zakariasen, Daily News. Feb.16, 1991
Serenade for Tenor and Orchestra (Chicago Civic Orchestra)
The afternoon was dominated by the world premier of Steven Mercurio’s Serenade for Tenor and Orchestra, a beautifully written piece recalling Ned Rorem’s recently heard "Goodbye My Fancy," and filled with ravishing sounds from the orchestra and the singer. Let us hear this again.
-- Robert C. Marsh, Chicago Sun Times. Nov. 19, 1990
The Birthday of the Infanta (Teatro dell'Opera, Rome)
Dirige Steven Mercurio (Wozzeck) con sensibilissima cura timbrica, con la morbidezza decadente che avremmo pensato adatta a un’opera di Zemlinsky: a noi piace.
-- Corriere Della Sera 7.7.96
Anche per la direzione di Steven Mercurio, qui con forza, lì con grazia, Mercurio ha saputo esaltare il doppio volto di uesta favola tragica. Un fraseggio più aspro quando l’illusione del Nano si infrageva contro la crudele realtà. La lettura del Compleanno dell’Infanta è tutta qui.
-- Marco Di Battista
Die Tote Stadt (Spoleto, Italy)
Una musica, va deto, già pronta per Hollywood, ma non per questo meno efficace, anzi bellissima, Mercurio non si tira indietro, ma accarezza con evidente voluttà perfino i momenti di più scoperta banalità melodica, e insieme ne fa risaltare la sapientissima costruzione musicale. L’orchestra suona ch’è una meraviglia: Mercurio sa trarne tutta la flessibilità necessaria. Sotto la sua guida sensibilissima i due strepitosi protagnoisti appaiono inimitabili.
-- La Republica 30.6.97
Steven Mercurio ha diretto gä splendidi complessi del Festival avendo ragione di rischi tremendi (a cominciare dal rapporto fra voci e orchestra), e serbando sia il rigore drammatico sia la libertà del «rubato» e l’abbandono melodico di cui l’opera trabocca.
-- Francesco M. Colombo Corriere Della Sera 30.6.97
Shostakovich, The Nose (Spoleto, Italy)
I contenuti e la magnifica veste dell’opera non sono stati punto traditi dalla realizzazione del festival spoletino, commessa alla direzione musicale del maestro Steven Mercurio ha tenuto il complesso cameristico ad una gradi di lucidissima definizione timbrica, cogliendo della partitura i processi piú caratteristici e le linee piú rivoluzionarie, rimarcando la sarabandesca dialettica dei gruppi strumentali e dei concertati vocali.
-- Enrico Cavallotti. Il Tempo 7.1.95
Rigoletto (Minnesota Orchestra)
Noi abbiamo assistito ad una recita di Rigoletto, l’immortale capolavoro verdiaano, una recita di primissimo livello con vari elementi di notevole interesse. La direzione di Steven Mercurio inanzitutto. Una direzione dal profondo scavo psicologico, variegatissima. Ha soprattutto colpito il modo in cui Mercurio ha saputo unire la scontrosità di Rigoletto con l’abbandono, la liricità di Gilda.
-- Nicola Lischi. Opera 6.97
Vanessa (Dallas Opera)
Last week, the Dallas Opera, in a co-production with the Washington Opera, gave the Pulitzer Prize-winning work a new hearing, under the superb musical direction of Steven Mercurio, and a visual facelift at the hands of stage director Michael Kahn and set designer Michael Yeargun. . . .
In some ways the most impressive performance was that of the American conductor Steven Mercurio, who transformed his orchestra into a strong symphonic ensemble and brought out those colors in the score that make it sound like a great tone poem.
-- Willard Spiegelman. London Financial Times
La Boheme (Opera Pacific)
It’s easy to forget the wealth of dramataic in a Puccini score – many conductors seem to – but they all glistened in the light when Mercurio led the orchestra. His care for the singers was always evident, and so many nuamces, such as the little portamenti in the violins, were lovingly handled, while maintaining Puccini’s crafty dramatic pacing.
