In 2010, the last time the OPERA America conference was held in Los Angeles, Long Beach Opera’s production of Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Eurydice, staged in a swimming pool, was a featured event. This June, when OPERA America returns to LA, running back-to-back with the World Opera Forum, more than half a dozen companies will be presenting projects — a testament to the vigorous operatic ecosystem that has exploded in the City of Angels in recent decades.

LA’s opera producers range from big — LA Opera, which will be presenting Turandot and the premiere of an evening-length concert work with music by Joel Thompson and a libretto by Imani Tolliver, written for tenor Russell Thomas, both at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during the conference — to tiny outfits like Synchromy, launched as a composers’ collaborative in 2010 and now focused on workshopping new opera projects. In between, there is Long Beach Opera, founded seven years before LA Opera in 1979 with a concentration on new and unusual repertory; Pacific Opera Projects, which has produced irreverent updatings of classic titles (such as a Magic Flute conceived as a 1980s video game) since 2011; and Valley Opera and Performing Arts (formerly Center Stage Opera, founded in 2005), which serves the San Fernando Valley with traditional titles, musicals, and mixed-genre concerts. Two vigorous young organizations, Yuval Sharon’s The Industry and Beth Morrison Projects, have found LA to be fertile ground for their cutting-edge art. The list goes on.

By sheer numbers, Los Angeles has more opera companies than other major metropolitan areas. The most significant reason for that appears to be the city’s size — LA’s sprawling geography and perpetually snarled traffic makes its many neighborhoods seem like separate entities, supporting their own infrastructure and arts groups. As Josh Shaw, who founded Pacific Opera Projects 12 years ago, puts it, “Long Beach is in its own world. Downtown is LA Opera; we are on the East Side.” In addition, opera impresarios have found that donors are not as wedded to single legacy institutions as they are, for example, in New York, and they’re eager to spread their wealth in order to build Los Angeles into an important cultural center. Unlike some of America’s other large companies in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Houston, Los Angeles Opera didn’t form until the mid-1980s. Before then, institutions like New York City Opera and San Francisco Opera performed in the city after the earlier Los Angeles Civic Grand Opera decided to present other companies’ productions instead of its own.

LA Opera is now the largest company, but it has matured with a host of smaller companies in the area as the city has continued to define its operatic landscape.

Scene Partners

While the companies, for the most part, don’t collaborate on projects, marketing, or other activities, they are collegial. “We have relationships as colleagues; we see each other’s shows,” Shaw says. “LA Opera Connects is renting our space to rehearse. People who have worked here have moved up the chain and are now running programs at LAO.” He sees overlap in the audience as well. “There’s a group of about 500 people in LA who are the opera crowd and go to everything they can. I will see them at LAO one night; at our show the next.”

Christopher Koelsch, president and CEO of LA Opera, says, “I believe in the collective power of a healthy ecosystem; it’s a net good for audiences.” One of the most troubling events in recent history was the death of the New York City Opera in its previous form, he says, explaining that it meant fewer performing opportunities in New York for emerging singers and directors. In Los Angeles, there are many cross-currents of artists working successfully and moving among these companies. Koelsch notes that director James Darrah and conductor Christopher Rountree, both artistic leaders at LBO, have worked at LAO. “We hear from our audiences that they want as much opera as they can get,” he says, “and they like that there is a distinctive aesthetic to each of these groups.”

The closest relationship in the ecosystem is between LAO and Beth Morrison Projects, a pioneering New York-based incubator of new work. Just over a decade ago, Koelsch cold-called Morrison to explore a partnership that would deliver stage-ready contemporary chamber operas as part of LAO’s new Off-Grand initiative to expand its audience and its producing footprint. Launched with Dog Days (music by David T. Little; libretto by Royce Vavrek) at RedCat in Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2014, the ongoing partnership, Koelsch says, has paid off enormously. “My most solemn responsibility is to create opportunities for artists to connect with audiences,” he says. “This partnership has led to growth and, despite the fact that we are so asymmetrically sized, has been a benefit for both organizations.”

Indeed, BMP opened a Los Angeles office in 2014, and has embarked on collaborations with other LA institutions, including the Philharmonic and the Broad, a contemporary art museum that hosts performances at times, as well as projects with local artists. During the conference, BMP will produce the West Coast premiere of Magdalene, a chamber opera by 14 women composers set to Marie Howe’s Magdalene poems, at RedCat. Half of BMP’s board members are now people from LA. “I find the donors here to be very open, and not proprietary in the way New York institutions are,” Morrison says. “The people who support new opera and music here are not attached to just one institution. They want LA to be a world-class art city, and they’ll do what they can to make it that way.”