-- Scott Duncan. The Orange County Register September 13, 1992
Corigliano, Symphony #1; Rimsky Korsakov, Scheherezade (Sacramento Symphony)
A high technical level of performance is also required and on Friday was fully realized by guest conductor Steven Mercurio, the orchestra as an ensemble and each of the instrumental sections. Everybody indeed did the sort of thing one would expect from a couple of other Philharmonics named the Vienna and the Berlin.
-- Alfred Kay. The Sacramento Bee March 29, 1993
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique; Lelio (Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg)
L’interprétation proposée ce soir par le jeune chef américain Steven Mercurio se signalait d’abord par une mise au point technique impeccable. L’OPI affichait une autorité instrumentale et un engagement des meilleurs jours. L’ensemble avait le brio, le ferveur et le fondu adéquats tandis que les pupitres des solistes (le cor anglais dans las "Scène aux Champs"!) savaient une fois de plus mettre en évidence toute la gamme de leur assurance et de leur virtuosité.
Steven Mercurio, le geste ferme, net, généreux, exaltant et très "bersteinien", évitait le moindre risque: il insistait sur le rythme marquant chague temps jusque dans les plus fins contours de la partition. Tout y était: l’intensité, l’élan, l’agressivité (cuivres et percussion!) et cela sur la base sonore tant lumineuse des violons que compacte des cordes graves. Et surtout: Steven Mercurio n’hésitait pas a souligner avec une fougue toute théâ
-- Luxemburger Wort March 6, 1997
La Traviata (Oper der Stadt Bonn)
Die Dirigent Steven Mercurio (eine Entdeckung) selbst mit seinem mäßigen Orchester zu einer meisterhaften Deutung der wahrlich kniffiligen Verdi-Oper abrundet.
-- Marianne Reissinger Munchen Abendzeitung Dienstag 11 Oktober 1994
American Accent
Steven Mercurio is poised to become our next star composer-conductor
by Brian Kellow
Opera News, June 1994
The distinguished author, translator and teacher Joseph Machlis loves to recount his first meeting, back in 1981, with Steven Mercurio – at the time, a composition student at the Juilliard School of Music. "I’m giving this course at Juilliard," Machlis recalls, "and I give out the scores of Salome. When I get to Steven, he says, ‘I don’t need it.’ I say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t need it?’ And he says, ‘No, I know it.’ ‘Oh, you know it,’ I say, indicating my skepticism. But I decided to keep my eye on this insolent student, and it turned out that he did know the entire score by heart. He conducted it right there and threw every single cue in place. And now he’s turned out to be a real opera conductor … great, sweeping gestures, and very secure. Just wonderful."
Today, Mercurio possess the same blend of solid musicianship, relentless drive and nervy confidence that grabbed Machlis thirteen years ago. Back then, Mercurio was completing his masters degree at Juilliard while working as a clerk at Barnes & Nobel Records. At home, he was up late night after night, feverishly hammering away at a huge Straussian orchestra piece eventually titled For Lost Loved Ones. Friends thought he was crazy for not trying a small-scale chamber work, which presumably would have had an easier chance of getting performed. For Lost Loved Ones was "forty minutes long, and as large as Ein Heldenleben," he recalls. "I was twenty-six years old, trying to write a piece that was bigger than I was, that probably no one would want to hear. But you do it because you hear it in your head."
A lot has changed since then. 1994-1995 marks Mercurio’s fourth season as principal conductor of Opera Company of Philadelphia. In 1992, Gian Carlo Menotti named him music director of the Festival of Two Worlds in both Spoleto (Italy) and Charleston, South Carolina. He also appears with the opera companies of Rome, Bonn, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, and Costa Mesa’s Opera Pacific. The critics, so far, have been overwhelmingly on his side. Reviewing Philadelphia’s La Gazza Ladra in 1991, The New Yorker’s Andrew Porter found Mercurio "alert as Abbado, but wittier; meticulous as Muti, but merrier." Other critics invariably mention his authority, passion and the "great, sweeping gestures" that Machlis observed.
Mercurio is half-Italian, half-Jewish and 100 percent New York. Dark-eyed and handsome, he could pass for a wirier Baldwin brother. His speech is as blunt and rapid-fire as a teletype, and he repeats words and phrases for emphasis, as he shifts from being intensely serious one second to being the class wisenheimer the next. He’s almost manically insistent that you get whatever point he’s making, and he constantly climaxes his thoughts with the classic New Yorkerism, "Know what I mean?"
Mercurio is closely identified with the works of Menotti; he has led The Saint of Bleecker Street in Washington, Philadelphia and Fort Lauderdale, and Goya in Spoleto (he’s also recorded it for Nuovo Era). He met Menotti in 1989 when Margaret Anne Everitt, then general director of Opera Company of Philadelphia, convinced the composer that the unknown Mercurio was the ideal conductor to lead the company’s revival of Bleecker Street.
That break was a long time coming. Mercurio was born in Bardonia, New York, in 1956; his father was a C.P.A., and his mother owned a delicatessen. As a kid, he was hooked on sports and rock and roll, and he is quick to point out the advantages of growing up in a nonmusical environment: "If you’re a child prodigy, and you sit there and have to practice, it seeps into your mind that music is an automatic response. I think that’s why to me everything has such a visceral side to it. I never learned anything on automatic pilot. That’s the kiss of death. For example, there’s no way a ten-year-old kid can really understand what Beethoven is doing – I don’t care how well these child prodigies play his music. When I was emotionally ready for the pieces, I sought them out. Nobody said to me, ‘This is a great piece.’ I felt as if I had discovered Puccini and Stravinsky."
Mercurio attended Graham Junior College and Boston university (where he studied composition with David Del Tredici), then entered Juilliard in 1980. Three years later, sponsored by Joseph Machlis and the Florence Locheim Stoll Foundation, he moved t Italy, where he orchestrated (without a piano) For Lost Loved Ones, and took a crash course in Italian at the Università Italiana per Stranieri in Perugia. When he returned to New York in 1984, Lukas Foss hired him as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, a post he retained for three years. He calls Foss "a brilliant person. He never promoted this Karajan-like mystification of the music-making process. We talked about it in real terms."
In 1987 he joined the Metropolitan Opera’s roster of assistant conductors. The highlight of his four years there was preparing and conducting the complete demo tape of John Corigliano’s and William M. Hoffman’s The Ghosts of Versailles, which served as textbook for the 1991 production. "Steve’s a brilliant guy," affirms Corigliano. "He’s got all the necessary things – incredible talent, phenomenal craft and he deals with people well. He understands structure, as anyone who is conducting large, abstract pieces of music must. He’s able to bring out the big shapes, and he’s not afraid to go for the jugular."
Mercurio’s goal is simply to "get it right" for the composer. He feels a particularly close affinity for Puccini, and he’s enraged by the critical condescension toward the composer that currently is in fashion. "It’s elitist bullshit," he says. "It’s the same thing with Tchaikovsky. People will talk about him in disparaging terms. Well, I wish I’d written The Nutcracker, know what I mean? Any contemporary composer would give his left arm to have written any of Tchaikovsky’s works. But instead they’ll say, ‘Well, of course, he’s not Wagner.’ But writing about death and legends and gods doesn’t mean that music is going to be any more serious. The music and the subject matter aren’t synonymous."
Mercurio’s obsession with his work, with constantly tackling new scores and addressing new musical problems, makes him impatient with the reactive tendencies that he perceives as crippling the music world. "the worst part about this post World War II generation," he maintains, "it that we’ve become totally evaluatory. We evaluate everything." As an example, he points to the endless debate over The Ghosts of Versailles. "It’s been talked about ad nauseam," he snaps. "There was article after article: ‘What did it do? What was it trying to do? Did it work?’ Enough to make you sick. He did it. People liked it. So get on with it.