Like Morrison, Yuval Sharon was based in New York when he started working on an Achim Freyer-designed production of Wagner’s Ring cycle at LA Opera; he sensed that the area would be a good fit for his avant-garde sensibility and felt a “spirit of collaboration” among arts organizations. LBO’s swimming pool Orpheus showed him “a window of opportunity for site-responsive work.” Sharon launched The Industry in 2010 and went on to produce groundbreaking projects like Hopscotch, an opera in 24 cars (2015). In 2020, Sharon became artistic director of the Detroit Opera. The following year, The Industry expanded its artistic direction to encompass two other artists, Ash Furie and Malik Gaines, with the goal, Sharon says, of mounting a project each year instead of every two or three. This year’s show, which will open just after the conference, is Comet/Poppea, a mashup of music by George Lewis and Monteverdi, directed by Sharon and starring Anthony Roth Costanzo.

OPERA America’s conference overlaps somewhat with the Ojai Festival, a significant national contemporary music festival. “Many of our supporters will be there; we can’t open a show that week,” Sharon says. “There’s a wonderful core group of supporters for new work, but everyone wishes it were larger. LA struggles with that in the shadow of the film industry — entertainment as commerce — and there’s a relatively small number of people that understand that these organizations only survive through donations.” Still, having multiple contemporary-focused companies in the same city is developing an audience base, says Jennifer Rivera, former general director and CEO of LBO. “Beth Morrison Projects and The Industry have made it so people don’t have to drive to Long Beach to find something out of the ordinary, but it also builds the muscle of avant-garde programming, creating a larger audience base.”

Live Studio Audiences

The post-pandemic return to live performance, and the work of luring audiences back to the theater, has been as challenging in Los Angeles as it has elsewhere. LA Opera has steadily built back its earned revenue numbers and expects to be close to its pre-COVID attendance percentage (81%) this season. “The trends are what everyone else is seeing — shows that hit big overperform, and those that don’t struggle,” Koelsch says. Contributed revenue is stable but expenses are up; LA Opera has kept ticket prices steady. LA Opera is “slowly winning back” its subscribers and has seen “insane” numbers of first-time attendees, many of them drawn by unusual projects like El último sueño de Frida y Diego (music by Gabriela Lena Frank; libretto by Nilo Cruz). This season, the company launched an auto-renewal system for subscribers, paid on a monthly basis, like a streaming model. “Ninety percent of subscribers moved into that system — we were taken aback by the number of people that signed up,” Koelsch says.

Long Beach’s audience has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels; the company is pushing the boundaries of the form in hopes of bringing in some non-typical attendees. In July, LBO will present the world premiere of Asunción (music by Latina pop singer San Cha; libretto by McCall Cadenas), an operatic expansion of Cha’s concept album La Luz de la Esperanza. “She has a huge following — will those people come to see her opera? Will the regular opera people like it? It’s an experiment,” Rivera says. “We did a film festival last year; it brought in a totally new audience.”

The smaller companies, with fewer seats to fill but also fewer performances and less opportunity to build word of mouth, also face audience challenges, especially in marketing their shows. “Pre-pandemic, our audience averaged 400–500 per production; we did two performances of each show,” says Valley Opera and Performing Arts (VOPA) founder Shira Renee Thomas. In September 2023, only about 200 people saw the company’s Bohème. Collaboration, she says, is the answer. During the pandemic, VOPA collaborated on a virtual Suor Angelica with Mission Opera in Santa Clarita; more recently, the two companies did a fully staged Romeo and Juliet with two performances in Santa Clarita and one in the Valley.

Pacific Opera Project soldiered through the pandemic doing 26 outdoor live performances, but this has not translated into full houses in the present. “In 2019, we could program something and unless it was an enormous venue, we knew it would sell out. Now, it’s erratic, and much more last-minute,” Shaw says. Like VOPA, Pacific Opera Project is also partnering with other institutions, like the Descanso Gardens north of Pasadena. “They have huge memberships. This takes much of the marketing component out of it,” Shaw says.

Synchromy, which serves composers, is less audience-focused: Its workshops are free and structured for audience feedback. The opera workshops are held in different venues — during the conference, an opera about the Cuban Missile Crisis will be offered at the Wende Museum, which focuses on the Cold War era, for example. “We didn’t think opera would be a regular thing, but it ended up having an enormous impact on the composers’ careers — one got tenure, the other got international attention,” says Elizabeth Huston, the group’s executive director. “We’re interested in giving composers a platform so that major opera companies can see their work. Now is a good time, with more companies becoming interested in chamber operas.”

And Los Angeles, she says, is the perfect spot for this endeavor. “It’s a unique market, and there’s such a huge community that there’s room for people to explore all different kinds of every different kind of art. This opera ecosystem is representative of everything opera can be.”