"I see a similar thing when I talk to students. Let’s say you’re talking about Luciano [Pavarotti]’s technique – where he covers, how he modifies his vowels, how he handles the passagio. And they’ll say, ‘I don’t like the way he sings.’ They become critics, and they’re no longer learning what they can from him. If you say, ‘Discuss the differences among Luciano, Di Stefano, Gigli and Bjoerling,’ they won’t know anything about the guys’ techniques, and they’ll barely know anything about the recordings. They’re too busy evaluating. And you know what? They’re not doing it."
Mercurio is a born teacher. His response to a simple interview question is both highly spontaneous and beautifully reasoned. It’s the same approach he takes with his orchestra musicians. Rather than condescend, or use the battery of intimidation tricks that many conductors rely on, Mercurio goes for positive reinforcement. "I almost always have a great rapport with musicians. They just want you to help them. It’s one thing to bark at the clarinet player, ‘You’re a bar late!’ He knows that. The question is, what can you tell him so that he can hear where he was wrong and get it right the next time?
"Being a good leader doesn’t mean you have to scream and yell. It means that the players will follow you off the edge of the earth because they have such confidence that you know the score, that you have both the skill and temperament to dictate the score to them. I hate people who say ‘I WANT PIANO!" and don’t tell you why. You have to say, for example, ‘Well we need a special kind of piano here because it needs to be transparent – less vibrato from the strings, so it sounds very eerie.’ Because they’re in the pit, opera orchestras sometimes feel they’re not appreciated, not the focus of attention. You have to convince them how essential they are to the success of the performance."
One group that he won’t be working with any longer is the Spoleto U.S.A. orchestra. When we spoke in February, the dust was still settling from the extended furor that tore apart the Charleston branch of the Festival of Two Worlds, leading Menotti to resign after a long battle with both ex-general director Nigel Redden and key members of his board of directors. Almost immediately, Mercurio followed suit. Press accounts reduced the matter to a standoff between Menotti the alleged archconservative and Redden the avant-gardist, but Mercurio insists the situation is much more complex. He feels the problems began several years ago when Menotti gave up his New York apartment and subsequently spent less and less time in the U.S.
"Gian Carlo is used to the Italian way of doing things," Mercurio explains. "Over there, the general managers raise the money, and Gian Carlo decides what the festival presents. Simple concept, right? What I believe happened in Charleston is that with Gian Carlo coming over only once or twice a year, Nigel raised a lot money and felt after a while that he wanted more input as to where the money was going." Gradually, Redden garnered more support for his ideas, which were not always to Menotti’s liking. The final straw was a conceptual-art project that Menotti opposed, but for which Redden had secured funding. The board, for its part, became increasingly divided between the two camps. "It was like an American corporate takeover," says Mercurio. "You know: you’ve worked in the business, so you think you know where it needs to go."
The upshot was that in 1992 Redden resigned his post in Charleston. The press, smelling blood, pounced on the story. Inflammatory articles turned up almost daily calling into question Menotti’s vision, even his competence. Mercurio now reckons that the press did nothing but compound the troubles in Charleston: "In 1993, the festival spent $250,000 doing the U.S. premiere of a Zemlinsky opera [The Birthday of the Infanta], but all the top articles were about Gian Carlo and the financial state of the festival. They low-keyed the artistic side and made it seem inconsequential. Some reporter from the Charleston paper came over to Spoleto [Italy] for four days and wrote six or seven articles. Not one of them was about the festival. I ran into her and asked her if she was planning to come see Il Trittico or The Rake’s Progress, the operas we were doing that year, and she said, ‘Oh, no. Those aren’t the articles my editor wants me to write.’ Instead, she wrote about what the Spoletini think about Gian Carlo and the festival – just scandal and gossip.
"To Gian Carlo, these personal assaults were unbelievable. You see, he’s basically given up on the United States. The corporate-board policy is something he cannot fathom. Now you can’t do anything without fifty people on the board telling you whether it’s good or not. He’s eighty-two years old, and he just said, ‘I don’t need this anymore.’"
Such conflicts are anathema to Mercurio, who loves the collaborative process. When working on a new production of an opera, he tries to be in on discussions with the stage director and designer at the outset. "there are a lot of decisions, in terms of shaping the flow of a piece, in which the conductor – if he’s got his face up out of the score – can assist the director." Last January, Mercurio led a successful revival of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa at Dallas Opera. Early on, he sat down with director Michael Kahn and discussed elements of design, problems in the libretto, the optimal number of choristers. When rehearsals began, he and Kahn posed a united front, rather than sending off mixed signals to the cast – and saved a lot of valuable time.
Vanessa’s characters are somewhat elusive; audiences often reach the final quintet without have forged a real connection with the people onstage. "But if it’s performed correctly, you should understand them," insists Mercurio. "If Vanessa is sung correctly, you believe she has chosen not to accept reality but is making one last-ditch attempt at happiness. To get to that point, the few moment when you do get to know the characters have to be very clearly defined." He attributes the Dallas production’s success partly to the hours he spent discussing the work with Menotti, who wrote the libretto. "I asked him what Sam Barber would want musically. How much rubato is really accurate for this style? How should the Baroness really act? How noble and how shallow is Anatol? Not from a 1990s perspective – I wanted to know what they were thinking when they wrote it."
Though some conductors consider it drudge work, Mercurio never tires of digging into the endless details and questions posed by the score; he’s like a translator looking for the exact nuance of a particular word or phrase. To Puccini lovers, he has become something of a hero for addressing the vexing problem of Turandot’s ending. The version audiences have come to know used Alfano’s second ending, his original ending having been cut heavily for the premiere. Mercurio tracked down Alfano’s original (in the first edition of the piano/vocal score) and compared it with the orchestral score, which ends with Alfano II. He also studied the correspondence between Puccini and Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the premiere at La Scala in 1926, and consulted with historian Mary Jane Phillips-Matz on the complex relationship between composer and conductor. Then he devised his own ending, taking the best of Alfano I and II, rewriting two transitions (the kiss and the revelation of Calàf’s name) and weaving in a long-neglected sketch of Puccini’s. Finally, he completed the harmony and orchestrated it. "I did a considerable amount of tinkering with the stuff in Alfano I to make it work better, then redivided the brass fanfares in the finale. I didn’t recompose them – I redistributed them. I did this in Philadelphia, with great success, and repeated it in Washington. And it just tore them out of their seats every night."
The concern Mercurio applies to he scores of others is, of course, rooted in his own compositional career. His music is tonal, deeply romantic (one chokes on the overused term "accessible"). His violin-and-piano interpretation of A Moon for the Misbegotten was heard at Town Hall in 1987; his Serenade for Tenor and Orchestra, with lyrics by William M. Hoffman, was played by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago in 1990. The following year, For Lost Loved Ones had its belated premier with the New York Philharmonic – seven years after he finished orchestrating. Audience were enthusiastic, but the reviews were scathing. Bernard Holland, in The New York Times, accused Mercurio of writing a banal work calculated only to please the poor mindless masses. Holland also implied that Mercurio’s motivation for writing conservative music was monetary – conveniently obscuring the fact that the composer had spent $10,000 of his own money just getting the parts copied. "Its such crap," fumes John Corigliano. "we all know that the people who are after money are the people who are writing academic stuff and getting every grant they can get their hands on. You can’t win if what you write appeals directly to the public, because you’re cutting certain critics out of the process. And they hate that."
The source of For Lost Loved Ones is the still-unexplained disappearance in 1978 of Mercurio’s younger brother, Paul. One of its themes is based on a native American work, "Song of the Deathless Voice," which, in the piece’s extended finale, fades away in a kind of quiet ecstasy: loved ones may die, but memory is a living, life-giving thing. Mercurio’s parents were in the audience for all the performances. His father, Peter, remember, "I was so overwhelmed by it. The ending was melancholy – it was all over, but there was hope, you know?"
Mercurio is philosophical about the work’s pummeling in the press: "I’ve read reviews of pieces that got the greatest critical response, and I don’t wish I’d written them. The composer is ultimately left with the piece, not the reviews." In the future, though Corigliano is doing his best to dissuade him ("I would encourage no one to write an opera, unless he likes having cigarettes put out on him"). "I want to write the Great American Opera," Mercurio admits. "I feel I’m more and more in touch with the experience of being an American."
Mercurio’s sense of his own Americanness informs his philosophy of the future of classical music. He feels that the best way for American orchestras to overcome their cultural inferiority complex is to invest in the American star conductor. "I have nothing against European conductors or European composers," he claims. "But if you’re sitting there in the symphony and you’re going to get some sixty-year-old European to come in, don’t expect the twenty-five- and thirty-year-olds to get excited about him. He’s not even part of the community. He comes in, does the concerts and leaves. In the old days, when Ormandy and Koussevitzky were around, they were a part of the community, and they turned on the next generation. There was Lenny [Bernstein] – young and on fire, and he was an American. He moved like an American and composed like an American and explained music to Americans so they didn’t think it was some foreign art form that didn’t mean anything to them. Why didn’t we learn from that? Why is this country so masochistic to think that if it’s ours, it isn’t good enough? Muti was in Philadelphia all those years and left nothing, because he didn’t turn on the next generation. So the average orchestra subscriber gets older and older, and the subscribers die off. But Slatkin’s doing very well in St. Louis. We can do it."
And yet, because he is a composer, Mercurio has a modest sense of the conductor’s role that is all too rare these days: the maestro’s energies are best spent giving the finest performance possible – but never at the expense of taking over the music. "The problem is that the composer has stopped being the focal point. It wasn’t so much of a problem when Mahler, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Debussy were all alive. The composers and conductors were all in it together. But now you’ve got the conductor speaking for the composer as if he were the composer. You can’t say ‘the Karajan Ring." You can’t! It’s not Furtwangler’s Ring, it’s Wagner’s! When you start arguing about interpretation being the point, you’re off on an inconsequential tangent. It all becomes a discussion of record collections. You’re not talking about the piece you just saw. You’re talking about whether it competes with your CD or not. When I do other people’s pieces, whether it’s Puccini or Del Tredici, I want to get it right for them. We don’t need to reinterpret something like Bohème. Just get Puccini’s vision. That’s hard enough."
Mercurio Rising
by Scott Duncan
The Orange County Register, January 16, 1996
It doesn’t take long for Steven Mercurio to betray his secret in conducting opera. "I’ve done four ‘Traviatas’ with four different Violettas (leading sopranos) this year," Mercurio said, the conversation barely a minute old, "and each one was different." "Is each one a performance would call ideal? No. But that’s not the point. Your job is to allow each singer what she needs t make the best performance."This doesn’t sound like a conductor talking. We’re used to much more attitude, lofty conductor-speak about "musical vision" and the "composer’s intentions." The gist being: there’s only one way – the conductor’s way.
Mercurio, 39, doesn’t even look like an opera conductor. He’s slimly handsome, with dark Italian features. He speaks eloquently about music, but the language is American informal. Opera News summed him as "half-Italian, half-Jewish and 100 percent New York."
His father was a CPA and his mother owned a delicatessen. He wasn’t closeted away in some European hochschule; growing up in the New York ‘burbs, he had wide musical interests that included a rock band.
But even more out of the ordinary is Mercurio’s careful, low-ego attention he brings to the enormously complicated multi-headed monster that is opera.
While most conductors pay lip service to he sense of collaboration opera requires, Mercurio lives it. Consider a recent production at Washington Opera, when director Lotfi Mansouri spied Mercurio lurking in the scenery of "Turandot" during a mundane lighting rehearsal.
"He asked me, ‘What the heck are you doing here?’" Mercurio said. "But I wanted to know what (soprano) Eva Marton could see up there. When I give a note to the singer I want to know what I’m up against."
Mercurio doesn’t merely rule from the podium, he roams the fiefdoms that constitute the kingdom of opera – the realms of director, sage designer, star singers, the orchestra, the chorus director – to find ways the music can make a more harmonious whole from these sometimes fractious elements.
"I don’t see it as a power struggle," he says of opera. "I see it as a unification. Bad conductors try to control everything. Good conductors try to unify. It’s easy to complain after the opera’s over, and a lot of conductors do. But why not work during the rehearsal period to become part of the production?"
It’s a philosophy that seems to be working for Mercurio, who clearly is a fast-rising American conductor. He’s back on his third invitation at Opera Pacific to conduct Verdi’s "Otello", opening Saturday; he led sparkling performances of two earlier company productions, "La Boheme" and last season’s "La Traviata."
He is music director of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto Festival in Italy and in his fifth season as principal conductor of the Opera Company of Philadelphia. He made his San Francisco Opera debut in the fall and conducted the recently televised Richard Tucker Foundation Gala in New York.
He is also a composer; his large-scale orchestra work "For Lost Loved Ones" received is world premiere by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic in 1991.
For Mercurio, the momentum in a live operatic performance is a constantly shifting dynamic.
"It’s as delicate as a dance," he said. "There are times when you say, so to speak, ‘Take it, it’s yours’ to a singer, and you give them the reins. Then the music asks to be urged on, to have more propulsion, and you say ‘I got it.’ And that can happen in one bar."
This sense of cooperation is what makes a Mercurio performance in the theater seem so organic and musical. There is also the sense of detail that comes from the pit; Mercurio works diligently to get the right orchestral sound to carry the drama.
"Orchestra players often feel anonymous," he said. "They fall into the trap of thinking they’re just playing movie music. You have to remind them that the quality of sound can cause an emotional reaction, not only in the audience but on stage for the singers as well."
Of course, the temperament of orchestras can change with the country. Mercurio tells of working feverishly in Bonn, Germany, to get the string players to put a little "expressivo" in their playing.
"Their attitude was like ‘Dragnet’ – just the facts, ma’am Then you go someplace like the Rome Opera, and you make a gesture with your left arm and whole string section jumps out of their seats."
Mercurio had an eclectic musical childhood – "I threw a few guitars around; that’s where my backhand (conducting) motion comes from" – but was a radio and television major at Boston University when he finally committed to music.
"I was into stuff like Chick Corea and fusion," he recalled. "But I was looking for something that was really built."
Gunther Schuller’s concerts at New England Conservatory revealed a different world; Mercurio switched his major to music and studied composing with David Del Tredici. Two years later, he was in New York's’ Juilliard School. He started conducting to lead performances of his own works and those of other composers.
"I started studying ‘The Rite of Spring’ and didn’t know it was difficult," he said. "I approached it like it was written yesterday."
After a few years as associate conductor to Lukas Foss at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Mercurio joined the Metropolitan Opera’s roster of assistant conductors, helping James Levine by preparing the demo tape of John Corigliano’s "The Ghosts of Versailles." When he filled in for an ailing colleague in Philadelphia, he came to the attention of Menotti, and his career blossomed.
Today, he strives to restore the sense of unpredictability to an art form that so often is stuck in the routine. "There are too many performances of just accompanying," he said.
"We’re too afraid to let things hang out a little bit. We’ve become intimidated by recording and we want everything to be that perfect. So conductors try to control everything and pull it all into themselves.
"You’re doomed when you do that. It’s all right to be a little messy if you’re going after something that might move people."